Shirtsleeve politics in the Big

December 29th, 2006

I really like John Edwards [our John2 from the Kerry-Edward's ticket.] What’s not to like? He’s easy in his own skin … how many people can you say that about? He has a rowdy, upbeat family … he’s got a populist message … sincerity oozes out of his every pore … and he looks great in shirtsleeves [more, he looks NORMAL in shirtsleeves.] Running for VP, he had a limited shelf space for his message — but we heard it often enough to know he’s a people’s candidate.

John kicked off his presidential run in New Orleans the other day — I caught it on C-SPAN last night, all of it … there is so much that is unpretentious about this man that it startles you. He stood in the yard of a very modest home, with a group of volunteer kids … all the faces were black, at least the ones I saw. He spoke with ease and confidence and there was no denying his soft Southern twang, so important in a presidential race. He called us to action, not just as political entities, but as human beings.

Would John make a good prez? Hell, I don’t know. We got brain in Clinton — we got brawn with Bush — maybe a little heart could be our next menu selection, huh? I know this much — Edwards has opened up a topic that is ignored by the political mainstream when he takes on poverty … it cuts wide and deep in this nation and defines our future. Christy Hardin Smith writes a great post, in two parts, which I’ve included below — DO open the links for poignant pictures.

Christy is writing about West Virginia, but we have similar pockets of poverty everywhere in this nation — I live in one. I’ve seen those same pinched faces here in the Pea Patch; they belong to my neighbors and aquaintances. When I first moved here, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing … now I’ve learned to be gentle with those I meet … I’ve had to accept that good minds are the product of reasonable nurture, decent education and good nutrition, most all of which is iffy, here in the Patch. Here, the “gravy train” is getting a job at WalMart — now there’s something to aspire to, eh? There’s a definition of “success.” [Not!] John’s Two America’s message would be lost on these folks — they only know the [hard-scrabble, ginding] one they live in … but they would recognize themselves when he talks.

And it’s too early for presidential hijinks, you say? Well, with the entirety of the nation soul-sick with what [who] it has at the helm, it’s never too early to begin a movement toward hope. And Hillary is in the game … don’t think she isn’t; her numbers are high and her coffers full. It’s not too early … let’s just hope it’s not too late.

I’m not going to delve into the bowels of who John is, what this means, yadda — it’s way too early in the game, although I had to laugh when he was hit with the accusation that he was rich … tell me who could run today who isn’t? There’s a John McQuaid post below — open the link to read the bloggers response, if you have time; they took John to task for using the Big Easy as a “political football” and for not pounding the administration on the failed levee’s. It’s a thumbnail of our dissatisfaction with the politics we’ve learned to hate. We’re cynical these days … we have cause to be — but maybe that defeats us as well as defines us.

This is a two-fer post: John’s announcing in New Orleans draws our attention back to Katrina [an act of God] — and the whopping, under-reported failures of the administration [acts of classism/racism/greed.] Those failures continue, daily — you’ll find excellent updates on the lack of progress and corporate hijinks below.

But all this cynacism is a buzzkill … I’ll be interested in what John2’s expanded message for the nation might be. Imagine — somebody asking CITIZENS to participate! What a refreshing notion!

And how ’bout this for a Dream Team? An Edwards/Obama ticket, with Dennis Kucinich as Sec of State and Wes Clark as Sec of Defense?

Too sane? Too much to hope for? Well — that’s my Happy Thought for the day, anyhow. [Admit it! It tipped your sensibilities upside down for a minute, didn't it? Turned that frown into a grin?!]

Big post, great reads — hope.

Jude

From the John Edwards Campaign

Tomorrow Begins Today:

“I’m running to ask millions of Americans to take responsibility for our country - to take action now to transform our country and ensure America’s greatness in the 21st century.”

Watch the video message

Why John Edwards Changes Everything
Bob Geiger
Dec 28 2006

In the backyard of a Hurricane Katrina victim in New Orleans’ 9th Ward, former Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards announced today that he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. And, in what can be better characterized as a talk than a formal political speech, Edwards changed the dynamic of the fledgling Democratic race for 2008 with both the tone and substance of his message.

Asking Americans to “be patriotic about something beyond war,” Edwards stood in the middle of a New Orleans yard and talked about getting Americans mobilized to create domestic change now and not just in conjunction with a political campaign. He talked earnestly about the need to restore America’s battered global image, the critical mass being hit in the country’s health-care crisis and the fact that he believes his vote to allow George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was just flat-out wrong.

Edwards says he strongly regrets his 2002 vote on the Iraq war resolution, that it was “a mistake” and rebuked the entire notion of a troop surge and escalating U.S. presence in Iraq.

“We need to reject this McCain doctrine of surging troops and escalating the war in Iraq,” said Edwards. “We need to make clear we’re going to leave and we need to start leaving Iraq.”

But more than anything, Edwards announcing so early and, more importantly, the way he’s entered the race has changed the entire landscape for aspiring Democratic nominees.

For Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich — the only other declared candidates at the moment — Edwards is setting a standard for energy and relevance that they will either equal or drop quickly from the radar screen, as Edwards attracts all of the early support and media attention.

For Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Barack Obama (D-IL), Joe Biden (D-DE), John Kerry (D-MA) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT), along with General Wesley Clark and Governor Bill Richardson, the sheer magnetism and established support that Edwards brings so early, forces them to either declare their intentions as well or risk losing support to the former North Carolina Senator with every passing week.

And why exactly would I say something like that when we’re not even out of 2006?

To begin with, Americans are bone-tired of disliking and disrespecting their president and, I believe, are unusually anxious to begin the presidential season to, if nothing else, give them the feeling that a change is coming sooner than later. People hungered for a change in the Congress and made it happen — now that strong desire to take out the trash moves to the executive branch of government.

Second, Edwards is starting his campaign in an interesting way by making it not about him personally, but about the problems of the world, the loss of global American prestige, our domestic strife and the extent to which his campaign is about getting people to make change now and not wait for the actions of a newly-elected president.

“We want people in this campaign to actually take action now, not later, not after the next election,” said Edwards this morning. “Instead of staying home and complaining, we’re asking Americans to help.”

Finally, many people, including yours truly, believed in hindsight that Edwards would have defeated Bush in 2004 had he been at the top of the Democratic ticket. Edwards was undeniably a more engaging personality than John Kerry and with so much of the vote driven by sheer disgust with Bush, Edwards would have picked up Kerry’s 49 percent of the vote and then some based purely on the likeability factor — that’s not the way a president should be chosen but, in our country, it just is.

And, after six years of Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, death in Iraq and the growing sense among Americans that life was much better — and safer — when we were liked and respected in the world, Edwards has a central theme that may resonate with millions of voters.

“The biggest responsibility of the next President of the United States is to reestablish America’s leadership role in the world,” said Edwards in his announcement this morning.

America is starving for genuine leadership and Edwards delivered an honest, inspiring message this morning — let’s see how his future opponents for the Democratic nomination respond.

Let the New Orleans Primary Begin!
John McQuaid, HuffPo
12.28.2006

Michelle Pilecki and Harry Shearer are on the money that John Edwards basically skirted the substance of the problems New Orleans faces in his Lower 9th Ward announcement. We don’t hear about the nexus of government screwups that led to the disaster and continue to this day. We don’t hear about how these might be fixed.

We don’t hear that both of his “two Americas” got hammered by Katrina and are still struggling through ongoing snarls of red tape.

That said, I’m a bit torn. I like Edwards, and I like it when national attention is focused on New Orleans, even if it’s a little off-point. (Let’s have a “New Orleans primary” and bring Hillary, Obama, McCain, Giulani - all of them - down to the 9th Ward or St. Bernard!) So I’m willing to forgive Edwards the omissions. He was painting in broad thematic strokes - that’s the purpose of a presidential campaign announcement, after all.

So while it wouldn’t make sense for him to get into the cause of the 17th Street canal breach, I thought the current plight of New Orleans fit into Edwards’ big themes pretty well.

The main focus of his announcement (transcript here) was a call to public service. Basically, he said that Americans can and should take both individual and collective action to address problems - including seemingly intractable ones like poverty that have languished in an era when government action is widely discredited (thanks in part to Katrina). New Orleans fits the bill pretty well - rebuilding and long-term protection are difficult, national-scale problems. Yet - more so than poverty or universal health care coverage - they are solvable problems, if only the national will and some political moxie could be focused on them.

He also, correctly, took President Bush to task for the fact that this has not happened. Bush has visited New Orleans and the Gulf coast more than a dozen times and signed off on billions in aid.

Yet there is still a national leadership vacuum on New Orleans. Why? Money and photo ops don’t solve problems. Like nuance, Bush doesn’t “do” government, as we’ve seen with Katrina, Iraq, and a dozen other things. For a complex problem like this one, you need to be knocking heads together to get the recalcitrant bureaucracies to MOVE. Only the president, or someone with the president’s personal proxy, can do this. Edwards noted this in his response to a reporter’s question:

[Bush] should have had somebody at a high level coming into his office every day - if I’d been president, I would have had somebody coming into my office every morning, and I would say to him, “What did you do in New Orleans yesterday?” And then the next day, “What did you do yesterday? What steps do we need to take? What are we not doing? What are the people in New Orleans telling us that we’re not doing?” And that’s the — unfortunately, that’s the kind of thing that didn’t happen. And as a result the federal government, while there’s been money allocated — and I’m telling you things everybody in New Orleans already knows, but of course the country needs to hear it — all this money’s been allocated and very little of it has gotten to the ground. You just don’t — you ride around and walk around out in these neighborhoods, you don’t see much change.

So, yes, the answer is yes, there is a very significant role that the federal government needs to be paying, that it’s not paying right now — playing, playing, I’m sorry.

A stock answer? Perhaps. If Edwards is elected, would he actually do this? Who knows. But at least somebody’s pointing out that this is what should be happening, and isn’t.

Bringing Poverty To The Table
Christy Hardin Smith, FireDogLake
Friday, December 29th, 2006
[open to view photos]

(Photo by Mary Ellen Mark. Read the accompanying text with the heartbreaking photos here, please. And have a glimpse of one tiny sliver of poverty in America. And then, take a moment to imagine being this little girl, with this family, and all of its attendant problems — none of which she asked for in any way by simply being born – and then think about just how many other children are living this life in America this morning.)

John Edwards entered the race … for the Presidency yesterday, in an announcement made from New Orleans lower ninth ward, with a discussion of poverty and citizen action on the issues involved as the centerpiece of his announcement. And I, for one, could not be happier that he chose to push those issues to the forefront of American political discussion — because it is past time that we all started having the necessary conversations on these issues.

The WSJ, of all places, had a profile of Edwards’ message and work on poverty that highlighted well his call to action and the “two Americas” that he spoke about so eloquently in the last Presidential campaign cycle and, on which, he has been working since 2004:

Those cheering on Mr. Edwards’s antipoverty crusade include party strategist Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore’s campaign manager in his 2000 presidency bid. Recalling Mr. Edwards’s past emphasis on the “Two Americas” theme, she says: “In 2004, that message went largely unheard. To his credit, he kept at it. And Katrina demonstrated the validity of that message.”

Ms. Brazile is admittedly biased toward the message if not the messenger. (She says she will remain neutral in the Democrats’ 2008 contest.) A native of New Orleans, she visited her father in the city this week for the holidays. Seven siblings and her extended family were among those displaced to other parts of Louisiana and seven other states, and like tens of thousands, they continue to struggle 16 months after Katrina to rebuild lives, careers and wrecked houses, she says.

Mr. Edwards plans to officially announce his 2008 candidacy to reporters today during a break on reconstruction work in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans’s most impoverished and hard-hit neighborhood. He is there with college volunteers he has mobilized. Earlier this year, Mr. Edwards labored in nearby St. Bernard Parish with nearly 700 student supporters who were on spring break from colleges in 27 states.

Yet as Mr. Edwards has suggested in speeches, his antipoverty theme is broader than helping Katrina’s victims. He speaks of “the forgotten middle class” and of workers generally, who have seen their wages stagnate and benefits erode.

One of the things that has infuriated me most since the Reagan era transformed political discourse in this nation into sound bites and PR manipulations is the need that conservatives have to demonize and dismiss America’s poor as if they were all a bunch of lazy bums who never lifted a finger in their lives. That kind of idiotic misunderstanding of the lives of most folks who live below the poverty line in America can only come from folks who haven’t ever really been poor — or known anyone who was, other than the folks who work for them about whose lives they never bother to inquire.

The decided lack of empathy or real understanding is further complicated by liberal politicians who are so busy running over to join the “beat on the poor” fray, because there is some sort of concensus that formed at some point that big money donors don’t want to hear about a topic this depressing anyway. Or that “voters” don’t want to be talked to as if they were adults — but merely want to hear happy news all the time.

But they could not be more wrong.

Here’s a thought for all the “look the other way” politicians and political operatives: the violent crime rate is rising in America again, and Katrina should have been a big ole warning shot across the policy bow for all of you that failing to address issues of poverty creates a whole host of problems for local, state and federal officials alike — and for the nation as a whole.

You think you can hide out in your happy little gated community and that the messy issues of poverty and despair won’t touch your pristine lives? Think again.

Poor children attend schools in your neighborhood. They clog your court system as abused and neglected children, then as juveniles, and on into adulthood, and then back again as parents who failed to learn how to adequately care for their children because they had no examples in their own lives of how things might be done in a better way.

Your tax dollars pay for all of this. You think it is cheaper to keep warehousing adult criminals instead of dealing with the root problem when children are young? Nope. Do we change how we do things — make things more efficient and put the effort into the early stage of life where it would allow us to really reap a cost-effective and lifetime benefit for an at-risk child? Nope.

And you think that real people living in America outside the realm of gated McMansions don’t have a very clear understanding of the impact of poverty and despair and racial tension and all of the other associated issues that surround poverty in this country?

Think again.

The common wisdom is that poor folks and children do not vote. And that the rest of the country does not care enough about them to vote their interests. Well, I am here to tell you this morning that THEIR interests ought to be ALL of our interests. Because their costs to society fall on every single person who pays taxes — and, honestly, as much as folks on the right bitch about taxes, shouldn’t they be the least bit interested in maximizing the returns on the money they do pay in — and reducing the overall needs and despair in order to reduce long term costs ought to be something everyone could get behind.

You’d think so, anyway, wouldn’t you.

I attended a symposium on poverty, inequality, race and the media sponsored by the Eisenhower Foundation on December 12th. It was an amazing discussion, one that brought out some difficult but necessary points about the way these issues have been covered in the media over the last forty-odd years since the Kerner Commission report.

And the decisions made in newsrooms on this sort of coverage mirror, in large and small ways, the way that politicians also deal with these issues. In many ways, for both corporate-owned media and politicians, dealing with poverty is a question of marketing: on both sides of the coin, the folks making the decisions think that “poverty” doesn’t sell well, and so it gets swept to the side.

In print media, the stories get shoved to a single column on page A17. Television media covers them with decreasing frequency, sandwiched between infotainment bits on Britney Spears’ panties, or lack thereof, and the latest celebrity DUI arrest photo. Folks in politics equally don’t want to talk publicly about these issues with much frequency, because they feel that it doesn’t make for much good news footage — it’s not soundbite friendly and, in any case, newsrooms don’t want to cover these issues anyway because advertisers don’t think “poverty” and “product sales” go well together.

I will talk more about the symposium in a subsequent post later this morning, but I wanted to touch on something from my remarks there that, I think, illustrates just how much can be involved in the issues surrounding poverty — and why it is essential that we look at the whole of the problem, not just tiny little pieces of it.

I spent my professional life working with at risk children in abusive and neglectful homes, or who had violent tendencies that grew out of any number of problems — home life, sexual abuse, mental issues stemming from drug or alcohol use while the child was in the womb, you name it — that landed them in the juvenile system. The issues involved could be overwhelming at times, and included, but were not limited to the following (from my speech to the group):

And in an abuse and neglect case, I would see the following pretty frequently:

– Mental health issues that had gone untreated for years
– Parenting skills counseling
– Drug and alcohol rehab
– Anger management counseling
– Sex abuse therapy – individual and group, for both the perpetrator and the survivor
– Foster care
– Medical intervention
– Criminal charges
– Job training needs
– Government benefits sign-up
– Medical cards for kids who had never had adequate care
– Budgeting skills classes
– Life skills classes (including things like why you should clean your house, why bathing is important, hygiene basics, etc.)
– Intervention services to assist the mentally challenged parents and children
– Medicare benefits problems
– Disability and Workers Comp benefits problems
– Social worker rotation through long-term cases because social workers are paid next to nothing to do one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
– Cuts in education benefits for Head Start and valuable early intervention programs like Birth to Three.
– Lack of prenatal care and awareness.
– Even more drug and alcohol rehab.
– Prison time for one or more parents.

And on and on.

That does not even touch on folks living below the poverty line who were never in trouble with the law. Folks who are working two and three jobs, trying to raise their families with no childcare assistance and little to no safety net. Folks for whom an illness could mean financial catastrophe for the whole family. Folks living one paycheck away from homelessness.

Take a look again at the WSJ piece on the Edwards’ announcement, and look at the accompanying graphic on the rateof poverty and the costs of healthcare, just as one comparison point. See how the graphs dip downward toward the year 2000, and then ratchet back up again throughout the Bush years in office? Think that’s a coincidence? Me, neither.

That it has taken a Presidential candidate standing up and talking about this issue to get it back on the front pages of newspapers — at least for the day yesterday — is unconscionable. But at least people are talking about it again, and for that I applaud John Edwards for sticking to a topic that all of us need to be talking about much more frequently. More on why that is in the next segment…

Bringing Poverty To The Table, Part II
[open to view photos]

(This shot is from the iconic Dorothea Lange, whose photographs stand the test of time in terms of documenting so much of American life and poverty during the Depression. I found this shot in a photo essay on poverty that is well worth a look.)

Back in early January of this year, I sat down to my keyboard and poured out a heartfelt post in the aftermath of the Sago mining disaster that occurred about 45 minutes down the road from where I live here in West Virginia. What I wrote then comes back to me this morning, and I wanted to re-emphasize a few points that still go unaddressed today:

We’ve gutted funding for mental health. We pay social workers who intercede on the children’s behalf less than they could make at McDonalds, but we expect them to do a job so difficult and so important to our communities. We spend huge sums of money on new prisons every year: imagine if we just dedicated a small portion of that amount to services on the front end of the problem — when these kids were small or even when they were still in the womb (you would not believe the amount of damage to a child that can be done by a mother using crack while pregnant) — how much better return would that be for our nation over the long run? These are the things that kept me up at night as a prosecutor. The individual stories behind every single one of the defendants and families that I saw, and the question of how to fix the problems that I kept repeatedly seeing, and not just put a band-aid on the problem and hope it would go away on its own. The question of how economic hardship can push someone already on the brink of disaster to do something so stupid, and that can impact his family for generations. But the answers were elusive, and still are.

This is a problem that we need a national discussion about over an extended period. Not some nasty political infighting. Not throwing a bunch of sound bites at each other and looking smug, digging in our respective positions a lobbing bombs out from behind the ideological bunkers.

A real, honest discussion. Education is the way out — but that only works if people in incredibly poor areas have access to decent education. How do we accomplish that?

Mental health and other safety net programs have been gutted over the last few years. Are we trying to create more criminals to lock up — because that’s been a big part of the result that I’ve seen in the real world trenches. But for a government running deficits as big as the federal government is, where is more funding coming from to increase these programs? And from states, who are having trouble meeting federal entitlements that keep pushing off costs onto the backs of governors whose budgets are already stretched thin? No easy answers here, that’s for sure.

Fair wages for a fair day’s work are essential. But how does that happen in an era when health insurance costs are through the roof — for both the worker and the business employing them — and energy costs are eating up the margins for a lot of other businesses who might have some slack? For that matter, exactly how does a CEO justify making 350 times or more than his lowest paid worker, all the while running a business into the ground with bad decisions?

The bottom line is this: there are some really tough choices facing this nation (and the discussion above is my no means a comprehensive list), and we need to approach them carefully because the results of our action or inaction have long-term ramifications for our children. Democrats used to own these issues because they listened to the voices of those people who needed help, who needed a hand up, and who were willing to do the work on their end to get the job done. And they spoke up for them, gave them a voice in the halls of power.

There, in a nutshell, is where I still am: trying to find a way to bring the voices of these folks to the fore because they have no real public voice in today’s politics. At least, they hadn’t had one — I am hopeful yet with regard to the incoming Congress and hope that issues facing folks at the bottom end of the economic scale will be given a lot more consideration in the days to come than they have been given the past few years.

Back in 1999, CNN did a profile of poverty in Appalachia, which included the following, which I still find to be true in parts of West Virginia and the greater Appalachia today:

It’s a part of the United States that, to some eyes, might look like another country. Appalachia has been called the forgotten America. But amid poverty and hardship, there’s also hope and self-reliance.

At a time of prolonged national prosperity, Appalachia is an area where the clanging bells of Wall Street’s economic boom are seldom heard. Where some people live in crowded shacks without plumbing, where health care can fall to Third World levels, where roadside garbage often goes uncollected and where unemployment stands at many times the national average of 4.3 percent.

It is here, a region dotted with economically depressed coal-mining towns, where President Clinton sees untapped commercial potential he hopes to unlock with his “new markets” initiatives — tax credits and loan guarantees for businesses that invest in distressed areas.

There have been limited successes in my state with business initiatives, but the greater question of “poverty” is so much more complex than simply adding more jobs — a lot of which require a good education and/or higher-level skills that many at the lowest levels of economic society simply do not have, and so cannot obtain these new opportunities without further intervention or training of some sort. West Virginia currently ranks as the fifth poorest state in the nation, and all over Appalachia problems associated with poverty persist with no end in sight.

Certainly personal responsibility plays a role in whatever situation an adult person finds themselves in through the years, but there are fundamental factors that a child of poverty has to overcome that a child born to middle class or upper class parents will never, ever have to face. And for a child who is physically or mentally abused, or who is born to a mother who never bothered with adequate prenatal care, nutrition or abstention from alcohol or drugs while pregnant, or who doesn’t have food to eat or clean clothes to wear, who has no encouragement to get an education and no real parental role model whatsoever growing up — admonishments that as an adult that person should be more responsible can be, at many levels, pretty much incomprehensible.

And for families who fall outside that parameter of at risk kids, who work hard every day at two or three jobs, try to raise their children with optimal parenting, and still find a whole lot more month left at the end of their paychecks — people who are doing everything right and still have a very, very difficult time getting by because they were born to a family tha didn’t have a trust fund, didn’t emphasize education, didn’t…well, you can pretty much fill in the blank.

Should we simply shut our eyes and walk away from the needs of our fellow citizens? I say no. As much as these folks have a responsibility to themselves and their families to do what they can to make their lives better, so should we consider all of the members of our community our concern — not just the folks who don’t need a hand up now and then — because it is in how we treat the least of these that we ought to judge our successes.

One of the biggest problems that I have seen is that the question of “poverty” is treated to piecemeal consideration. You want to lower the birth rate for underage kids in America — but refuse to talk about any sort of education about contraception, other than keep your legs crossed, don’t have sex and, if you do, don’t talk about it with your parents because they don’t want to know. You want to decrease the number of folks who are homeless — but the greater issues of mental health services having funding cut or drug and alcohol addiction or economic instability for the lower middle class and the increases of families becoing homeless due to health care costs and the new bankruptcy laws that have been devastating for families in that situation…and on and on.

Housing costs in the last few years have skyrocketed all over the country. Siun forwarded a link to me last night about the housing situation for the poor in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina — and I read the article just shaking my head. Read for yourself the situation that these two sisters find themselves in, and ask yourself if we cannot do better than this.

One of the biggest issues that never seems to get play in public discussion is the role that malnutrition and hunger in the lives of poor children plays in their long-term prognosis for the future. I found some information on this issue relating to poverty in Chicago, and I find it fascinating — and quite disturbing. As a mother myself, I know how I struggle day in and day out to get my child to eat well, because I have done extensive reading on the importance of this for her health and for her brain development for the long haul. There are also greater questions as to how this can impact a child in the womb in terms of pre-natal care, things that I have seen with abuse and neglect cases that I have dealt with through the years.

There are so many issues intertwined. So many issues.

The Eisenhower Foundation has put up video clips from each of the speeches from the forum that I attended on December 12th. The audio is a little low on the clips that I’ve viewed, but I highly recommend watching them of you get the time — in particular, Ray Suarez and Colbert King were quite good and hit the points on the media issue squarely where I felt they needed to be hit. But all of the presentations were on point and very much needed in the run-up to the new Congress being sworn in, and in preparation for the Foundation’s follow-up report to be issued in 2008 on the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report on poverty, inequality, and race in America.

These are issues on which I would like to have a lot more discussion in the weeks and months ahead. And I wanted to throw this out to all of you to help to shape the conversation.

What issues do you see in your own communities with regard to these problems and the overarching issue of poverty? What do you feel most urgently needs to be addressed? What solutions have been attempted in your community — what has worked, and what has not? With whom would you like to have discussions on this issue at the national level? Whose voices do you find most compelling on these issues — and why?

I’m looking forward to all of the responses on this. And to much, much more discussion to come.

America’s Open Wound
Bob Herbert
Thursday, December 21, 2006 by the New York Times

It’s eerie. The air is still. There is no noise. Night is falling.

The five stone steps in front of me once led to a porch, or maybe directly to the front door of a house. There is no way to be sure. The house is completely gone. All that’s left are the five steps, one of which is painted with the address, 1630 Reynes St. The steps sit alone, like a piece of minimalist art, at the front of a small vacant lot full of weeds and rubble. Next door is a house that is completely capsized, fallen over on its side like a sunken ship.

Welcome to the Lower Ninth Ward. You won’t find much holiday spirit here. In every direction, as far as it is possible to see, is devastation.

On another lot, piled high with the rubble of a ruined house, I saw a middle-aged man standing in the front yard weeping. He wore a dirty white baseball cap and he was sobbing like a child. I walked toward him to ask a question but he waved me away.

Whatever you’ve heard about New Orleans, the reality is much worse. Think of it as a vast open wound, this once-great American city that is still largely in ruins, with many of its people still writhing in agony more than a year after the catastrophic flood that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Enormous stretches of the city, mile after mile after mile, have been abandoned. The former residents have doubled-up or tripled-up with relatives, or found shelter in the ubiquitous white trailers of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or moved (in some cases permanently) to Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and beyond. Some have simply become homeless.

“This is a ghostly city, if you ask me,” said Sheila Etheridge, a waitress whose home was destroyed and whose three children are staying with relatives near Atlanta. “It gets real spooky when the sun goes down. They let me sleep in the back of the restaurant. But I’ll tell you the truth, we don’t have too many customers. You see what those neighborhoods are like. They’re empty. The people gone.”

The recovery in New Orleans has gone about as well as the war in Iraq.

In mid-September 2005, with parts of the city still submerged and soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division on patrol, President Bush made a dramatic, flood-lit appearance in historic Jackson Square. In a nationally televised speech he promised not only to do all that he could to rebuild the Gulf Coast, but also to confront the terrible problem of deep and persistent poverty.

“That poverty,” said the president, “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”

Now, more than a year later, the population of New Orleans is less than half what it was before the storm. The federal government has allocated billions for the city’s recovery but much of that money has been wasted or remains hopelessly tied up in the bureaucracy. Very little has gotten to the neediest victims, the people who were poor to begin with and then lost their homes and their livelihoods to the storm.

Many of the city’s hospitals and schools remain closed. Some will never reopen. There is very little public transportation. The politicians have come up with a stunning array of post-Katrina initiatives, but one grandiose recovery plan after another has faltered.

The terrible experience of the flood and its aftermath has left an imprint on the minds of most residents that’s as distinct as the water lines that stain so many of the city’s buildings. A cabdriver’s voice faltered as he told me about an obese woman who put pillows under her arms as the floodwaters were rising. She thought the pillows would help her float.

“She drowned,” the driver said.

Emotional and psychological problems are rampant, but there is a drastic shortage of mental health professionals to treat them. People are suffering from severe anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and other illnesses. Doctors told me that large numbers of mentally ill individuals have gone more than a year without taking their prescribed medication.

Many of the poor residents in the city feel that they’ve been abandoned by the government and the rest of America, and that the president broke his promise to help. “We’re in terrible trouble down here,” said a woman named Delores Goode, who stood outside the Superdome asking passers-by if they knew where she might find work as a baby sitter. “We were all over the television last year. Now we’re back to being nobody.”

Tale of Two Sisters
Why Is HUD Using Tens of Millions of Katrina Money to Bulldoze 4534 Public Housing Apartments in New Orleans When It Costs Less to Repair and Open Them Up?
Bill Quigley
Thursday, December 28, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Gloria Williams and her twin sister Bobbie Jennings are 60 years old. They are two of the over 4000 families who lived in public housing in New Orleans before Katrina struck who are still locked out of their apartments since Katrina. Their apartments are two of 4534 apartments that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced plans to demolish. Demolition is planned even though it will cost more to demolish and rebuild many fewer units than it does to fix them up and open them. Ms. Williams and Ms. Jennings, and thousands of families like them, are fighting HUD, they want to return.

Gloria and Bobbie started working early. As children they picked cotton, strawberries, snap beans and pecans before and after grade school every day in rural Louisiana. “We were raised up to work,” they said.

They moved to New Orleans after their father drowned. Their home was marked by regular domestic violence. A few years later, their mother was murdered by a boyfriend.

As teens they moved in with an abusive relative. They ran away, came back, and stayed with other relatives. They can even remember nights when they slept under their aunt’s bed in a hospital while waiting for her to recuperate.

As young women they continued working. They worked in restaurants before starting careers as Certified Nursing Assistants. Then they worked for years in nursing homes and in private homes caring for the elderly and disabled. They fed people, cleaned people, bathed people, cared for people. Each married and raised children and grandchildren. Like 25% of the households in New Orleans, neither owned a car.

Both sisters are now 60. In the past few years, their years of physical work took its toil and they could not longer work. Ms. Jennings had back surgery and suffers with high blood pressure. Ms. Williams has heart and lung problems, high blood pressure, and clots in her legs that prevent her from standing or walking for long periods. Each lives solely on about $600 a month from disability. No pensions.

When Katrina hit, they had been living in the C.J. Peete apartments for years. Ms. Bobbie Jennings had been there for 34 years. Her twin sister, Ms. Gloria Williams lived there for over 18 years.

Their combined families, 18 in all, evacuated to Baton Rouge to ride out the storm. When it was clear they would not be going home any time soon, their host family told them it was time to move on. In September 2005, the family of 18 moved into one daughter’s damaged home in Slidell, about 30 miles away from New Orleans - all sleeping on the first floor because the roof was still damaged.

One of their sisters, Annie, was in the hospital with cancer when Katrina hit. It took the family weeks before the finally found her in a hospital in Macon, Georgia.

When the city opened, they got rides into town and checked on their apartments. No water had entered their apartments at all. But their doors had been kicked down and all their furnishings were gone. The housing authority told them they could not move back in for a couple more months while their apartments were secured and fixed up. The housing authority started fixing up and painting apartments in her complex, but abruptly stopped after a few weeks.

Slidell was getting tight, so they accepted an offer to relocate to California. After a month, they returned. Being 3000 miles apart from family was too heartbreaking. A four day bus ride brought them back to Slidell in January 2006. After hitching rides into New Orleans, Ms. Williams found a subsidized apartment. The only way the landlord would accept her, though, was if she paid him an extra $400 under the table. Otherwise, he would rent it to someone else who would.

So Ms. Williams paid the extra money and moved in with her grandchildren while she waited for her old apartment to reopen. She used FEMA money to buy new furniture. In late February 2005, Ms. Williams was hospitalized for three weeks for surgeries on her legs.

In June 2005, HUD announced they were not going to let any residents back in her apartment complex and three others (Lafitte, St. Bernard and BW Cooper) because they were going to be demolished. Over one hundred maintenance and security workers for the housing authority were let go. HUD took over the local housing authority years ago and all these decisions are being made in Washington DC.

The demolished buildings would make way for much newer and many fewer apartments which would be built by private developers. The demolition and private development would be financed by federal funds and federal tax breaks designed to help Katrina victims!

Nearly $100 million in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds were designated for the private developers. Another $34 million in Katrina Go-Zone tax credits were also donated to the developers.

In July 2005, Ms. Williams apartment caught fire and again she lost everything. Her landlord did not want to let her out of her lease. He told her that she and her grandson could still live there, all they had to do was clean the soot off the walls and ceilings.

At this, Ms. Williams broke down and went back into the hospital.

Ms. Jennings got an apartment and allowed her daughter and her grandchildren to live there because they have no place to stay. She also took her in her little sister, Annie, who was dying of cancer. Annie died on August 17, 2005.

Both sisters have severe problems every month making ends meet. Utility bills eat up most of their monthly checks. With no car and their apartments across the river from New Orleans, they cannot get to the doctor.

Christmas was very tough. Ms. Williams said “We didn’t have a Christmas. We didn’t have food to put on the table.” Her grandson went to her sister’s house to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Ms. Jennings cried as she said “Behind Katrina and my little sister dying, my life just stopped. This is the second year we didn’t have a Christmas. It is so hard to try to start over. I let my daughter and her two grandchildren sleep on the bed. I sleep on a pallet on the floor. Before Katrina I was on blood pressure medicine once a day. Now I take 4 blood pressure pills three times a day. I also take pills for depression, nerves and stress.”

“We just want to go home,” Ms. Williams said. “People knew us in our neighborhood. They never messed with us. I could leave my back door open when I went to the grocery. People don’t understand that was our home. We want to go home.”

Why would people want to go back into public housing? Aren’t the developments dangerous and crime-ridden? Isn’t this an opportunity to start over and make something better?

Public housing residents know full well the problems of public housing, but still they want to return.

Why? Start with the fact that New Orleans is in the worst affordable housing crisis since the Civil War. Tens of thousands of houses still remain in ruins after Katrina. Rents for the rest have gone up 70-80 percent since Katrina. Even before Katrina, there was a waiting list of 18,000 families seeking to get into public housing - now it is much, much worse. HUD’s demolition plans target 4,534 apartments of public housing in the community. They plan to demolish 1546 apartments in BW Cooper, 723 in C.J. Peete, 1400 in St. Bernard, and 865 in Lafitte.

These are not the dense high-rise towers. Public housing in New Orleans is made up of development clusters of mostly two and three story buildings with six to eight apartments in each.

New York Times Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, criticized plans to demolish these apartments, saying on November 19, 2006: “Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States..Solidly built, the buildings’ detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary public housing complex.”

Most of the public housing apartments rented for very modest rents tied to the resident’s incomes. Most did not pay separate utility charges. Leases were essentially for life, unless someone in the family was caught breaking the law.

HUD initially said they had to demolish because the buildings were so damaged they were dangerous to the residents.

That was not true.

John Fernandez, an Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, inspected 140 of these apartments and concluded in papers filed in court that “no structural or nonstructural damage was found that could reasonably warrant any cost-effective building demolition.Therefore, the general conclusions are: demolition of any of the buildings of these four projects is not supported by the evidence of the survey, replacement of these buildings with contemporary construction would yield buildings of lower quality and shorter lifetime duration; the original construction methods and materials of these projects are far superior in their resistance to hurricane conditions than typical new construction and with renovation and regular maintenance, the lifetimes of the buildings in all four projects promise decades of continued service that may be extended indefinitely.”

Residents promise to fix up their apartments themselves if given the chance. “I clean for a living,” said one young woman resident at a recent public hearing where 100% of the residents opposed demolition. “I clean for a living and I am proud of it. I clean every body else’s houses, I will sure clean up my own house - just let me back in to do it!”

After it the public understood that the buildings were not actually in such bad shape, the authorities then said it would cost much more to repair the buildings than to demolish and start over.

That too was not true.

The housing authority’s own documents show that Lafitte could be repaired for $20 million, even completely overhauled for $85 million while the estimate for demolition and rebuilding many fewer units will cost over $100 million. St. Bernard could be repaired for $41 million, substantially modernized for $130 million while demolition and rebuilding less units will cost $197 million. BW Cooper could be substantially renovated for $135 million compared to $221 million to demolish and rebuild less units. Their own insurance company reported that it would take less than $5000 each to repair each of the CJ Peete apartments.

HUD suggests that less-dense “mixed income” communities are the way to go.

But residents and the community knows that if HUD has its way, only about 20% of the families who lived in these developments will be allowed to return.

New Orleans has suffered through the experience of HUD’s “mixed income” policies before. The St. Thomas housing development, once home to 1510 families, was demolished with promises that people would be returning to a beautiful redeveloped community. Instead, there is now a Wal-Mart on the site and hundreds of cute gingerbread pastel houses. How many of the 1510 families who used to live in St. Thomas have been allowed to move back in? About a hundred. A few of these families have had to force their way in with litigation by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. The demolition of St. Thomas is hailed as a mostly-good outcome by nearby developers and some of the young professionals who moved into the surrounding neighborhood knowing what was coming. What do the 1400 families who were moved out and not allowed to return think? Don’t ask - no one else is.

HUD has the same plans for the neighborhoods where they are trying to demolish housing. According to documents filed with the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency: St. Bernard will go from 1400 apartments to 595 apartments, only 160 of which will be for low-income public housing residents. There will be 160 tax credit mixed income and 145 market rate units; CJ Peete will go from 723 units to 410, 154 will be public housing eligible, 133 mixed income and 123 market rate; BW Cooper will go from 1546 to 410, 154 public housing eligible, 133 tax-credit mixed income, and 123 market; And Lafitte will downsized in the same way.

As a result HUD plans to spend tens of millions of Katrina assistance funds to end up with far fewer affordable apartments.

The new Congress is looking into this. Representatives Barney Frank and Maxine Waters chair the committee and subcommittee with oversight of HUD. There is also a federal class action lawsuit filed by the Advancement Project, Jenner & Block, and local attorneys.

Residents of the St. Bernard housing development and their allies plan are not waiting any more. On Martin Luther King day, January 15, 2007, they are going in with or without permission.

“What better way to celebrate Martin Luther King day than to risk going to jail for justice?” says Endesha Jukali, a neighbor who lived and worked in St. Bernard for years.

But the clock is still ticking. HUD, who has not “officially approved” its own announcement, says the demolition needs to get started to take advantage of the Katrina tax credits. Neither the Congress nor the federal courts have yet stepped in to stop the demolitions.

What do the sisters think about this? Ms. Jennings says: “I lived there for 34 years. That is my home. I just cannot afford to live outside the development. I don’t know how else to explain it. I have the tears, but I do not have the words.” Her twin sister, Ms. Williams cries and says: “That was my home for over 18 years. I never gave them no trouble. My home never flooded. I will clean it myself, just please let me back in. I wish I could make people understand. I just want to go home.”

For more information about this matter see www.justiceforneworleans.org or contact the Advancement Project at (202) 728-9557.

New Orleans officers charged with murder
Seven face charges for gunbattle that left two dead after Hurricane Katrina
Judi Bottoni / AP
Dec 28, 2006

[Note: FOX News and other conservative pub's cited this incident as "conspiracy theory" in the early fallout from Katrina.]

NEW ORLEANS - Seven police officers were indicted Thursday on murder or attempted murder charges in a pair of shootings on a bridge that left two people dead during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The district attorney portrayed the officers as trigger happy.

“We cannot allow our police officers to shoot and kill our citizens without justification like rabid dogs,” District Attorney Eddie Jordan said.

The shootings took place under murky circumstances six days after the storm and became one of the most widely cited examples of the anarchy that descended after Katrina.

Two men were killed and four people wounded on the Danziger Bridge, which spans the Industrial Canal.

At the time, the sweltering city was still littered with corpses as rescuers tried to evacuate stranded residents and looters ransacked stores.

Police initially said the Sept. 4, 2005, shootings occurred after shots were fired at Army Corps of Engineers workers.

Police Superintendent Warren Riley called Jordan’s comments “highly unprofessional, highly prejudicial and highly undignified,” and urged the community to withhold judgment until a jury decides their guilt or innocence.

“We want justice first and foremost,” Riley said, “but for the district attorney to try and prejudice the community against these officers before all the evidence is heard is really, I think, a sad day for the city.”

Defense attorneys said their clients are innocent.

“As a wise man once said, a district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” said Franz Zibilich, attorney for officer Robert Faulcon, who is charged with murder and attempted murder. “They heard only one side of the story.”

A judge gave the officers 24 hours to surrender and said there would be no bond for the four accused of murder, which carries a possible death sentence. The officers accused of attempted murder were to be held on $100,000 bond for each count.

The grand jury issued the charges after hearing weeks of testimony. The foreman of the panel, Lee Madare, declined to comment in detail as he left the courthouse but asked a reporter, “Do you understand the word cover-up?”

A spokesman for Mayor Ray Nagin declined to comment on the indictments.

According to a police report, several officers responded to a radio call that two fellow officers had been hurt. When they arrived, seven people were seen running, and four began firing at police, the report said. The officers returned fire.

The victims were Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally retarded man, and James Brissette, 19. The coroner said Madison was shot seven times, with five wounds in the back.

‘Running gunbattle’

Riley has described the confrontation as a “running gunbattle” that lasted several minutes.

Madison’s brother, Lance, has said the two were crossing the bridge on their way to another brother’s dental office when a group of teens ran up behind them and opened fire. As they fled, Lance Madison said, he and his brother encountered seven men who jumped out of a rental truck and also began firing.

The police department has said an officer shot Ronald Madison after he reached into his waistband and turned toward the officer.

Lance Madison denies that his brother was armed.

In addition to Faulcon, police Sgt. Kenneth Bowen and officers Anthony Villavaso and Robert Gisevius were charged with murder. Officers Robert Barrios, Mike Hunter and Ignatius Hills were charged with attempted murder.

The indictments were the latest blow to the reputation of the beleaguered police department.

More than 200 officers on the 1,500-member force were disciplined for various offenses after the storm, including failure to show up for work.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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