.Steve Gilliard on fire:
The Price of Failure (The News Blog)
The New York Times finally starts to get it:
From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy
Ted Koppel finally starts to get it:
Ted Koppel Rips FEMA’s Michael Brown on Nightline (Americablog)
A very interesting question:
Will the New New Orleans Be Black? (BC)
(Excerpt)
From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city’s
housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may
get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home
owners will get very little – even if they are insured. The renting
majority may get nothing…We all know that the prevailing model for
urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides
an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale,
under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure…”
Left Behind II
Unrest Intensifies at Superdome Shelter (AP)
Left Behind III
Amid Stench of Death, Poor Bear the Brunt (Guardian)
Deregulation and Disaster, or Welcome to Easter Island, the Land That Devoured Itself. Jason Leopold is on the case:
Global Warming and Widespread Blackouts Are Just as Dangerous as Terrorism (DV)
Didn’t see it coming, says Bush? Maybe he should’ve read National Georgraphic — in October 2004:
Gone With the Water (NG)
My City Was Gone
Jericho (Limited Inc)
LI, a former resident, remembers. (Excerpt)
If I were [still] living in NOLA…I’d be in the Civic Center or the
Superdome. Evacuation at a moment’s notice is not in my economic cards
– I have no car, I have no cell phone, and I have no desire to leave my
possessions (a computer, a tv, a stereo) to the winds, or to a passing
looter. Although I very much understand taking bacon and beer (which,
by the way, is a good thing to drink when the water becomes polluted –
that is, after all, why beer was invented), I very much don’t
understand evacuating New Orleans without any regard for the stuff left
in the stores, especially the weapons. I don’t understand not
impounding that stuff the first day. This is New Orleans, after all,
where every native has a funny story about some naïf tourist venturing
out to some area which is not to be visited without an armed escort. We
toyed with these stories, when I was there, because there was a certain
resentment of tourists, who were in search of easy vices but hadn’t
earned the right to them – didn’t even understand that vices come in
bundles, and some of them you might not like at one in the morning. New
Orleans isn’t just like a banana republic, it is one. There is no real
police force in New Orleans. There is a praetorian guard that protects
the garden district, and Jefferson Parish middle class folk, and
enforces the rule of the jungle on the Ninth ward. Over the decades,
both sides of this equation were educated to believe in a very direct
view of the regulation of social relations. When I hear calls to shoot
to kill the looters, that is the Garden District expressing what it has
always thought.