The Katrina Disaster: Two Years Later - and Counting
OpEd News
August 18, 2007
"Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome. We want evacuees to come home, for the best of reasons -- because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love."--George W. Bush, 9/15/05
Noble words, indeed--too bad he didn't mean it. To Bush & Company, the Katrina disaster was not a matter of human suffering and loss; it was just another opportunity for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.
"The city, developers and the feds are planning the largest urban renewal and black removal in U.S. history. While it's clear that blacks were hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, there is no aggressive plan to bring them home."--The Washington Post, 5/17/07
* "Public housing officials decided Thursday to proceed with the demolition of more than 4,500 government apartments here, brushing aside an outcry from residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina who said the move was intended to reduce the ability of poor black people to repopulate the city."-- The Washington Post, 12/8/06
* "This is a government-sanctioned diaspora of New Orleans's poorest African American citizens. They are destroying perfectly habitable apartments when they are more rare than any time since the Civil War."--Attorney Bill Quigley of Loyola University's law school in The Washington Post, 12/8/06
Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was two-thirds African American. The "new and improved New Orleans" is expected to be less than half African American.
*******
The Road Home program, which provides assistance to people displaced by Hurricanes, will stop accepting applications July 31, 2007--largely because of an estimated $5 billion shortfall in the program. So much for Bush's promise, "[W]e will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives (9/15/05). " Five billion dollars equals about two week's expenditures for Mr. Bush's war on Iraq.
*******
* "... [G]overnment neglect has plagued the rebuilding of smaller towns like Biloxi Mississippi, and rural parishes of Louisiana, leaving the entire region in distress. In Biloxi, the first to be aided after the hurricane were the casinos, which forced low-income people out of their homes and neighborhoods."--The Black Agenda Report, 8/9/07
Eleven of the thirteen Biloxi-area casinos that were damaged or destroyed by Katrina are already back in business, and the number of casinos in Biloxi is expected to double in the next 10 years because a post-Katrina rule allows casinos to be built 800 feet ashore instead of on floating barges (UPI, 8/2/07)
*******
* "With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama's football stadium"-- Jay Reeves, AP, 8/13/07
These investors are taking advantage of tax breaks created by the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005 (GO Zone), which included the Tuscaloosa area even though it is not near the coast and received little damage from Katrina. Investors there can write off more than half the cost of a $300,000 condo in the first year--instead of the regular depreciation benefit of about $11,000. Of course, ordinary people who buy a home don't get this break.
*******
A Congressional investigation has found that, even though FEMA officials received numerous warnings about dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes in the trailers provided to Katrina evacuees, they refused to allow testing of the trailers because they would no longer be able to claim that they didn't know there was a problem. This cannot be excused as incompetence or an honest mistake. It is what Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) described as "premeditated ignorance". Waxman said:
"[S]enior officials in Washington didn't want to know what they already knew, because they didn't want the legal and moral responsibility to do what they knew had to be done."--The Washington Post, 7/20/07
*******
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, 145 countries and twelve international organizations offered money, materials and help. The Bush Administration managed to squander most of the help and all of the good will.
* "Countries were trying to donate desperately needed goods and services, but as a result of bureaucratic bungling and indifference, those most in need of these generous offers and of aid never received it."--Melanie Sloan, Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, 7/27/07
An offer from Greece to provide two cruise ships to house displaced residents was refused. The Bush Administration preferred to spend millions to lease ships from Carnival Cruise Lines.
Meals Ready to Eat from Britain were not distributed because of a ban on British Beef (due to fear of Mad Cow Disease) Instead, the uneaten meals were put in storage at a cost of $16,000 a month.
*******
Despite a Bush Administration pledge to increase the number of Katrina-related contracts awarded to small business, their percentage has actually fallen--from 12% to 7%. In fact, $95 million in contracts the Bush Administration claimed were awarded to small businesses were actually awarded to large companies like Halliburton and Bectel. (USA TODAY, 8/2/07)
*******
Hurricane Katrina exposed something that Americans don't want to think about or talk about--poverty in America. This is the "other America" of John Edwards' "two Americas". These are fellow Americans who struggle every day just to get by, even in the best of times. When Katrina flooded them out of their homes, they were left with nothing--no home, no job; and the Bush Administration has left them with no hope.
In 1977, former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey said:
* "The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped."
If that is true, the Bush Administration and its accomplices in Congress have failed in every respect.
It is time for a change in Washington, DC. It is time for America to elect a government that takes care of its own people, instead of spreading death and destruction around the world.
Share your thoughts in the Forum
