What you are saying speaks huge truth and the truth isn't about New Orleans alone, it's about all the other priorities in the vast flyoverland and neglected cities and even decaying suburbs, about bridges, roads, schools, you name it.

I get the sense out here in flyoverland that people are getting fearful that the wheels have come off our government in almost all respects. There is no sense that it is working for any of us or that it even remembers how or that it even wants to bother to figure it out.

I think we're going to have to go back to the grassroots in all respects to fight off the incompetence of the federal government and the global forces that ignore us completely.

And what can you say for the media? The MSM plays "Where's Waldo" with Anderson Cooper. And the blogs? Blogs are too skewed towards white urban professionals who either want to impress you with their Ivy League education or to play political gotcha. They're great for shaking up the moribund national leadership, but they're too impressed with their process and technique and the cold medium of the internet. You aren't going to find any substantial interest in the disadvantaged here.

If I were someone in NOLA, I'd be seeking help from other states, cities, and grassroots organizations. I don't think you're going to find any help in Washington, DC.

I fear that if we don't rediscover populism with a heart we're going to get it coming at us instead as populism based on fear of immigrants, minorities and the poor as neglected priorities come home to roost in the form of social unrest.

This kind of reminds me of John Kerry asking why we were building firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in the states. I agreed it was a decent question to ask, but I don't think it's the right way to make policy. A better question would have been, "Why did we waste a bunch of money invading a country that was no threat to us when we have need of that money at home?"

See, I'm just not sure where you're going with this whole "New Orleans is more important than Israel," notion. Do you mean we should curtail our foreign policy until we've cleaned up all of our domestic messes? Or do you just mean that people should be talking and thinking more about New Orleans? Are you talking about policy or point of view?

If you're talking policy, then I have say that we can do more than one thing at once. Also, it leaves the door open to a bunch of other nonsense like, "Why are we funding the NEA when that money could be sent to New Orleans?" or "Why build that highway in Illinois when that money could go to New Orleans?"

If you're just talking about point of view, perhaps implying that there's a sickness in American culture that's left us indifferent to the suffering around us, well... that's a whole other discussion, but I don't think it's well served by implying that interest in suffering abroad should shift to interest in suffering at home. I don't see that the "New Orleans vs. Israel" idea is even necessary. All you need to say is, "Why the heck have people forgotten that one of our cities got wrecked?" I guess I just don't believe that news coverage of Israel is even part of the answer to that question.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I totally disagree. I think we're talking about an inability of Americans to focus on what we as Americans are genuinely committed to do. We have a very specific contract, the Constitution, that commits us to defending Americans and promoting our own general welfare. It doesn't commit us to defending Israel or any other country for that matter. The NEA is also in America. And yes, your inability to tell the difference between Illinois, an American state and its American roads, and Israel is part of the problem.

It's more point of view. But I am trying to figure out why there is such indifference to suffering at home. The massive attention given to Israel shows that we clearly have the capacity to take an interest in the plight of others. Yet in the case of New Orleans we don't. Israel shows we can care, and if there's anything we ought to care about, it's the unprecedented and preventable destruction of one of our major cities.

As I said, I'm trying to upgrade Nola, not downgrade Israel. I'm pointing out: "See how much you care about Israel? That's good, but you should care about New Orleans even more, because it's yours." If I neglect my children because I'm doing great community service work that makes a real difference, I'm still a jerk. There's a balance to be struck, of course, but I think New Orleans is a neglected child. We can do both, but if we're not interested in suffering at home, we have no business in being interested in suffering abroad.

Gad, rereading my post, I'm appalled at the bleak cynicism on display.

On the other hand, I'm reminded of that comedienne who said "No matter how cynical I get, I can't seem to keep up."

In the first place the nation's current focus, such as it is, isn't on Israel; it's on the war in Lebanon.

And in the second place, currently, New Orleans doesn't have any video, any photos, or even, any "story." It's caught in a bureaucratic maze, and inasmuch as the rest of us are outside that maze, we can't see what's going on inside it. I'm afraid that those who are directly interested (that is, New Orleanians) are going to have to slog their way through all by themselves.

.  .  .  a ruined city full of destitute black people  .  .  .  .

I thought they'd earlier been transported to Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, and other welcoming environs.

Not so? 

I'm quite skeptical that many liberals or leftists lost sleep over the Israeli victims of the Katyusha attacks.  The obsession for progressives was over the casulties caused by Israel, abetted by the United States.

Now I understand the obsession of progressive American Jews over casulties inflcited by Israel.  For those that feel that these casulties are the result of unjustified force, there is a feeling of shame.  How can a people who are supposed to stand for social justice be the source of sufferring?  For others who believe that Israeli actions are mainly justified self-defense, there is still pangs of doubt and pain caused by Lebanese and Palestinian civilian casulties and prayers for peace.

I've never understood  the obsession by non-Jewish liberals with respect to Israel.  Some of it I suppose is a measure of cosmpolitan sensibilty - the idea that views expressed foreign elites should be shared by enlightened Americans.  And it is most certainly the view of European elites that any casulties inflicted by Israel are the most important in the world.  Certainly, that's what all the elites in Islamic and Arab nations are saying.  Somehow, these casulties in particular are "understandable" bases for acts of mass murder.  Its somewhat ironic that the word "proportionate" has been the latest buzzword of Israel's detractors. 

The horrors experience by the people of Lebanon in the past month were real.  They deserved an outcry.  (As did the horrors of the Jews and Arabs of Northern Israel terrorized by Hezbollah.)  But there are places where the progressive outcry is even more necessary, where thousands die every day - and the indifference by most progressives is staggering. 

I agree that the neglect of the suffering in New Orleans is a national travesty.  And the neglect of progressives to highlighting the abandonment of an American city is a travesty.  But then again, none of the death and destruction caused by natural and man-made catastrophes in New Orleans can be blamed on neocons or a "Lobby" or a conspiracy.  Simply callous treatment of wealthier Americans to our largely African-American underclass.  But that doesn't make for news when the levees aren't flooding.           

Let's be more specific: there's a serious and credible proposal to save the New Orleans area (and south Louisiana) by rebuilding the wetlands. Cost estimates are on the order of $14 billion, to be spent over a number of years. Without a project like this, we might as well abandon the city: it's doomed as the land will continue to sink and the sea will continue to rise otherwise.

The bill is less than three years of the aid that's sent to Israel, and less than is spent on the Iraq war every couple of months. It's nonsense to say we can't afford it, and since we're going to have to do something similar for South Florida soon, and then we'll need another massive project to save Manhattan if we don't stop global warming, we'd better get cracking.

I think a big part of the answer is because the conflict in Lebanon is somebody else's screw-up. We like focusing on somebody else's problem- where we can play hero- rather then our own problems. Plus, for the MSM, flak and safari jackets of the type you get to wear in war zones are so much sexier then the grubby old tennis shoes you need to pick through the wreckage of the 9th ward.

But it's not just New Orleans- as other posters have noted, there's a massive effort going on to ignore the less pleasant parts of flyover land. This willful blindness isn't anything new. It's been going on for probably literally centuries, and is, in large part, responsible for what happened to NOLA in the first place. As for the why of this- there's no easy answer to this complex question, but I want to point out that the evidence indicates classism to be a bigger problem then racism, since a large portion of that ignored flyoverland is in fact white, and still in desparate straits.

Dude, the reason no one is talking about is that if you don't live in Texas or Georgia, it's simply not affecting your life right now. The only people outside of the immediate disaster areas who have ongoing contact with the victims of Katrina are people in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Atlanta, i.e. those cities where the refugees have settled (and have been settled).

So, you got four states, all told, for whom Katrina is still causing problems. People in California, New York, and the other populous coastal areas, aren't dealing with the strains that large numbers of refugees are putting on the system.

The national conversation on this isn't going to change, and that's too bad because the refugees are still getting screwed by the federal government a year after the fact.

It's just not true. I know of at least one Democrat who is running around the country trying to remind people about New Orleans (it's in every speech): John Edwards. He's called for a Marshall Plan to Rebuild the Gulf.

If you haven't heard it yet, you will. The reason Democrats are quiet is because we're a minority in Washington and can't get the media to pay us a whole hell of a lot of attention.

From speeches by Edwards:

They’ve become the face of poverty in America – a symbol of the poor and forgotten families that live in big cities like New Orleans and in small towns and rural America too.

But if Katrina showed us the Two Americas, it also showed us something else. It showed us the American people want to live in one America. In the months after the hurricane, millions opened their hearts, their homes and their wallets to this cause.

It’s clear the American people want to do the right thing on poverty, but it’s also clear there are a couple things holding us back.

So many of our families are struggling too much themselves to focus on those in need. Others don’t want to repeat the failures of the past and throw money at a problem with the hope it will magically disappear.

These are very real concerns, but they’re ones we can overcome.

• If our ideas about alleviating poverty are based on the values that made our country great -- that we expect people who are capable of working to work, expect them to be responsible, and expect them to make smart choices.

• And if we make it clear that ending poverty is not something we are doing just for others but something we do for all of us.

http://oneamericacommittee.com/news/speeches/20060622/

Down in New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes and untold numbers lost their lives because the levees we built were too weak and too low. We knew better, but we didn't act because we didn't want to look. That's how it is with the moral foundations of our society....

Finally, we need to build a Gulf Coast that is "built to last," with the infrastructure to compete. That's not trails these days, it's modern mass transit. It's not dams, it's energy-efficient businesses and homes. Urban homesteading is a start, but let's bring together the great private engines of development, challenge them to build integrated communities, and leverage federal dollars to do it.

We'll beat poverty in the 21st century by building a Gulf for the 21st century. While we fight poverty in the Gulf, we also have to fight poverty across America. We should begin by returning to a promise once kept and now broken: If you work full-time, you shouldn't have to raise your children in poverty.

http://oneamericacommittee.com/news/speeches/poverty20050919/

There's a long-term pragmatic argument for rebuilding New Orleans, or at least for agitating for rebuilding New Orleans, but it pains me to have to state it: Changing the political climate in the United States so that an injury to any of our citizens is seen as an injury to all of our citizens. Next time, the disaster may strike your block and everything within a five-mile radius of it. If we don't start changing our ethic toward others now, then you are likely to get the same shameful treatment that New Orleans and its people have gotten.

It pains me, because my suspicion is that the sort of change in our politics I seek can not be relied on in time to help New Orleans.

I'm in a suburb south of St. Louis, and only had a two hour outage, admittedly with the chaos of seven dogs inside because it was too hot. Nevertheless, there's a broader national issue here.

As with many ideas du jour, electrical power deregulation had unforeseen consequences. Utilities became sensitive to short-term stock price, so, for example, did not build additional generating capacity because they could buy it, over the interconnect grid, from other utilities with hydroelectric or other minimally expensive generating methods.

Without going too much into the engineering of it, the grid was not designed for massive interconnection, which, at the time of design, was an occasional thing. This wasn't bad engineering, because some of the key technologies available for interconnect today simply didn't exist a few decades ago. Texas' regulatory authority insisted on upgrading to the new technology, and they've had the least problems in the country.

To bring the grid up to rugged standards, including resistance to sabotage, will cost $20 to $30 billion dollars. Under the current economic model, the utilities can't make the investments and not have shareholder suits.

This is one of the many areas where national critical infrastructure needs ruggedizing, but where funds aren't available. To me, electrical grid survivability, and probably even more chemical industry protection, are far more important than the "Star Wars" missile defense system [note 1], but far less glamorous.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
[Note 1] As opposed to national BMD, theater BMD is more reliable and flexible -- and increasingly is being deployed on Navy ships, Army point defenses, and, still in development, an Air Force airborne laser.

Footnotes, Howard? You shame us all.

One of the most stunning things for me as a Canadian watching America is the casual ongoing degradation of America's infrastructure. Whether it be roads, bridges and dams, the electrical grid, urban water and sewer systems, inner cities, education or seniors care I am astonished by the NMP willingness to simply let things rot away.

Many aspects of Canada's infrastructure (particularly rural roads in remote areas) are or were probably not up to America's standards. And our continuing investment occasionally leaves something to be desired. But the wholesale decay your nation seems to be embracing frightens me.

Twenty five years ago brownouts and intermittent power failures were a staple of African cities and proof of the degeneration and economic and political instability of these nations. Now its a fact of life in the United States.

I think it would be worth an entire series of threads to explore why this is happening and how this can be arrested.

I think he was referencing the recent Seymour Hersh article.

To be fair, I don't know that the article makes the argument that the United States colluded with Israel to plan or agree upon the attack on Hezbollah.

It appears that Israel's effort against Hezbollah was planned and decided upon domestically.

What Hersh is suggesting is that Israel not only planned it in advance, but notified or advised the United States of these plans and intentions in advance, and obtained tacit support and consent.

Given the behaviour of the United States in this imbraglio, I don't think that is an incredible or unrealistic assertion.

Hersh also suggests that one of the reasons that the United States chose to consent to and support (although perhaps not the sole reason or even the dominant reason), was the opportunity to 'test' and 'refine' plans for an Iranian strike by the US which may or may not come to pass.

Another of Hersh's suggestions is that the US government consented to and supported Israel's actions because it saw those actions as advancing its own geopolitical position - neutralizing Hezbollah weakened both Syria and Iran and also neutralized a potential counterattack strategy by Iran. This is pretty nakedly the way the Americans saw it while the war was going on, and partly why they supported Israel during it. That's what all Condoleeza Rice's talk of 'birth pangs of a new middle east' was about. The only issue then is when did they make these decisions, when it was happening, or in advance?

So that's the case. I suppose what it comes down to is, is Hersh a credible and reliable journalist whose work is such that we should give a measure of credibility to him and his sources. In that respect, he is the man who broke My Lai, Abu Ghraib and a number of other stories which turned out to be very true.

Against this is the credibility of the Bush administration. Remind me. Is there anything they've ever told the whole truth about?