It started with Reagan and ended with Clinton's health care plan. Now the elites are convinced that government cannot and SHOULD not be used in a competant manner to address problems in society.

New Orleanians are paying the price for this new creed.

Or poor people. Or young people. Or old people. Or sick people. Why would we expect this administration to care about New Orleans? What's more shocking to me however is the failure of the press and yes, even many bloggers, to take Congress and the Bush Administration to task in revealingly how completely the recovery efforts from Katrina have failed Americans in need. Tim Tagaris' posts have opened a window into what's happening there.

The reason we all participate in paying taxes and in the social contract is in part for protection from our government in times of crisis. This government has failed to hold up its end of the bargain to American citizens.

How strong and how compassionate of a nation can we appear to the rest of the world?

I read these posts and spend time thinking about Karen Carter and William Jefferson, and I'm less interested in the race than I am simply ashamed.

Actually, I think this is the view of a lot of NOLA voters and bloggers as well.  This was my view, which is why I was so surprised when the netroots took up this particular race as so important.  To me, the important races were the mayoral and city council ones and some of the recent ballot initiaties (one place where common sense prevailed).

The overwhelming sense of the people down here is "please just HELP us", and when viewed through the single issue of Katrina, neither Jefferson nor Carter is going to be that effective in getting us the aid we need.  Carol Shea-Porter will probably end up being a better advocate for is.

And after December 9, we will be back to fighting FEMA and fighting Road Home and fighting City Hall, and clamoring for coastal wetlands protection, cat 5 levee protection, closing MRGO, insurance reform, holding the Corps accountable, reparations for the failure of the federal levee system, rebuilding our health care and psych care and educational and criminal justice systems, protecting our historic legacy.  And a lot of people will do it while still gutting out moldy houses, still living in FEMA trailers, still working at low-paying jobs waiting for the real jobs to come back.

On December 10, the national netroots community will talk and talk and talk about the results of this election and what it means to the nation, to the Democratic party, and to 2008.

On December 11...what?  Will it be yet another Ash Wednesday, where you've had your fun and you quietly scoot out of town with your hangovers and your souvenirs and you forget about us til next time, while we stay behind to clean up?  Or will you stick with us and continue to fight this fight?  Not just in the political realm, but in the reality realm.  Come down here.  Grab a shovel or a hammer.  Put GOTV on ice for a few months and try some Get People Home.

Don't let your disappointment in the candidates convince you that you are helpless to do anything.  The election was never The Most Important thing in the first place, if you really want to help our city.

Bush may lack the ideological world view that will allow him to conceive of financing the rebuilding of New Orleans.

But he also lacks the imagination.  And I think that a Republican rebuilding would end up being a Negro Removal Project anyway (what many Blacks called urban renewal projects, and slum clearance, during the 1960s).

And they're already thinking about tearing down public housing, with tens of thousands of people living in trailers.

But Stoller is spot on in expressing almost inexpressible feelings.  Where IS the leadership? at national, state, and local levels.  I hate to talk about the good old days, but can you imagine Lyndon Johnson, JFK, or even Nixon sitting in Washington or Camp David for days while this was going on?

Or would Russell Long and Hale Boggs and their relations let this stagnate?  I just don't think so.  (Writing the following has brought up emotions that are decades old, and I may have gone on too much in a stream of consciousness that I did not intend)

I've lived through terrible hurricanes (Florida Keys, 1960, Hurricane Donna the most severe) that destroyed our house when I was 13.  The National Guard was occupying Key Largo the next day.  Health service lining us up for mass inoculations, food, the whole nine yards you see on television.  Parts of the Keys looked like Bandar Aceh (sp?) in Indonesia.  Luckily we sat out the storm sheltered a few feet above the high water mark of the storm surge and a few miles north of where the eye hit.

Now there weren't 500,000 of us, and I remember thinking "Thank God this didn't hit Miami," and the storm surge was the only flooding (though at least 15 feet high from water marks in Islamorada) and if memory serves, the death toll was less than 10 due to the very efficient evacuation of the Keys--there were traffic jams of Greyhound buses taking people north to Dade County or wherever they went. According to plan, presumably.  

We didn't leave for Miami because the storm was originally going to hit Key West, 100 miles away.  Big mistake; by the time the storm turned more northerly, we realized that the road between Key Largo and Homestead might be impassible, so we had better stay where we were, in a motel in the town of Key Largo, one of the highest places on the island.  And we were fine there.

Walk out the next morning, go a quarter on a mile south, and seaweed marked the high point of the storm surge on the Overseas Highway.  Houses and especially trailers were torn up like someone churned the area with an eggbeater.  One large commercial fishing boat was sitting right next to the Overseas Highway--several miles from the ocean at that point--for several years.  The further south one drove, the worse it got.  

But systems were in place foll;owing the storm, people knew what to do, even though bridges were washed out.  And remember also, there were military bases near Key West, so I suspect the civil defense plans, protection of power supply and the water pipeline, etc., were exceptionally well thought out.  But the operation went very smoothly, under the circumstances, which were difficult.  New Orleans would have been more difficult then, but I think they would have managed much better in 1960 or 1965 than in 2005.

More Black lives would have been saved in the still segregationist South of the early 1960s than now.  Those hospitals would have been EVACUATED if they were on the Keys, for example.  And, yes, the sensitivity to the Keys to hurricanes, and the potential for mass deaths down there was well known.  But the certainty of catastrophe in New Orleans if a Donna/Andrew hit head on was widely, widely known.  I knew it!  Scientific American, National Geographic had had several stories on just what would happen when....

And New Orleans did "dodge the bullet."  They didn't get the worst of either the winds OR THE HUMONGOUS STORM SURGE that hit Mississippi. It sounds like the storm surge may have been five or more feet HIGHER than Donna's on Islamorada.  The force of this wall of water is unimaginable.  People living right on the coast survived it, I can't imagine how.  I don't know if more than a very few people had remained on Islamorada (also the site of the 1936 hurricane that killed hundreds of people), why didn't they send in the Guard and CLEAR the coastal housing of people before the storm.  THAT wasn't half a million people!.

But the storm surge was no surprise to me, sitting in New York.  I have the National Hurricane Center website bookmarked.  I knew that I believe it was the third lowest barometer reading was recorded in the storm even before New Orleans was ordered evacuated.  The storm track was bulls eyeing NOLA, It is simple physics, the storm surge is a bulge of water pulled up by low pressure--or, depending on your point of view, pushed up by higher air pressure on the surrounding water--sort of like what happens to water when you suck on a straw.  Really low pressure in the eye means a high storm  surge, and all those millions of tons of water sweeping onto shore in a bulge, not even a wave, and then letting go, like if you took your mouth of a straw, but the bulge water would be 20 feet high and maybe tens of miles wide (maybe less, depends).

The water slowly rose in New Orleans.  Words can't describe what had to have happened on the Mississippi coast.  The damage there was inevitable.  The very inevitability of this damage  should have rendered coastal evacuation a no brainer.  And the population was smaller with, I bet more roads north to higher, safer ground to, at least, ride out the storm.

And what happened IN New Orleans? I can't add anything except one thought.  In 1928 during exceptionally high spring floods, the levee gave way on the Mississippi flooding thousands of miles of Delta land.  This is a long way from New Orleans (where parts of the levee system were intentionally blown up--another story) except that the descriptions of the levee giving way--sort of turning to pudding at the bottom of the levee, sound like what must have happened to parts of the New Orleans levee system.  Neither was overtopped.

They were supposed to have learned a lot about levee building from the 1928 flood.  Leaving aside possible cutting of corners on design and in construction techniques in the 1960 1990 levee building phase, earth dams and levees need a lot of maintenance.  I worked some on a couple of small clay dams in the North Carolina mountains when I was a kid.  Holes, gaps, voids develop in the middle of these structures.  You have to fill these voids on a regular basis--it's not that hard, you can do it hydraulically.  From reports of nearby homeowners, it doesn't sound like some of the levees were properly inspected and maintained.  It sounds like they were "leaking" at the bottom.  This observation was not brain surgery.  Why weren't they maintained.

In the face of wholly predictable tragedies, what has happened to this country that skills and techniques for dealing with similar disasters developed over long periods of time have decayed.  The memories of the average citizen may be short, but that's what we have a government FOR.  That's the main purpose of the National Guard, for example.

OK I'm going off preaching to the choir.  But the pain, and I'm not alone, is so intense, even though I am not directly affected by the disaster. on the Gulf Coast as we were in New York by 9/11.

What can be done that avoids Bush? The new Democratic Congress can establish and fund a New Orleans recovery agency. The Republican congress left 9 of 11 govenment funding bills for the new year and new congress to handle. If a new NOLA recovery agency is included in another funding bill that Bush wouldn't veto, it could be done. We need action, oversite, and direct funding for a responsible federal agency. Not volunteers. Not charity. Fed action now. Could a bill name a nonprofit such as Habitat for Humanity, instead of Haliburtin types? Does it have to be the president naming agency heads and workers? Every way you turn the president is standing in the way, but there should be some way around him!

How to explain the inaction on Katrina damage in NO?

Obviously, the regime is going to shed no tears; it gets a lightening of the city's average shade, leaves some interesting real estate projects maturing (as parts of NO decay) and is one further example of YOYO.

But - I can't help feeling that if Baltimore suffered as much, even though those affected were somewhat less than lily-white, the regime would still not have got away with letting the city fester, nor would the media or other political actors have let them do so.

As some Lousiananans have pointed out recently, there is no line in the 100 Hour project for Katrina; and I get the feeling that, despite being an open sore on the body politic, it has not been a priority for the Congressional Dem leaderships to keep on at the issue.

Of course, I may have missed the big announcement. That happens.

Remember how it's been, over the past few years, when the Dems have spoken about practically anything, unless it was a position the Administration felt they could exploit?

Damned skippy you remember...nothing.  Because that's how much you usually heard.  The Dems could make all the racket in the world about any number of issues, but almost always it was as if they were speaking in a soundproof room.  

As long as there were no hearings, no prospect of legislation, the media said that whatever the Dems said was a non-story.  And we know how much the GOP wanted to talk about Katrina.

I don't think there's been apathy; mostly, there's been an information shortage.  If a story isn't getting into the media, the tendency is to assume it's going OK.  And the media let themselves get rolled over the Katrina anniversary, as the 9/11 anniversary controversies started early this year.

We in the blogosphere got rolled by that one too, as we were in the thick of trying to get the story out about the 9/11 docufic.  But realistically, it's hard to be everywhere at once.  Look at the issues that came up, starting with the 9/11 BS:

1) The 9/11 docufic.

2. The Military Commissions Act.
   
3. Iraq, Iraq, and more Iraq.
   
4. Foleygate.
   
5. Oh yeah, Afghanistan's going south too.
   
6. And a host of issues surrounding the campaign to regain Congress: are our candidates doing the right things with their ads?  Are they standing up and being Democrats, or are they still afraid to be Dems?  Are they running against the war, or dodging it?  And so on.

And we can't forget that we rely on the MSM for data, at least.  We can take a story they bury on A17, and trumpet it across the blogosphere, but using the Web as a means of citizen reportage as distinguished from citizen commentary is still in its infancy: we're still new at covering stories that the media isn't covering at all.

I've been saying since the election that the first big Congressional hearings in January should be about the failure of Katrina reconstruction, both on account of the New Orleans itself, but also to start emphasizing the broader messages of Administration incompetence, lack of caring, and lack of accountability in ways that have clear human costs that all Americans can relate to.  People can argue over what things are really like in Iraq, but they can't argue much about New Orleans; anyone can go there and see for themselves.  I've written diaries at DailyKos to get the stats out about how few people have moved back to New Orleans even now.

I'm not apathetic in the least about New Orleans, and I'm doing what I can with what voice I have to say, "this is important, and it's still a disaster."  Still, with Iraq and the Congressional changes hogging the news, very little is going to get onto the MSM radar until after the changeover unless it's either a right-wing talking point or an issue that you can't escape if you spend any time in the blogosphere.

So I'm not ashamed; I'm realistic.  If I were a Republican or a member of the Gang of 500, I'd be ashamed, but I'm not, and I realize we're still having to carry both those groups as we try to move America in the right direction.

I felt that helplessness and the loneliness you write about when I was there in September. I wrote about it on My Left Nutmeg (I am living in Connecticut but viit New Orleans once or twice a year).

Briefly, it is like surviving in a war zone: no home, no food, no hospitals, no help. It is hard to fight being hopeless and the good people who are living in NOLA are truly heroic.

The lesson for me is that there is no such thing as Homeland Security. This is a town we knew could be targeted for terrorism, in order to achieve exactly the destruction that resulted by the negligence of our government and its agencies.

I will never stop being mad, as I was angered when it happened and as I keep trying to get people to visit and help.

It is not just New Orleans. A lot of South Louisiana and South Mississippi have devastation that is even worse than what you see in the city. The bottom line is it will be decades to just return to pre-Katrina levels if it ever does recover to that point.

The next major problem you will see will be a second wave of migration that will occur when the FEMA trailers are taken away next year. That will displace hundreds of thousands again. At this point few families have been able to rebuild in either state and there is no affordable housing to rent or buy. Louisiana and Mississippi will be in the news once again in 2007 when you see the second wave of migration.

Here's a piece by NOLA journalist Lolis Eric Elie that describes the train of thought that leads some in the black community to support the embattled Jefferson the same way they supported Nagin:

http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/ba se/news-0/116521530573700.xml?NMLEE& coll=1

For all those people who choose to ignore the incomparable contribution New Orleans has given to the rest of the nation, for all those people who choose to just believe the simplistic characterizations of New Orleans as a cesspool of crime and debauchery drowning in a bowl, guess what? It's coming to your hometown. The economy of this nation no longer supports the middle class. All of our jobs are going overseas. The only thing keeping the whole thing afloat is debt, but eventually, that party has to end. And after all of our Hummers and Escalades and Expeditions have melted the Greenland glaciers, 90 percent of the country will be up to its necks in water.

As New Orleans goes, so goes the rest of the nation.