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