Greg Palast has written an article describing how many of the poorer districts of New Orleans are even now not repaired. Worse, housing projects that were either not damaged at all, or minimally damaged, have been locked against previous tenants. Black water soldiers are guarding the projects.
Ms. Patricia Thomas was kept from her home .. And sometime between Greg Palast's interview with her and the writing of his article, Ms. Thomas died.. She survived Katrina, but not the neglect she suffered afterwards.
excerpt:
Yet, two years later, there’s still bars on the windows, the doors are welded shut and the residents banned from returning. On the first anniversary of the flood, we were filming this odd scene when I saw a woman on the sidewalk, sobbing. Night was falling. What was wrong?
"They just messing all over us. Putting me out our own house. We come to go back to our own home and when we get there they got the police there putting us out. Oh, no, this is not right. I’m coming here from Texas seeing if I can get my house back. But they said they ain’t letting nobody in. But where we gonna go at?"Patricia Thomas
Idiot me, I asked, "Where are you going to go tonight?"
"That’s what I want to know, Mister. Where I’m going to go - me and my kids?"
With the help of Patricia Thomas, a Lafitte resident, we broke into an apartment. The place was gorgeous. The cereal boxes still dry. This was Patricia’s home. But we decided to get out before we got busted.
I wasn’t naïve. I had a good idea what this scam was all about: 89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security’s trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it.
(photo by Greg Palast.)
snip:
And Patricia Thomas? Patricia found work sweeping up tourists’ vomit and beer each morning at a French Quarter karioke [sic]joint. Not much pay, no health insurance, of course. A few months ago, Patricia died - in a city bereft of health care. New Orleans has closed all its public hospitals but for one "charity" make-shift emergency ward in an abandoned department store.
No public hospitals, and a fraction of the Mental Health professionals are left in the city, just when folks need them the most.
Here is a link to a blog called Think Nola that is full of resource links and first hand accounts of life there now..
And the other Portrait I worked on was of a potential candidate for Attorney General, a supposed Democrat who changes his positions on important issues like the wind in the mountains. For example he was very vocal critic of Bush's handling of the aftermath of Katrina, just before the last election but reportedly back pedaled..
Lieberman’s reversal underscores the new role that he is seeking to play in the Senate as the leading apostle of bipartisanship, especially on national-security issues. On Wednesday night, Bush conspicuously cited Lieberman’s advice as being the inspiration for creating a new "bipartisan working group" on Capitol Hill that he said will "help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror."
But the decision by Lieberman, the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to back away from the committee's Katrina probe is already dismaying public-interest groups and others who hoped the Democratic victory in November would lead to more aggressive investigations of one of the White House’s most spectacular foul-ups.
Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush.
Is it possible that if Lieberman, and others in Congress, had kept up the pressure investigating the handling of aftermath of Katrina, Patricia Thomas would be alive today? How many others have not recovered their lives or even perished since Katrina blew down the levees? It's been two years, isn't it about time we knew?
UP date 3:03 pm Pacific Time..
I posted the Lieberman portrait on the midday open thread, and it was pointed out to me that I made him "too handsome". That got me thinking about his duplicity. I decided to digipaint his other face. Here it is:
Cross posted at Choice Changes.
Finally my friend MAX's contribution, Da Boot: