WP-Losing Hope in Louisiana

[earth mom]

This is as outrageous as it is pathetic! If it wasn't obvious before now that *Co and Fema could give a damn, it is obvious now! :grr:

Losing Hope in Louisiana

By Jennifer Moses
Wednesday, October 12, 2005;
Washington Post Page A17


BATON ROUGE, La. -- Nearly six weeks after Hurricane Katrina altered both the landscape of Louisiana and the national psyche, most Americans seem poised for the next news cycle: the fight over the new Supreme Court nominee looks to be especially juicy, as does the fun brewing down in Texas over Tom DeLay. But here in what has become, by default, Louisiana's most populous city, the hurricane just won't go away, and the initial excitement of being the state's primary triage center, and suddenly finding ourselves elevated from Nowhere on the Bayou to the center of MediaWorld, has long since worn off.

<snip>

Jobs are as rare as snow in August, and thanks to Washington's prevailing ethic of handing out the goodies only to chartered members of the Goodies Club, barely a trickle of cleanup jobs are going to Louisiana businesses or Louisiana workers, and those few that are magically trickling down into the local economy are grossly underpaid. This because the president suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires that federal contractors pay workers prevailing wages on federally funded projects. The Louisiana State University system, which includes not only the state university but also three public hospitals, is about to lay off 5,000 more workers. Trailer parks intended to house the displaced are being set up in overstrained and underserviced areas that all happen to be -- surprise! -- majority black, while Baton Rouge's solid, if old and often abandoned housing stock, is left to rot. Meanwhile, the governor flails around, her heart in the right place and her hand in a wallet stuffed with IOUs. Happy fall, y'all.

<snip>


But if you go down to the shelters, wait in one of the blocks-long social services lines, or drive out to any of the many churches where evacuees sleep in pews, you won't hear people talking much about the bursting of the myth of compassionate conservatism. Instead, what you hear in the giant River Center downtown, where some 1,000 evacuees are still living on fold-out canvas cots, is that there isn't enough underwear. Nor are there laundry facilities. Nor is there any kind of FEMA presence, FEMA having set up elsewhere. You'll hear mothers complain that a shelter is no place to school -- let alone raise -- a child. And you'll hear one horror story after another about how FEMA has denied evacuees any financial assistance, accused applicants of fraud, lost their case numbers or given a family's assistance to estranged ex-husbands who have long since moved to faraway states. The financial assistance the evacuees are waiting on is $2,000, a sum that would last me approximately five minutes. In the meantime, food, shelter and clothing are being provided not by the kindly hand of Uncle Sam but by the courtesy of the Red Cross.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that the Feds aren't here at all. Helicopters swoop overhead, young men in military fatigues -- many of them too young to shave -- patrol the shelters and the streets, and Gen. Russel L. Honore (the "Ragin' Cajun" from Lakeland, La.) continues to kick butt. It's just that the federal government, having apparently lost its ability to govern, has gladly allowed private organizations, and especially the churches, to shoulder most of the burden of care, granting Jesus primary responsibility for clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. But even Jesus is beginning to feel the strain. You can see it in the eyes of the faithful, as they line up for handouts at Bethany World Prayer Center or Istrouma Baptist Church. You can see it in the exhausted faces of children enrolled in the "second shift" of already dysfunctional, crowded schools. You can even see it on the roads, where ordinarily placid drivers, faced with hours-long commutes, morph into desperate maniacs.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101324.html?nav%3Dhcmodule&sub=AR

[Brotherjohn]

1. This was echoed in a recent NYT story that followed several families...

... of N.O. evacuees to rural Oklahoma.

While it wasn't explicitly stated, there was every implication that their plight was directly due to shifting of funding to "faith-based" organizations. And the results were horrible.

They were first bussed up to Arkansas. Then they were "distributed" to some god-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere in eastern Oklahoma. Their cel phones wouldn't work, they could not get out to look for jobs or houses (not that there were any in the area), and theye were just wallowing. And THIS was how the federal government chose to "house" them.

The church group housing them made repeated references like "I hope we get reimbursed for this".

So instead of spending our federal dollars on adequate temporary housing in actual places where the evacuees might be able to start a life, we send them off to whatever church group figures they could get a grant to do it (not that their hearts aren't in the right place, but THEY aren't in the right place).

After seeing the desolation of the area, and the fact that there wasn't an African-American in sight, one of them actually said "They trying to slave us. They going to make us pick cotton. We gon' die." I can imagine that's what it must have felt like.

Oh, here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/national/nationalspecial/09Refugee.html

Faith-based government: Reminds me of when I received a referral for counselling for my daughter after Hurricanes Ivan and Dennis... what I actually got was a handwritten number for a local church.

[Jon8503]

2. Shouldn't the LA politicians be looking out for their citizens?

Where is senator Landrieu & the governor?

If this is going on, they should be screaming about this.

They should be looking out for hometown construction businesses or any LA business that could do the work that is needed. They should be put on a first priority basis if they are qualified and have the means to do the work.

Seems like that would be their job to be looking out for their constituents.

[cap]

3. the LA politicians are screaming for federal assistance

they are askin' but Bush aint givin'.

Faith-based... ya gotta believe God will provide, 'cause the churches are overwelmed.

Same thing happened in RI during the Great Depression, in Pawtucket, there was 75% unemployment. They left it to the Catholic Church to provide. The Church tried but failed miserably. They even tried reinstituting the Victorian workhouse. That failed too. People felt so sorry for the folks in the workhouse, they threw bread over the walls.

[Cults4Bush]

4. I can't believe this one dropped off... kickin' to get on the greatest.

I wish more people could read what we read.