[Dialogue] Compassionate Conservatism??

[Carlos R. Zervigon]

Thanks Jim

 

The Baker Bill which is supposed to pay up to 60% of the value of houses in
heavily flooded areas and essential to bring New Orleanians back and set the
stage for affordable housing is being opposed by the Administration in favor
of using the relatively meager community block funds on a fraction of those
properties. The per capita help compared to Mississippi and New York after
911 is pitifully small. Compared to every other natural disaster it is
outrages. The myth that our local leadership has done no planning is
entirely the fabrication of the administration to cover up its utterly
incompetent response. The house committee investigating the federal response
after demanding a ton of information from Gov. Blanco dug up a handful of
emails to make her look bad and has had no interest in getting to the bottom
of the issues. I strongly believe that Karl Rove et al want to strengthen
the republican party in Louisiana by keeping out the African American poor
who are spread all over the country.

 

Carlos R. Zervigon, PMP

Zervigon International, Ltd.

817 Antonine St.

New Orleans, LA  70115  USA

504 894-9868 Mobile: 504 908-0762

carlos at zervigon.com

http://www.zervigon.com

 

  _____  

From: Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of jim rippey
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2006 9:42 AM
To: Dialogue
Subject: [Dialogue] Compassionate Conservatism??

 

 Also anti-environment.  See next to last paragraph. 

--Jim Rippey, Bellevue, NE

---------------------------------------

 

The Catastrophe Is Not Over

By Jennifer Moses, Washington Post
Saturday, January 28, 2006; A21

BATON ROUGE, La. -- While the rest of the country wakes up in the morning to
read about the latest round of Washington scandals, the misery in Louisiana
continues unabated. Except for a few older, historical neighborhoods on
"high ground," New Orleans is uninhabitable, and Cameron Parish, in the
southwest corner of the state, basically no longer exists, having been wiped
out by Hurricane Rita.

Meanwhile, though Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf
Coast region, it's being split between Mississippi and Louisiana, perhaps
because, even though Mississippi has fewer than one-fifth the number of
affected households Louisiana does, its governor, Haley Barbour, an
ex-Republican National Committee chairman, is a pal of the president. But
with all the problems Louisiana is facing -- including a new round of
budget-slashing -- no one seems to be talking about the looming human
crisis: Where will the tens of thousands of evacuees living in hotels go
when the Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying the bills in
February?

Here in Baton Rouge, housing experts fear a new storm surge -- this one of
people with no jobs, no insurance, no one to take them in and, as of next
month, no roof over their heads. In the meantime, the local low-income
housing market has never been tighter, as both FEMA and HUD have bid up
housing and rental prices, leaving longtime working-class residents of Baton
Rouge scrambling to find even minimally decent housing. As soon as their
leases expire, rents for apartment dwellers, most of whom are on
year-to-year leases, are being jacked up. The St. Vincent De Paul Society
(among other institutions that serve the poor) is providing more than 25
percent more meals than it was before the storms. And homeless shelters have
gone begging for permission to add beds. As for the thousands of families
desperate to move out of government-sponsored hotels: tough luck. Because
even if you've managed to find yourself a job, the chances of finding
affordable housing are next to nil.

Nationally, the number of families dwelling in FEMA-sponsored hotel rooms is
just over 25,000, with more than half of those in Louisiana and Texas. FEMA
is paying for some 8,600 hotel rooms in Louisiana, most of which are
concentrated in the southern swath of the state and are occupied by more
than one person. The government, in its demonstration of Oprah-era
sensitivity training, is urging these families to relocate -- to go
somewhere far, far away, Minnesota, say, which has generous welfare
benefits, or Oklahoma, which has lots of open space -- but for some reason,
most of the families living in hotels just want to go home.

Of course, it could be worse. FEMA might have stuck to its earlier cutoff
date of Jan. 7, as many hoteliers in New Orleans did, booking rooms occupied
by homeless evacuees for the Mardi Gras tourist season, resulting in storm
victims being evicted just in time for winter to set in. (A federal judge,
hoping to prevent this trend, recently ruled that evacuees in New Orleans
will be allowed to stay in government-funded hotels until March 1, the day
after Mardi Gras.) And let's give FEMA credit where credit is due: The
agency has promised -- in writing, no less -- that it's going to help
rehabilitate sections of neglected working-class neighborhoods in Baton
Rouge to accommodate the newly and about-to-be homeless. The only problem
is, so far at least, the contract is worth just about as much as the paper
it's written on. On the other hand, FEMA continues to award storm-cleaning
contracts to some out-of-state companies that sprang up just a few days
after Hurricane Katrina lunged ashore. So at least someone's being helped.

According to Randy Nichols, executive director of Baton Rouge's Alliance for
the Homeless, the real hitch is that FEMA is still treating the disaster in
Louisiana as a historic, one-time, one-size-fits-all catastrophe, rather
than as a long-term problem that requires a long-term fix. One long-term fix
-- not just for residential planning but for flood control in general -- is
restoring Louisiana's wetlands, which in the olden days acted as a natural
buffer to storm surges, and without which none of South Louisiana would have
been inhabited in the first place. But no one's talking much about the
wetlands, perhaps because the subject is too, well, environmental. (And we
know how the Bush administration regards the environment.)

In the meantime, however, the problem of homelessness isn't just local. All
the president of the United States has to do to glimpse the horrors of
homelessness up close and personal is walk over to St. John's Church on
Lafayette Square, where every night a dozen or more homeless men and women
congregate for a good night's sleep. Surely there's room in there for a few
thousand more.

Jennifer Moses is a writer.

C 2006 The Washington Post Company

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