The catastrophic government failure that conspired with Hurricane Katrina to devastate New Orleans two years ago will not easily be forgotten. The images were stark--families stranded on rooftops, panicked masses at the fetid Superdome, bloated bodies left adrift--and the soundbites terse, with Bush's back-slapping "Heckuva job, Brownie" providing the best summary of his Administration's sense of accountability to the people of New Orleans. In the media and among the American public, the outrage--at the suffering, injustice and official incompetence--was seemingly universal. So it is difficult to understand how New Orleans could have been allowed to endure what came next.
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Noted.
The Nation and the NAACP; democracy derailed in Honduras; Sotomayor and Ricci
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Public Option Now!
Getting a Medicare-style public plan as part of healthcare reform is a winnable fight.
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Noted.
Sebastian Jones on healthcare reform, Nisa Qazi on refugees in Pakistan, John Nichols on NOW's Kim Gandy
With such a perversely skewed economic development strategy, the spiraling social crisis that followed--documented by the articles in this issue--was probably inevitable. Still, it was helped along by yet more bad policies. The public school system was drastically remade and is now a patchwork quilt of charter schools along with a small, withered state-run system. Housing remains a huge problem. When rents spiked to 45 percent above pre-Katrina levels, the government responded by slating 5,000 public housing units for demolition. As attorney Bill Quigley puts it in this issue, "Neighborhoods are breaking down because we don't have the families back. We don't have a lot of the churches. We don't have the infrastructure in poor communities that we had before." Given all this, the rise in crime that has disfigured the city was practically foreordained. With the murder rate hitting record highs, law-and-order politicians prescribed a crackdown, and arrests now stand at an average of 1,300 per week.
The solutions to these problems are almost too obvious to mention--but they all depend on the creation of a very different sort of public sector, one that works for the people, not for business elites and Washington ideologues. That does not seem to be in the cards right now. Instead, communities, aided and inspired by outside volunteers and charitable donors, are taking matters into their own hands. They are fighting to restore their neighborhoods, keeping in mind the delicate ecology around them. They are preparing as best they can for the next storm.
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