* In the spirit of Independence Day, nationwide concerts will be hosted by music venues on July 1st, 2010 to benefit those directly impacted by the Gulf Coast Oil Spill. The organizers have created an ambitious goal: Gather music venues around the country to donate...
Relief/Recovery
From the Oval Office, Promises for Gulf Coast Restoration, MMS Rehab
We’ll look at the energy aspects of President Obama’s Tuesday Oval Office address “in the coming days” (as he might say). Meanwhile, we want to focus on two of the most promising elements of the president’s remarks (text here). First, about three minutes in, he...
Infrastructure, Baby, Infrastructure!
A Defense of Stimulus Investments
Joe Conason, a stalwart defender of infrastructure, has written a strong column defending the stimulus money dedicated to repairing America’s aging roads, levees, bridges, transit systems, schools, and other essential components of our nation’s physical...
New Orleans’s Super Weekend
We prayed for a one-two punch of good news, and the Saints and the voters delivered (helped no doubt by the prayers of the nuns and priests in Saints owner Tom Benson’s posse). It is a delicious feeling of rejuvenation only four short years after the storm left us...
America’s—and New Orleans’s—Debt to Haiti
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A2q60qg0WA&feature=player_embedded In reply to Pat Robertson’s comments about Haiti’s alleged “pact to the devil” (aptly described by Gawker as “galactically vile”), Mr. Raymond Joseph, the Haitian ambassador to the U.S., says: “I...
Help for Haiti
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake has rocked and toppled much of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the most powerful quake to strike there in 200 years. The quake lasted a full minute; the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, also 7.0 on the Richter...
What Is New Orleans?
Resilient, a Moveable Feast, and Growing, Slowly
Loyola panel discussion well attended, thought-provoking, encouraging The moderator and panelists presented some very thoughtful and deeply felt responses to the question “What Is New Orleans” at Loyola’s Nunemaker Auditorium Wednesday night. In his introduction, the...
Obama Visits New Orleans (Too Briefly)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od2bOkQ4Kf0 President Obama visits New Orleans for about four hours today. He will visit the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School in the Lower Ninth Ward from about noon till 1:00 p.m., and then will hold a town hall meeting at UNO...
Scenes from a Health Reform Phone Bank
The setting: The living room of a volunteer’s apartment in Manhattan. The action: A night of phoning voters, mostly Obama supporters, in Florida, Indiana, and Virginia. Many wrong or disconnected numbers, or no one home (so we leave messages). “Hello, my name is —....
Senator Kennedy’s Gulf Coast Rebuilding Plan
“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” While others have gone quickly online with some very affectionate and stirring tributes to Senator Kennedy, we wanted to take a...
RT4: Sinking to New Heights
Just a quick word to say hello to our friends gathering in New Orleans this weekend for the fourth annual Rising Tide bloggers’ conference on the recovery and future of the Sunken City. Can’t be there this time—profound regrets—but we’ll be there in spirit and hope to...
“American-Made”: A WPA History for Our Time
(“Yes We Can” Do It Again)
Levees Not War has been recommending a Civilian Conservation Corps for Louisiana coastal restoration for some time now, and here is more encouragement in that direction.
From his first days in office, Franklin Roosevelt worked to establish relief programs to ease the pain of 25% unemployment nationwide, with some 15 million men, or 60 million Americans, having no income whatsoever. But it was not until his third year in office that Roosevelt launched the WPA, the famous jobs and public works program that is one of the hallmarks of the New Deal.
Happy Mardi Gras 2009
To everyone in New Orleans—and wherever Carnival is celebrated—we send warm greetings and best wishes for abundant fun and pleasures on Fat Tuesday, for joyful forgetting and release from heavy cares, and hopes that you may come back to your daily life refreshed and reinvigorated, with not too grinding a hangover.
ReNEW | ReOPEN Charity Hospital
Our friend Schroeder at People Get Ready rightly points out that in a city beset by so many problems at once, New Orleans residents have to choose their battles. Levees Not War focuses on infrastructure and coastal restoration, but we also urge our readers—in the Sunken City and beyond—to help save Charity Hospital, a towering embodiment of the social contract built with obsessive attention to detail by Huey Long in the 1930s, from an expensive, unnecessary, and largely destructive plan by the LSU Medical School and the Veterans Administration that would raze it and about 250 structures in the surrounding neighborhood (all on the National Historic Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s Most Endangered Places).
Further Thoughts on Obama and New Orleans
A few days ago, prompted by an article by Naomi Klein in The Nation (“New Orleans: The City That Won’t Be Ignored”), we were asking, “Where was Obama while McCain was exploiting Gustav?” On further reflection, we should acknowledge that as the hurricane was approaching and two million were evacuating, fearing Katrina II, Obama said he did not want to get in the way of the emergency preparations. Also, it was easier for McCain to join his fellow Republicans, governors Barbour and Jindal, and with help from President Bush, all of whom had an interest in the GOP’s being seen as handling the emergency effectively.
Where Was Obama While McCain Was Exploiting Gustav?
In a powerful article in The Nation (9/22), Naomi Klein points out that “The City That Won’t Be Ignored” is being neglected by Obama—who blew it when he let McCain and Palin fly down to Mississippi to show their concern while he stayed away. Maybe McCain’s act was lame, but at least he came. Gustav didn’t inconvenience the Grand Old Party so badly after all. Maybe McCain’s visit was only setting the stage to demand new offshore drilling, as Bush did the very day after the storm, while more than half a million were without electricity and New Orleanians weren’t yet allowed to return home. Great: Republicans got credit for caring about storm victims.
Rising Tide III in New Orleans Aug. 22–24: A Conference on the Future of New Orleans
The third annual Rising Tide conference of Katrina bloggers and activists will convene in New Orleans on the weekend of Aug. 22–24, the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (8/29/05). The main event is Saturday at the Zeitgeist Arts Center at 1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. (504-827-5858).
Tribute and Prayers for Senator Kennedy
Senator Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama on Jan. 28 in an appearance
with Caroline Kennedy and Rep. Patrick Kennedy at American University,
Washington, D.C. Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/New York Times.
Barack, You’re Totally Our Infrastructure Hero!
At a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisc., on Feb. 13, Barack Obama “turned it down a notch” and gave a major policy address that laid out a broad agenda for reinforcement of the American economy. The plan would restore a measure of economic balance and stability, create infrastructure and renewable-energy jobs, and many other necessary and ambitious undertakings. The speech is substantive and shows Senator Obama’s seriousness and grasp of economic reality and possibility. Optimism and realism together. We’re delighted to see at least one of the three major candidates offering serious solutions to infrastructure and environmental degradation (as John Edwards also did). See excerpts from Obama’s speech below the fold.
Homeless for the Holidays: Who Would Jesus Evict? A Tale of Two Christmases: 2007, 1959
In New Orleans, where rental costs and homelessness have doubled since Katrina, protesters at City Hall clashed with police and some were Tasered while inside the City Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 units in the city’s four largest public housing projects.