Filed under: Elections, Katrina, Mississippi, Politics, Religion | Tags: Alabama, bigots, homophobia, John McCain, Travis Childers
My comment from Mooncat’s recent Left in Alabama post on McCain’s visit is too good not to share.
Democrats fell less than two percent short of flipping the Mississippi-01 with six candidates on the ballot. The two Dem candidates combined got 50.6 precent of the vote. The NRCC outspent the DCCC two-to-one on this race. This is a Republican +10 Congressional District.
And McCain draws 100 people here[Selma].
DNC is attacking McCain (finally!). The video of the ad is worth a look, but even if you can’t handle video you should check out the link just to read the headline.
One more positive sign, and I might just move into the “McCain has nowhere to go but down” camp.
I am hoping that the GOP race-baiting is finally going to backfire. And that none of their strategists will realize McCain is coming off as a cranky old man who’s out of touch with everyone except Joe Leiberman.
How Insane is John McCain? So insane he’s happy to be endorsed by a bigoted pastor who says, more or less, that God damned New Orleans because some homosexual people like to hang out there. Now that’s insane.
Filed under: Blogs, Civil Liberties, Community, Economy, Elections, Environment, Human Rights, Iran, Katrina, Media, Mississippi, Politics, Pro-Choice, Progressive, Strategy, war | Tags: activism, Alabama, New Media
If you want to be the New Media voice of the New Southern Left in Mississippi and Alabama you can be.
If you want a revolution in media affairs, right here where we live, you can have one.
Are you ready to show the nationwide progressive movement that we are just as committed to taking our country back as people in Philly and New York and L.A.?
I’ve got you’re compelling new media narrative, neatly framed and ready to roll. I’ve got your target audience. I know where to bring the traffic. I cannot release the story until I’m sure a few people are willing to trust me enough to say what I ask them to say and say it to the people I ask them to say it to. If enough people are willing to help, it shouldn’t cost anyone much of time or energy.
This moment is ours. If you want to join with me and seize it, leave a me a comment here and let me know you’re in. If you’re a registered Left in Alabama member, read this proposal, take the poll, and leave a comment.
I’m giving until it hurts here. I’m begging for support.
Left in Alabama? Cotton Mouth? WriteChic Press?
Alert Readers click links. They also leave comments and thank outstanding bloggers like MEC when they spotlight the issues we care about.
Filed under: Civil Liberties, Community, Economy, Elections, Environment, Human Rights, Iraq, Katrina, Media, Mississippi, Politics, Pro-Choice, Progressive, Religion, Surveillance State, war
The AP has a new story out about those toxic FEMA trailers.
I’ve been sick the last couple of days and am still not feeling well. I hope to be back up to full speed with my posting and catch up on comments this weekend.
Gray Swoope, director of the Mississippi Development Authority says the reason we don’t have more housing for people to live in on the coast is that environmental standards make it difficult to rebuild. It’s kind of funny to me that he’s using this excuse for a lack of low-mod income housing. Environmental standards don’t seem to be posing much of a problem when it comes to getting commerical developments approved.
Also, Swoope refused to comment on the diversion of recovery money originally allocated for health care into a project to build roads for a Toyota plant in North Mississippi.
The story also mentions the possibility of Congressional oversight hearings on the use of $600 million in housing grant money for port renovations, but the paragraph that mentions the hearings looks like it was copied and pasted from the AP report I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
Two free clinics on the Coast that have been using out-of-state volunteers to treat people who have no place else to go are being forced to shut down. The state of emergency ended in January, and the state medical licensing board refuses to grant the clinics a temporary license to continue to operate. Some doctors worry that the free clinics are stealing their customers, even though health care providers on the Coast have not recovered to the point where they can handle everyone who needs treatment.
Other Coast-related news:
Mississippi House Ways and Means Committee to discuss Katrina recovery with the Development Authority today.
The Development Authority sets a March 15 deadline for applying for Phase I and II homeowner assistance grants.
The Sun-Herald Legislative Notebook discusses the opposition of some legislators to the governor’s plan to use recovery-related money for a road-building project in North Mississippi.
New America Media has some strong words about Alphonso Jackson and the diversion of $600 from low-mod income housing into port renovations.
The Clarion-Ledger has an opinion on the governor’s use of housing money. I still wonder where their numbers on the FEMA trailers come from, but I am glad to see them making a strong statement on the need to make housing on the Gulf Coast a real priority. Take a look at rdhdawg’s comment about the Homeland Security Committee hearing last week.
Marketwire links to an ignorant Draft Haley campaign. Notice the fourth paragraph from the bottom – the part about his national award leadership after Katrina. That paragraph is boilerplate propaganda, probably produced with state resources, and the American Legislative Exchange Council is a right-wing organization.
The Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal issued a report at the end of 2005 (pdf) that ran nearly 200 pages. The commission was chaired by the governor’s nephew, Henry Barbour. Henry was the manager for the gubernatorial campaign and is also in the lobbying business. The report certainly looks comprehensive. I am interested in analyzing it to see how much substance it actually contains.
One reason I think it might be useful is that the first few pages list the names of commissioners, commission staff, and committee members who worked on the report. I recognize a lot of the names, but there are a lot of people on the list I’ve never heard of. I am curious to see if any of these people are connected to the governor, to big real estate developers, and to the big corporations who are fueling the war in Iraq. I am also curious to see if any of these names have cropped up in news reports dealing with the questionable use of recovery funds since the report was released. The governor’s commission has a website.
Filed under: Human Rights, Katrina, Mississippi, Politics | Tags: Republican war on human decency
Since I doubt very many people are blogging this afternoon, I’m using the day to do some research and get to the point where I can start contacting some folks for to see if the data exists to answer a few specific questions. I would like to call attention to this recommendation from the Steps Coalition CDBG Report Card (pdf):
MDA should develop or else provide funding to non-profits who have case managed a Small Rental program targeting non-professional landlords. One example is the Rental Relief Program operated by Lutheran Episcopal Services in Mississippi with support from the Mississippi Association of Realtors. In return for a cash payment of up to $10,000 from LESM to cover materials, the landlord entered into an agreement to rent the apartment at pre-Katrina rates for one year. MDA should provide flexibility in the grant amounts and affordability term to match the landlord’s needs. The estimated cost will depend upon the grant size and participation, but an additional $250million in $20,000 grants could repair and reopen 12,500 units.
This is, I think, a key recommendation. $250 million is not a lot a money compared to the total amount of money we’ve received for re-building: $5.4 billion. 12,500 units becomes a very significant number when you compare it to the number of households still living in FEMA trailers because there is no affordable housing for them to move into: 11,641.
Basically, $250 million, if targeted correctly, could go a long way toward solving this problem. A commenter at one of the blogs I’ve been reading (sorry, don’t remember which one) noted last week that this is all about priorities. I couldn’t agree more. Any time you hear a politician saying we just don’t have the money to fix a problem, take a close look at their priorities. Government pays for what it wants to pay for.
Thanks to everyone who is helping to call attention to this issue, and especially to Cotton Mouth. I’m planning to keep the focus on it for a while. If this is your first visit here, you can find some facts and suggestions on how to help raise the public profile of the Gulf Coast housing crisis on the sidebar to the left.
One comment on last night’s post (see below), in the form of a note to Mississippi Democrats: The governor says he’s trying to keep Toyota from taking new jobs to Kentucky. Don’t let him use this as a scare tactic. Be clear and be firm about this. Tell him he can’t have money intended to help families who are still living with the effects of Katrina for economic development. If he can’t find the money to bring these new plants in from other sources, it is a failure on his part. And remember, if the article is correct, he’s talking about proposed jobs. Not established ones. It is impossible to “lose” these jobs if the company haven’t even finalized its decision to locate them here.
The idea that anyone who opposes the use of this money to build roads must be against bringing in jobs is ludicrous. People are smart enough to see through the governor’s scare tactics if you talk about this in the right way. Calling your state rep. or senator about this might actually do some good, since it seems like the issue is very much in play.
Enjoy the Super Bowl, and eat lots of nachos.
Update: Thanks to mooncat at Left In Alabama. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make my own blogroll more useful to our purposes here. I’ll be making some changes to it as soon as I have time, and I’ll also be sharing some thoughts about community organization in the next few weeks. Solidarity Forever!!
Filed under: Human Rights, Katrina, Mississippi, Politics | Tags: Republican war on human decency
Shorter: Barbour wants to take $108 million from the hurricane reserve fund to pay for road improvements to attract more Toyota plants. Or something. (If the goal of a newspaper is to keep readers informed, there are so many problems with the article I don’t know where to start with this). It seems like Coast legislators are not wanting to go along. Dirk Dedeaux wants to use bonds for the improvements. The governor is raising the spectre of jobs lost to Kentucky if everyone doesn’t just shut up about it and let him do what he wants.
And note the comment immediately below the story. I have to dig into this and see if I can figure out what’s up with it. I haven’t logged into the American site in so long I can’t even remember my username and password. If anyone has an account already set up, please go and tell that ignorant person that it’s not about “taking responsibility” for oneself, it’s about the fact that the governor has put our recovery money into everything but rebuilding the housing that is needed for these people to move out of those trailers. Please?
So I guess the half-finished summary and a lot of other thoughts I had on the Steps Coalition report card will have to wait. Again. I’ve been working all day and just picked this up when I sat down to read the paper. I am afraid we’re going to see this every Friday until all that money is gone. So I’ll be back with more information on this once I am able to round it up.
If anyone has any ideas on how to approach this, I’m listening.
More
There’s more than $108m at play. He also wants to fill the Rainy Day Fund with some of this money, so he can spend the whole budget instead of putting 2% into the RDF. So one way to look at it is that he’s trying to use this money to circumvent the law. He’s also arguing that it’s better to use this money than bonds for the roads because that way, the state doesn’t have to pay interest on it. There’s also this tidbit:
Barbour wants to use $108 million of the $268 million left in the state’s “hurricane reserve fund.” The fund was created from $368 million given to the state for emergency health-care needs, he said. Some of the money has been used as a short-term solution for funding Medicaid.
So he may be trying to make sure this money isn’t used for Medicaid, which everyone who’s been paying any attention at all knows he wants dismantled. Here’s another thought. Accuse me of drifting into tinfoil hat territory if you wish. He may also be trying to spend this money before someone thinks (since we have this formaldehyde and mold problem in these trailers dating back at least to 2006) that it might be a good idea to use this emergency health-care money to do screenings and, you know, treat some of the medical problems people might have from breathing formaldehyde and mold.
But the big, big question about this story, and one I doubt any newspaper or teevee station will report, is:
Who’s going to build those roads?
Update: Got a new password and took care of that commenter.
Update II: $25 million of that roadwork to be done on Mississippi 9 in northeast Mississippi.
Also note the numbers on the FEMA trailers in the article :
More than 8,300 FEMA trailers (housing at least two people each) are still being used in south Mississippi.
How many more than 8,300? Has to be a lot more if 11,641 families are living in FEMA trailers. Where did this 8,300 number come from? And, how many more than two people each? These numbers are not sourced. Not even a little.
Last Update for Tonite: Gotta sleep. I tracked down the reporter who wrote the story to the Clarion-Ledger and left constructive criticism in the comments thread under the story there. I am not finding much else on this at the moment. If anyone wanders by who can clear up this numbers issue, leave a comment, please. If not I’ll send some e-mails to some organizations tomorrow and see if I can get a trailer count. Please be alert and send me tips if you hear any details on the issues I am working on here: Port Renovation, Formaldehyde, and now Diversion of Emergency Health Care Funding.
I have lots of off-line obligations this weekend, but I am working on a simple English summary of the Steps Coalition CDBG report card. I also have a couple of other posts in mind, if I manage to get the summary of the report card done in time to do some other writing.
One thing I noticed as I was going through the report card last night was that, according to the Steps Coaltion analysis, $250 million of the money that the governor plans to use on port renovations, if re-directed toward helping small landlords repair damaged units, could get us as many as 12,500 rental units that are not currently available. (I wrote that from memory, but I believe it’s accurate. I’ll double check and confirm when I publish the summary.) I encourage you to read the whole thing if you have time. The more I understand the details, the worse the governor’s recovery program looks.
In the meantime, tune in to WriteChic Press for your weekend FISA updates and some other cool stuff, as well. (And thanks to mdking for the update to this post.) This is a blog with an attitude. I’ll be visiting WriteChic again, and leaving some comments.
Cotton Mouth has Obama video and a Mississippi blog round up. Check out A.M. in the Morning! for the latest on the GAO National Flood Insurance Report (it’s not pretty).
It looks like the discussion of the port renovations and the formaldehyde cover-up in the greater blogosphere has just about played out. My next step on the issue is to go through the Steps Coalition Report Card with a fine-toothed comb and to do the same for the governor’s recovery plan. It is very important to be alert to opportunities to raise public awareness of the issue. I encourage folks to keep writing about it and keep sending out the facts that I’ve put together up to this point. A few more links are below.
A Federal judge dismissed the class action lawsuits filed against the Corps of Engineers over the condition of the New Orleans flood walls this week. Too Sense discusses the injustice of this decision in a post today that will make you very angry at the government.
Countificus at DK picked up our action alert on the port renovations from Cotton Mouth on Jan. 26, but I just discovered it today. A big thanks to Count for helping to spread the word.
Benjamin T. Greenberg of Hungry Blues wrote a good post yesterday that covers several of the issues we’ve been working on here, and includes links for further reading.
And here’s a site you may wish to bookmark: Katrina-in-Mississippi.
I’ve learned some things over the past week that I plan to share as soon as I have time to write about them.
Haley Barbour to speak at the Missouri Republican Lincoln days event, according to the Springfield News-Leader. Here’s what they’re saying about Haley in Missouri this week:
Elected to a second term in office with more than 58 percent of the vote, Barbour has been nationally recognized for taking the lead early on helping Mississippians rebuild and recover after Hurricane Katrina. Barbour created the Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal to develop a broad vision for opportunities to help South Mississippi rebuild after Katrina.
For his leadership after Katrina, Governor Barbour was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award, which is presented by the bipartisan American Legislative Exchange Council to a nationally recognized public sector leader who has an extraordinary record of successfully advancing Jeffersonian principles. (emphasis added)
Although these paragraphs appear verbatim in the News-Leader article, I actually copied and pasted them from the Missouri Republican Party web site. The Missouri Republicans, no doubt, got them from the governor’s office. Take a look at the last three paragraphs of this biography from Haley’s official website.
In fairness to the News-Leader, they do provide a link to the GOP site the article comes from, and they name the site as a source. But, citation to the web site is at the end of the first paragraph of the story. The link is at the end of the second paragraph, which is a quote from a Missouri GOP official.
So the article gives casual readers the the impression that just the first two paragraphs are from the GOP site. If you don’t go and read the GOP press release at their site, or if you see this article in print, it is natural to assume that everything’s going just fine down here and we all love Haley for rebuilding our state for us.
Even worse, the actual fact that is stated about Barbour in the paragraphs I quoted above is that “he was nationally recognized” for his leadership. One would think that, since he were nationally recognized, he did a pretty good job. Even though those of us who live here know he hasn’t done a good job, and the newspaper doesn’t really say he did a good job, that’s the impression most people who read this article are going to get.
So, let’s take a look at the “bipartisan” organization he was recognized by. It turns out that the American Legislative Exchange Council is actually a conservative group with a savvy marketing plan:
ALEC has the financial support of more than 200 corporations including Coors, Amway, IBM, Ford, philip Morris, Exxon, Texaco and Shell Oil. William Bennett, Jack Kemp, John Sununu, and George Bush have all addressed ALEC sessions in recent years.
When ALEC began, it comprised only a handful of right-wing legislators; by 1991, it had grown into a clearinghouse of information for 2,400 conservative officeholders in 50 states, almost one-third of the 7,500 state legislators in the country. According to a representative of the National Council of State Legislatures, although ALEC has not substantially modified its right-wing position on what it considers to be its core issues, it has been successful in attracting more moderate legislative support by toning down its more extreme rhetoric.
Here we have a right-wing organization with national reach that’s given our governor an award. The award serves to legitimize his lies about the real condition of Mississippi families on the Gulf Coast. An editor at the News-Leader just laps it up and regurgitates it back to a mass audience without a second thought.
This is exactly what I am talking about when I say the mainstream media has abdicated its responsibilities. The News-Leader could have taken the opportunity to have a reporter google “Gulf Coast Recovery Haley Barbour.” That would have provided any enterprising reporter worth her salt enough questions to put together a real story. With a couple of phone calls and all of 45 minutes writing time, someone could have written a good enough story to draw attention to the ongoing crisis here. It took me less than 10 minutes to find out the real story on ALEC.
Alternatively, the paper could have left out the Republican propaganda and just noted that Barbour would be the speaker. Instead, they copied and pasted without giving it a second thought. As a result, their readers are a now little more disinformed.
This goes on in every newsroom in the country, every single day. It’s one of the reasons why so many people have such distorted views — not only about our recovery efforts, but about Iraq, the economy, the Bush assault on our civil liberties, poverty, immigration, and practically every other issue that conservatives talk about. It’s why the work of people like Bob Somerby and the folks at Media Matters is so important. If you read Somerby’s Daily Howler every day for a month, it will change the way you think about the news business forever.
The only way to change the story of the Gulf Coast recovery and bring the housing crisis to people’s attention is to point things like this out when we see them.
I tried to leave a comment on the News-Leader website. It only took second to sign up for an account, but when I tried to log in, I got a message that my account is “inactive.” Maybe new accounts require the approval of an actual person, so I will try to log in tomorrow and post an update if I’m successful.
You can go here and leave the News-Leader feedback on their website. Address and phone number are not required information. I entered my e-mail address because I want to see if they respond to me. This is the message I sent:
RE: Haley Barbour to speak at Lincoln Days.
1. Are you aware that we still have more than 35,000 people living in toxic FEMA trailers in Mississippi?
2. Are you aware that the American Legislative Exchange Council is bipartisan in name only and is actually a right-wing organization?
Information on the Mississippi Gulf Coast housing crisis: http://geneo.wordpress.com/gulf-coast-housing-crisis-spread-the-word/
I received a confirmation message that promised a response within 7 days. We’ll see if I actually get one. Obviously, the more communication they receive about this, the better.
(btw, John, take a look at their front page. Does it look familiar?)
I’m adding a new category, MSM Stenography. It’s for documenting cases where lazy reporters and editors copy Republican press releases word-for-word and pawn them off as news.
Update (Feb. 1):
Today I received an e-mail from an editor at the News-Leader requesting a lot of personal information to “confirm” my “letter to the editor.” I sent a polite response. I declined to supply my phone number or a photo of myself. I also explained that I didn’t realize I was submitting a letter to the editor, since I sent my comment through a page that was clearly labeled “site feedback.”
I sent him the address for this post and invited him to read and comment on it. I also sent him the address to the facts about the housing crisis I put together earlier in the week. We’ll see if he reads and responds.
I received an activation e-mail for my account on the News-Leader forums. If you go to the News-Leader link at the top of this post, you can read the comment I left there. This brings up another issue that I think is important. Letters to the editor are good, but for something like this where you see disinformation sitting out on the web, it’s best to attach a public comment containing the real facts directly to the disinformation if at all possible.
Here’s a blog I just located that you might want to keep your eye on: Katrina in Mississippi.
I picked this up in comments to a post on the housing issue at Too Sense:
You should check out The Equity & Inclusion Campaign being organized across the Gulf Coast to fight for equitable (re)development, and also consider supporting both the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act (S.1668) – currently stalled in the Senate due to the Sens. Vitter and Shelby from LA and AL, respectively, and the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act (HR 4048).
The commenter is a Ph.D student at MIT who has worked on recovery in New Orleans. At her blog, the Redstar Perspective, I found a link to The National Low Income Housing Coalition. At their site, you can find the legislative background of the act and a tool you can use to contact your Congresspeople and ask them to support it.
National Low Income Housing Coalition
Stirling Newberry on the consequences of the Iraq war:
The outcome of this war has been dismal. The rest of the world is growing, but at the cost of dramatic reductions in US standard of living and developed world control of the shape of the future. This was always a possibility: slash US standards of living and let others grow. The War has not changed this scenario, but instead merely bought, at massive cost, a buffer for a relatively small sliver of US elites.
The choice then was: slow growth for the rest of the world at high US standards of living, or faster growth for the rest of the world at lower US standards of living. The United States has decisively chosen the second, and it is possible to compare the various US austerity scenarios. The one we have chosen is high consumption now in return for much lower autonomy later. (Via Corrente)
It’s worth noting here that methods the Bush administration has used to loot the treasury and give billions of dollars to his friends and campaign contributors aren’t much different from the methods Haley Barbour has used to distribute our disaster recovery funding to various family members and business associates. Many of the companies who have benefited most from the war have also made a lot of profit from Katrina.
In other news:
We’ve killed 1,000,000 Iraqis since the war started.
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson blames the mortgage crisis on blacks’ and Hispanics’ fear of banks. You may remember Jackson as the man who approved the governor’s use of $600,000 in housing funding for the port renovation and then tried to pretend that the wording of the law forced him to approve it.
