Hi. Please do check out tomorrow's panel of threatened UCLA Professors discussing the implications of the new McCarthyism. Realistically, we're facing a battery of assaults on liberties of all varieties and the response by these formidable targets should provide material useful in this epic struggle. I hope it's recorded. Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30mon1.html?th&emc=th Louisiana in Limbo NY Times Lead Editorial: January 30, 2006 New Orleans waits. While some heroic efforts at rebuilding are taking place, hundreds of thousands of residents have put their lives on hold until they know what the government's next steps will be, leaving the shells of their houses as placeholders. But the Bush administration has now rejected the most broadly supported plan for rebuilding communities while offering nothing to take its place. It has been five months since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and for many the norm is still the claustrophobic new reality of tiny trailers and multiple families crammed into single apartments. Louisiana is trying. You can hear jackhammers pounding and buzz saws whirring on Canal Street in New Orleans. Dedicated workers endure a grinding daily commute from points north, like Baton Rouge, as they try to make the city and the region whole again. But the mission is far from complete and the challenge is beyond the scope of a broken city and a poor state. New Orleans's crisis has little relation to anything the nation has faced in modern memory, and traditional solutions will simply not help. Homeowners many very poor people whose houses had been in their families for generations had varying degrees of insurance before the disaster. When entire neighborhoods are devastated, their mildewed furniture and drywall piled on the roadsides, it's impossible to tell the people who are well insured to rebuild and hope that the houses all around them will somehow be reclaimed somewhere down the line. But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a plan.) Instead of an alternate solution, the president's Katrina czar, Donald Powell, has offered sleight of hand, touting $6.2 billion in development money for Louisiana passed last year by Congress as if it were somehow a substitute. And in an attempt to narrow the scope of the problem, Mr. Powell says the government first needs to care for the roughly 20,000 homeowners without flood insurance who lived outside the federally designated flood plain. The real tally of destroyed or damaged homes in the region is well over 200,000. And the real need is housing for residents, whether they were renters or owners, insured or uninsured, living above the flood plain or trusting the federal government's levees to protect them from storms. Perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the wreckage of poor, low-lying New Orleans neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward. That has sparked the unproductive, blame-the-victim debate revolving around whether people should have lived there in the first place. The Ninth Ward provides a misleading picture of the city, as do the relatively unscathed tourist areas like the French Quarter and the Garden District. Huge swaths of the city have the empty quality of a ghost town. Stores wait for residents to reopen; residents wait to see if neighbors will return. The city and surrounding parishes will not meet Mr. Powell's neat categories, when renters lived beside owners, insured next to uninsured. He is talking like an actuary when a leader is needed to rescue this region. Now, Congress has a responsibility to follow its own lead rather than the president's. We were outraged once, shocked at the images on our television sets, at the poverty in our collective backyard and at the devastation of a great city. As the disaster threatens to become permanent, we have every reason to remain so. *** http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/27/AR2006012701207.html Washington Post January 28, 2006 The Catastrophe Is Not Over By Jennifer Moses BATON ROUGE, La. While the rest of the country wakes up in the morning to read about the latest round of Washington scandals, the misery in Louisiana continues unabated. Except for a few older, historical neighborhoods on "high ground," New Orleans is uninhabitable, and Cameron Parish, in the southwest corner of the state, basically no longer exists, having been wiped out by Hurricane Rita. Meanwhile, though Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf Coast region, it's being split between Mississippi and Louisiana, perhaps because, even though Mississippi has fewer than one-fifth the number of affected households Louisiana does, its governor, Haley Barbour, an ex-Republican National Committee chairman, is a pal of the president. But with all the problems Louisiana is facing -- including a new round of budget-slashing -- no one seems to be talking about the looming human crisis: Where will the tens of thousands of evacuees living in hotels go when the Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying the bills in February? Here in Baton Rouge, housing experts fear a new storm surge -- this one of people with no jobs, no insurance, no one to take them in and, as of next month, no roof over their heads. In the meantime, the local low-income housing market has never been tighter, as both FEMA and HUD have bid up housing and rental prices, leaving longtime working-class residents of Baton Rouge scrambling to find even minimally decent housing. As soon as their leases expire, rents for apartment dwellers, most of whom are on year-to-year leases, are being jacked up. The St. Vincent De Paul Society (among other institutions that serve the poor) is providing more than 25 percent more meals than it was before the storms. And homeless shelters have gone begging for permission to add beds. As for the thousands of families desperate to move out of government-sponsored hotels: tough luck. Because even if you've managed to find yourself a job, the chances of finding affordable housing are next to nil. Nationally, the number of families dwelling in FEMA- sponsored hotel rooms is just over 25,000, with more than half of those in Louisiana and Texas. FEMA is paying for some 8,600 hotel rooms in Louisiana, most of which are concentrated in the southern swath of the state and are occupied by more than one person. The government, in its demonstration of Oprah-era sensitivity training, is urging these families to relocate -- to go somewhere far, far away, Minnesota, say, which has generous welfare benefits, or Oklahoma, which has lots of open space -- but for some reason, most of the families living in hotels just want to go home. Of course, it could be worse. FEMA might have stuck to its earlier cutoff date of Jan. 7, as many hoteliers in New Orleans did, booking rooms occupied by homeless evacuees for the Mardi Gras tourist season, resulting in storm victims being evicted just in time for winter to set in. (A federal judge, hoping to prevent this trend, recently ruled that evacuees in New Orleans will be allowed to stay in government-funded hotels until March 1, the day after Mardi Gras.) And let's give FEMA credit where credit is due: The agency has promised -- in writing, no less -- that it's going to help rehabilitate sections of neglected working-class neighborhoods in Baton Rouge to accommodate the newly and about-to-be homeless. The only problem is, so far at least, the contract is worth just about as much as the paper it's written on. On the other hand, FEMA continues to award storm-cleaning contracts to some out-of-state companies that sprang up just a few days after Hurricane Katrina lunged ashore. So at least someone's being helped. According to Randy Nichols, executive director of Baton Rouge's Alliance for the Homeless, the real hitch is that FEMA is still treating the disaster in Louisiana as a historic, one-time, one-size-fits-all catastrophe, rather than as a long-term problem that requires a long-term fix. One long-term fix -- not just for residential planning but for flood control in general -- is restoring Louisiana's wetlands, which in the olden days acted as a natural buffer to storm surges, and without which none of South Louisiana would have been inhabited in the first place. But no one's talking much about the wetlands, perhaps because the subject is too, well, environmental. (And we know how the Bush administration regards the environment.) In the meantime, however, the problem of homelessness isn't just local. All the president of the United States has to do to glimpse the horrors of homelessness up close and personal is walk over to St. John's Church on Lafayette Square, where every night a dozen or more homeless men and women congregate for a good night's sleep. Surely there's room in there for a few thousand more. Jennifer Moses is a writer. 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