From Advancement Project, watch the video: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

If you read The Shock Doctrine, this news comes as no surprise.  HUD/HANO has been itching to destroy the public housing in New Orleans since Katrina hit.  It looks like in mid-December 15th, they are slated for demolition:

On the 12th day before Christmas, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is planning to unleash teams of bulldozers to demolish thousands of low-income apartments in New Orleans. Despite Katrina causing the worst affordable housing crisis since the Civil War, HUD is spending $762 million in taxpayer funds to tear down over 4600 public housing subsidized apartments and replace them with 744 similarly subsidized units--an 82% reduction. HUD is in charge and a one person HUD employee makes all the local housing authority decisions. HUD took over the local housing authority years ago--all decisions are made in Washington DC. HUD plans to build an additional 1000 market rate and tax credit units--which will still result in a net loss of 2700 apartments to New Orleans--the remaining new apartments will cost an average cost of over $400,000 each!

Affordable housing is at a critical point along the Gulf Coast. Over 50,000 families still living in tiny FEMA trailers are being systematically forced out. Over 90,000 homeowners in Louisiana are still waiting to receive federal recovery funds from the Road Home. In New Orleans, hundreds of the estimated 12,000 homeless have taken up residence in small tents across the street from City Hall and under the I-10.

What a lovely Christmas gift to give those who can least afford it.  And we'll still call ourselves the richest country in the world. 

In conjunction with Human Rights Day on December 10th, a variety of concerned groups will come together to resist the demolition of public housing in New Orleans.  They need your help.

Lots of information and resources available at Advancement Project.  

Spocko's Brain: KSFO-AM Radio is at it again. Hosts tell prison rape jokes and declare that New Orleans Saints' fans displaced by Katrina should "stop whining and shut the h*ll up."   Since KSFO is owned by ABC/Disney, we're waiting for the promo, "Hi, Kids!  I'm Mickey Mouse, and I endorse hate speech!"  Read more...

h/t Cliff Schecter

And it's only Wednesday.

Today on Hardball, David Shuster gave a scathing rundown of what has been a horrific week for President Bush and the Republican Party. Starting with the president's awkward visit to New Orleans to mark the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the "Brownie" moment, Shuster then moves to the resignation of Bush's disgraced Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales and of course, yesterday's revelation that Idaho Republican, Larry Craig, had been arrested for seeking sex with an undercover officer in a bathroom stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.

Download | play Download | play (thanks to Scarce for the video)

Shuster: "The White House did offer a statement today on the Larry Craig sex scandal. A presidential spokesman expressed disappointment, but refused to say whether Craig should keep his job. That means the White House is trying to stay detached from Senator Craig in much the same way the White House has tried to stay removed from the lingering Gulf Coast problems since Hurricane Katrina."

Reuters Via Yahoo:

Former Sen. John Edwards said at a Hurricane Katrina conference he would propose what he called "Brownie's Law" requiring that qualified people, not political hacks, lead key federal agencies.

Edwards, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, drew laughter when he spoke on Monday of the proposal at the "Hope and Recovery Summit" ahead of the two-year anniversary of the storm on Wednesday.

"It's an absolute travesty to have people who are essentially political hacks in a very responsible position," he told the audience at the University of New Orleans.

"Brownie" refers to Michael Brown, who was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when Katrina struck the United States on August 29, 2005. He was criticized as being a political appointee unprepared to lead FEMA when a floundering government effort stranded thousands for days in flooded New Orleans. Read more...

Corrente:

Un-f**kin-believable. No, cancel that. Standard operating procedure*. Read it and scream:

The Army Corps of Engineers, rushing to meet President Bush's promise to protect New Orleans by the start of the 2006 hurricane season, installed defective flood-control pumps last year despite warnings from its own expert that the equipment would fail during a storm, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The 2006 hurricane season turned out to be mild, and the new pumps were never pressed into action. But the Corps and [MWI,] the politically connected manufacturer of the equipment are still struggling to get the 34 heavy-duty pumps working properly.

The pumps are now being pulled out and overhauled because of excessive vibration, Corps officials said. Other problems have included overheated engines, broken hoses and blown gaskets, according to the documents obtained by the AP.

And guess what the political connection was?

MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

There's a special place in hell reserved for these guys.

Blog for our Future:

(Newt Gingrich, speaking at CPAC) blamed the residents of New Orleans' 9th Ward for a "failure of citizenship," by being "so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

And he called for a "deep investigation" into this "failure of citizenship."

Here's the full quote:

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane. (emphasis original)

To listen to the audio, click here.

I tell you, this CPAC convention really highlights the humanity of these conservatives.  And the worst part?  It's not the first time Newt's put this in one of his speeches.  Jeffrey Feldman has more...

Mardi Gras is almost upon us.  It is impossible to think of Mardi Gras without thinking of New Orleans, still devastated by Katrina. But while the media gleefully talks about which actors are participating, many Ninth Ward residents aren't as jubilant, having lived a Lenten-like deprivation for almost two years.

ContraCostaTimes:

It has been 17 months since Katrina and broken levees devastated the Crescent City.

A helpless nation watched images of the unfamiliar: Third World America with a president up a creek without a paddle. Fleeing residents were first identified by media and government as refugees, not survivors.

The governor was frantic, a chicken with her head cut off. The off-color mayor described the city as like "fricking Baghdad." Now Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin expect an economic miracle, a J-curve rebound. Yet, the latest Census figures indicate that 241,201 people left the state. Homes and neighborhoods aren't fit to live in.

They call the state's $7.5 billion hurricane aid program the "Road Home." But the road home to New Orleans has potholes. Home insurers no longer are bound to Emergency Rule 23, enacted to prohibit post-Katrina cancellations. Relief money has been misspent or wasted. Federal, state and parish officials are caught up in turf battles. The mostly poorer sections, like the Lower 9th, are ghost towns.

True, French Quarter hotels and bars are busy. So are the casinos. Tourists still stroll Bourbon Street drinking Hand Grenades. Street performers are back. So is the Acme oyster house.

But all isn't well here.

Whole neighborhoods are gone. Not far from Armstrong Park you can find the remains of the day.

The silence is deafening. For blocks there are no people. Steps lead to nowhere, not porches. The random repopulated home becomes an oasis in a desert of despair.

  Looks like President Bush "overlooked" New Orleans....again.

From Yahoo! News: (h/t HuffPo)

New Orleans is still a mess and the pace of recovery across the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina's strike remains achingly slow after 17 months. But none of this captured President Bush's attention on the year's biggest night for showcasing policy priorities.

In the president's State of the Union speech last year, delivered just five months after the disaster, the devastation merited only 156 words out of more than 5,400.

On Tuesday night, the president spoke for almost exactly as long before a joint session of Congress. But Katrina received not a single mention.

By contrast, in the days ahead of the president's address, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia compared the U.S. money being spent on Iraqi reconstruction with the fraction committed to the Gulf Coast rebuilding. And, chosen to give the Democratic response to Bush on Tuesday, Webb brought up the continuing struggle of Katrina victims right away, listing "restoring the vitality of New Orleans" just behind education and health care among his party's most pressing priorities, according to the text of his speech distributed in advance.

MSNBC:

A new report by scientists studying Louisiana's sinking coast says the land here is not just sinking, it's sliding ever so slowly into the Gulf of Mexico.

The new findings may add a kink to plans being drawn up to build bigger and better levees to protect this historic city and Cajun bayou culture.

If the land is shifting - even slightly - engineers may need to take that into consideration as they build new levees and draw lines across the coast to identify areas that should and shouldn't be protected.

Continue reading »

 Scout Prime will be keeping us informed about the terrible situation in NOLA:

That's right, the Corps of Engineers is taking a "strategic pause" between essentially completing repair work to broken levees and "strengthening flood protection in New Orleans" according to the NYT...read on

 St. Paul Travelers Cos. Inc., Louisiana's largest commercial insurance provider, plans to cancel all its commercial property policies in the New Orleans...First Draft has the details...

The importance of this can not be overstated. If there is no insurance there is no rebuilding. George Bush can claim the levees are hunky dory but NOLA residents do not have faith in them and now we see neither does the insurance industry....read on

Most of the Jazz institutions were destroyed...

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Jude Law, Douglas Brinkley, and Irvin Mayfield are helping "the Music for Tomorrow."benefit on Sept 18 2006.  Call 504-888-7608

Check out the website: Music for Tomorrow   

Since I posted about the racist comments made by St. Tammany Parish's sheriff Jack Strain, there's been a lot of local heat on him. Strain has refused to comment which isn't surprising, but you can read all about it in NOLA.com