KATRINA 'Heck Of A Job' Still Left It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina, followed quickly by Hurricane Rita, ripped through New Orleans. The storms claimed 1,956 lives, displaced 800,000 others, created $91.7 billion in damage -- the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history -- and left 80 percent of New Orleans underwater. (For a refresher, click here to our Katrina timeline.) Yesterday, President Obama visited the region and gave a speech at Xavier University, where he highlighted the progress that has been made in reconstruction, but also the challenges that remain. "While an incredible amount of progress has been made, on this fifth anniversary, I wanted to come here and tell the people of this city directly: My administration is going to stand with you -- and fight alongside you -- until the job is done, until New Orleans is all the way back," the President said. "I don't have to tell you that there are still too many vacant and overgrown lots," Obama said. "There are still too many students attending classes in trailers. There are still too many people unable to find work. And there's still too many New Orleans folks who haven't been able to come home." The President called Katrina "a shameful breakdown in government," a view endorsed this week by none other than former FEMA chief Michael "heck of a job" Brown. He said in interviews this week that he was handicapped by a lack of resources and support from local and federal officials, including President Bush himself. "I really needed the president to get the attention of the entire administration. I needed every Cabinet secretary to be full hands on deck," Brown said. "Not having him do that was a tipping point."
WHAT WE KNOW NOW: Quite a bit has emerged since the initial coverage of Katrina that paints a clearer picture of what happened during and after the storm, and why. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, PBS, and Frontline just issued a series of reports about police conduct in New Orleans in the aftermath of the storm. The most explosive story reported last week that, in the days following the storm, the New Orleans police department sent out an order authorizing officers to shoot looters on sight. Federal agents have already opened an investigation into those orders. Frontline aired a special featuring journalist A.C. Thompson, who explored the death of New Orleans resident Henry Glover. His shooting death in the aftermath of the storm went un-investigated for months, but Thompson uncovered extensive evidence that Glover may have been murdered by a New Orleans police officer, and that his death was then covered up by other officers who may have burned the body. The FBI opened an investigation into the killing, and indictments have been returned against five New Orleans police officers. The Times-Picayune has, for years, been reporting on the shootings at Danziger Bridge, where police opened fire on a crowd of unarmed New Orleans residents who were in search of food and other supplies. Two people were killed and four were wounded, and after a long investigation, six officers have been indicted in those killings. A clearer picture of how the Bush administration botched the reconstruction efforts has also emerged. While Bush pledged to do "what it takes" to restore the city, the New York Times collected evidence of "breathtaking" fraud in the recovery efforts, highlighting $2 billion of waste and abuse of reconstruction funds. Also, in the five years since the storm, Bush officials finally admitted what most knew: they botched their response to the storm.
MEDIA FAILURE: Many news outlets have been marking the half-decade since this tremendous disaster with self-congratulatory pieces. On NBC, Brian Williams hosted a heavily promoted Dateline special, "Hurricane Katrina: the First Five Days," which recounted the anchor's experiences covering the immediate aftermath of the storm. Unfortunately, the special typified many of the problems with mainstream media coverage of Katrina: full of self-praise. Williams relied mainly on recollections of his own coverage and said, for example, "People say, on this crisis, the media found their voice. ... We owed it to these people [suffering in New Orleans] to ride herd of these officials." But as reviews of the show pointed out, little actual journalism took place during the hour-long special, and "beyond vague references to government incompetence, there was little explanation as to why the suffering there was so intense." Not only did Williams fail to examine the government response to Katrina immediately following the storm, he also rehashed the popular media myth that violence was out of control in the days following the storm, giving a detailed account of having to be protected by armed police as he reported. But as the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported only a month after the storm, "most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow provided a good template for media coverage, broadcasting live from New Orleans last week. She detailed many of the issues still facing the city, and issued a call to action: "On this anniversary, there will be a lot of reporting over the next few days about this city's recovery from the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina," Maddow said. "Call it a recovery or call it survival, it's not over. And this isn't just New Orleans. This is America. And if we do not feel like we are all in this together, we better have a damn good excuse for that."
GOING FORWARD: There is still much work to be done in New Orleans. Most immediately, as hurricane season approaches, the levees must be secured. The Institute for Southern Studies (ISS) has a new report about the key failures yet to be addressed by the federal government, including a failure to properly inspect and secure new levees. Under a federal law passed in response to the levee failures, the government promised to have 20 new levee projects reviewed by outside experts. According to the report, it appears that fewer than 10 will be inspected. Also, Congress recently held up $19 million in funding to restore Louisiana's coastal wetlands -- a key buffer to oncoming hurricanes. Aside from infrastructure, there is serious work to be done on a humanitarian front. Recent studies have shown disturbing mental problems in both children and adults who survived the storm. Also, more than 64,000 buildings in New Orleans remain blighted, while there has been a 40 percent increase in rent in the properties that do remain. And while 95 percent of New Orleans residents have returned to their homes, only 24 percent of the Ninth Ward has returned. The ISS study calls for a full examination of the failures during and after Katrina, so that future disasters can be handled better. "It's critical that failures that emerged in U.S. relief and response policy during the storms of 2005 are addressed to protect residents from future disasters -- especially with growing concern that climate change is heightening the intensity of storms that may strike the Gulf Coast and other areas."
"I can't spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead," President Obama told NBC's Brian Williams last night when asked about the growth of the fringe "birther" movement. "There is a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly," Obama explained. "I'm making decisions that are not necessarily good for the nightly news and not good for the next election, but for the next generations," Obama told NBC last night. Fifty-nine percent of Americans believe Sarah Palin lacks the "ability to be an effective president," according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll. Only 26 percent of adults said she would have the ability to be effective, while that number is considerably higher -- 47 percent -- among Republicans. Only 21 percent of independents said Palin would have the skills to be effective. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is spearheading efforts to build the Park 51 Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York City, "told a Middle Eastern newspaper that he believed election-year politics had stoked the debate over the project and blamed a 'tiny, vociferous minority.'" The full interview is available at The National newspaper's website. The "consensus among economists" is that the Recovery Act "worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s," but other emergency measures implemented by the Obama and Bush administrations played a larger role. The stimulus "was important for confidence," said Harvard's Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF, adding, "But fiscal stimulus was the least important of the three planks of the government's strategy." Underwater mortgages "are a massive drag on the economy and it could take years to eliminate the negative equity from many markets." While many homeowners are paying their mortgages, they are "trapped" and unable to move for better jobs because they would lose money if they sold their homes. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan recently announced a program to help homeowners with negative equity. Government anti-poverty programs now "serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand." Upwards of 50 million Americans on Medicaid and more than 40 million Americans are now receiving food stamps. And finally: A New York Assembly candidate from Brooklyn has a very convincing character witness — his mom. He sent out a fundraising mailer titled, "My son Doug Biviano wants to protect your PENSION," which featured nothing but four quotes from his mother and a picture of the candidate and his mom. |
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"Simply put, [the Gulf of Mexico deepwater drilling moratorium] will cost us more jobs and economic devastation than the oil spill itself."
-- Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), 6/07/10
VERSUS
"Oil supply firms went to court to have the moratorium overturned, calling it illegal and warning that it would exacerbate the nation's economic woes. ...Yet the worst of those forecasts has failed to materialize."
-- The New York Times, 8/24/10
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