Love song for New Orleans

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This evening's Netflix was A Love Song for Bobby Long. The plot and such were pretty thin, and John Travolta chewed up the scenery as his trademarked charming villainous rascal while Scarlett Johansson did an okay job but that's all you can say about it, but it was an affecting movie for me anyhow mostly because of one of the uncredited stars of the movie: New Orleans and its musical culture, destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.

I watch Travolta, then Scarlett Johansson, walk past places I knew, places I've seen, and realize that they're no longer there, not in any meaningful way. The musical culture depicted in the movie... it's not there anymore. Destroyed. All gone. Nothing left but a Disneyfied New Orleans, purged of what made it one of the great cultural cities of the United States, and one that is still surrounded by rotten levees patched with sand that will break when the next moderate-sized hurricane hits.

Anyhow, the song above is by Grayson Capps, a New Orleans musician. It's not one of his best songs, go to Youtube and search for his name for better songs, his music is what New Orleans was, a mixture of blues and jazz and rock and roll all mixed up into one spicy gumbo. But this particular song is a lament that still is not being heard. A great American city was destroyed by neglect and incompetence, and what little rebuilding has been done by locals with whatever scrap they could scrape together. There is a trillion dollars to bring "democracy" to Iraqis, but not a dime to bring safe levees to New Orleans. And nobody seems to care, or give a damn, or see a thing.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Just another day in New Orleans

This isn't any day special for New Orleans bloggers. They don't need to remember Katrina's effects. They're still living it, and paying the price. They are tired. New Orleanians angrily blast zealots and bigots who blame local politicians for the failure to rebuild public infrastructure, pointing out that a) local politicians haven't gotten anything other than a couple of small loans from the federal government to rebuild with, loans that, unprecedentedly, the feds are requiring to be repaid (disaster loans to cities for rebuilding infrastructure have traditionally been forgiven by the federal government), and b) the problem isn't corruption because New Orleans government is now cleaner than is the norm for U.S. politics thanks to a vigorous and energetic reform movement that has thrown the bums out and put in vigorous safeguards. New Orleanians are angry. They were flooded out by flawed levees designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers which were not overtopped (and we have video to prove it) but rather collapsed due to design flaws, and now are being required to pay the whole price of a disaster created by the U.S. government and its incompetence and penny-pinching. And to add insult to injury, Dear Leader showed up in New Orleans and caused traffic mayhem in order to perform his little stage-managed photo-op where he lied his ass off about the amount of money given for rebuilding to the City of New Orleans (which is $0 -- ***ZEEEEROOOOO***, folks, just those two small loans which have to be paid back).

Yessiree, just an other day in New Orleans. And, for that matter, on the rest of the Gulf Coast, which, outside of the casinos, is just as much a shambles as New Orleans, but with one important distinction: The very survival of southern Mississippi isn't dependent upon creaky levees designed and maintained by the provably incompetent U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, thus more rebuilding can be done there. In South Louisiana nothing could be rebuilt until the incompetent U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released new floodplain maps, and even then the maps they eventually released were completely bogus -- New Orleanians complain that in some places the maps will require them to elevate their homes ten feet above the high water mark, while in other places the maps have them underwater if the levees break again. And to add insult to injury, Mississippi, which at least is above water without the need for levees, got far more money to rebuild than Louisiana...

Anyhow, enough ranting. Today, we're all Louisianians. And we're all just as fucked as Louisianians if we rely on our federal government, which we pay money to in order to protect us, but which apparently prefers to send that money to Bush cronies instead of giving us what we pay for.

-- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin

When the levee breaks

It has been two years since New Orleans was flooded by defective levees, levees that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has now admitted were defective.

Today, two years later, New Orleans and the Louisiana Gulf Coast is still a mess. The utilities company, Entergy New Orleans and Entergy Gulf Coast cannot provide reliable power or gas service and has filed for bankruptcy despite the fact that their parent company, Entergy Corporation, is recording record profits. If they cannot provide services then government should step in and provide services (that's the whole point of government -- We The People band together and provide services for ourselves that for some reason private enterprise can't or won't provide), but local governments are bankrupt because stores cannot operate without electricity and property taxes cannot be paid without income from jobs that can't be there without electricity, and the federal government refuses to give them any money unless they provide matching funds and besides the federal government won't allow them to provide electrical service to replace the service Entergy isn't providing using these funds.

So now people have moved back, but they're not getting the services they spent so many years paying for -- no fire protection, no police protection, no flood protection (the levees are sitll broken, the U.S. Army Corps of engineers says it will not be until 2011 that the levees are even to the level of protection that they were *supposed* to be at in 2005). The Republican response is, "well who needs government?". But the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and Louisiana Gulf Coast will have an easy answer to that, as they show you the remnants of fire stations and police labs, the roads washed away that can't be rebuilt because the federal government won't provide money, the mountains of trash from gutted homes that FEMA is legally responsible for removing but refuses to see... they need the government they spent so many years paying for, the government that is supposed to provide public services like roads, fire protection, and disaster management. Unfortunately, recovery money is largely going to Bushevik cronies instead. What the people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast are getting is the sort of "service" that a stallion gives to a mare, right up the ass...

-- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin

Katrina 2 years later

Little rebuilding money has reached individuals displaced by the storm. The levees are still a mess. Major portions of New Orleans and surrounding coastal areas are still deserted ruins. And now Dear Leader is going to New Orleans to talk about how, two years after he left them to die, Mission Accomplished: It's no wonder the ratbastard isn't announcing his itinerary in New Orleans. Given how people feel about him down there, there ain't 'nuff Secret Service agents on the planet to keep him safe if there's even one sniff of his evil smirking ass in the air.

-- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin

"We called it Hurricane FEMA"

It turns out FEMA lied about conditions in a FEMA trailer park near New Orleans that they evacuated precipitously. They had told the press that they evacuated the park because of raw sewage and power outages. But it turns out that the reality was different: They decided to pack up and leave because of a contract dispute with the owner of the park.

Meanwhile, residents of FEMA parks have been given until August to find new housing. There is no new housing in the New Orleans area -- indeed, there has been a total of six hundred reconstruction grants given out thus far, far fewer than needed to rebuild the housing of the New Orleans area that was destroyed by Katrina -- so where do these people go? Well, they get ethnically cleansed to elsewhere, of course, since they are predominantly brown. How dare those nasty mud people expect the government to rebuild housing that was destroyed due to government incompetence! Why, next thing you know, they'll be expecting government to, like, provide fire and crime protection!

But of course they're just unseemly mud people, so nobody gives a shit...

Finally: Congratulations to St. Bernard Parish school superintendent Doris Voitier for winning the 2007 JFK Profiles in Courage Award for her actions in re-opening the St. Bernard Parish schools only months after Katrina hit. Thus far she's not in jail, despite her prediction that she would be. But I'm sure FEMA is working on that. Given the pace that FEMA works, though, I suspect Doris will die of old age first...

-- Badtux the "Racism? In America?" Penguin