So this is progress? (RE: The Empty Streets Of New Orleans now titled Silence After the Storm)

Earlier I read a news article title at USA Today which said: Bush points to improvement in Gulf Coast.  Finding the article to be mostly the usual Republican propaganda I went on to other venues and other reports to actually learn something rather than just baste myself in GOP BS.

But while reading Peter Whoriskey's "The Empty Streets Of New Orleans" (update piece is now titled "Silence After the Storm) it I reflected on the supposed progress in the Gulf Coast claimed by the president.

What planet is he living on?

From Whoriskey's piece linked below under orange print:

Tallies of electric bills and school enrollment figures show that less than half of New Orleans's pre-storm population of 455,000 has returned. The population of adjacent St. Bernard Parish has shrunk from 65,000 to less than 20,000. In small towns along the Mississippi Coast from Bay St. Louis to Biloxi, fewer than 5 percent of destroyed homes are being rebuilt.

See these are facts.  These are what I like to see in a news report. 

Facts, are balance, unlike today's other WP "report" on what happened after Katrina's landfall which is filled with Republican propaganda on the subject.  (Reviewed on this blog too).

More from Whoriskey:

Nearly a third of the hurricane trash in New Orleans has yet to be picked up, according to federal Gulf Coast Recovery Coordinator Donald E. Powell, and there is still some to be cleared in Mississippi, as well.

...
"It was just the perfect storm of bad policy," said Reed Kroloff, the architecture dean at Tulane University, who worked on the mayor's first rebuilding plan. "If you wanted to kill a city, this was the way to do it. . . . God help the people of modest economic circumstances waiting from Nashville, Tennessee, wondering if they can ever come home."

I do think that when one former resident declares that the city was swampland that will be reclaimed that the reporter could have noted that it has been found that the dredging of the huge channel for boat traffic without a program to keep the many miles of wetlands between New Orleans and the ocean healthy helped doom the city.

 Also, of course, if the levees had been maintained (and Congress and the Bush administration had the authority to tell the Army Corps to check and fix the levees) much of New Orleans would not have been destroyed  Did some editor slice that out of this report and make it less complete?

But Bush people took away the money slated for 2003 work on the New Orleans levees which may have exposed the dangers and led to real repairs that could have saved the city.  (The money was used in our action in Iraq.) Then they got the blame pinned on the Army Corps of Engineers.  Of course the AC of E accepted blame.  Bush is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.  He is their boss.  It would be helpful if reporters more often reminded Americans of real facts of politics when writing articles.  That used to be the norm.  I guess that got to be too inconvenient for neocons and the big business which back the Republican party and finances our mainstream news services.

Still the journalist has brought some facts about the post Katrina period into the news.  And that is an accomplishment.

tags: katrina  new orleans  gulf coast  rebuiliding  

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