Centerblue.org

It has been one year since much of New Orleans was destroyed, and initially defiant cries of survival and rebuilding have been replaced by an eerie silence. Mile after mile of urban abandonment stretches across much of the city and the Gulf Coast, a magnitude of devastation impossible to fully capture on camera. Block after block of decaying homes lie dark and vacant, their doors creaking in the wind.

It’s really something unimaginable, a microcosm of what the remains of our civilization might look like should we ever be struck collectively dead by some virus or manmade catastrophe.

Ever since Katrina I’ve always believed that plans to rebuild this city were foolish. You can’t just plop down roads, houses, schools, police stations and firehouses and expect people to move in like some kind of “SimCity” simulation. Building a living, breathing city takes time and the creation of a virtuous economic cycle: jobs bring people, which bring more jobs, which bring more people, and so on. The economy of this city has been destroyed, with more than a third of its jobs eliminated. Economically there is nothing to bring people back.

What reason do people have to uproot whatever lives they may have built elsewhere and come back to New Orleans? Who would want to move back into an empty block, being the only person there surrounded by ghostly houses, with no shopping centers, supermarkets, or other amenities nearby?

Why should we spend federal money building things that nobody may use, in an area that cannot be guaranteed to flood again if hit by another Katrina-type hurricane?

The answers are becoming painfully obvious one year later. It is highly unlikely that New Orleans or the nearby Gulf Coast will return to their former glory anytime soon, and it is far more likely that vast areas will remain abandoned. Rebuilding should be focused in and near the areas that were more minimally affected and which still contain populations. If the remainder is to come back at all it will do so organically, over time, in the way all cities and populations have grown.

The truth is sad and marks yet another decline of the American Empire, but it is what it is.

People are noticing that Bush, who had gushed about the evils of poverty in New Orleans after the Katrina disaster, has gone strangely silent on the issue.

Bush had the opportunity to renew the nation’s attention to poverty after his rousing speach in Jackson Square. Instead, he has gone quiet as soon as the immediate crisis passed and instead has encouraged politics that worsen poverty in the country, not make it better:

*Bush’s Office of Management and Budget contemplates projections involving steep cuts to programs like Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, job training, and tax credits to minority-owned programs.

*The number of people living below the poverty line has increased sharply since the beginning of the Bush administration. In 2000, 31.6 million people were considered poor; in 2004 the number had increased to 37 million, or almost 13% of the entire population. This lies in contrast to years of decline in the poverty level during the Clinton administration.

*Bush continues to oppose an increase in the minimum wage, stuck at $5.15/hour for almost a decade. Unfortunately, inflation has not stopped during that period, so that anyone making the minimum wage is effectively much poorer than they were ten years ago.

*Bush’s “forward looking strategy on poverty,” according to the Heritage Foundation, has been to “raise work levels, reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing, and promote marriage.” (Oh I see..preventing gay marriage reduces the poverty level. Who would have thought?! Out of wedlock births have been increasing in recent years, not decreasing, according to experts. Who knows what “raising work levels” means in an era when many good manufacturing jobs are being shipped off to China.)

It seems like Bush only cares about poverty as long as it’s the crisis of the moment, and is content to just give tax breaks to the rich when people aren’t looking. Or maybe he just knows that the poor tend to vote Democratic.

A well-respected doctor who arrived in New Orleans to assist patients as Hurricane Katrina came near has been accused of murder along with two nurses.

Dr. Anna M. Pou and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo have been charged with administering lethal amounts of morphine and a central nervous system sedative to several patients who they felt had no hope of surviving the Katrina crisis and subsequent evacuation.

We should not rush to judgment on these women. The circumstances they faced were impossible:

Overheated patients were dying around her, and only a few could be taken away by helicopter, the only means of escape for the most fragile patients until the water receded. Medicines were running low, and with no electricity, patients living on machines were running out of battery power…By Wednesday and Thursday, with New Orleans flooded, a credit union being looted across the street and gunshots heard outside, hospital staff members had concluded that some patients were simply not going to leave the building alive…[Pou's lawyer] said the sickest patients could not have been evacuated on the inflatable boats being used. And he said that to take patients to the roof for helicopter rescues, orderlies had to squeeze them through a 3-foot-by-3-foot hole in a hospital wall and push them on gurneys up the ramps of the parking garage before carrying them onto the roof…some patients also died while being transported under those conditions.

Modern society has no name for the desperation seen in Katrina’s wake. Before we judge these women, who if guilty as charged honestly believed they were doing the best they could for their sickest patients, let’s not forget the context in which these emergency life-or-death decisions were made. Honestly had I been terminally ill in that hospital without hope of surviving an evacuation I would rather have been euthanized than left to thugs and rats.