Disparity, injustice, incompetence and corruption infect our response to this national tragedy. This diary upholds my vow to "never forget" or let others forget New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Katrina.
The Katrina disaster will, I believe, be the most revealing event of this time in US history. The fury of Katrina brought the loss of a unique national treasure - a part of our economic, social and artistic identity, a major American city, a port, a huge swath of the Gulf Coast and the home to some of our most fragile and forgotten citizens. Though our leaders always knew that it would happen someday and we had "plans", the plans turned out to be empty promises. Promises that continue unfulfilled. When do we call them lies?
More bellow the fold...
The waters of Katrina washed away our illusions of national pride and capability, revealing our vulnerability and evidence of the growing poverty in our eroding national character. We were vulnerable not because we lost so much - but because we were unable to respond to the loss in a manner equal to its challenge. There has been no lasting sense of a national commitment to our people - the victims of this storm and decades of national neglect - no national call to action for people, only to property and investors.
We sent money - plenty of money - but did not care apparently who got it. We accepted without outrage the lack of spending oversight or accounting for either helping the victims or rebuilding. We have no formal plan for the future rehabilitation of New Orleans or the region. There is no blue ribbon panel or commission of national stature convened to develop such a thing. "Brownie" the Fed responsible for overseeing recovery is still on the payroll. We do not know why the levees failed and the report from the Army Corps of Engineers will not be available until next July, giving local officials responsible for preventing another catastrophe little time to make appropriate adjustments before the next hurricane season begins.
Half a million people, Katrina's children, have been dispersed around our vast country, frequently without adequate documentation of who they are and where they were sent, complicating reunions, financial support and rehabilitation for employment. No one seems to have a plan for how to fix this, though we actually were discussing expeditions to Mars last summer.
True, many Americans of great conscience and selflessness stepped up to help from the beginning of this and are still helping and giving. But there is no collective action, no vision, no coherent purpose borne of our national will. The collective "WE" expressed through the non actions of this government and glib mouthings of the media only reveal slowly dissolving promises and unmitigated desperation. Our national debate revolves around the OTHER Gulf as the growing gulf between the darkness at the center of our nation's soul and the need of OUR OWN people goes unattended. We seem to hold to the zero sum thought process that there is only so much to go around and ya know, something has to give....
We sit here after three months with an unexamined but unbelievably low count of the dead - indeed, we haven't even identified or buried hundreds of the dead already collected - and we keep finding more. Returning citizens experience the incredible horror of "coming home" to dead relatives in wrecked homes that were not, in the end, truly searched as promised. It appears that someone "forgot"? Our government argues over who will pay for the DNA testing to identify the lost...but they at least are beyond suffering. And oh, by the way, did I mention that unless the Democrats (thank God!) had intervened, the Republican Congress would have cut funding to Medicaid, Medicare and the WIC nutrition program just at the time when people made vulnerable by their losses to the storm would need help the most? They may still succeed in making these cuts eventually.
Today I am documenting the most recent outrage in an unending stream of failed response and caring...the fact that thousands of Katrina evacuees are being TURNED OUT of their shelters in locations all around the country - in danger of going from refugees from a disaster to permanent homelessness.
The following is an article in the WaPo that describes the most recent government screw up in the necklace of broken promises.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"The Federal Emergency Management Agency's evolving efforts to shelter Hurricane Katrina victims continue to waste huge amounts of taxpayer dollars and could soon leave many evacuees short of money and facing eviction, according to renter advocates and housing industry officials.
The concerns focus on FEMA's extension of an $8.3 million-a-day program to house 549,000 people in hotel rooms beyond an Oct. 15 deadline and its handling of a new rental assistance program, which offers displaced families a lump sum of $2,358 for three months' rent. The disaster agency has previously drawn criticism for its troubled $1 billion-plus effort to house hurricane evacuees in 125,000 trailers.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group, said that because the rent program is based on the $786-per-month national median rent for a two-bedroom apartment -- rather than city-by-city rates used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- many evacuees taken to more costly cities are already short on cash. Typically, the coalition said, renters must pay a deposit and first month's rent; it cited Washington as an example, where the average rent is about $1,100 and where about 5,000 people have been resettled.
Apartment owners say they also are encountering problems collecting rents because FEMA hands money directly to storm victims, instead of using housing vouchers or payments to landlords as HUD does for some low-income renters. Some families that left their homes with only what they could carry have used FEMA's cash for food, clothing and transportation.
"We felt if we did the right thing, FEMA would step up and provide housing assistance for all these folks. Here we are four weeks later, and a lot of these folks simply do not have rent money to pay," said Kirk H. Tate, a member of Houston's Katrina housing task force and a partner at Orion Real Estate Services Inc., which manages 12,000 apartments in the city.
SNIP
"The warnings come as a wide range of players in the nation's housing and lodging industries express mounting exasperation with FEMA's shifting efforts to cope with the evacuee crisis. Although the administration has proposed cruise ships, trailers, President Bush's nascent "urban homesteading" initiative, hotels and now apartment grants, they say FEMA is ignoring advice from experts inside and outside the government.
"The normal FEMA programs just aren't working. They may be good for 1,500, 2,000 people, but when you're talking a half a million, they do not work," said Douglas S. Culkin, executive vice president of the National Apartment Association.
Culkin said 1 million rental units are vacant in the southeastern United States at half the rate of FEMA's $1,770-a-month hotel program. He called the current spending rate of $250 million a month "a horrendous waste of tax dollars."
Linda Couch, deputy director of the low-income housing coalition, agreed that taxpayer money could be saved by using vacant apartment units. "If the federal government made a choice to subsidize them at the rents they are available at, it looks like it still would be less than having them live in a hotel," she said."
SNIP
The scale of Katrina's exodus is immense and growing. On Thursday, FEMA's acting director, R. David Paulison, increased the agency's estimate of the number of families expected to need housing for up to several months, from 300,000 to between 400,000 and 600,000."
Please fellow Kossites, keep following this, please send letters to your Congressman or Senator reminding them not to forget. We must keep Katrina's children in our active awareness.
Lets use our creativity, imagination and will and renew our dedication to this challenge. This is the most important test we face of who we are and who we are to become and they are counting on us.