Some True Heroes

November 14th, 2007 · No Comments

This Veterans Day Monday it’s time to salute and support some true heroes. President Bush will not meet them or greet them. Brian Williams and other network anchors will not report on their inspiring struggle against immense odds. You will not see them on the cover of Time or any other newsmagazine.

For these unsung heroes courageously fight their truly lonely fight, forgotten by their leaders, abandoned by the mainstream media and by many other Americans. They stand alone in the face of scorn from these fellow Americans, who cruelly deride them as crazy or foolish to be hanging in there fighting their fight, who tell them their problems are all their fault, because they’re fighting they way they do.

These heroes have been making great sacrifices to continue their fight…For they fight the good fight not on some distant shore, but….

in New Orleans and in Louisiana’s other storm-ravaged parishes devastated by Katrina and Rita. They are not fighting militarily, but fighting a peaceful, lonely battle not only to pick up the pieces of their own shattered lives, but to bring their beloved New Orleans and other communities back.

But they have to contend, if homeowners, with the one thing that should be helping them make their homes and their lives whole, but has instead made their lives hell and even brought about or exacerbated depression, anxiety and other ills: Louisiana’s frustrating Road Home program. Her Road Home has been riddled with delays, red tape, and other snafus from Day One.

Because Katrina and New Orleans recovery are my main topic of interest, ever since I joined Daily Kos about two months ago, I’d been hoping I’d find a diary by someone living in New Orleans or elsewhere in Louisiana who’d been dealing first-hand with the Road Home. I wanted to find a first-person account, a “human face” to represent the many struggling with this program. So on Friday, I was grateful to find such a diary.

For a powerful, moving look at what it’s like to try to put one’s life back together after Katrina, dealings with “contractors” who turn out to be scam artists, and the mental/emotional tortures involved in just coping with all that other stuff, and at the grueling Road Home application process itself, see nolalily’s diary, posted after her husband applied for one of these grants. She provides eloquent, heartfelt testimony of the hardships they’ve been dealing with and emotions they’ve been feeling as well as the difficulty of the application process itself.

nolalily’s diary made such an impression on me emotionally I was unable to fall asleep Friday night after I’d read it. My heart goes out to nolalily and her husband for what they’ve been through, and are still going through, and I worry about how they’ll be faring. Because the application was just Step One–I’ve heard nothing good about the Road Home. nolalily and her husband are true heroes.

And it saddens me and makes me physically ill to think about what nolalily and her husband and tens of thousands of other Louisiana homeowners who only want to rebuild their homes and bring some normalcy to lives that have been turned upside down are being put subjected to after having survived Katrina and Rita.

This is because of Bush’s war on Louisiana. Briefly, in “Louisiana’s Relationship From Hell” I went through how the Road Home program came about and went into various snafus involved. And said that an earlier plan–the Baker Plan–had been rejected, which I’m now going to go into in more depth. Because, as brought up in that diary, Bush has had a sinister agenda in Louisiana ever since the levees broke and has wanted to ensure the success of his Final Solution there. Hence the malevolent machinations by a BushCo bent not on restoring Louisiana to wholeness and wellness but on ensuring that she remain ethnically cleansed of those displaced by New Orleans’ flooding. And by discouraging the staying in New Orleans by people who either remained during the storm or who have returned, by keeping their lives difficult and painful.

According to Dan Baum in “Letter From New Orleans: The Lost Year,” in the Aug. 21, 2006 issue of .The New Yorker here’s how this happened: Seven weeks after Katrina, Louisiana Rep. Richard Baker

introduced a bill to finance reconstruction throughout the state…Under the bill, the government would buy at sixty per cent of the pre-Katrina value any flood-damaged house or small business in Louisiana that an owner wanted to sell. The government would consolidate the properties and sell them for planned development. Baker’s proposal was big enough to save New Orleans. (my emphasis) It would put money and options in the hands of homeowners. And it was tailored to appeal to Bush’s sensibilities–government involvement would be temporary, and about half the initial public outlay would be recovered when redeveloped properties were sold….

Per the Baton Rouge Advocate:

A Herculean effort by Baker managed to get the Blanco Administration and the fractious and uncoordinated Louisiana delegation in Congress on board for the bill. Baker got it passed out of the House in record time. But White House aides, citing vague concerns about financial accountability, stalled it in the Senate.

Certainly Louisiana’s delegation set no speed records in coalescing around the Baker bill. It was as if they had all the time in the world to dicker about provisions. But in the end, Louisiana’s leadership was for the bill. Key GOP leaders in Louisiana and former U.S. Sen. John B. Breaux, a Democrat close to the White House, were unable to get the president’s team on board.
Baker and the other Louisiana politicians who had struggled valiantly to reach agreement on this desperately-needed plan had not been aware that not only did BushCo not have Louisiana’s best interests at heart, it was playing a sadistic psychological games against a Louisiana whose Democratic governor they could not forgive for making BushCo look bad during Katrina. BushCo had been taking advantage of a fragile, exhausted Louisiana desperate to find a way out of the excruciating crisis imperiling her very survival.

As all of this was going on, I followed it closely through the Times Picayune, Advocate, and other Louisiana media. It made me sick to see what BushCo was doing to Louisiana. The game they were playing kept Louisiana on a dizzying emotional rollercoaster–the high at the start when BushCo was leading Louisiana’s leaders to believe that they supported the Baker plan. This made Louisiana feel hopeful. But after that they started giving mixed signals, like when they stalled the bill in the Senate.

But Louisiana was plunged into a new low when an evil Bush Administration determined to snuff out the light of New Orleans won out. As Baum continues,

On January 24th, [2006], New Orleans suffered what Baker called a “death blow.” Donald Powell, who was overseeing Gulf Coast recovery for the White House announced that President Bush would not support the Baker bill. The President didn’t want the government in the “real-estate business,” Powell said. Of the more than two hundred thousand Louisiana homes that Katrina destroyed, the federal government would pay to rebuild only a tenth, he said: those which lacked flood insurance, were owner-occupied, and were outside established floodplains. Officials at all levels of state and local government appeared to be taken completely by surprise; on the streets of New Orleans, people were visibly stunned.

Baum adds that an official involved in the negotiations with the Administration told him that

the responsibility for handling the bill…had shifted from the cooperative Treasury Department, to the office of Allan Hubbard, the President’s chief economic adviser. “Hubbard just looked at it as ‘We don’t want to set up another bureaucracy,’” (My emphasis.) the official said…

Then, as if it wasn’t enough for Bush to reject Louisiana’s Baker Plan, Bush felt he had to berate her. In a Jan. 26 press conference reported by Bayou Buzz Bush criticized Louisiana for lacking a rebuilding plan! (my emphasis) He said …

it’s important for New Orleans and the state of Louisiana to work together to develop a state recovery plan…Those plans haven’t–the plan for Louisiana hasn’t come forward yet, and I urge the officials, both state and city, to work together so we can get a sense for how they’re going to proceed.

As if all the work Baker did to get Blanco, Nagin, and all members of Louisiana’s Capitol Hill delegation on board for the Baker Plan didn’t count!

Editorialized the Baton Rouge Advocate

It is difficult to understate the feelings of betrayal in Louisiana because after a great deal of work to get Louisiana’s fractious leadership on the same page with a housing plan, the White House rejected it…

There is simply no way Louisiana can afford to rebuild vast stretches of devastation, absent some federally backed funding mechanism….

The president has betrayed the faith that Louisiana residents placed in him after his pledges in Jackson Square that the nation would do what it takes to rebuild…The White House isn’t intellectually or financially honest with us in this discussion.

While the Baker Plan episode can be looked at as the time Bush showed his true colors as an enemy of Louisiana, the buck stops with Allan Hubbard, the repulsive bean-counting piece of scum who is responsible for pulling the rug out under what would perhaps have been a far better rebuilding plan for Louisiana. And how sadly ironic it is that by opposing the setting up of “another bureaucracy” Hubbard paved the way for the Road Home, the mother of all frustrating bureaucracies, where homeowners who only want to repair or rebuild their homes, who apply for grants, are fingerprinted and otherwise treated as criminals as well as having to deal with extensive paperwork (like having to come up with property titles, proof of insurance and other documents that could have been lost in the flood) and other red tape.

Regarding the Road Home, many, even though it’s run by a Virginia corporation that’s charged with handing out the grants and has been screwing up right and left, have put the blame on Blanco’s shoulders, which is part of the reason she decided not to run for re-election. But in my view, the ultimate responsibility for the fact that the Road Home had to come about in the first place rests with Hubbard, who, by denying Louisiana’s storm survivors the chance to be able to take advantage of the Baker Plan, furthered BushCo’s sinister agenda in Louisiana.

So there are no heroes in this sordid saga of how a Louisiana denied the chance to begin making herself whole sooner and more quickly under the Baker plan was forced to wait months for the Road Home to come to fruition and be approved by BushCo.

No heroes, that is, except for nolalily, her husband, and all other New Orleanians and other Louisianians who’ve been hanging in there, bravely struggling to rebuild, waiting on a Road Home that has gotten to be like Waiting for Godot–in the face of Bush Administration neglect and hostility towards Louisiana and their having been forgotten and abandoned by the mainstream media and many of their fellow Americans. Determined to fight the good fight to rebuild their homes and lives and bring their beautiful, beloved city back.