Pelosi's Challenge In New Orleans

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:


Pelosi's Challenge In New Orleans
Submitted by Isaiah J. Poole on August 10, 2007 - 4:43pm.


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to lead a House delegation to New Orleans and the Mississippi coast starting Sunday in an effort that should draw fresh attention to what remains the shame of the nation, two years after Hurricane Katrina swept through the Gulf Coast. Their challenge is to make this trip more than either a political road show or a brief glance at the region's suffering that rates little more than a few seconds on the TV news.

At a time when the failures of conservative governance just in the last two weeks are strewn across the country like rubble from a bomb blast—the lack of infrastructure investment that led to the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the lax enforcement of mine safety standards surrounding the ongoing Utah mine collapse, the see-no-evil regulatory environment that set the stage for the mortgage lending crisis and the wider plunge in the stock market—the disastrous effects of Bush administration policy on the Gulf Coast is still without peer. It's not just the criminally bungled initial response that continues to have ripple effects on the population; it's also the policies that the administration does have in place based on its discredited notions of what's right for America.

For example, at a YearlyKos panel discussion last week, three New Orleans community activists detailed the effects of misguided policies driven by conservatives in Washington. Malik Rahim, founder of Rebuild Green and the Common Ground Collective, New Orleans lawyer Tracie Washington, and Alan Gutierrez, executive rirector of Think New Orleans, told of how the diversion of federal education funds into inexperienced charter school administrators, rather than the public education network, has left school children in some cases without textbooks and adequate teachers and with higher education costs. They gave examples of how federal contracts awarded without stipulations for how workers were to be paid meant that a handful of business owners were getting rich while people doing the hard work associated with the rebuilding process were getting not much above minimum wage—if they were getting paid at all. (They also pointed out that even with all of the work to be done, African-American male unemployment in New Orleans is over 50 percent.)

And don't even get them started about federal housing policy in the region, where the results so far, according to a report by PolicyLink, an urban and social justice think tank, are that there is funding to replace only 40 percent of the 82,000 low-income housing units destroyed by the hurricane—and those new units are almost certain to be more expensive than the ones they are replacing.

Angela Glover Blackwell, the director of PolicyLink and the moderator of the panel, said that visitors to New Orleans will find that the French Quarter "is back and is functional" and that the wealthier, predominately white areas are experiencing a steady recovery. Not so the predominately black Lower Ninth Ward and other low-income areas. "There is an unevenness that is so strong it paralyzes you," she said. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/pelosis_challenge_new_orleans?tx=3

[partylessinOhio]

1. If Madame Squeaker was serious she would have "pushed" through

Katrina relief before her vacation just as she did FISA.

You can fool some of the people some of the time... this trip is all for show just as her jaunts to Europe and Asia have been.

Impeachment would solve many, many more problems than her showboating.

:thumbsdown: