Katrina,
One Year Later
Most of a major American city, New Orleans, is now gone forever.
Almost 500,000 of its former residents live somewhere else;
of those who remain, 70,000 families are in 240 square foot
FEMA trailers. Not a single dollar of federal housing repair
or home reconstruction funds has actually made it to New Orleans
yet, for complicated reasons of course. The city’s levees
today are weaker than they were before they failed last year.
Until they’re fixed, most homeowners are afraid to rebuild,
even if they could afford to which they can’t.
We’re still finding the bodies, though at less than
a dozen a month now. The confirmed dead and missing, well
over 3,000, is almost identical to the number lost in 9-11.
How many are attributable to the storm and how many to equally
disastrous government response we’ll never know.
We do know the disaster continues. There’s no more public
housing. 5,000 units are about to be demolished and the sites
turned over to private developers. Public health care is a
nightmare. Last summer there were 22 hospitals with 53,000
beds, today there are 7 left with 15,000, not a single one
a public hospital. The city’s water system pumps 135
million gallons a day. People actually use 50 million, 85
million disappears through leaks. This costs the city $200,000
a day, but it doesn’t have the $1 billion it’ll
take to fix things. The public school system is basically
gone. Of 115 public schools, today there are just 4 left,
plus two dozen or so new charter schools, publicly funded
but privately run, mostly by churches.
What’s happened in New Orleans is a window into a post-apocalyptic
picture of many things that could go wrong, given half the
chance, anywhere in our country. Of course Katrina profoundly
shook our confidence in our current government’s ability
to handle disaster. But for many it also raised larger questions
of how we prioritize what government can and should be doing.
We don’t seem to have any trouble when our friends run
low, delivering laser-guided bombs halfway around the world
and faster than FedEx. But getting people in our own cities
out of harm’s way when we knew that was coming, that
somehow proved impossible just a year ago. It wasn’t
impossible of course, it just reflected choices about what
was important and maybe who was important. And the simple
fact is that hundreds of thousands of New Orleans’ poor,
the same people left behind when it was evacuated, are also
being left behind in its reconstruction.
So what does it mean when the administration of our federal
government almost literally abandons one of our great cities,
in part at least and regardless of what anyone says, because
it’s largely poor and black? We think it’s a clear
sign but only one of many that something’s terribly
wrong. Because when some people count more than others, we’re
not living in the America we think we know anymore. And the
prime example of that is what happened in the 2004 presidential
election, when one party’s operatives in Ohio, Florida,
and other states managed to make close to 2,000,000 mostly
black and Democratic votes and voters disappear, through massive
fraud and other electoral manipulation.
This is, or should have been anyway, the most important news
story of the past 20 months. Had it happened in any other
democracy in the world, it certainly would have been for them.
The fact that it isn’t and wasn’t for us speaks
volumes about the cowed state of American journalism and especially
our broadcast media. Because the effective theft of an American
election represents a threat to our way of life and our system
of government at least as great as any posed by, say, Islamic
terrorism.
Some of the people who made these kinds of things possible
like Rep. John Sweeney who led the 2000 “Brooks Brothers
Riot” that prevented the Miami-Dade recount of the Bush-Gore
election, are still working hard to insure that every vote
cast in America does not count the same. And if they’re
successful you can bet that every vote cast in future presidential
elections will be tallied on machines made by one of four
companies, the largest of which, Diebold, made good on its
2004 promise to “deliver Ohio” for the Bush campaign,
with no recountable record of any kind, and hardly any trace
left behind.
Of course people can still choose, or try and choose, whether
America in the future is a representative democracy or a banana
republic. Fair national elections and a president elected
by a majority of its voters are usually pretty good indicators.
But if these things aren’t worth fighting for, it would
be hard for us to figure out what parts of our founding fathers’
vision would be. We’re not sure what liberty and justice
mean without fairness and respect for the rule of law. But
we’re also not ready to accept that one man equals some-portion-of-a-vote,
that some segments of We, The People are more equal than others,
or that an electronic coup d’etat is less dangerous
to our democracy than a military one.
BP
