Is Equal Justice Ever Possible With Such Gigantic Income Inequality As We Have In The U.S.?

Remember that horrific story-- about a decade back-- about cops in New Orleans shooting unarmed civilians running for their lives from the Hurricane Katrina flood waters? In 2007 5 white police officers were indicted for opening up with shotguns and AK-47s on two families of black people on the Danziger Bridge looking for shelter from the deadly storm. Four people were severely wounded and 2, included a handicapped man, were murdered. The New Orleans Police Department worked to cover up the criminal behavior of their officers but eventually the murderous cops were found guilty and faced as much as 65 years in prison. The case was thrown out and a deal was made in which the officers admitted guilt but were given short sentences. I heard the story on the radio today and it made me think about how the establishment protects itself from equal treatment under the law--and protects its tools of enforcement as well. Obviously the white washing on the Flint lead poisoning catastrophe comes right to mind and how low level civil servants are being scapegoated while Gov. Snyder is still walking around a free man.

Thursday, writing for ProPublica and the New Yorker, Jesse Eisinger took at closer look into why the banksters haven't been punished for their criminal behavior that cost so many families their homes and life savings. My friend Brad put a political spin on Eisinger's point:

Sanders: the system is broken and we need to change it.
Clinton: the system is good and we need to protect it from a few bad apples

Eisinger discovered that the SEC was about to charge Goldman Sachs executives with a serious mortgage fraud case in 2009. But the lawyer whose job was to take the case to trial, James Kidney, sensed that "the SEC staff was more worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an email from Reid Muoio, the head of the SEC’s team looking into complex mortgage securities. Muoio, who had worked at the agency for years, told colleagues that he had seen the 'devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.' This attitude agitated Kidney, and he felt that it held his agency back from pursuing the people who made the decisions that led to the financial collapse."

Kidney became disillusioned. Upon retiring, in 2014, he gave an impassioned going-away speech, in which he called the SEC “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors.”

In our conversations, Kidney reflected on why that might be. The oft-cited explanations — campaign contributions and the allure of private-sector jobs to low-paid government lawyers-- have certainly played a role. But to Kidney, the driving force was something subtler. Over the course of three decades, the concept of the government as an active player had been tarnished in the minds of the public and the civil servants inside working inside the agency. In his view, regulatory capture is a psychological process in which officials become increasingly gun shy in the face of criticism from their bosses, Congress, and the industry the agency is supposed to oversee. Leads aren’t pursued. Cases are never opened. Wall Street executives are not forced to explain their actions.

Kidney still rues the Goldman case as a missed chance to learn the lessons of the financial crisis. “The answers to unasked questions are now lost to history as well as to law enforcement,“ he said. ”It is a shame.”

There were fines but none of the greed-obsessed "good people who have done one bad thing" were ever charged. It's like the entity Goldman Sachs defrauded their customers out of billions of dollars with no humans ever making any decisions about the criminal patterns. While Eisinger was researching a book on the subject for a year, he discovered"case after case in which regulators were reluctant to use the laws and resources available to them. Members of the public don’t have a full sense of the issue because they rarely get to see how such decisions are made inside government agencies." Kidney helped him with his research and showed him how "the big banks had 'captured' his agency-- that is, that the SEC, which is charged with keeping financial institutions in line, had become overly cautious to the point of cowardice."

The Abacus investigation traces to a moment in late 2006 when the hedge fund Paulson & Co. asked Goldman to create an investment that would pay off if U.S. housing prices fell. Paulson was hoping to place a bet on what we now know as “the big short”: the notion that the real-estate market was inflated by an epic bubble and would soon collapse. To facilitate Paulson’s short position, Goldman created Abacus, an investment composed of what amounted to side bets on mortgage bonds. Abacus would pay off big if people began defaulting on their mortgages. Goldman marketed the investment to a bank in Germany that was willing to take the opposite side of the bet — that housing prices would remain stable. The bank, IKB, was cautious enough to ask that Goldman hire an independent manager to assemble the deal and look out for its interests.

This is where things got dodgy. Unbeknownst to IKB, the hedge fund Paulson & Co. improved its odds of success by inducing the manager, a company called ACA Capital, to include the diciest possible housing bonds in the deal. Paulson wasn’t just betting on the horse race. The fund was secretly slipping Quaaludes to the favorite. ACA did not understand that Paulson was betting against the security. Goldman knew, but didn’t give either ACA or IKB the full picture. (For its part, Paulson & Co. contended that ACA was free to reject its suggestions and said that it never misled anyone in the deal.)

When SEC officials discovered this in 2009, they decided that Goldman Sachs had misled both the German bank and ACA by making false statements and omitting what the law terms “material details” — and that these actions constituted a violation of securities law. (The SEC oversees civil enforcement of U.S. securities law and can charge both companies and individuals with violations. Its work can often be a precursor to criminal cases, which are handled by prosecutors at the Justice Department.)

Kidney was a trial attorney with two decades of experience at the SEC, and had won his share of courtroom battles. But the stakes in this case were particularly high. Politically, it was a delicate moment. The global financial system was only just recovering, millions of Americans had lost their jobs, and there was growing public anger about the bailout of the banks and car companies in Detroit. When Kidney looked at the work that had been done on the case, he found what he saw as serious shortcomings. For one, SEC investigators had not interviewed enough executives. For another, the staff decided to charge only the lowest man on the totem pole, a midlevel Goldman trader named Fabrice Tourre, a French citizen who lived in London, and who was in his late twenties when the deal came together. Tourre had joked about selling the doomed deal to “widows and orphans,” and had referred to himself as “Fabulous Fab,’’ a sobriquet that probably would not endear him to a jury. He was an easy target, but charging him was not likely to send a signal that Washington was serious about cracking down on Wall Street’s excesses.

Kidney could not understand why SEC staffers were reluctant to investigate Tourre’s bosses at Goldman or anyone at Paulson & Co. Charging only Goldman, he said, would send exactly the wrong message to Wall Street. “This appears to be an unbelievable fraud,” he wrote to his boss, Luis Mejia. “I don’t think we should bring it without naming all those we believe to be liable.”

Does anyone care? Sure, even if Bernie isn't getting more votes than she is, he's getting plenty of votes and those are the people who do care. People who vote for Hillary... they either can't comprehend, are complicit or don't care enough to be motivated by it. These people care; that's how they got on this list:

Guest Post By Roger Pippin: Will The Re-Flooding Of New Orleans Be Another Predictable Surprise... Again?

Ivor van Heerden-- knows too much about why Katrina happened

Roger Pippin, a native of South Louisiana and alumni of Louisiana State University, is a researcher in emergency communications and management science. He is currently living and working in the Harlem community of New York City, leading workshops on the history and impact of Hurricane Katrina, and is moving to Atlanta next month to join the Centers for Disease Control as a research fellow.

Besides eating too much utility pizza and writing all day, I’m working with a non-profit group here in New York. We recently sat down for an interview and casual show and tell with Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the directors of Trouble the Water, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina. Now bear in mind that these guys produced Fahrenheit 9/11, so as you can imagine, they have some pretty strong and well articulated opinions about Katrina. At the end of our time together, I asked Mr. Deal the question “what do you think was the real reason behind Katrina?”-- a question I ask of anyone involved in a substantial way just to see their answer. His reply stuck with me because it was the most lucid and simple thing I have ever heard about Katrina: “The tragedy of Katrina happened because people in power made a decision that other people were going to die.”

Indeed, the chess board is that simple, but the pieces have complex stories.

As a simple boy from Louisiana now spending a little time in the Big Apple, I have found that one way to explain the convoluted mess of Hurricane Katrina to people is to compare some of its features to 9/11.

Both of these events were life-changing for many people, they both created many casualties, they both involved a massive clean-up effort, and they both were completely predictable by anyone who knew anything about intelligence management, communication science, and had half a brain in their head.

They both were, to use the language of Max Bazerman, a “predictable surprise”-- a type of event that is empirically predictable, but psychologically unacceptable to predict. In other words, something that happens because of the human tendency to avoid making a decision that involves incurring significant cost in the present in exchange for the mitigation of theoretically catastrophic cost in the future. You could pay now, but maybe you’ll get lucky and things will just stay the same (Wall Street, anyone?)

It is here that the similarities between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina end. Hurricane Katrina obviously did not receive the same level of coordinated response as 9/11. More importantly, 9/11 did not take place in Louisiana, a place that is as wonderful and charming as it is backwards and corrupt. At this moment, I am scared for my friends and family in New Orleans and South Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina was The Event for many people because it was like watching a nightmare in slow motion. At this moment I know that it will happen again. It is as predictable as algebra and inevitable as gravity.

Because Louisiana State University has fired Dr. Ivor van Heerden, a research scientist who has criticized the Army Corps of Engineers and their role in the construction of the levees, I worry that the state itself and New Orleans in particular are headed in direction that will make the re-flooding of New Orleans another predictable surprise, again.

Was Louisiana State University professor Dr. van Heerden fired from his position because he dared to criticize the engineering skills of the Army Corps of Engineers? Is LSU worried about their funding from the Feds so much that they are willing to throw out the truth along with their dignity and responsibility towards the citizens of Louisiana? Does this criticism of the ACE put LSU in a position where they have to fire van Heerden because they are dependent on Federal grant money to keep up the status quo? Probably. The facts of the case seem to answer all of these questions in the affirmative.

But because LSU won’t/can’t release any comments or documents about ongoing personnel decisions, we may never really know. Instead of drawing the dots that may or may not be there, I’ll stick to the ones that glare out to me, namely, the dots that, when looked at from far above the fog of bureaucracy, spell out the words expertise and public safety. How is the role of expertise corrupted when it comes to public safety?

These are the relevant facts: Dr.Ivor van Heerden was the Deputy Director of the LSU Hurricane Center and Associate Professor of Research with the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at LSU. He will be let go within a year. Now, there’s a lot of people in various comment sections of the blogosphere that argue that since he’s still there, why is everybody up in arms that he was fired? The answer is that egg-head jobs aren’t like normal jobs. If you are a professor and you haven’t made tenure yet, you can be fired for all kinds of reasons: not publishing enough, not glad handing the right departmental oldsters, anything really that the tenure committee decides. Yet, unlike regular jobs, most of the time your get a 6 month or 1 year heads up before you canned. Nevertheless, he still got the axe.

Recently the The Nation pointed out that Van Heerden was the leader of "Team Louisiana," the official independent state-funded investigation of the Katrina flooding. That panel found that the levee failures reflected poor design, bad science and shoddy engineering on the part of the Corps. The Bush Administration had held the levee failures were an "act of God."

Calling the failures an act of God essentially means that no one is responsible for the failure of the levees because no one could have planned for an event like Hurricane Katrina. Van Heerden’s point is that the danger was always there, and we could have planned for it. My point is that if we can’t put our finger on the reasons why the levees fail, then they will fail again. At this point, I’m sure some Bushite will throw up their hands and mash their teeth about how they don’t want to play the blame game. Indeed, the blame game does not interest me in the slightest, but the reason behind the levee failures is still a pertinent and scientifically valid question. It is not our job to sue the company that made the toxic waste that allegedly caused the cancer, but it is our task to find out where that waste may be.

Recently, van Heerden was removed as the deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center. Soon he will be without a job at all. Engineering professor Marc Levitan resigned from his position as the director of the LSU Hurricane Center over the firing of van Heerden. Less than two weeks ago, students at LSU protested the firing of Dr. van Heerden. Citizens of New Orleans have also protested the firing of van Heerden, who has become somewhat of a local hero. As a former academic, I can tell you that when the public starts protesting against the firing of a professor, then something is up.

So here’s a quick review-- Back in 2006, when van Heerden’s book The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina (a wonderful book full of data, although the prose is somewhat tortuous) came out, a work that was critical of the Government and the Army Corps of Engineers, the New York Times reported that:

A message from Mr. [Michael] Ruffner, the vice chancellor for communications [at LSU], to Dr. van Heerden after their meeting stated that the university wanted to be in on helping with the recovery of Louisiana, "not in pointing blame.” In an interview Mr. Ruffner said Dr. van Heerden's training in environmental management did not qualify him to comment on engineering matters. "We don't see him as a viable source to be discussing the engineering aspect of the levees," he said. "I have an advanced degree in communications, but that doesn't qualify me to comment on the New York Philharmonic."

This type of dangerous and infantile argument is repeatedly leveled, both officially and unofficially, against van Heerden and in general anybody who speaks about the Gov’s FUBAR before, during, and after Katrina. Now, despite the dozens of issues with this situation, here’s where things really start to go down the toilet for LSU, because this is the point where LSU officials, true to their style, begin to depart from any semblance of reality. What has to be made clear is that van Heerden has a PhD in marine science. Apparently, Ruffner doesn’t understand that levees that hold back water from drowning cities occasionally have interaction with substances called “water” and “soil,” topics which are covered in monastic detail by marine scientists. In fact, van Heerden is an expert on geotechnical soil issues that pertain to foundational failures. Or, to parse it down a bit for the Ruffner crowd, van Heerden knows a lot about dirt that goes under stuff, stuff like levees. Ruffner admits that he isn’t qualified to conduct the Philharmonic, but omitted in his reasoning is the fact that he isn’t qualified to speak about geotechnical soil issues either. But, his job is to be the chief spin-minister of LSU, so this is to be expected.

Even more interesting is the implication of this for experts caught in similar circumstances between the truth and hard place (made of government funding).

What does it mean to be an expert in an academic and research environment composed of various, interlocking, monetary fulcrums? I’m old enough to know the reality is that funding trumps scientific validity half the time anyway, but the funding that LSU might be buying by firing van Heerden is not purchased with firing one man, it is purchased via the safety of over a million human beings living in the New Orleans metropolitan area who will not be protected in the future because the truth of an engineering failure has been willfully oppressed, and therefore will not be corrected to any substantial degree.

What the bureaucrats at LSU don’t get is that expertise is no longer a matter of simple specialization. Although we still see the conflation of the two in some of the natural sciences, and perhaps even some branches of theoretical mathematics, the idea that the topical area on your PhD diploma means that you are only an expert in that area is laughable. First, sometimes people who get advanced degrees keep learning, reading, and doing things in other areas, which is sometimes part of being a responsible intellectual-- you go where the evidence demands, even if its into a related field that isn’t written on your diploma. Second, technology such as levees is cannot be compartmentalized into a specialization such as civil engineering. Levees are a type of technology that represents a sort of expertise “nexus,” a physical manifestation of where many specializations meet. For example, consider the science and art of prosthetic limbs. The A-list for this technology includes electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, rehabilitative therapists, sculptures, and physicians. What people like Ruffner are arguing is that only the physician is qualified to speak about prosthetic limbs, whereas the mechanical engineer who specializes in prosthetic limb development is not qualified to speak because he isn’t an M.D... The same situation is going on with LSU attempting to muzzle van Heerden. You can’t understand an event like Katrina from a viewpoint of academic specialization. Any attempt to do so will result in a false description and diagnosis of the problem. Academic specializations were developed in a day and age (in Germany) when those categories made sense, but they have no place in a catastrophic failure like Katrina, which requires solid investigative skills and good general scientific expertise, not fidelity to your original specialization.

Even though van Heerden’s degree is not in civil engineering, he still knows a hell of a lot about levees, and moreover the dirt underneath them, which might be an important thing if, say, a hurricane went over New Orleans and pushed the levees out of the ground because the soil wasn’t structurally sound enough to support said levees. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Van Heerden also know a lot about how the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), built by the ACE at tremendous cost with almost zero return, has allowed salt-water into the wetlands and thus destroyed both the marsh and its ability to lessen the effects of storm surge that helped destroy the levees. But that has nothing to do with levees, only the water that pushes on them, so it’s irrelevant, right?

Van Heerden was still the deputy director of the Hurricane Center and head of Team Louisiana when the downplaying of this qualifications began, but most damningly against LSU, every other scientific and engineering body that has examined the New Orleans Levee problem agrees with van Heerden, with the exception of the Army Corps of Engineers. For example, Raymond Seed, a UC Berkeley professor of engineering said very plainly in a letter to the American Society of Civil Engineers that "'My own University (U.C. Berkeley) was also approached in an inappropriate manner during that same Winter of 2005-06, but such untoward pressures were simply rebuffed. That, in the end, probably goes right to the heart of what really separates a top-flight university with one of the top Colleges of Engineering in the nation (and the top-rated Department of Civil Engineering in the nation) from a university like LSU."

Burn. It’s also interesting that the American Society of Civil Engineers refers to the breaking of the New Orleans levees as “the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.” What about the money? Nola.com reported that

The federal government is the largest source of research funding for universities, and LSU was lining up tens of millions of dollars for coastal and wetlands work-- much of which might be partnered with the corps. Having one of its professors lobbing bombs at the feds made some at the university fear for the LSU pocketbook.

If you’re from Louisiana, this might not be a surprise for you. Because all of Louisiana’s oil platforms are more 3 miles off our coast, the Federal Government receives all of the oil and gas royalties produced by those facilities, unlike states like Texas and Wyoming that get to keep the money. Louisiana produces between 20 and 25% of all of the oil and natural gas in this country, and so obviously if we got to keep that money, I would not be writing this because the levees would have been made out of gold-reinforced concrete topped with diamonds and therefore still standing. But, because the Feds get all the cash, universities like LSU are almost totally reliant upon them to ration out money, and the Army Corps of Engineers is practically forced to build everything on the cheap. All of this begs the question of who is really at fault-- I would say that the ACE has some responsibility here, but it is really the Feds that want van Heerden to shut up. If everyone woke up to the idea that Louisiana would be the richest state in the Union if we kept our own petro-royalities, the Feds might lose their infinite piggy bank. If people realized that if we had that money we could build levees that would last a thousand years, then the Feds couldn’t keep Louisiana on a leash to maintain its golden goose status. The ACE is not the ultimate problem, the Fed’s greed is, and the ACE is only an agent of that greed.

Some people might argue that with these kinds of monetary stakes, maybe LSU should fire van Heerden for the greater good of the University, another cash cow with its 35,000 students and kick-ass football team. Of course, that line of reasoning makes perfect sense, as long as we unblinkingly buy into the unsaid assumption. It makes sense to fire him as long as the only ethical model we have to gauge this situation is cost-benefit analysis in terms of sheer dollars. I start from a very different place, namely, preventing people from dying and cities being destroyed.

Consider what will happen to the next guy in this position. Will he stifle the truth in order to not rock the boat even though it means that south Louisiana will flood again and again? Why does funding for LSU take precedence of the safety of the citizenry? Money is always a factor, but this entire line of thought is the exact same kind of logic that made the event what it was in the first place-- save money now, spend hundreds of billions in the future to repair the inevitable damage. Sure, ditching van Heerden means LSU gets its blood money for the next couple years, but the cost will be the re-flooding of New Orleans and hence the rebuilding of the city and the housing of hundreds of thousands of people. What is LSU going to do, get rid of everyone that wants to talk about the real reasons that New Orleans was made into a wasteland?

I think they can and they will, and this is my point. This attack on expertise is not about who is qualified to speak about what. The attack and firing of van Heerden isn’t even about tenure or academia; the ivory tower is so corrupt that it is the height of naiveté to look to it as a place of redemption for galvanizing the populace in the quest for truth. The firing of van Heerden is about getting rid of evidence so that the system that oppresses Louisiana and keeps the Feds happy continues. It’s about making the public un-safe so that the people of Louisiana will continue to do what they’re told, and therefore keep those royalties in the hands of the Man.

The officials at LSU are Bush cronies and lackeys, so what. Because that administration seemed to reward being incapable and mediocre is not my concern. We should ferret out stupidity in any form. And I hate to be a cheese ball and semi-quote Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, but I feel like LSU is so concerned with squabbling over scraps from the Feds table that they’ve missed their god given right to something better. Is the ACE to blame? Sure, sue them to hell if you can (the lawsuit against them started a few days ago; interestingly van Heerden is set to be a witness-- too bad his credibility is wrecked). But there’s plenty of blame to go around, and if you look at this situation with the right frame of mind, you’re bound to see that the ACE simply for what it is-- just another special interest group. They’re selfish and somewhat incompetent, but not the devil behind the strings.

If you want to save van Heerden, save New Orleans, and get the levees rebuilt correctly, then we have to get our own money and stop relying on the Feds and ACE. Everything else is just fingers in the dam. Any other path is folly.

Make no mistake, New Orleans will flood again, and then you will see what I am talking about. For me, it will be another day where I have to blink the tears away from my eyes and say “I told you so.”

We've heard plenty about black marauders in New Orleans after Katrina, but not so much about anti-black violence by whites

It seems New Orleans has an even better-kept secret. Within the historic (and now largely black) Algiers district of New Orleans -- set off from most of the city proper by being across the river, and principally accessible by ferry -- lies the nearly all-white enclave of Algiers Point, scene of white anti-black violence researched by A. C. Thompson.

"Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply 'didn't belong.'"

-- A. C. Thompson, in "Katrina's Hidden War," in the Jan. 5 Nation

by Ken

"The existence of this little army isn't a secret, " says Thompson. "In 2005 a few newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in glowing terms in articles that showed up on an array of pro-gun blogs; one Cox News story called it "the ultimate neighborhood watch." A shooting victim, Donnell Harrington "recounted his ordeal in Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke."

However, Thompson continues, "until now no one has ever seriously scrutinized what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and nobody has asked the obvious questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to a different, far uglier truth?"

Thompson spent 18 months investigating, with support from the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and New America Media.

I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington, [his cousin Chris] Collins and [his friend Marcel] Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

And, in case you were wondering, none of them were punished. There appears to have been no investigation of the shooting of Herrington, Collins, and Alexander.

Lance Hill, executive director of Tulane University's Southern Institute for Education and Research, told Thompson:

"By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt -- that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion,. It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period.

"You can trace the origins of the Algiers Point militia to the misfortune of Vinnie Pervel," Thompson writes. The 52-year-old white building contractor and real estate entrepreneur had his Ford van carjacked by an African-American man who attacked him with a hammer. "Vowing to prevent further robberies," Thompson writess, "Pervel and his neighbors began amassing an arsenal. Pervel says he also feared for the safety of his mother, in her 70s. 'We thought we would be dead. We thought we were doomed.'"

And so Pervel and his comrades set about fortifying the area. One resident gave me video footage of the leafy barricades the men constructed to keep away outsiders. Others told me they created a low-tech alarm system, tying aluminum cans and glass bottles together and stringing them across the roads at ankle height. The bottles and cans would rattle noisily if somebody bumped into them, alerting the militia.

Pervel and his armed neighbors point to the very real chaos that was engulfing the city and claim they had no other choice than to act as they did. They paint themselves as righteous defenders of property, a paramilitary formation protecting their neighborhood from opportunistic thieves. "I'm not a racist," Pervel insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

In some ways the story is most notable for what Thompson couldn't find out. It's not surprising that official records of that period are spotty and incomplete, but he had to sue the coroner, who in violation of the law refused to make available what records he did have. Those records proved almost useless, but he was shocked to find out that the New Orleans Police Department was only investigating three shooting incidents from the period. The NOPD wasn't exactly forthcoming either.

It's not a pretty story, but can we really allow it to simply pass unaccounted for? Even Vinnie Pervel is surprised that nobody except Thompson has ever come to ask him about a shooting that took place a few feet from his house (in which he says he had no involvement). "I'm surprised. If that was my son, I'd want to know who shot him."

#

AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE TRAGEDY OF KATRINA-- THE TANCREDO PERSPECTIVE

Most people would agree that the Bush Regime has botched the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina-- and botched it horribly. Even extreme right-wing loon, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the KKK candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, remarked that "this whole fiasco has been a perfect storm of corruption and incompetence at all levels.” Unfortunately, Tancredo departs from the rest of the human race just after that.

According to today's Hill Tancredo is demanding that all spending on reviving New Orleans and the Gulf Coast be stopped once and for all. He said it's “'time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station' and urged an end to the federal aid to the region that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina two years ago. 'The amount of money that has been wasted on these so-called "recovery" efforts has been mind-boggling... Enough is enough.'"

One wonders if the good and decent citizens in the Denver suburbs will ever get that notion in their collective heads.

And don't think Tancredo is completely alone in his thinking about adandoning New Orleans. Many on the extreme fringes of the right, the kooks and loons who don't believe in the power of government to play a positive role in civilized society, all just over it (though, to be honest, I don't remeber this particular segment of the population ever beeing into it). Where most Americans see our neighbors and countrymen in need of help, they see moochers rejoicing in their own wrecked lives at the opportunity to live, albeit miserably and hopelessly, at the expense of others. This is, after all, the face of contemporary Republicanism: Larry Craig meets Grove Norquest:

Nobody is owed a living for the rest of his life because he had a bad break two years ago. Yet, we still have people affected by Katrina who have FEMA paying their rent. How sad and pathetic is it that these shiftless people are still leaching off their fellow citizens? Since when is being in the path of a hurricane supposed to give you a permanent "Get Out of Work Free" card?

EVERYTHING IS GETTING BETTER, RIGHT? ESPECIALLY IN NEW ORLEANS AND IN IRAQ AND THEN THERE'S THIS GREAT ECONOMY...

The Bush Regime says there is progress in Iraq and soon, despite all the epirical evidence to the contrary, they have the media repeating it as if it were obviously true. Even Democrats of a certain bent and persuasion-- a Brian Baird (D-WA), for example, comes back from a few dizzying, jetlagged hours in the Greed Zone declaring that the war is-- lo! and behold!-- being won.

I just drove home from dinner and I heard Bush on the radio, broadcasting from New Orleans where he was celebrating the tremendous progress he-- and he alone-- claims his regime has made in rebuilding the city. The only president to have ever lost an American city, Bush stood up and, with a straight face, said this to the long-suffering citziens, and ex-citizens of the once thriving and beloved city of New Orleans:

When Hurricane Katrina broke through the levees, it broke a lot of hearts, it destroyed buildings, but it didn't affect the spirit of a lot of citizens in this community.

...It's sometimes hard for people to see progress when you live in a community all the time.

Laura and I get to come-- we don't live here. We come on occasion. And it's easy to think about what it was like when we first came here after the hurricane and what it's like today. And this town's coming back. This town is better today than it was yesterday. And it's going to be better tomorrow than it was today.

Is he really as clueless as his speech- writers make him sound? Does he believe this heartless drivel? Is he blind? Maybe he needs to go to Australia and get the perspective he claims the citizens of New Orleans don't have. Or perhaps he could just watch Katie Couric's video report on New Orleans.

Two years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, people in New Orleans are still frustrated with the slow place of recovery.

At the time the wild storm left thousands of residents stranded on rooftops, while others made do in sub-standard shelters.

America was criticised for initially mounting a Third World response to a massive domestic crisis.

...In New Orleans two-thirds of the residents are back - the French Quarter survived Katrina and the music and restaurant scenes are recovering.

But few neighbourhoods are thriving, much of the city looks like a wasteland and businesses and homes are still abandoned.

With bells ringing to mark the moment the levees began to break, many residents have a lingering sense of abandonment and frustration at the rebuilding efforts.

Everyone I know who has visited beyond the Quarter and every TV report I've seen, shows the same thing: utter neglect and devastation, a complete lack of vision, competence and will from the top to actually accomplish the daunting task of reviving and rebuilding the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Many years ago I used to smoke dope to this when it was first released. Maybe Bush did too:

I BET BUSH GETS SOME SLIMEBAG INTO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S CHAIR BEFORE HE DOES ANYTHING TO HELP NEW ORLEANS

On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Regime may have no real plan to rebuild New Orleans, but they probably do have a plan to insert the incompetent knave who was in charge of homeland security at the time, into the Attorney General's job. Even before the news had leaked out that Gonzales was finally resigning, there were rumors that Chertoff would be the next Attorney General. Right-wing propaganda sites like Drudge and the Politico started the day claiming that Bush was going to make a recess appointment to avoid having the Regime's overwhelming criminality broadcast all over TV during confirmation hearings. Both the GOP-connected sites removed the recess appointment posts within minutes, apparently having gotten word from their superiors at the propaganda ministry that that wasn't today's message. (If you're wondering why Gonzales resigned today, instead of last week or last month or two months ago, Sidney Blumenthal makes a great case in Why Did Gonzales Resign? that "without Karl Rove around to give him his orders, and with the investigations closing in, 'Fredo' had nowhere to turn.")

If Bush doesn't do the recess appointment thing-- and he crossed his heart and hoped to die in front of Harry Reid that he wouldn't do that this time-- he could just try to get Chertoff through the way normal presidents do. (Best of luck with that, Bushie.) Or he could appoint a quasi-respected Republican senator. Senators always confirm other senators. Bush may have trouble finding one as corrupt and malleable as he would want, although John Cornyn would fit the bill. Or he could just leave Paul Clement in as Interim or Acting A.G. until the clock runs out. I guess for the next few days the traditional media will be able to talk about who'll be the next in line instead of Michael Vick finding Jesus or Owen Wilson's attempted suicide.

Almost all of the remainder of this most hated of all lame ducks' term will be about letting clocks run out-- including the disgrace of the inaction on New Orleans.

REPUBLICANS STILL FAILING AMERICA ON NEW ORLEANS... AND EVERYTHING ELSE

Bush's failed Iraq policies cost the Republicans the House and Senate in 2006 and will devastate the party in 2008. But the seminal event where it finally clicked with most Americans that having George Bush in the White House-- whether one thought he was there legitimately or not-- happened two years ago. Rationally, no one can blame the hurricane part of Hurricane Katrina on Bush. But the catastrophe associated with it, for most Americans is what the Bush Regime is all about, at least domestically: incompetence plus an ineffectual philosophy of governance that works for the very rich and leaves everyone else out to dry-- or, in this case, drown.

Those who weren't sharp enough to understand that the mantra of Grover Norquist, the Bush Regime's Ideologue-in-Chief-- that line about shrinking government down so it was small enough to drown in a bath tub-- was actually playing out in New Orleans, might have still understood the nature of Bushism as it was expressed by the #1 Republican in the Congress, Planet Denny Hastert: "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." People, American citizens, were still dying in the streets when Hastert said there would be no federal help for New Orleans. The Bush Regime itself tried to present a kinder, gentler face and made all kinds of promises, but for them, of course, the tragedy of New Orleans was another way to enrich themselves, their cronies and campaign contributors.

Bush is the first American president to have lost an American city. His regime's efforts to rescue New Orleans have been as ineffectual as everything else they say they are trying to accomplish-- although the Insider self-enrichment they never talk about has proceeded at a healthy enough clip.  This morning's NY Times features Barack Obama's plan for the actual recovery in New Orleans. Bush's greatest domestic failure and broken symbol of whatever bond he had with the American people can only be highlighted by Obama's and other Democrats' plans to bring back one of the great American cities. It isn't something you have heard Romney, Giuliani, or any of the other pathetic pygmies™ discussing.

The Gulf Coast restoration, Mr. Obama said, has been weighed down by red tape that has kept billions of dollars from reaching Louisiana communities. As president, he said, he would streamline the bureaucracy, strengthen law enforcement to curb a rise in crime and immediately close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in order to restore wetlands to protect against storms.

Mr. Obama also said that he would seek to lessen the influence of politics in the Federal Emergency Management Agency by giving its director a fixed term, similar to the structure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FEMA director would serve a six-year term, under Mr. Obama’s plan, and report directly to the president.

...“Let New Orleans be the place where we strengthen those bonds of trust, where a city rises up on a new foundation that can be broken by no storm,” Mr. Obama is planning to say Sunday, according to remarks provided by his aides. “Let New Orleans become the example of what America can do when we come together, not a symbol for what we couldn’t do.”

Tomorrow John Edwards and Hillary Clinton will both attend a summit conference dealing with the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Bush's Gulf Coast coordinator is in New Orleans, busy playing politics and insulting the state and city leadership. Of course all 9 of the pygmies™ are otherwise engaged, each somewhere rasing money from fat cat donors. Bush himself will be in Seattle desperately trying to resuscitate the wrecked career of one of his rubber stamp congressmen, Dave Reichert, a lackluster backbencher about to be swept from office by a brilliant and outspoken Darcy Burner, whose campaign is raising as much money this week from online donors as Reichert is from the wealthy contributors eager to get their pictures taken with Bush for $2,300 each. (You can help Darcy make a monkey of Bush here.)