FoodMusicJustice.com

Yes, I know. It’s sacrilege.

But the Question of the Age - for New Orleans at least - is this:

Is the perpetuation of the inept and corrupt criminal enterprise known as the US Army Corps of Engineers more important than the physical survival of New Orleans?

The issue really is that stark.

I’ve never been prouder to stand by someone: Dr. Ivor Van Heerden.

Van Heerden continues, at great personal expense, to insist that the Corps (and their enablers at LSU) tell the truth about why New Orleans flooded in 2005.

For the full story: Ivor Van Heerden, the Corps, and LSU

Note: If you question my categorization of the Corps as a criminal enterprise, they crossed that line when they applied pressure on LSU to censor and ultimately fire Professor Van Heerden for telling the scientific and engineering truth about the New Orleans levee failures.

I just learned the name of the federal bailout program for the nation’s reckless speculator class.

It’s called the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The acronym for it is…TARP.

It took less time for the Congress to write away $700 billion than it did to get food and drinking water to the thousands stranded at the Convention Center three years ago.

The function of a tarp is to protect a damaged roof from the elements until a proper repair can be made. It’s meant to be a temporary patch. It’s something everyone knows can’t work by itself or be permanent.

So what’s is the plan to fix the structural damage to our highly leveraged and highly shredded financial system?

“Plan? What plan?

Isn’t this $700 billion TARP enough?”

Man, not even FEMA would try to bill the taxpayers $700 billion for a tarp.

I knew it was just a matter of time before the rest of the country caught up (or caught down) with New Orleans. I just didn’t expect to happen so soon.

Millions are losing their properties. Millions more will lose their job. Tens of thousands of businesses will close their doors. Communities will be challenged. Lives uprooted.

All because a federal system, engineered at great tax payer expense for the benefit of a few insiders, finally got tested and proved to be gravely wanting.

And it’s all being covered over with a $700 billion tarp - until the next storm comes.

“Brownie here’s doing a heck of a job.”

New Orleans can console itself with the fact it knows how to be broke with grace - something the rest of the country has long forgotten - and has much better food and music.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls America…

Thanks for all the support our video “The Katrina Myth.”

At the moment, we’re a hair away from having had over 60,000 viewers in just 10 days.

I hope you’ll continue to spread the word about this video. It’s the only “quick read,” comprehensive source of info on levees, levee failures, and the reality of New Orleans geography.

A lot of long time residents wrote us saying they were grateful for the video because even they’d been bamboozled by the propaganda about New Orleans “doomed geography.”

New Orleans is doomed ONLY if the Army Corps of Engineers is not brought to task, reformed, and put on the job of designing and building a levee system that works.

Speaking of the Corps, finally after how many years, informed commentary about the Corps investigation of itself (sic) is appearing. Much of it confirms what levees.org has been saying since the beginning…and more critiques from more sources are in the pipeline.

It would have been great if the Corps management had copped to their errors three years ago and focused on correcting them instead of running an expensive, full-court publicity blitz obscuring the facts in an attempt to “defend” themselves.

Watch for things to heat up on this issue in the weeks and months to come. It’s not over yet.

Click here for “Corps Self-Critique Criticized”

After the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the government-embedded crooks went to work stealing relief money.

The criminality went straight to the mayor’s office.

The good news is that San Francisco city government got cleaned up somewhat as a result of the scandal.

Maybe the same will happen for New Orleans.

In the meantime…

It looks like Mayor Ray Nagin’s brother-in-law and others in the Nagin circle were billing the federal government for repairing homes that did not exist, for work that was never done and for work that was done by volunteer church groups.

Details at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/us/nationalspecial/13activist.html?em

It will be no consolation to New Orleaneans, but the reality is that the levees around Sacramento, California are in worse condition than the ones in New Orleans ever were.

Here’s Part Two of the story:

There’s more. Click here for PART THREE: Earthquakes, Levees, and the Fate of California

New Orleans was worse than you think…and other US cities are at current risk of even greater catastrophes from…levee failures.

That’s the conclusion of group of respected civil engineers who have studied natural and engineering disasters (New Orleans was an engineering disaster) all over the world.

Here’s Part One of the two-part series.

There’s more. Click here for PART TWO: California’s levees are even worse

Want to look up the status of the New Orleans levee system?

It used to be as easy as contacting the Corps local librarian. Now all the records have been removed to a warehouse and the public no longer has access to them.

Is this one of the Corp’s post-Katrina improvements?

The local New Orleans business magazine does an excellent job of covering social justice issues.

Obviously, it’s not the magazine’s “beat” but when it does cover the subject, it’s worth reading.

When the artist known as ReX faced tens of thousands of dollars in fines for posting positive public art, the magazine not only covered the story, but also covered his nemesis, a dangerous lunatic called the Gray Ghost who is paid by the city to essentially vandalize public property with a gray paint roll.

(If New Orleans didn’t exist, someone would have to make it up, the only problem being no one would ever believe it.)

This issue of New Orleans City Business covers a particularly vicious practice of local police, setting up homeless people for petty crimes and then charging them with felonies that could result in their imprisonment for up to a decade. Great journalism.

Click here to read the article

It’s a mystery - to the Times-Picayune at least - why police harassment of backstreet culture in New Orleans continues, and who is behind it and why.

First, in every city that I know, the mayor runs the police because it’s the mayor who appoints the police chief. One word from the mayor and the word would trickle down: leave the Indians and second lines alone, or if there is a reason for communicating, do it with the same respect you’d afford people attending the opera or symphony.

Treme seems to be the battleground now. It must have to do with real estate and the desire of the city to “gentrify” north of Rampart. Why they think it’s necessary to kill the culture of the Treme in the process - one of the most culturally significant places in North America (and the world) - is another great American mystery.

Destroy what’s great to replace it with…what exactly?

Click here to read the latest police outrage