Pelosi's Challenge In New Orleans

[babylonsister]

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/pelosis_challenge_new_orleans?tx=3

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.

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The Democratic House leaders going to the Gulf Coast will be able to say that they have tried to show leadership while President Bush, after seeming to realize how seriously he and his administration goofed in the initial response to the storm, has since seemed to have put it out of his mind. It was the Democrats, after all, who passed $6 billion worth of Katrina funding, although the fact that it had to be wrapped into the Iraq war funding bill was distasteful, to say the least.

But their trip will be a waste of time if they only come to crow about what they've done and about their intentions to throw more money at a recovery scheme that is clearly not working for the people in the region for whom it most desperately needs to work. A purely partisan appeal won't be enough, for a number of Democrats share the blame for government failing the poor of New Orleans. But Pelosi and her colleagues will have an opportunity to make a compelling case for why progressives can be trusted to govern in times of crisis by laying out in graphic detail a critique of why conservative governance has not worked and cannot work to rebuild the lives of the poor and dispossessed in the Gulf Coast. Then they can present a progressive vision of how not only the Gulf Coast can be revived but of how devastated communities across the country can be transformed in ways that all of their residents can benefit.

[Vidar]

1. Sound like a Bush-style photo op to me.