Live Blog: “The Adults Take the Stage”

The first Democratic primary debate will begin soon. Let’s watch together and document the highs and lows. Unless the CNN questioners are really insistent on avoiding discussion of important issues, I expect this debate to be much more substantive than either of the Republican debates so far. So does Brian Beutler at The New Republic: The Adults Take the Stage in the Democratic Debate.

Relative to the two Republican presidential primary debates already behind us, Tuesday night’s Democratic primary debate is expected to draw a modest TV audience. Back on January 31, 2008, when candidate Barack Obama was still a political phenom, CNN logged the most-watched presidential primary debate in its history to date, drawing an average of 8.3 million viewers. With the second Republican primary debate last month, the network nearly tripled that.

We surely have Donald Trump to thank for the disparity. Had he sat out the race this year, he would have deprived Fox News and CNN of his singular combination of fame, media savvy, insensitivity, and cringe-inducing combativeness. But even absent Trump, Republican primary debates would probably draw bigger audiences than their Democratic counterparts. It isn’t wrong or biased to say that Democrats make comparatively boring television. But that isn’t a strike against Democrats, either. It’s a reflection of the fact that the Republican Party, unlike the Democratic Party, is dominated by reactionary voters, which makes its candidates prone to saying or doing outrageous things out of a sense of necessity….

In the first Republican debate, Donald Trump stood by his history of making insulting comments about women, particularly Rosie O’Donnell, and his polling lead increased. To preserve his viability, Marco Rubio announced his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest—and it worked. In the second Republican debate, two doctors (Rand Paul and Ben Carson) declined to correct and admonish Trump for suggesting a link between vaccines and autism, and Carly Fiorina burnished her credibility with conservatives by fabricating a ghoulish summary of Planned Parenthood sting footage.

The backdrop for the first Democratic debate also includes a governing meltdown in the House Republican conference, which has been unable to align behind a successor to House Speaker John Boehner, whom conservatives successfully deposed more than two weeks ago.

I don’t expect anyone to make personal attacks in tonight’s debate–although Lincoln Chafee is a wild card. I think the debate will be generally polite though. It won’t be “must-see TV” for those who like watching reality shows. People who are looking for some crassness and stupidity can follow Donald Trump on Twitter. I hear he’s going to live-tweet tonight’s debate.

The main thing Hillary needs to do is be herself. Bernie needs to try to get noticed by some non-white, non-“creative class” voters. As for the other three candidates, O’Malley needs to get some voters to know who he is, and Chafee and Webb need really need to explain what they are doing on that stage.

Bernie Sanders will be debating formally for the first time in a very long time. The Chicago Sun-Times: Here’s Bernie Sanders debating — in 1998.

Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders doesn’t have nearly as much debate experience as his rival Hillary Clinton, so when footage of one of his debates resurfaced, it had to be shared.

The footage is from the Vermont congressional race in 1998, when Sanders ran for re-election against Republican Mark Candon. Sanders ended up winning that race.

Not much has changed for Sanders since then, whether you’re talking about his policies or his often disheveled hair.

Tonight’s debate will be the first time the two leading Democratic candidates will be able to face off on issues like trade and economic equality.

Watch the video at the link. Even though he hasn’t done much debate prep, I still expect Bernie to do well. He speaks quite well extemporaneously.

What about Joe Biden? The NYT reports: Joe Biden Won’t Be Participating in the Debate.

CNN can put away the extra lectern. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. isn’t coming.

Mr. Biden’s office said he would watch the Democratic presidential debate from his official residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

“Vice President Biden will host a high school reunion following which he will watch the Democratic debate at the Naval Observatory,” an Obama administration official said.

The high school classmates, a group fewer than 50, will not be staying for the debate, the official said, but it was not known who else, if anyone, the vice president might be watching with.

Time for creepy Uncle Joe to quit playing games.

Thanks to Dakinikat for this one from the WaPo: Joe Biden isn’t running for president, by Daniel Drezner.

The media is beginning to tire of the Biden story. It’s the media that stoked the Biden flame, but after two and a half months of it, they’re starting to grow weary of the non-story. As my colleague Greg Sargent noted five days ago:

Mr. Vice President, enough is enough. The first Democratic presidential debate is in five days. Tell us what you’re going to do already. …

But the game Joe Biden is playing now, in holding back on making his decision and telling us what he plans to do, just has to end, and fast. At best it’s becoming a farcical distraction that is beneath him. At worst it’s becoming a serious waste of our time.

And now the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker have added to the drumbeat:

Perhaps not since Mario M. Cuomo, then the governor of New York, left a plane bound for New Hampshire idling on a tarmac in 1991 has there been such an extended and late-hour public agonizing by a major political figure over whether to run for president. Mr. Biden initially said he would decide by the end of summer. Now aides are researching filing deadlines to see if he can keep his options open into November.

The danger for Mr. Biden, as his advisers know all too well, is that intrigue can easily turn into fatigue. After 10 weeks of his being egged on by Democrats disenchanted with Mrs. Clinton and by a news media eager for a race to cover, Mr. Biden increasingly faces demands that he make up his mind.

When you’re being compared to Mario Cuomo on dithering, it’s time to fish or cut bait.

Again from the WaPo: Martin O’Malley, looking for a spark.

Here’s a phrase you’re certain to hear from Martin O’Malley after he takes the debate stage here: “15 years of executive experience.”

O’Malley, who served for seven years as Baltimore’s mayor and eight years as Maryland’s governor, routinely touts his record of getting things done and argues that’s what sets him apart from his Democratic rivals.

So far, that argument hasn’t resonated with many voters. O’Malley remains mired in the single digits in national polls as well as those from Iowa and New Hampshire. Even Democrats in O’Malley’s home state of Maryland are more inclined to support Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

O’Malley’s campaign is banking on a breakout moment on Tuesday night, as voters across the country get their first chance to size up all five candidates seeking the Democratic nomination.

More about O’Malley’s experience at the link.

On the remaining candidates:

Yahoo Politics: The invisible candidacies of Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee.

Somewhere in America, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee are alive and running for president. We know this because they have campaign websites, Twitter accounts and communications directors for their campaigns, although fairly uncommunicative ones. And on Tuesday night they will take their places on the stage with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley for the first Democratic presidential debate, fielding questions from Anderson Cooper. CNN has set a low bar to appear on the stage, requiring only that candidates reach an average of 1 percent in three national polls — a threshold Webb and Chafee barely meet. But one absolute requirement is that participants actually be running, which is why you won’t see “Other” on the stage, although in this compilation, he or she was running at a comparatively strong 2.5 percent.

Still, by some measures — such as campaign appearances, media visibility or returning reporters’ messages — it can be hard to discern the difference between either of these former United States senators and the elusive “Other.” Repeated emails to Webb’s spokesman Craig Crawford last week — first inquiring about his public schedule, then just seeking signs of life — went unreturned. Perhaps Crawford doesn’t like Yahoo News for some reason, although a reporter for Mother Jones magazine who tried reaching Crawford last week had an identical experience. The last public utterance of Webb’s I could track down, apart from occasional tweets, was a Sept. 28 appearance on Alan Colmes’ Fox News radio show, in which he agreed with Colmes that he was a long shot for the Democratic nomination but predicted that if he is the candidate, “I think we will win, and win big.”

Chafee’s aide Debbie Rich, described as his “communications consultant,” was only slightly more responsive than Crawford. After twice affirming that Chafee had no public schedule for the five days leading up to the debate, she was asked for evidence that he was seriously running for president and replied tersely: “He was welcomed by residents in Exeter, N.H., on Tuesday. Very good reception.” On Wednesday, Chafee took to Twitter to boast that Grammarly, a grammar-check website, had ranked his followers tops in grammar in their Facebook posts, and he followed up that news with a burst of commentary on issues as varied as the Mideast, mental health and trade policy, amounting to five tweets over two days. Donald Trump tweets more in his sleep. Chafee’s media coverage is so scanty that he couldn’t even raise a scandal last week when, speaking at a foreign policy forum, he came to the defense of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, a position as idiosyncratic, and considerably more fraught, as endorsing the metric system. Which he has also done.

Andy Borowitz at The New Yorker: All Eyes on Bitter Chafee-Webb Rivalry.

LAS VEGAS (The Borowitz Report)—When the curtain rises on the first Democratic debate of the 2016 campaign, all eyes will be on the bitter rivalry between the former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee and the former Virginia senator Jim Webb.

While both camps are mum about the vicious hatred that has consumed the two men on the campaign trail, political insiders familiar with the Chafee-Webb blood feud are expecting fireworks in Las Vegas on Tuesday night.

“It’s always hard to make predictions about a debate, but one thing is guaranteed,” the political scientist Davis Logsdon said. “These two men cannot stand each other.”

Sources differ over what caused the white-hot hostility between the two former officeholders, but most agree that Webb’s two-per-cent support in some polls deeply rankles Chafee, who has garnered only one per cent.

Read the rest at the link.

That’s it for me. I hope you will join me to watch and comment on the debate.

Tuesday Reads: Hopping Mad

Good Morning!!

The painting above and the rest of the works illustrating this post, are by Edward Hopper.

For the first time, I’m really angry with Senator Elizabeth Warren. I generally get an email from her at least every couple of days, but since her “meeting” with Joe Biden, there’s been nothing. She owes it to Massachusetts voters and to all of her supporters to explain what is going on. This morning I sent her an email and a tweet asking her to clarify where she stands on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and telling her she should be ashamed for allowing the media speculation to continue. I also said that if she undercuts the first woman ever to have a serious chance to be president, I will never vote for her again for any office.

Right now the media is running wild with rumors that Warren would agree to run as Joe Biden’s vice president, and/or that she would endorse Biden if he ran for president. How she could even consider supporting Mr. MBNA–who wrote the legislation on which the Patriot Act was based, sponsored a bill that would have made declaring bankruptcy much more difficult (a bill that was defeated by Ted Kennedy and Elizabeth Warren), and wrote the mass incarceration bill that Hillary Clinton is being excoriated for–I cannot begin to understand.

Here’s the latest on this story.

Chair Car, Edward Hopper

Washington Post: Top Democratic fundraisers invited to meet with Joe Biden at Naval Observatory.

Major Democratic fundraisers have been invited to meet with Vice President Joe Biden at his residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory after Labor Day, part of a series of conversations he is having with senior party players as he contemplates jumping into the 2016 race.

Among the guests invited to the gathering are top bundlers who raised large sums for the Obama-Biden campaigns in 2008 and 2012, according to people familiar with the outreach. The sitdown is scheduled to take place during the week following Labor Day….

In recent weeks, Biden has been huddling with longtime supporters and allies to discuss the possibility of making another White House run. On Saturday, he met with Elizabeth Warren, the populist senator from Massachusetts.

His consideration of another campaign comes as front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton has fielded mounting questions about her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

The news that the FBI is investigating whether the system put any classified information at risk has rattled some top party financiers, particularly donors who were major players in Obama’s fundraising network who have little personal history with the Clintons. In the last few weeks, e-mails and calls have been flying back and forth between top bundlers as they try to assess how serious Biden is and whether Clinton is on shaky ground.

Automat, Edward Hopper

CNN: Does Elizabeth Warren regret not running for president?

The scourge of Wall Street might have disappointed her legions of “Run Warren Run” supporters by ruling out her own bid for the White House earlier this year.

But the Massachusetts senator is in the thick of the Democratic race anyway. Warren offered a fresh glimpse of her political star power and talismanic value for Democrats when she held a furtive meeting with Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday — which briefly knocked even Donald Trump out of the headlines.

The encounter, first reported by CNN, intensified speculation that Biden, perhaps encouraged by front-runner Hillary Clinton’s ebbing poll numbers, is moving closer to a White House run and is keen to connect with Warren’s fervent supporters.

It also returned her name to the political mix, as Biden’s interest in powwowing with her as he mulls a presidential run demonstrates her clout, and those same flagging poll numbers raise the specter of whether Warren missed her moment — or might still plan to seize it and enter the 2016 race herself.

Can you see why I’m hopping mad this morning?

Think Progress: How Elizabeth Warren Is Pulling The Strings In 2016.

Back in March of this year, Senator Elizabeth Warren dashed scores of progressives’ hopes and dreams with one simple sentence: “I’m not running and I’m not going to run.”

But the influential Massachusetts Democrat is still very much a part of the 2016 presidential election. Her recent private meeting with Vice President Joe Biden — who is said to be seriously considering jumping into the race — has sparked enthusiastic speculation of a possible endorsement, or even a Biden/Warren ticket. Last week, she cast doubt over the widely-held assumption that Hillary Clinton would be the decided nominee. “I don’t think anyone’s been anointed,” she said.

That Warren holds more influence as a non-candidate than as a candidate is not a new idea. But now that presidential campaigns are well underway, the degree of that influence is becoming more visible. Coincidentally or not, the major Democratic contenders have been pressured to take positions on many of Warren’s own key issues.

There’s plenty more at the link.

Compartment C, Edward Hopper

NY Daily News: Barack Obama gives Joe Biden his ‘blessing’ for 2016 presidential run.

Vice President Biden invited top Democratic donors to meet with him after Labor Day, and President Obama is said to have given his “blessing” Monday, heightening the buzz over the veep’s Oval Office ambitions.

“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an endorsement during the Democratic primary,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said during a briefing.

He added that President Obama has said making Biden his running mate “was the smartest decision he ever made in politics” and that those comments reflected on Obama’s views of Biden’s “aptitude” for the presidency.

“I’ll just say that the vice president is somebody who has already run for President twice. He’s been on a national ticket through two election cycles now, both in 2008 and in the reelection of 2012,” Earnest said.

“So I think you could make the case that there is probably no one in American politics today who has a better understanding of exactly what is required to mount a successful national presidential campaign” than Biden, he continued.

Hotel Lobby, Edward Hopper

Republicans would be thrilled to run a candidate against Biden. Check this out from right wing site The Blaze: Run, Joe, Run. But You’ll Have To Do It Without Elizabeth Warren.

After nearly two terms of Obama and all the years with unforgettable Biden “gaffes,” could anyone really cast a vote for him; even those on the left?

How could Biden be taken seriously when he’s said so many things that made people shake their heads in amusement … or is that amazement?

Who could forget when Biden said, “My mother believed and my father believed that if I wanted to be president of the United States, I could be, I could be vice president!”

Or, how about the first campaign rally when Biden introduced Obama by saying, “A man I’m proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next president of the United States — Barack America!”

Also, who could forget his not too politically correct mention of ethnicities when he said, “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent … I’m not joking.”

Finally, who could forget all of those pictures with uncomfortable looking women seemingly wishing they could remind Biden about the rules of personal space?

This right winger is making far more sense than anyone in the corporate media. A bit more:

While it’s almost too late to jump into the race at this point, many supporters tout Warren as being “right about everything.” So, maybe they wouldn’t care how late it is.

Remember, Biden is considering getting into the race this late in the game so anything is possible. However, Warren has repeatedly said she is not running for president.

Even if she were to consider running as a vice presidential candidate, it seems more likely that she would run with Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) because many believe and rightfully so, that their left-wing socialist policiesare very similar.

Room in New York, Edward Hopper

So far I’ve only seen one article that deals with the real chaos that would ensue if Biden runs, with or without Warren’s backing. Regarding the possibility of Warren being Biden’s running mate and/or supporter, Michael Tomasky writes: Hillary vs. Biden Would Get Ugly Fast.

The big Biden question is whether he’s just preparing in case Clinton becomes felled by scandal or “scandal,” or whether he decides in the near future that she’s damaged enough already that he might as well hop on the bus and see where it takes him. The former course of action, well, that’s all right; given what appear to be Bernie Sanders’s general-election limitations and the fact that Martin O’Malley isn’t exactly setting the nation on fire, it seems a reasonable thing for him to be thinking about.

But what if he just decides the hell with it, I’m running? A Biden v. Clinton primary battle could be—and if Biden manages to win a couple of primaries, most certainly would be—far more acrimonious than the Clinton-Barack Obama fight of 2008.

Three reasons. The first has to do with race and gender and history. When Clinton announced in 2007, she was going to be the first woman president. Then Obama got in, and he was going to be the first black president. He totally trumped her on the history-maker scale. I realize not everyone saw it that way, but in general terms, given the, ah, special racial history of this country, and given the role the Democratic Party played in changing that history for the better, Obama had the larger and more morally urgent historical claim to make in the minds of most Democrats and liberals. The woman would have to wait, as women so often do.

Hotel Room, Edward Hopper

Well, she’s waited. Not that she had any choice in the matter, but she did. And now, to a lot of Democrats, it’s her turn. The party can make history twice in a row. Imagine!

So now, an old white guy is going to saunter in and step on that? And if he’s going to do it, he’s not going to be able to do it politely, which brings us to reason number two why this would get ugly. Biden is not going to get anywhere with a campaign that says: “I have better ideas than Hillary Clinton does,” because he probably doesn’t, and she has perfectly fine and laudable ideas, even if a lot of liberals don’t want to admit that yet.

No. He’s going to have to run a campaign that says, sub rosa: “I’m a stronger and safer nominee because she’s corrupt.” Because that’s the only argument, is it not? He can’t out-populist her, really, even with Warren promoting him—he’s been in politics for 40 years and he’s always been a pretty conventional establishment liberal on economics. He can maybe say he has more experience, but she’s got plenty of that, and it’s not a deficiency; it would be like Tim Duncan saying I have more experience than LeBron James. Yeah, you do. So what?

Yes it would get incredibly ugly–especially if Warren is involved in Biden’s decision or his campaign.

That’s why I’m hopping mad this morning. Warren needs to clarify the situation right away.

What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread.

Friday Reads: Nearly 10 years after and we’re still traumatized and victimized

Good Afternoon!

Some times right wingers get so caught up in their frames that they will drop all buzz words and pretension of being anything other than self-aborbed assholes steeped in white privilege.  Yesterday, the Editors of the Chicago Tribune let slip the dogs of class war.  There are many who seek a return to colonial plantation economics by demonizing and isolating the poor and disadvantaged. These folks with dreams of Randian dystopias are the worst of rent seekers who peddle influence through lobbyists and stupid, greedy politicians. Their attack dogs usually frame class warfare on the poor and middle class families by poor shaming and seek elimination of unions, public education, and safety nets like those for the elderly and the unemployed. It’s rare you get to actually see one of these “conservatives’ write–even metaphorically–about cleansing society of them in such an honest way.

The Chicago Tribune published an op ed by Kristen McQueary that openly pined for a Katrina-like disaster for Chicago so that the kind of carpetbaggers we’ve been dealing with here who have been sucking all the resources and profits they can out of us can free Chicago from its black population and teacher unions and other right wing bugaboos. She wails and laments that it was only use of metaphor.  Most of us can see the true intent. Here’s McQueary’s little wet dream.

That’s why I find myself praying for a storm. OK, a figurative storm, something that will prompt a rebirth in Chicago. I can relate, metaphorically, to the residents of New Orleans climbing onto their rooftops and begging for help and waving their arms and lurching toward rescue helicopters.

Tell me exactly again how this little white girl can compare feeling overtaxed and overregulated by her local government so much that 10 days on a roof experiencing unimaginable heat, hunger, death, and thirst could compare–even “metaphorically”–to her “struggle”. Her goal?

Residents overthrew a corrupt government. A new mayor slashed the city budget, forced unpaid furloughs, cut positions, detonated labor contracts. New Orleans’ City Hall got leaner and more efficient. Dilapidated buildings were torn down. Public housing got rebuilt. Governments were consolidated.

An underperforming public school system saw a complete makeover. A new schools chief, Paul Vallas, designed a school system with the flexibility of an entrepreneur. No restrictive mandates from the city or the state. No demands from teacher unions to abide. Instead, he created the nation’s first free-market education system.

Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth.

She obviously did no homework on the ground when she wrote these things. I doubt she’d put her children into any charter school here where most are under-performing as badly as before but hey, some nice white, upwardly mobile carpetbaggers are making profits out of it instead of teacher’s making living wages.

Part of the “reform” was the wholesale firing of some 7,000 teachers, most of whom were black, who formed the backbone of the city’s middle class. That hurt.

One parent complained that the all-choice system actually disempowered parents. If she complained, she risked being asked to leave the charter school. The schools have more autonomy, but parents have less power.

Berkshire says the charter sector is now consolidating, with chains taking over most of the stand-alone charters, and with the successful charters defined as those that produce the highest scores. Innovation is hard to find. What is common practice is long days, tough discipline, testing, and “no excuses.” One parent lamented that the charter sector thinks that parents and children are problems, not patrons of the schools.

Ignored in the celebratory accounts, she says, is the large number of young people who are not in school and the persistence of poverty and youth violence …

The performance of these schools is now well documented.  However, these numbers mater not to ideologues like McQueary who would rather read effusive statements of similarly minded ideologues and reports cooked up by think tanks wishing to see more of the same.

But then there is Mercedes Schneider, who reports that the state released 2015 ACT scores for every district, and the New Orleans Recovery School District ranked 70th out of 73 districts in the state. Its ACT scores are virtually unchanged over the past three years. The RSD ACT scores of 16.6 are far below the state average of 19.4.

An average ACT score of 16.6 is low. Louisiana State University requires a composite score of 22. A composite of 20 qualifies for La’s tuition waiver to a 4-year institution; a composite of 17 qualifies for tuition waiver for 2-year technical college.

And here’s the latest study by Research on Reforms in New Orleans, comparing the Orleans Parish public schools to the reformers’ Recovery School District. “A study of three ninth grade cohorts, beginning with the 2006-07 year, shows that the percentage of OPSB 9th graders who graduate within four years is almost double that of RSD 9th graders, and the RSD’s dropout rate is nearly triple that of the OPSB.”

New Orleans’ poor Black children are still being left behind. Indeed, all poor children are on an “education island” according to analysis done by Andre Perry.

The middle class opted out of the public sector, and the least powerful are on an educational island. Eighty-seven percent of the children in New Orleans public schools are African-American. In the 2004–05 academic year, 77 percent of New Orleans students were part of the free and reduced lunch program, which was how schools primarily measured poverty.

The term “economically disadvantaged” is the designation currently used, but it entails the percentage of students eligible for SNAP, TANF or Medicaid. At the start of the 2014 academic year, 84 percent of students were economically disadvantaged. Economically disadvantaged students make up 92 percent of enrollment at Recovery School District charter schools.

For the educated, New Orleans is the most wonderful city on the planet. But our enjoyment is a function of a peculiar distance from the poor.

Scott Eric Kaufman–writing for Salon–analyzes the piece. 

McQueary provided a laundry list of conservative goals that the city met after it had been battered so badly it barely function as a city anymore: “[a] new mayor slashed the city budget, forced unpaid furloughs, cut positions, detonated labor contracts[,]” making “New Orleans’ City Hall leaner and more efficient.” It never occurred to her that if your ideology requires thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced in order to be enacted, the problem likely isn’t the city — it’s your ideology.

Putting aside that McQueary’s vision of Chicago as a mansion on the hill requires the eradication of many of its African-American residents, the most disturbing aspect of her editorial is that she imagines herself to be one of those residents, stranded on a rooftop waving this very op-ed like a bed-sheet in the hopes of being rescued.

“I can relate, metaphorically, to the residents of New Orleans climbing onto their rooftops and begging for help and waving their arms and lurching toward rescue helicopters.” She did, literally, write that. But she went one step further, arguing that her plight is more desperate than those in New Orleans because “here, no one responds to the SOS messages painted boldly in the sky.”

Besides the fact that that final line makes absolutely no sense — New Orleans residents weren’t hiring biplanes to alert authorities as to their whereabouts via skywriting — the problem with McQueary’s editorial is that it exists, which points to a failure of judgment on her part, as well as that of every member of the editorial board who read and signed off on her egregious “hot take.”

Indeed, this has been a “hot take” for some time.  David Brooks–notorious unemployable plutocrat–started this meme almost immediately with his little puddling space on the NYT.  This is from September 8,2005.

Hurricane Katrina has given us an amazing chance to do something serious about urban poverty.

That’s because Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty.

It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn’t working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn’t take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide.

The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago, leaving neighborhoods where roughly three-quarters of the people were poor.

Yes. Those ideas worked so well we now can read these headlines in the Time Picayune: “New Orleans is 2nd worst for income inequality in the U.S., roughly on par with Zambia, report says.” This story dates from roughly a year ago on August 8, 2014.

New Orleans ranks second worst in the country for income inequality, according to Bloomberg, which maintains a ranking of the most unequal cities in the country. The report puts inequality in New Orleans roughly on par with that in Zambia, according to statistics kept by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Bloomberg plotted America’s 50 most unequal cities according to their Gini coefficient, which measures the concentration of income, rather than overall income (gross domestic product) or the wealth of the average citizen (median income). In a country with a Gini coefficient of 0, all residents enjoy the same level of income. In a country with a Gini coefficient of 1, a single person holds all the country’s wealth.

New Orleans’ Gini index was .5744.

Only Atlanta — .5882 — had a higher coefficient than New Orleans, according to Bloomberg. Atlanta’s median household income was $46,466, more than $12,000 higher than that of New Orleans. Even as Atlanta had more inequality than New Orleans, the average resident in Atlanta was much better off than the average New Orleanian.

Adam Johnson–writing for Alternet--considered the Op-Ed to be down right evil.  Again, we’ve seen this before from the corporate elite who just love to make money at our expense and to label us a wasteland where they can come imprint their culture and priorities onto us.  Forget the fact we invented jazz, a unique form of American cuisine, and nearly every one in the world wants to visit, we’re just one big wasteland that is overrun with poor folk!

It’s a sentiment not uncommon on the corporate right. The idea that Katrina was a sort of biblical flood that washed away liberal excess in New Orleans is taken as gospel by conservatives and corporate democrats alike. Even Obama’s Secretary of Education got into a bit of hot water when he said in 2010 Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”.

He later walked back the statement after a torrent of backlash but his point was clear: mass tragedy provides an opportunity for corporate forces to expedite the raiding of public trusts and circumvention of democracy and collective bargaining. It’s an axiom so taken for granted that a recent tone-deaf tweet by the New York Times even insisted the foodie culture was “better” after Katrina. Needless to say this left a bad taste in several people’s mouth, going viral for the wrong reasons:

But McQueary’s piece is far worse. Praising a devastating storm that killed 1,800 people as a net positive is already a terrible thing. Expressly wishing for a devastating storm to come along and wipe out the third largest city in America so one can expedite a Randian end times is positively psychotic. In an attempt to be polemical, Ms. McQueary exposes the dark heart at the core of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism”. For these people, it is not a thought experiment. It’s not rhetorical. It’s real. They truly believe largely-black, union-friendly cities would be better off in the long run handing over the reigns of their local governments to technocratic, largely white neoliberal systems. To them, the tragedy of Katrina wasn’t the mass displacement and death of thousands, it was that it didn’t happen soon enough.

Just two weeks after Katrina, when 96% of the corpses still remained unidentified and the Superdome was, according to FEMA, a “toxic biosphere“, Koch-funded Freedom Works published an op-ed in The National Review calling the storm a “golden opportunity” and insisting officials use the ensuing chaos to push for massive corporate overhaul of the New Orleans education system.

Today, a Chicago transplant from Hurricane Katrina responded to that incredibly insensitive and incredibly wrong Op-Ed.

McQueary attempted to make the giant leap between the subject she wanted to write about—i.e. perceived fiscal irresponsibility in Chicago—and the subject she hopelessly tried to connect it to—her idea of the rebirth of New Orleans on the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Now there’s no doubt that New Orleans has made great strides and implemented remarkable reforms in the aftermath of Katrina. As McQueary rightly points out, the city is in many ways back to normalcy (or whatever the New Orleans equivalent of “normalcy” is) and has emerged from catastrophe a stronger place.

But there is no balance to her idealized perception of a utopian New Orleans where corruption, overspending, and waste (to her mind, in the form of “unnecessary” city employees) have been thoroughly uprooted. She forgets the fact that in the past ten years New Orleans has seen a mayor federally indicted and jailed for giving his sons’ company prejudicial treatment in city contracts, many thousands of poor New Orleanians still unable or unwilling to return to a city that doesn’t want them, and a New Orleans East that remains utterly blighted and left behind in the overall recovery of the city—and those issues are only the tip of the iceberg.

But I might have been able to forgive her for her misguided and Ayn-Rand-esque idealizing of my hometown, if she had not simultaneously idealized and glossed-over the depth of suffering and pain that so many New Orleanians went through—including myself.

So when I see a professional writer from the premier newspaper of the city in which I currently reside—who decidedly did not experience this catastrophe herself—writing about “wishing for a storm in Chicago… A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops,” I get a little angry.

Better yet, I get infuriated.

Again, let me tell you, the recovery from Hurricane Katrina is a totally different experience and depends on which side of town you live on.  It’s been characterized as a Tale of Two Cities. Uptown is under perpetual road reconstruction.  Downtown still is pockmarked with deep, deep potholes and impossible roads.  That’s just one really noticeable example that I personally can provide. There are a lot more provided in this WBUR interview with Allison Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center with Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd discussing a new report.

“We know from the disaster literature, a couple of things: that whatever the trends were before the disaster tend to get accelerated after the disaster, and also folks that were doing okay, or doing well, actually benefit from all the new infrastructure. But folks who were poor or had poor health, it’s really hard for them to recover. The shock is often too much.

So what we’re seeing is growing income inequality as many of our white households are doing much better but black households are not. We see employment rates for black men are virtually the same that they were before the storm, but for white men they are much better. It’s interesting down here, if you talk to folks, it’s almost like a tale of two cities and it often splits on racial lines.

So you’ll talk to white folks and they’ll say, ‘Wow! The city is doing much better. Never been better, all these great things are happening. Entrepreneurship, the economy is great, our wages are up. Etcetera, etcetera.’ But you’ll talk to black folks and they’ll say, ‘Things are much worse, a lot of our neighbors aren’t here. It’s been such a struggle to rebuild. I don’t even had some of the business networks I used to have.’”

Angell Marie Boutte has been living in her Gentilly home since 2007 without electricity and water.

Then, there’s actual reporting like this from the National Geographic: “10 Years After Katrina, Some Are ‘Homeless in Their Own Homes’; Even after a decade, elderly, frail, and disabled New Orleanians are without homes or essential services.”

The state-administered Road Home program, financed with grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has handed out $9 billion in rebuilding grants to 119,000 Louisiana homeowners. But thousands of those recipients were never able to finish repairs. There are many reasons for this, but the most common is contractors who took grants and didn’t finish work. Ramm-Gramenz says nine of ten of her cases involve contractor fraud, which ran rampant in the wake of the hurricane, especially with older people.

“It breaks my heart,” says Travers Kurr, a street-outreach worker for UNITY of Greater New Orleans, who, since Katrina, has worked with hundreds of people living in squalor in their own flood-damaged homes, often surrounded by mildewed photographs of happier days.

Despite their limitations, some of these people may have been capable of living on their own before the flood. Neighbors say they used to see Angel Boutte outside of her home and they often brought her plate dinners. But in recent years, she’s become a recluse within her family’s house, which Boutte says has barely been touched since floodwaters submerged it and she was rescued from the roof by helicopters (records indicate Boutte did not receive a Road Home grant).

Recently, Boutte, 52, peeked through a window screen that’s ripped in the middle, showing her black dress and a large crucifix. She’s lived in the once-tidy brick house since she was about six, she says. Her mother died in 1984, and her father died in 1998. And while the house may look bleak now, Boutte remains confident that people will come to her aid.

An analysis by The Data Center found that 25 percent of residential home addresses in New Orleans were still blighted or vacant in 2010, five years after the storm. Since that time, the city has demolished a total of 4,106 buildings through a careful blight-abatement process, but tens of thousands of empty properties remain.

There are some wonderful pictures at that link of people living in New Orleans right now that you would swear were living in the worst countries in Africa.  Also, try these pictures of abandoned homes that are still standing today from The Telegraph if you want to see what I drive by all the time.   The only picture in this post that is directly post Katrina is the one at the top. The other three are from these links which are definitely worth the seeing.

I can personally tell you that I am not better off.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?