Prometheus 6 - Katrina aftermath

Sometimes my heart breaks

Prometheus 6 — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 08:01:42 -0400

The quote of note is a whole 'nother article.

New Orleans public housing residents take back their homes
by JusticeforNewOrleans.org
Public housing residents took action Saturday to take back their homes, despite the efforts of HANO (Housing Authority of New Orleans) and HUD authorities to stop them. Residents rallied at the Florida, St. Bernard, C.J. Peete and Magnolia sites, forcing their way through locked and boarded doors to begin gutting and repairing apartments.

At the Florida development, residents led by the New Orleans Survivor Council and volunteers from Common Ground forced open doors with crowbars and removed flood damaged property. Tenants were visibly joyful at being in their homes for the first time since Katrina.

To date, HANO has not announced any plans for re-opening or rehabilitating public housing, leading to growing anger and frustration among residents.

5,000 Public Housing Units in New Orleans Are to Be Razed
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, June 14 — Federal housing officials announced on Wednesday that more than 5,000 public housing apartments for the poor were to be demolished here and replaced by developments for residents with a wider range of incomes.

The announcement, made by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso R. Jackson, provoked strong criticism from low-income tenants and their advocates, several of whom noted that thousands of public housing apartments had been closed since Hurricane Katrina. But local officials have for months said they do not want a return to the intense concentrations of poverty in the old projects, where crime and squalor were pervasive.

Invest in trailer manufacturers (are there any American ones left?)

Prometheus 6 — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 07:58:28 -0400

Mr. Shiyou returns to working on the all-but-destroyed house of a beloved 89-year-old neighbor. Ms. Shiyou, meanwhile, recreates in her mind the home they shared for 10 years and lost nine months ago.
The Kia Sephia and the Dodge pickup in the driveway. The curio cabinet, with all those angels collected by her late mother. The framed family photographs. The children's encyclopedias. Her set of dishes, whose pattern was, was —
"God, what color was my kitchen set?" Ms. Shiyou asks, her voice breaking. She says it will come to her, but it doesn't.

Lives Suspended on Gulf Coast, Crammed Into 240 Square Feet
By DAN BARRY

LAKESHORE, Miss., June 12 — If you were to fly over rural Hancock County here, you would see more than 9,000 of them, white rectangles clumped in sun-bleached parks and scattered in piney woods like pieces of a trashed picket fence. Pick any one, and contained within that FEMA trailer are lives in claustrophobic suspension.

What to you expect after being on the receiving end of a national "fuck you"?

Prometheus 6 — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 02:48:27 -0400

Justyn Green, 12, and his brother Jaleel, 8, spent six days at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans with their mother and father -- hot, hungry, thirsty, dirty and frightened. They heard gunfire and saw dead people. They got out at one point, only to be forced to return when police in a nearby town turned away thousands of evacuees at gunpoint. When they finally boarded a bus to leave -- after enduring a line so long they could barely stand -- they thought the horror was over, but it wasn't. The bus flipped over near Opelousas, and their father was killed.

The boys "didn't say a word" at the Superdome, said their mother, Joy Green. "They looked so lost and scared. There was no security at all. You were on your own."

The boys still don't talk much.

For Many of Katrina's Young Victims, The Scars Are More Than Skin Deep
By Julia Cass
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 13, 2006; A01

We got the hint when that bridge was blocked by armed citizens

Prometheus 6 — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 08:21:50 -0400

Quote of note:

Finally, we turn to the question of skin color. For each of the episodic news conditions we created a lighter and darker complexion image of the person in question. We anticipated that the impact of skin color would be especially influential when the person in question was non-white. That is, we expected that darker skin color would prompt people to consider race only when they believed the person in question to be non-white. In fact, the impact of the skin color manipulation on the level of recommended financial assistance was striking. (We have plotted the difference in the level and length of disaster relief between the dark and light conditions in Figure 3.) When the hurricane victim in the news was a dark-complexion white, the amount of assistance for hurricane victims actually increased. Perhaps well tanned whites are perceived as vigorous, fit and attractive, thus putting our respondents in a more favorable state of mind concerning hurricane victims in general. But for every other ethnic group -- blacks, Hispanics and Asians -- the effect of skin color ran in the opposite direction. When people saw a dark-skinned black, Hispanic, or Asian, they recommended lower levels of financial assistance. This divergence in the effects of skin color for whites and non-whites was statistically significant. A similar, but weaker pattern emerged for duration of assistance. Here the effects of darkened skin color were to increase the duration of assistance in the white and Asian conditions, but to decrease it in the case of the African-American and Hispanic conditions.
These results suggest that news media coverage of natural disasters can shape the audience's response. Framing the disaster in ways that evoke racial stereotypes can make people less supportive of large-scale relief efforts. News reports about flooding evoke one set of apparently positive images in the reader's mind; reports about lawlessness evoke quite another.
The effects of the racial identity of individual hurricane victims on the prescribed level of government assistance for all victims are suggestive of what psychologists call the "automaticity" of stereotyping. People cannot help stereotyping on the basis of ethnicity despite their best efforts to act unbiased and egalitarian. As we noted at the outset, this particular sample of participants consisted of highly educated individuals who located themselves toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. Many of them live in and around the nation's capital, one of the more racially diverse and cosmopolitan areas of America. We suspect that this group would score at or very near the top of most measures of support for civil rights and racial equality. Yet their responses to Katrina were influenced by the mere inclusion of racial cues in news media coverage. The fact that this group awarded lower levels of hurricane assistance after reading about looting or after encountering an African-American family displaced by the hurricane is testimony to the persistent and primordial power of racial imagery in American life.

Natural Disasters in Black and White
How Racial Cues Influenced Public Response to Hurricane Katrina
By Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin
Thursday, June 8, 2006; 6:05 PM

Hurricane season looks to be a lot of fun this year

Prometheus 6 — Wed, 31 May 2006 13:22:00 -0400

Poverty keeps many from preparing for storm season
Preparing for hurricane season with expensive supplies takes a back seat to everyday life for many of South Florida's low-income residents.
BY ANDREA ROBINSON AND NATALIE P. MCNEAL

On the cusp of a new hurricane season, Sheila Tobias is in a bind.

Generators, flashlights, batteries and nonperishable food are things that South Florida's poor and working-class families may not be able to afford for the coming storms. Among them is Tobias, a Miramar mother of two and a substitute school bus driver who makes $9 an hour.

''I don't have the extra money,'' said Tobias, 39. ``I have to take care of the kids, take care of school clothes. That's all the money I have.''

From the Nice Work If You Can Get It Department

Prometheus 6 — Fri, 19 May 2006 12:29:36 -0400

Quote of note:

...Documents show that the government paid Blackwater $950 a day for each of its guards in the area. Interviewed by The Nation last September, several of the company's guards stationed in New Orleans said they were being paid $350 a day. That would have left Blackwater with $600 per man, per day to cover lodging, ammo, other overhead--and profits.
... According to Blackwater's government contracts, obtained by The Nation, from September 8 to September 30, 2005, Blackwater was paid $409,000 for providing fourteen guards and four vehicles to "protect the temporary morgue in Baton Rouge, LA." That contract kicked off a hurricane boon for Blackwater. From September to the end of December 2005, the government paid Blackwater at least $33.3 million--well surpassing the amount of Blackwater's contract to guard Ambassador Paul Bremer when he was head of the US occupation of Iraq. And the company has likely raked in much more in the hurricane zone. Exactly how much is unclear, as attempts to get information on Blackwater's current contracts in New Orleans have been unsuccessful.

In the Black(water)
by JEREMY SCAHILL
[from the June 5, 2006 issue]

Tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims remain without homes. The environment is devastated. People are disenfranchised. Financial resources, desperate residents are told, are scarce. But at least New Orleans has a Wal-Mart parking lot serving as a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center with perhaps the tightest security of any parking lot in the world. That's thanks to the more than $30 million Washington has shelled out to the Blackwater USA security firm since its men deployed after Katrina hit. Under contract with the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Federal Protective Service, Blackwater's men are ostensibly protecting federal reconstruction projects for FEMA. Documents show that the government paid Blackwater $950 a day for each of its guards in the area. Interviewed by The Nation last September, several of the company's guards stationed in New Orleans said they were being paid $350 a day. That would have left Blackwater with $600 per man, per day to cover lodging, ammo, other overhead--and profits.

Shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

Prometheus 6 — Sun, 07 May 2006 08:38:29 -0400

Oh, what a surprise! I had no idea this would happen!

Something else interesting in the article:

In a city of family allegiances, the candidates are shadowed by the legacies of two powerful political families that ran affairs here for decades — that of Mr. Landrieu, whose father was mayor, whose sister is a United States senator and whose aunt is the president of the school board; and the Morial clan, which produced father-and-son mayors. Though both families are Democratic and are disdained by white conservatives, any association with the Morials, especially, is currently regarded as politically toxic, given the changed electorate.

Conservative White Voters Hold Sway in an Altered New Orleans Electoral Landscape
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 6 — The city's changed demographics made themselves felt all week as a tight race for mayor headed toward the May 20 runoff.

Black officials have run City Hall for decades, but with the population dispersal caused by Hurricane Katrina, white voters — especially conservatives — hold the keys to the drab 1950's building downtown. Both the incumbent, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, and his challenger, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, need this group, and both are now flirting with it, flaunting endorsements from conservative white also-rans in the April 22 primary.

But the electoral dance has to be delicate in a city with long memories and short fuses. Hurricane season is bearing down, last year's catastrophe is ever present, and decades' worth of decline has not gone away. The challenges: do not scare a traumatized electorate, but do not lull it either; and distance yourself from prior black mayors — deemed corrupt by whites — but not too much.

Newer Orleans will be much like Old Orleans

Prometheus 6 — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:31:11 -0400

Quote of note:

Just as disparities between rich and poor were exposed in the days after Hurricane Katrina, class and wealth seem to be playing a significant role as elected officials struggle to determine which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and which should revert to swampland, if not bulldozed and sold en masse to a developer. While Eastover is full of the sound of saws ripping wood and the pneumatic punch of nail guns, the sound of the Lower Ninth Ward is mainly silence.

On one level, the rebuilding plan approved in March by Mayor C. Ray Nagin appears to put every neighborhood on the same footing. That plan places responsibility on residents to determine who is moving back to their communities and to decide collectively on a vision for their neighborhood.

But not every community has the same resources to track down former neighbors and draft a plan that can provide for things as diverse as a local elementary school and a grocery store.

In Rebuilding as in the Disaster, Wealth and Class Help Define New Orleans
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS — Floodwaters were still sloshing around inside the houses of Eastover, a gated subdivision that was home to some of this city's wealthiest black residents, when the neighborhood association decided to hire a boat for a rescue operation last September.

The rescuers were not searching for someone stranded, but rather trying to retrieve a roster of residents from the association's offices so it could start learning who planned to move back.

That's because poverty is the counterweight on the pendulum that is our economy

Prometheus 6 — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 13:30:13 -0400

Quote of note:

Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, says they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he says, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don't care.

"This idea that it's a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality," he says, "just doesn't pass muster."

Post-Katrina dialogue on poverty fizzles
By ALLEN G. BREED
AP NATIONAL WRITER

Don't tell the Rev. Randall Mitchell that Hurricane Katrina somehow opened people's eyes to the depth of poverty in this nation. Americans knew the extent of the problem long before the storm, he says. They'd just learned to live with it.

How...stupid

Prometheus 6 — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 11:22:07 -0500

Budget Vote Revives Bid for Arctic Oil Drilling
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A05

A last-minute deal to secure the vote of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) on a $2.8 trillion budget plan has given new life to the Republican drive to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

The budget blueprint for fiscal 2007, which will begin in October, includes a $10 billion Gulf Coast restoration fund that would be financed from the leasing of arctic refuge drilling rights, revenue from new drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf of the Gulf of Mexico and further sales of the broadcast spectrum. With that provision in hand, Landrieu cast the only Democratic vote for the budget resolution, which squeaked through Thursday night, 51 to 49.

"It's not easy being alone on anything. I don't relish this position," Landrieu said. "But, at times, it's necessary."

Gulf coast recovery is an economic and political necessity. ANWR drilling is not.