Two years ago at this exact day and exact minute, Hurricane Katrina made its first Gulf landfall on the Louisiana coast.



I would like to mark this day by providing a series of links to recent news about the recovery, or what passes for it. First is my series of blogs about the hurricane:

No Environmental Reviews
Disaster Profiteering (highly recommended)
The Working Class
Global Warming
Insurance Malfeasance
Blaming the Victims
Faith-Based Recovery, I
Faith-Based Recovery, II & III
Faith-Based Recovery, IV & V
Faith-Based Recovery, VI

Next, I have rounded up external links to news sources that have pertinent stories.

Katrina: A Reality Check for All Towns -- Focuses on aftermath in New Orleans
New Orleans Still Struggling Two Years After Hurricane Katrina -- Focuses on health care
Survey: Post-Storm Mental Health Worsens -- Gulf Coast in general
FEMA suspends use, sales of ‘toxic’ trailers -- However, just so no one forgets the stonewalling they did prior to this:
House Panel Probes Toxic FEMA Trailers

(I'm thinking I may have to do a health piece soon. That is the one issue I never really wrote about.)

In the midst of all the 2-year anniversary coverage by the media, some of which will be disgustingly smarmy and positive to the point of being an outright lie, let's not forget about anything attending the tragedy. I intend to mark the occasion later today by viewing An Inconvenient Truth again and considering the environmental aspects of the disaster, both those which followed it and those which I am convinced led up to it (i.e., global warming). The best way to observe the day is to consider what we might be able to do to prevent it from happening again.

Have they learned nothing from New Orleans?

The Bush administration will allow some development in flood plains without formal environmental reviews.

Predictably (and rightly), the move has enraged environmentalists, who have been advocating for the disappearing wetlands for decades now, mostly in vain. This move allows developers to build on small tracts of land, and it places minimal restrictions on what can be built. Types of buildings to be permitted include residential homes, shopping venues, hospitals, prisons, and schools.

If you were a resident of low-lying Louisiana who had experienced Hurricane Katrina (or evacuated and returned to find your community in ruins), wouldn't it make you feel nice and cozy to know that your kids' new school could be built on a filled-in marshland that had flooded before--as long as the school was small and the entire development didn't take up over half an acre? (In some parts of rural Louisiana, that's not out of the question.)

(Oh, and is due to be reclaimed by the sea in a few decades because of global warming-induced rising seas, another problem that is not being addressed in the coastal "recovery.")

And if you were, perhaps, a researcher of endangered species--maybe even the elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker--wouldn't you be pleased to know that developers could pull the same sort of stunt that the timber industry did in the 1940s, when it completely stripped clear the last confirmed habitat of Ivorybills?

Oh, sure, the Endangered Species Act would provide protection for areas where the birds are known to roost. But that's the problem, isn't it? They are hard to find, and with recent potential sightings in Arkansas and Florida, there's a possibility that they might be in pockets all over the Gulf states. However, those two sightings are increasingly being called into question since the scientists involved have not produced good video or photography yet. If other potential areas are wiped out before the birds could even be found, it opens the floodgates for the areas in Arkansas and especially Florida to be given similar treatment.

And, from the same article, this is just disgusting:

Another part of the regulations, approved in coordination with other federal agencies and the White House, waives the formal environmental reviews entirely for coal companies when they bury or reroute streams with their mining wastes.

So okay, if your friendly neighborhood coal company decides to dump waste product in a stream, completely cutting off the flow of water with the trash, no one has to run it through any sort of review process.

I'll make sure to drink bottled water when I am in Louisiana.

This bit of news was a very unwelcome addition to my e-mail inbox this morning. However, it will provide a good opening into what's coming next: an in-depth discussion of the environmental destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina--and, more significantly, the ill-considered recovery plans.

I have made this blog mostly about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, yes, but frankly, I'm tired of having so much material to write about.

Why does the Conservative Political Action Conference have any credibility in Republican political circles? It's apparently little more than a hate-fest in which the speakers run a race to the bottom.

By this time anyone who follows politics has heard about the ugly rantings of Ann Coulter, and her homophobic slur against John Edwards. The condemnation from all sides has been absolutely justified. This woman has been allowed to get away with spewing verbal vomit for far too long without being held to account for it in a meaningful way. She's the one who, if you'll recall, made nasty remarks about the 9/11 widows because they held politics other than her own. Now, I'm all for free speech. However, when I say "allowed to get away with" what she does, I simply mean that her brand of political "commentary" should disqualify her from the pundit's seat that she has occupied for a long time. She has the right to say it, but what she has to say adds no value to the political system and shouldn't be given airtime.

However, there was another remark made that is, arguably, equally offensive, if not more so. This remark has had very little coverage except on the blogs. I only discovered it myself from the Blog for Our Future coverage, via Crooks and Liars.

For your reading pleasure, the dishonorable Newt Gingrich on Hurricane Katrina victims:

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.

As readers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed, I've been focusing heavily on the recovery process of Hurricane Katrina lately. Much attention has been devoted to the initial response and its shortcomings, but critiques of the reconstruction are harder to come by.

And now... we come to an issue that is not only being overlooked, but appears to have a very strong public relations effort underway to spin it a certain way.

This is a multi-pronged issue, but in a nutshell, it's this: Big industry is getting free rein to buy up anything it can get its hands on, with encouragement and aid from the government at several levels. In the meantime, coastal residents and local businesses are having to rely on private charities (as well as an Attorney General who will fight for them against people trying to ruin them financially) to get back on their feet.

It's fairly common knowledge that war profiteering on a truly grand scale is taking place in Iraq while the Iraqis and our own soldiers watch the country degenerate into total anarchy and civil war. This same type of corporate profiteering, often by the same companies, is taking place on our very own Gulf Coast as well, while the residents of the coast are left to fend for themselves.

This issue deals with the great divide between the haves and the have-nots, and as such, it is intimately related to the housing and insurance problems associated with the Katrina recovery. This story is likely to have some overlap with previous entries.

It's no secret that the response to Hurricane Katrina was a fiasco, wherein no one got really suitable treatment but the level of recovery was still dramatically divided by race and class boundaries. Based on some of the stories in the news, which speak glowingly of Mardi Gras or the rehabilitation of the Superdome, you'd be led to believe that these disparities only surfaced during the immediate response attempts, and that things have been hunky-dory since then.

Well, you'd be wrong. The recovery of Hurricane Katrina is plagued with problems, the first of which I have already touched on--it does not consider the coming rise of the sea levels or the inundation of the coast's natural defenses, which global climate change is predicted to cause. As I've said, there are several others: environmental damage, the domination of the rebuilding process by big industry, and the class-based inequality of personal property recovery. Although they are all closely related, today's blog will only look at the last one.

The homeowners of coastal Mississippi have been parties to a lawsuit headed up by the state's Attorney General. The basis of the suit was that their home insurance companies wrongly denied them damages for wind damage, because water damage that occurred later (and may or may not have been insured) obscured what part of the damage was actually caused by wind. Contrary to a popular claim, the lawsuit did not seek to award flood insurance damages to anyone who did not have flood insurance, nor did it award any damages to anyone who didn't have hurricane insurance. In its sales pitches, the insurance industry misrepresents just what "hurricane insurance" really is (it's homeowners' insurance and does not include flood damage), but they don't outright lie in the legal contracts. The fine print is there to read. Any lawsuit based upon this would have been, well, dead in the water. (Sorry for that.)

They won their suit. And one of the companies, State Farm, retaliated by freezing new policies for the state, as well as issuing a veiled threat to the entire Gulf Coast that they would pull as much existing coverage as they could legally get away with before the 2007 hurricane season begins. Louisiana pre-empted this by implementing a rule for insurers that:

suspends the right of any insurer to cancel or nonrenew any personal residential, commercial residential or commercial property insurance policy covering a dwelling, residential property or commercial property located in Louisiana that sustained damage as a result of Hurricane Katrina or its aftermath, or Hurricane Rita or its aftermath.

As appalling as the treatment of Mississippi's insured coastal homeowners is, though, the plight of the uninsured or under-insured is far, far worse.

Chip Pickering, Representative from Mississippi, has become Mississippi Chairman of John McCain's presidential campaign, and Co-Chair of the southern region.

He gives an explanation for this in the Hill Blog. There's really nothing new or surprising in it. The issues of importance to him are Staying the Course, stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing judges, and advocacy of Religious Right wedge issues such as marriage.

If Pickering wants to hitch his horse to the dying viewpoint that the war in Iraq is "winnable," that's perfectly all right with me. And if John McCain wants to coast on the strength of the Religious Right in the South, that's fine with me too.

However, the Religious Right should be made aware of Pickering's ties to Jack Abramoff, particularly some of Abramoff's dirtier associations that involve drugs, prostitution, and child slavery. (Yes, it really is that sordid.) Quite a curious background for one who talks about government reform. I was planning on getting into some depth about this, and at a later date, I will. For now, I am focusing on Hurricane Katrina and the issues surrounding that.

Oh, speaking of which, my dear Representative has something to say about it:

The federal response to Hurricane Katrina teemed with waste as each layer of bureaucracy siphoned off needed federal funds, until sometimes only half or a quarter of what Congress appropriated reached the victims. John McCain’s dedication to a smaller government through cutting waste and restraining unnecessary spending shows he will not bend in the fight to make the government more effective and more responsive to tax payers.

OK.

While I suspect that, had McCain been at the helm, the response might have been somewhat better (I mean really, how could it have been any worse?), Pickering needs a slap of reality upside his head.

The problem with the recovery was emphatically not that there was too much government. Perhaps he needs to talk to his own constituents on this issue; he seems a bit out of touch. The complaints certainly were not that there was too much government involved with the response.

Secondly, George W. Bush allowed the federal bureaucracy to twiddle its thumbs while he was photographed presenting a birthday cake to John McCain on August 29, 2005.



Funny. You'd think that if McCain were at all interested in Hurricane Katrina victims, he would have told the "Decider" to get off his duff, go back to Washington, and do something about the situation. You'd think that McCain would have used the power he had as a member of the then-Majority and shown some leadership. It was a national crisis, a natural disaster with a death toll the likes of which had not been seen since 1928.

Pickering is just cynically using Hurricane Katrina for his own benefit and McCain's, name-dropping the storm because he represents part of Mississippi that was impacted by it. We don't need more of that.

The barrier islands of the Gulf Coast are an important defense against hurricanes. Mostly uninhabited, they are the first landforms that a Gulf Coast hurricane strikes. While they do not weaken the hurricanes (they aren't large enough), the islands take the brunt of the hurricane's storm surge, diffusing it somewhat before the eye makes landfall on the mainland. They are also an important defense against tsunami, a real (if little-known) threat. Significant seismic activity has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico fairly recently.

Global warming is predicted to melt part of Greenland and/or West Antarctica, raising sea levels worldwide up to 20 feet (more if all of Greenland and some of West Antarctica melted). This would have horrific consequences on coastal cities around the globe, of course. This blog, however, will focus on one specific area -- the United States Gulf Coast. (Ha, doesn't it always?)

If global warming raised sea levels as predicted, most of low-lying Louisiana -- as well as the critical barrier islands -- would be underwater. The low-lying swampland of Louisiana, which has been receding for years now, is another natural barrier for the coast, as well as an environmental treasure. It too would be covered in water.

The coastline would lose its natural defenses against hurricanes.

And, as research is indicating, global warming would also intensify the hurricanes themselves.

In the wake of the lawsuit in favor of coastal homeowners who were victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, State Farm Insurance has announced that it will not write any new policies for residents of Mississippi:

Bob Hunter of the Consumer Federation of America said he believed State Farm's action was a warning to other Gulf Coast states.

"I would say it's a warning shot," Hunter said. "The insurance company here, State Farm, is basically saying, 'If you make us pay what we owe, we're gonna … take it out on your citizens.'"

And here's Mississippi's Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood on it, after the company tried to blame "judicial uncertainty" for its move:

"They [State Farm] created the problem," he said. "If they would have paid what they owed in the first place, there never would have been a lawsuit filed."

I could not agree more with either person.

In a printed article that I read this morning, the company is also cited as "assessing how many of the current policies in Mississippi will be renewed this year."

That's a red alarm that homeowners on America's most vulnerable coastline will have their insurance revoked before the 2007 hurricane season kicks off -- a season that is forecast to be a repeat of seasons such as 2003 and 2004, after the current El Nino dissipates. If one company is allowed to get away with it, you can rest assured that others will follow in its wake.

Apparently, the company tried to pull this in Florida as well, but -- in a series of events that truly blows my mind -- was stymied by the new Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist. Credit where it's due, I guess, although from this article, it appears that he did it for the wrong reasons.

Insurance companies can't cancel your homeowner policy before December or raise your rates for the next 90 days.

Throwing another hard jab at the property-insurance industry, Gov. Charlie Crist persuaded his fellow Florida Cabinet members to pass an emergency order to that effect Tuesday.

The 90-day rate freeze is intended to make sure companies preparing rate-adjustment requests take into account the steep savings they should get under an insurance law Crist signed last week.

...

The order, which prevents insurers from dropping customers until after the next hurricane season, was approved despite strident objections raised by insurance-industry lobbyists and concerns from state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink and Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, who both said the rule could put some companies in too much of a financial bind.

Although Florida does tend to treat its hurricane victims better than the victims of Hurricane Katrina in MS and LA, this whining about profits really rings hollow when you consider that

[a] year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, 35,000 Mississippi households remain at odds with State Farm, and now the company says it won't issue any new homeowner policies in Mississippi.

Yeah, cry me a river.

I sat through this hurricane. My family's house in Mississippi took roof damage that still has not been repaired. I have since then moved out of the area, but I follow developments very closely. I have come around to the conclusion that disaster victims and potential disaster victims need a media-savvy group to lobby for them. Their entire livelihood depends on the whim of political power-brokers, and, while the insurance industry is rich and powerful, the small businesses and homeowners have NO voice after the storm passes through.

(Cross-posted on the Daily Kos.)

One trend that I am thoroughly sick of seeing is the one that goes something like "let's attack the victims of Hurricane Katrina."

The first kind of it is the government-endorsed attack line branding the victims as fraudsters who were ripping off taxpayers. This is epitomized by the December 2006 GAO report that makes note of "questionable" payments amounting to about $1 billion. (Now, let's see, how long did the Coast have to wait for help to arrive in the first place, and, oh, how much have we spent in that wasteland known as Iraq, again...?)

CNN reported on the findings. Some choice samples:

In one case, FEMA sent $46,000 to 10 people in Plano, Texas, to cover out-of-pocket housing expenses while at the same time paying for their apartments. Seven of the 10 people "self-certified" to FEMA that they needed rental assistance despite the fact they were living in rent-free housing.

Since, of course, no one who's lost their home and most of their property might have any expenses to cover beyond rent. And that average of $4,600 per person is just outrageously over-the-top. How dare the government be so wasteful?

The GAO says FEMA also sent nearly $17 million in potentially improper rental assistance to people living in FEMA trailers.

Potentially improper. But I've forgotten; this has become a world of "guilty until proven innocent."

And don't even get me started on those FEMA trailers. If I had to live in one of those things after experiencing a natural disaster and having my home destroyed or condemned, I'd want some spare cash too.

And nearly $20 million went to individuals who registered for assistance for both hurricanes Katrina and Rita. For example, one individual received two housing replacement payments of $10,500 each, despite the fact he had only one property to replace.

Where can I get one of these $10,500 houses?

There is, of course, another line of attack used against the hurricane victims.

Wow, time to dust off, oil, and polish this blog. It's been awhile. I will have some real blog posts later, and over the weekend, but in the meantime, here's a roundup of interesting topics.

• Most importantly of all, I have a new banner graphic.
  
• On blog community site Daily Kos, blogger "Bill in Portland Maine" gives us the Hurricane Katrina Hall of Shame, a list of the worst of the worst in quotes from public figures. I am from the Gulf Coast region and have a personal stake in this, but anyone with a heart would do well to read this.
  
• The Gulf Coast has lucked out this year, so far. After fears that Ernesto would enter the Gulf of Mexico and intensify to a major hurricane, it took a turn north. I'll have a blog entry this weekend about the dynamics in play this season, which have thus far kept activity minimal.
  
• John Kerry sends out a fundraising e-mail for Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland, who is running against Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. Because he used the true statement that Blackwell abused his office in the 2004 election and prevented legitimate voters from casting their ballots, the media attacks it. Amazing that it's acceptable political discourse to accuse the opposition party and 60% of the American public of aiding terrorists, but it's NOT acceptable to call attention to voter suppression.
  
• The South's obesity problem continues to... um, expand.
  
• Senators George Felix Allen of Virginia and Conrad Burns of Montana are idiots. With enough people coming out to vote for their opponents--Jim Webb and Jon Tester--they can be removed from office this year. The polls are showing both races neck and neck.
  

That's all for now! A preview of features for Friday and the weekend:

• A blog on the technology of voting systems. Why the systems used in most precincts in the U.S. are horribly insecure
  
• A blog on the 2006 Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons, with analysis of factors that have so far enhanced or prevented tropical cyclone formation