LAT: On Their Own in New Orleans(reconstruction private not public,no net)

On Their Own in Battered New Orleans
What Bush said would be one of the largest public reconstruction efforts ever is becoming a private affair, leaving the tough choices to residents as their risks increase.

By Peter G. Gosselin, Times Staff Writer


....Lost amid continued talk of billions in federal aid is the fact that most homeowners and businesses are being left to make the toughest calls on their own. Lost is that New Orleans' recovery — which President Bush once suggested would be one of the largest public reconstruction efforts the world had ever seen — is quickly becoming a private market affair....

***

To market advocates, this is the way it should be. Rugged individuals settled the American West in the 19th century and can resettle the Crescent City in the 21st.

But the risks that individual New Orleanians must shoulder in such an on-your-own recovery appear staggeringly large....

***

The situation in which residents find themselves is an extreme example of a trend underway for a quarter-century, a shift of economic risk from business and government to working families, and an increasing reliance on free markets to manage society's problems.

Safety nets such as unemployment compensation, employer-provided healthcare insurance and pensions, and, recently, effective disaster relief have been reeled in or removed. Increasingly, families from the working poor to the affluent are left largely to buy and sell their own way to safety even when their individual efforts seem utterly outgunned, as they do in the case of Katrina....


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-orleansrisk4dec04,0,7300204.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Then why the hell do we pay taxes if we are "on our own" when disasters happen? Why does * get up there and lie about saying that this will be the "largest reconstruction effort ever" if FEMA's not doing a damn thing. I say we cut off their supply of tax dollars if that's the deal!

"The World's Only Superpower."

:hurts:


What a DUMP!

anymore...

I felt like a superpower when we did good things in the world. Now we just look like superassholes!

Thanks BushCo! :sarcasm:

Ultimately, if the wealthy do not want to abandon New Orleans altogether, they are going to have to provide incentives for the working class to return. Those incentives will include a piece of the pie; a stake in the city, or else the elites will fail to get the help they so urgently need to rebuild their businesses and lives. Gone are the days of cheap and readily available maids, cooks, poolmen, nurses aides, etc. Those with $$$ are going to have to figure out how to rebuild the community at a cost workers are willing and able to bear. That cost climbs everyday as more and more of the disenfranchised decide to move on with their lives in other locales. It will take some sweet fruit to lure them back.
Community development will come to mean something to those who had everything, for they will realize that without the working class they can't make a dime.
A house and its contents cannot be replaced by the small grants FEMA is offering. It will take things like interest free loans to give the local economy what it needs to stage a comeback. The plan to pay off mortgages might work for some who are in dire straits, but for that ponzi scheme to work the bond speculators are going to have to take a calculated risk on getting enough speculator/developers to buy up huge tracts of land, bring back the housing stock AND HAVE IN PLACE a working/middle class to purchase the rehabbed houses. If people don't have the means and can't afford the upgraded housing, who will repurchase these properties? The investors will end up with a glut of shiny new houses just awaiting the next hurricane season, and without a national commitment to wetland preservation/redevelopment and levy rebuilding it sounds like a very risky venture.
It seems to me that those who stand to benefit most in the long term better get off their collective behinds and figure out the riddle of this Gordian knot.

the runaway fascism of the marketplace, the ruin of nationwide economic collapse (i.e. Peak Oil -- and no public transport to ease the blow) plus the additional destruction of local natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, more hurricanes etc.) -- all this while the global corporations fatten themselves by outsourcing, downsizing and feeding on the wreckage.

As to the improperly constructed levees, that's merely more proof of the obscene corruption undermining our nation from within.