The future of recovery

The Gambit Weekly just ran a long interview with New Orleans Recovery Director Ed Blakely.
Perhaps the most interesting parts are about changing state and local bureaucracies. While Blakely seems to have had some successes, I wonder if the passing months and approaching elections will dim these prospects. With time people often lack the same sense of urgency and elections bring out the worst of bureaucratic power games. Of course, demonstrable successes coming from the new procedures Blakely has promoted might be the kind of wedge needed to open a new front in these battles.

The waters keep rising

If you didn't have a chance to hear Alix Spiegel's two-part report on the misery of life in a post-Katrina trailer park and the cavern of depression into which most residents have fallen, you need to do so. Some of these folks were hurting before Katrina, but even the strongest have been beset by nearly insurmountable obstacles to rebuilding their lives, getting out of the park, and making a new start. At least in New Orleans, bad as it is, we have community, friends, and helping hands.

When I travel, especially to poorer parts of the world, people ask me how the U.S., the richest and most powerful country on earth, can permit such a travesty. I can't ever seem to come up with a satisfying answer.

Kudos to Daniel Schorr

In his review of the week's events with Scott Simon, Schorr made the link that the press needs to keep hammering at: our national infrastructure receives substandard upkeep and unnecessary disasters, like the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans, are going to continue to happen. Wake up people! Next time it's going to be you

Third World and Sad

There's a tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker you see on some cars around here that at once proclaimed the distinct and independent spirit of New Orleans while also displaying the racism that undergirds so many of the euphemisms here. It read: "New Orleans: Third World and Proud."

Well, today on an airplane trip into New Orleans I was reminded of how much truer that bumper sticker has become. Our plane was filled the brim with kids in a Christian youth mission. They've come down here to save us (they're t-shirts said something like "Rebuild, Renew, Blah, Blah, Blah). Now don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see folks coming to New Orleans: to see what happened, to help, to spend their money, to tell their friends and family and congresspeople and president about what they've seen and what they haven't seen. But I fear, like much of this kind of mission tourism, that their sense of their own good works excuses the larger forces at play and the reasons why their efforts are needed. The U.S. federal government should be sending down people (and employing locals): workers, builders, bureaucrats, the whole nine yards. They broke the city, they should pay for it. And that's the problem with so much of the mission work is happening in New Orleans and in the rest of the world: it obscures the larger social, economic, and political story behind a much more palatable one about charity.

So to the missions: Thanks. We need the help. But don't forget to let the dirt bags know what's what. To go home and ignore what has happened and just tell folks, "Oh those poor people; but at least we helped" is actually just turning a blind eye. Keep your eyes open.

So thick, you can't cut it with a knife

What is it? Red tape! And we're so tied up in it here along the Gulf Coast that we can barely move. It's as if the good folks in Congress and the White House never thought through what a real disaster would be like: overwhelming destruction, otherworldly costs, and almost no local funding. How is New Orleans supposed to put up 10% matching costs toward rebuilding when we tax revenue was a trickle? How are we supposed to do the audits and unbelievable paperwork required for rebuilding projects when we've had to cut back on city staff and budgets?

Accountability is a good thing and should be built into the rebuilding projects, but we need help at every level and we need help navigating the labyrinthine bowels of FEMA and other federal agencies.

(And if I hear one more FEMA official say, "Oh, well, we can work around [insert bureaucratic problem]. All you had to do was ask," I'm gonna smack 'em. People down here have been busting their butts to improve things. If FEMA would just remember that it's their responsibility to help us out of something the federal government got us into, things would get moving in the right direction.)

The kids are all right

Whoda thunkit, but MTV News just published one of the most cogent presentations of New Orleans's difficulties and promise to be found in the mainstream media. Still, the kids have shown themselves to be pretty apathetic at the ballot box (and forget the barricades), so I'm not holding my breath that this will change much. But it's still nice to see someone's giving the story a proper perspective.

Apparently New Orleans got the wrong kind of surge

An AP story by Andrew Taylor reports that "The boost in troop levels in Iraq has increased the cost of war there and in Afghanistan to $12 billion a month, and the total for Iraq alone is nearing a half-trillion dollar." $12 billion a month! For a failed war based on fabrications and incompetence. Take note, Louisiana politicians, if you really want to learn the game of lying and corruption, this is how the big boys do it.