How time flies. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, here are some developments I’m sure we all could have predicted ten years ago.
1. Hundreds of crooks and grifters soaked up Katrina relief money. Not all of it, but a lot of it.
2. Whites got a lot more help from relief money than blacks. Inequality really is built into the system. See also Why New Orleans’s Black Residents Are Still Underwater After Katrina.
3. Since so many schools were damaged in the storm, the for-profit school grifters moved in and took over the school system. Since then there’s been all kinds of happy talk about how well this is going, along with the occasional story about New Orleans kids being taught that cave men lived alongside dinosaurs. A New Orleans mother and educator complains that what New Orleans really got was colonialism, not reform.
After Katrina, New Orleans became a city where all sorts of conservative ideas could find petri dishes to grow in – think maggots on corpses.
And everything was skewed to reward white Plutocrats, Oligarchs, and their sycophantic grifting minions.
From a liberal/progressive viewpoint, the aftermath of Katrina is a horror-show.
Minority neighborhoods raise, schools privatized, etc.
And example of government at first ignoring a tragedy, and then taking advantage of it for the benefit of cronies – white cronies.
From a conservative viewpoint, the aftermath was a huge success! “Blah” neighborhoods were raised, and replaced with condo’s and McMansions for wealthy white people, who want the NO experience (which has significantly changed. It’s not the same city as it was before, so the experience has changed. But, for conservatives, that’s the feature, not a bug!).
Schools were privatized for the fun and profit of grifters who don’t give a damn about education – only profits.
So, ten years after Katrina, NO is the classic example of how and where this country is completely split.
One side sees the unfairness of it all, from ignoring the warnings, to the sad, sad, results.
The other side sees the resulting changes and thinks, “HUZZAH!!! KA-CHING!!!!!” Katrina did what decades of Conservative wishes and dreams couldn’t do.
Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
But rank ugliness, avarice, and a complete lack of compassion for people and their concerns lie in the eyes of the beholder.
The most perfect example, was the comment by the sociopathic mother, Barbara Bush, of our then sociopathic Preznit, w:
“So many of the people in the arena… were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them…”
If there was a God, she should have been reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes on the spot.
And don’t get me started on all of our conservative uber-“Christians” blaming the sin of homosexuality on the hurricane.
When hurricanes strike Texas, can we blame conservative “Christians?”
It would only be fair.
If only we could do this to Chicago.
If there was a God, she should have been reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes on the spot.
I can feel the love, gulag!… 🙂
WAY OT:
When Jeb(!) appears, if I could go, I’d carry a sign that says, “The Right to Uprise!”
Trent Lott got his plantation restored, and a brand new porch on the big house to boot. I think he invited Bush to come on down an sip some mint juleps and enjoy a lazy breeze on his new Katrina funded rebuilt porch. Life is good for the white southern aristocracy.
“Hundreds of crooks and grifters soaked up Katrina relief money”
I know a guy who scammed the gubmint out of thousands from a storm down in the keys before Katrina, biggest right-wing moron I know, nothing but FAUX news and el-rushbo propaganda 24-7. Oh and most of his grandchildren are on public assistance! You should hear him go on about the black welfare queens, it’s really quite amazing!
Katrina and the aftermath seemed to prove that we had been hollowed out as a nation, and that the habit of looking at ourselves as civilized beings was mere pretense. There was a “Mad Max” feel about it that remains haunting.
Aside from the horror of the event on the Danziger Bridge, there was another incident on Gretna Bridge, where people escaping from New Orleans were turned back by the Police. It seemed a sign as sure as any other that we had descended into some sort of savagery, although, so called “savages” seldom act with comparable disregard for human life.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4855611
Ten years later, we still haven’t recovered our humanity or our footing as a nation. A lot of people carry around their copies of the Constitution, but, I think many of them never even got through the Preamble. If you look at the goals cited as rationale for founding the nation, the “justice, common defense, and general welfare.” These are all collective goals, they are meaningless otherwise. Katrina struck us in the face with the fact that we had lost their meaning in pursuit of “individual freedoms” and self interest.
As the narrator says at the beginning of “Blood Simple,” “Here in Texas, it’s every man for himself.” We are a Texans, now.
Dubya’s tool-belt photo op pretty much summed it up for me. Fake fake fake.
joan,
That was piddly-sh*t fake, compared to the codpiece-enhanced landing on the aircraft carrier to prance and preen that it was “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.
Slapping on a tool-belt is nothing compared to maneuvering an aircraft carrier for a photo-op, and having some poor pilot have to haul w’s ass in the backseat of a plane and make it look like he was a “Top Gun!”
This is why Bernie Sanders has traction. You can imagine him taking aim on a disaster fraud. HRC, not so much. She means well at an upper-management level, and she communicates on a technocratic level. It is a better problem to have than the T-rump show going on in the ReTeaVangeliKlan party, but it is still a problem. The nation feels both righteous and self-righteous indignation. Democrats need to get some of that harnessed and addressed specifically. I still want to see a couple of financial operations busted up.
I beat Vox to the punch, but here they are:
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/19/9174077/hillary-clinton-black-lives-matter
Well, while Bush and his tool belt was a great performance in sincerity, Paulie Ryan’s scrubbing pots and pans in a soup kitchen wasn’t too shabby a performance either.
At least Paulie boy waited till they were closed so he would not have to fraternize with the poors.