Fucked New Orleans: Yes We Can, We Will Fuck Back

by Eli of WeCouldBeFamous

Watch New Orleans progressives very carefully over the next 24 months. We have a Mayor to elect.

Thanks to the Rude Pundit for the soap box, for coming to the New Orleans panel at Netroots '08, and for providing a great forum to showcase the best of the New Orleans blogosphere.

There are great guests all this week, stay tuned.

Fucked New Orleans: The Better Than Before Addition

by Eli of We Could Be Famous

How does a neighborhood get the resources to rebuild?

It is not based on how badly it was damaged during the storm.

If you want social services, new facilities, or expedited infrastructure repair you've somehow got to prove your neighborhood has already sufficiently recovered to some undefinable technocratic benchmark.

If your neighborhood is in poor condition and think the restoration of basic social services might help people return or encourage entrepreneurial investment, forget it.

That's called "starving the footprint."

Every important master plan or critical rebuilding decision has been made with this basic ideology as a guide. The assumption that viability precedes social services has been glossed over by the local media, never been honestly brought before the public, informs every critical rebuilding decision and serves to enshrine the federal displacement of New Orleanians, the largest migration of Americans since the Dust Bowl, as amongst the most embarrassing humanitarian hypocrisies in this nation's history.

Look at the important master plans soon to be released or already public.

The Recovery School District is embarking on a vast privatization experiment and will unveil a ten year master plan this summer that was developed by a corporation being investigated for defrauding the US government for shoddy work in Iraq. The future capacity of the school district to educate the children of New Orleans is informed by demographic projections that assume that the lack of housing and social services will prevent repopulation.

The city routinely demolishes private homes of solid foundation. The city knocked down public housing projects that were structurally sound, architecturally significant, and did not flood. Rents are too high and wages are too low. The homeless population is double what it was before the storm. Single-occupancy homes are being multiply-occupied. There isn't enough affordable housing available to rescue our neighbors being poisoned by FEMA's formaldehyde-laced trailers. With places to live at such a high premium and without basic acknowledgment of the immediate need to solve the affordable housing crisis, let alone come up with a plan for doing so, the population of New Orleans cannot return and badly damaged neighborhoods cannot repopulate fast enough to get on the list of communities "viable" enough to receive social services and civic attention.

Management of public transportation has just been privatized after a contract was signed with a French multinational. Though I am looking forward to some of the common sense changes that need to be made, elsewhere bus lines will be rerouted to better service the population that received the least damage from Katrina. Devastated neighborhoods will lose access to a valuable quality of life incentive.

To get recognition and thus, social services, from the planning firms hired to do master plan after master plan, neighborhoods must position themselves against one another, jostling for their slice of a pie that seems to mostly be reserved for those that are already well-fed.

If the determination is that some small portions of the city should not be rebuilt because it can not be protected properly from floods or is environmentally hazardous for humans, that's fine. It isn't about stubbornly replacing every single wood plant, damn the science. The way to do that is to announce why an area is deemed unsafe and then to provide the social services, buyout packages, and higher-ground housing alternatives necessary to help people move to and repopulate safer areas. Instead, the city's strategy has been to let the "free" market to permit New Orleanians to invest their lives into neighborhoods that all along were not going to receive crucial social services based on a preordained ideology that restoration of basic social services fails to act as a stimulus for revival.

Fucked Louisiana, Fucked USA (part 2 of 3)

So, in part one we talked about how Louisiana is tripping over shiny oil royalty pennies when it faces billion dollar megaproblems. Here's a few ballpark numbers: Coastal Restoration: $35 billion plus. Category Five strength flood protection for S. Louisiana: $25 billion plus. Roads/Bridges infrastructure backlog: $14 billion plus. Better schools $?? Rebuild New Orleans $?? The list goes on and on, but for a poor state with only 4 million people these are titanic problems, and many of them can't be put off any longer. But what kind of leaders does Louisiana select to address these issues? Well, in a twisted bit of absurdism, Louisiana finds very sophisticated ways to choose colorful, entertaining, and corrupt leadership. This parade of characters is only broken up by the occasional boring, spineless "reformer" type, who invariably disappoints the hopeful goo goo voters.

So let's review some of the usual suspects currently in office, and try not to cry.

Bobby Jindal is our new Governor, the one you've been hearing so much about. He's an Ivy League Rhodes Scholar biology major who wants creationism and anti-Darwin sham-science taught in schools. Quite the whiz kid, he. Jindal got elected on reform rhetoric, and proudly touts all these ethics laws he supported that actually weakened the enforcement of ethics standards. Also, his office is less transparent than Dick Cheney's undisclosed location.

During the recent veepstakes, Jindal has served as McCain's catamite, parroting misleading GOP talking points about oil spills after Katrina and Rita. In short: post-storm spills never happened, and more drilling will solve all our energy problems! They're actually running on this shit, and think it's a winning issue. Recently Jindal spewed the McCain line implying that Obama is willing to lose a war to get elected. That's pretty damn funny, since the only combat Jindal ever experienced was "spiritual warfare" between himself and a demon that was attacking his crazy girlfriend. Deep in the spiritual "shit", Jindal distinguished himself on the battlefield by pissing in his pants, and having a panic attack when his crazy girlfriend started acting even crazier. Some braver fundagelical Christians on the scene decided to perform an exorcism. I'm not making this shit up.

The other day Jindal waited for McCain who was coming to LA to do a photo-op on an oil rig, But there was a huge oil spill in the Mississippi that day, and McCain canceled the "pro-drilling" excursion.

After Katrina, Sen. Mary Landrieu said she might have to punch Bush in the nose. Months later, after Bush gave his shitty 2006 SOTU speech, Bush was making his way down the aisle and Landrieu was on the side within striking distance. Bush had just glossed over the Gulf Coast's plight in his speech. I couldn't believe it, but when Landrieu spoke to Bush she congratulated him on his choice of Recovery Czar. I suppose that was politically smart, but I'd been hoping for a throwdown. (Btw, Bush's Recovery Czar was a Texas banker and Bush cronie named Donald Powell who basically spent two and a half years walking back a strong flood protection commitment he made to New Orleans. Countless times Powell would hedge on definitive answers to life and death questions about whether New Orleans should be protected by something better than weak Cat 3 levees and floodwalls. For context, here's how other nations do it.)

I was shocked to learn that some Louisianan cops had tasered Dubya and Colin Powell recently, and called them names, but it turned out they were actors in Oliver Stone's next film.

Mayor Ray Nagin, alas, is a chocolate George Bush-- minus the competence. While this might seem like an incomprehensible notion, I can assure you it's true, and it's probably not as scary as you imagine. Nagin can't competently see anything through, not even a big mistake. Which is nice. Below, E writes about the emerging NOAH scandal in New Orleans. One of the political hooks that will midwife this (blogger-generated) story into the national news stream is the distinct possibility that some construction companies got paid federal dollars for work that was actually performed by volunteer labor. The fresh-faced Christian volunteers who came down to New Orleans to do some good, and who helped gut storm ravaged homes... probably became the means to a paycheck for some connected crony who sat on his ass the whole time. If and when details like that surface, the Teflon Nagin administration will be in some trouble. Because it's Louisiana, though, there's always some bizarre detail beyond the basic alleged improprieties. In this case, such a detail might involve bamboo underwear.

We have a guy named John Kennedy running for Senate. As a Republican. A few years ago, John Kennedy was a Democrat running on a platform of economic justice. After he lost that race, he decided some changes were needed. He crafted a brilliant plan: first he would fellate Karl Rove and become a Republican, then he would disavow his liberal past and embrace George Bush, and try to beat Landrieu by telling Louisianans she's weak on oil shale. Kennedy recently did a statewide tour with a dozen stops, and more people just read this post than attended his events.

Senator David Vitter. Or as I affectionately call him-- Vitty-cent. What can you say about this diaper dandy? I mean, it's been quite a year for him, hasn't it? First he was mentioned as Rudy Guiliani's running mate. Then he got busted for past whoring, and went into hiding for several days. He apologized for a vague "sin" and has never been more specific than that. His Madam recently committed suicide, and he has the gall to try to use supporters' campaign donations to pay for the legal trouble his private whoring caused him. What a fuckmook. Now Vittycent's going to run for re-election while supporting "pro-family" marriage amendments. One fun thing to track is whether a local Republican named Vincent Bruno decides to run against him. Years ago, Bruno was the first to publicly call Vitter out for his hypocritical indiscretions, and he recently said that he might run against Vitter and ask him whether Vitter ever had any previous homosexual encounters. Why would he do this? Does Bruno have proof of some incident? That would be the interesting question. Perhaps Vitter is like Heidi Klum: he has "private junk" under Seal. (Also, recall that long ago, a GOP operative implied that Vitter was soft on homosexual issues, and he became enraged and assaulted her.)

Rep. "Dollar" Bill Jefferson. The Feds famously found $90k of alleged bribe money in Jefferson's freezer. Jefferson's been indicted, and this year he complained about the FBI watching him take a piss the morning of the raid. New Orleans has been watching him and his family's political machine piss on our faces for years, so I'm not sure why he was so embarrassed. Anyway, this is a guy who worked his way up from poverty to Harvard, then entered New Orleans politics so he could, first and foremost, enrich himself and his family. It's sad. Jefferson was re-elected in 2006 because conservatives and others allied with the Jefferson machine in order to strategically send the crook back to D.C. rather than elect a competent liberal alternative. Many were hoping that State Senator Derrick Shepherd would make the runoff that year. Let's see what he's up to:

State Senator Derrick Shepherd, currently under Federal indictment, recently broke into his girlfriend's house, punched her in the stomach then took her cash and phone. Allegedly. Then he retired to his home, which is not in his district, and ordered up some female talent for a private lap dance party. He was arrested during a lap dance and is currently in a halfway house. Shepherd is a Gulf War I veteran who built a rock solid political machine from scratch. I've studied him up close, and he's a perfect scoundrel.

So that's the story on those dildoes.

Yeah, we're fucked here, and we fuck ourselves further with the politicians we elect. And afterwards, all too often, Louisianans retreat into a comforting fatalism, and find pleasurable abandon in our rich cultural delights. I have no problem with the culture part. But the unholy triumvirate of mega problems, stupid leaders, and micro-solutions is catching up with us, and we need to do something about it quick.

Part 3 comes next, and it's not about Louisiana being a canary in the mineshaft. It's about you.

The More You NOAH

by Eli of WCBF

Y'all ought to read up on the emerging NOAH scandal coming out of the Nagin administration in New Orleans.

New Orleans Affordable Homeownership, or NOAH, is a city established and city administered non profit empowered with community development block grant development money to provide home remediation services to low income seniors after Hurricane Katrina. This scandal was uncovered by bloggers and was quickly picked up by a local TV affiliate. The story is likely to garner national attention soon.

So if you want to say that you knew about the NOAH scandal BEFORE it was trendy, I suggest you pay attention.

After receiving NOAH's list of homes it claims to have serviced under the Mayor's Home Remediation Program, a quick survey determined that many of the homes had not been gutted or were not owned by low-income seniors. Soon after, it became clear that many of the contractors hired by the agency to do work were in poor standing with the state of Louisiana.

After Lee Zurik's initial TV report went live, Mayor Nagin hastily organized a press conference to desperately denounce the allegations and allege that citizen watchdogs asking obvious questions were hurting New Orleans' recovery efforts. The Mayor claimed that a new list of properties was the only accurate list.

That list, it would appear, raises as many questions as the first. Why would a home owned by the chief of police be gutted with city money? Why would NOAH claim to have paid contractors to gut homes that were actually worked on by the homeowners themselves or by volunteer groups? Why were the homes of slumlords claimed to have been gutted by NOAH? Is it more sinister than incompetence? Was it money laundering?

I won't just bare all right now. I'll leave something to the imagination.

The naked truth lies behind these links:

The initial blogger-generated reports can be found here and here.

The first TV report is here and the follow-up is here.

The Mayor's angry press conference is here.

Keep up on the latest by routinely checking back here and here.


Update: WWL will report tonight that HUD, the FBI, and the New Orleans inspector general's office will open up official investigations into NOAH.

And I'm E of We Could Be Famous. I'm so happy to be blogging alongside the shellfish today. We're going to thieve away all of the Rude Pundit's fame and use it for our own selves!


NOTHING TO SEE HERE

I have a question.

What the hell is 'Katrina fatigue?'

My understanding is that the phrase 'Katrina fatigue' describes the perceived decline in national interest in the recovery efforts of New Orleans and the Gulf South. The term does more than point out the obvious in regards to the ephemeral nature of 21st century media. It implies a saturation, a torrent of Katrina and New Orleans related coverage that ultimately spoiled American attentiveness. Certainly when considering mainstream national discourse or even online progressive discourse, it would appear that 'Katrina fatigue' has indeed relegated recovery news and views to the periphery. If it is not now mostly treated as a regional issue, it is increasingly buried on a dishearteningly long list of Bush administration disgraces.

Now that we are approaching the third anniversary of the levee breaches with the same long list of basic human needs that the government fails to meet, are we even still on the radar? Is the New Orleans recovery an issue in the Presidential campaign? Has the right-wing so effectively faulted the people of New Orleans for the federal government's pathetic disaster response that the issue is too hot of a potato for Barack Obama to touch?

I was lucky enough to attend Netroots Nation '08 in Austin with Mr. Pundit. One of the panels there was a fun sort of pundit practice session in which Matt Yglesias and another guy played faux-conservatives on a hostile cable news show. They critiqued participants on their posture and on the talking points they used to score points in the 'spin zone.' As I waited for my turn in front of the camera, I went over in my head the types of right-wing attacks I expected to be forced to confront. I assumed it would be something along the lines of "Wasn't it mostly Ray Nagin's fault?" or "Why are we even rebuilding that city, shouldn't we just raze the whole thing?"

But when it was my turn the question was "So everything's back to normal, right?"

For whatever reason, THAT never crossed my mind as something anyone would think. Actually living in New Orleans has made that assumption so ridiculous that I guess I totally forgot that Americans who have obtained their sense of the recovery from the opening montage of Fox's BCS championship coverage might internalize this poor representation of reality.

So while I fumbled my way through my pundit audition, I realized how little America knows about the present-day situation in New Orleans and also how difficult it is to tell the truth about what is going on without presenting the task at hand as totally insurmountable.

But if America has "Katrina fatigue," will it make any difference how New Orleans residents shape their message for a national audience?

My heart says something else about the media and America's "Katrina fatigue."

Try experiencing "Katrina fatigue" as a New Orleanian.

We might be tired of fucking hearing about it ourselves. We reached our Katrina saturation point almost three whole years ago.

Hi, I'm oyster from the Your Right Handjob blog. Big thanks to His Rudeness for this opportunity and platform. We're getting off to a late start, so "let's roll". === Fucked Louisiana, Fucked USA (part 1 of 3) In the typical ass-to-mouth maneuver that is Louisiana politics, our elected leaders want us to think that it's an improvement when Big Oil takes its filthy cock out of our state's bleeding rectum, and stuffs it down Louisiana's throat. During the split-second before our salivary glands absorb the fecal matter, we have a blissful moment where we think: "Boy, our ass sure feels better now." That dubious moment of ass relief is now. Or, to put it another way: while the nation suffers from a quasi-recession, the pols in dirt poor Louisiana are busy fantasizing about the upcoming speedball of oil/gas revenues that will soon be injected into state coffers. Again. Yay! This time, we just know we won't "waste the boom". This time, there will be a Chicken a la Kingfish in every pot-- we promise! Yeah, right. Most other states will soon be running budget deficits, but Louisiana will be enjoying phantom "surpluses" because of high gasoline prices nationwide. It will be like the go go seventies all over again! (That decade hella-sucked for most everyone else, but since it sucked slightly less on a relative basis for Louisiana, we felt like lucky ducky pelicans.) Of course, several things have to be ignored for this "lucky" feeling to properly take hold: for example, you gotta ignore the whole Federal Flood/Hurricanes thing, the whole crumbling schools and infrastructure thing, the whole destruction of our coastal wetlands thing, the whole (unacceptably weak) levee/floodwall repair thing. But if we can ignore all that, and get used and abused by this orchestrated national oil drilling discussion/diversion, then those shiny pennies-on-the-dollar in oil royalties start to look pretty good, and we think maybe those shiny pennies can wash our billion dollar problems out of our hair. Well, not so much. Despite the recovery help we've received from the rest of the country, incredibly large challenges surround us-- environmental, economic, infrastructural, educational, criminal. Even after cataclysmic disasters decimated our "Energy Coast", and the fatally flawed federal floodwalls drowned our best city, and after the federal government couped us up in toxic trailers while we waited for belated and piecemeal recovery funds that the Bush administration was happy to overestimate and delay... even after all that bullshit, Louisiana has little collective sense of how thoroughly it has been rooked, rickrolled, bamboozled and bought. It was like a circle jerk of accepted risk, and we were the retarded cousin in the back of the room curiously watching the "cool guys" beat their meat. Then they told us we could join the club if we ate their soggy risk biscuit. We were elated! So we did, gobble gobble, and they laughed and laughed. They're still laughing. Consider how preeverted and fucked up things are down here: we're actually giddy to spend these oil royalty dollars on rebuilding our coastal wetlands-- the same coastal wetlands that were sliced and diced and killed (in large part) by the oil infrastructure that supplies the rest of the country with oil and gas! Here's the arrangement, simplified: the nation gets energy supplied through Louisiana, the oil companies make ginormous profits, and Louisiana sacrifices its coastal ecology and natural hurricane buffer so that it can get pennies on the dollar back from Big Oil, to address the billion dollar problems that Big Oil helped exacerbate. This is what constitutes "boom times" in da gret stet. Maximum risk, minimum recompense. It seems delusional, and it is, but not as much as you might think. (More on that later.) Don't get me started on the absurd floodwall situation that "protects" the city. Holy Grandpa Shit on the wall! After the Federal Flood-- the worst engineering failure in the nation's history-- the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is going to build us what we were promised in the fucking 1960's, but never fucking received: WEAK CATEGORY 3 flood surge protection. Hopefully, this time the USACE won't screw it up, and everything will hold. But questions still abound. What happens to New Orleans' tourist economy if a hurricane hits us before the flood protection is finished in 2011? Answer: We're fucked. And what happens to this vital port city if a Strong Cat 3 or better hits us after 2011? Answer: We're fucked. And do you think the fact that we're fucked has escaped notice of the Reinsurance industry? Fuck no! They know we're fucked, and they're going to fuck us with outrageous insurance premiums and exclusions, until another disaster comes along and permanently fucks us. And how can our region recover if it's prohibitively expensive to insure? You fucking tell me. Many of us feel vaguely cheated down here, but instead of getting collectively outraged, informed and mobilized... we decide to indulge in a delusion, and pretend a few fleeting oil pennies will solve things (boy aren't they shiny, though!). We've been fucked for so long I'm concerned that we won't know when we're seriously fucked. And we're looking seriously fucked this time. And that has direct implications for the rest of the country. But, like George Bush and the neocon hardcunts, when Louisianans are in a pinch they sometimes like to "double down" on their fuckedness, and elect politicians based on either 1) their entertainment value, or 2) faux-reformist happy talk. More on that dynamic in part 2. --- Update: Slight edits made and links have been added for clarity.

Some things about people from New Orleans:

We don't care what you think. We've been doing our own thing for 300 years.

We don't want to go to your parades, ya'll don't throw anything.

100% humidity is the best moisturizer they ever came up with.

It's "New A'wlins," not "N'awlins."

We would have been fine if the federal levees hadn't broke.

We don't give a damn if you're gay.

We never had that many Starbucks coffee shops to begin with, we think yankee coffee tastes like instant.

None of those people who are stumbling around drunk in the French Quarter actually live here.
Neither do all those college girls who show their tits at Mardi Gras.

We aren't any more ashamed of our politicians than we are of yours.

At this time of the year, we all have one eye on the weather channel and one eye on Saints training camp.

We don't have southern accents, I don't care how they talk in the movies. And nobody in New Orleans calls people "cher."

We know about the danger of flooding. We're working on it.

We are not governed under the Napoleonic Code.

We are well aware of the dangers of hurricanes. Over 400,000 of us evacuated safely in advance of Hurricane Katrina. We hope you never have to try it.

We are among the most flood-insured populations in the country.

We didn't vote for George W. Bush in the first place.

We all know several people who moved to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and some who moved here because of it.

Only tourists wear Mardi Gras beads when it's not Mardi Gras.

New Orleans has over 300 bloggers, some of whom will be posting here in the coming week.