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Most of the fraud was probably by evacuees who didn't particularly need the debit cards. I highly doubt anyone was buying an iPod to listen to while they starved to death at a transit station.
Looks like to me you are saying the people that didn't come back didn't come back for those two reasons and those two reasons only.
Most of the fraud was probably by evacuees who didn't particularly need the debit cards. I highly doubt anyone was buying an iPod to listen to while they starved to death at a transit station.
Katrina's Latest Damage
Crime is up. Schools are overcrowded. Hospitals are jammed. Houston welcomed a flood of hurricane evacuees with open arms. But now the city is suffering from a case of 'compassion fatigue.'
By Arian Campo-Flores
Newsweek
March 13, 2006 issue - In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Houston earned a loving moniker among many of the evacuees who sought refuge there: the Big Heart. This, after all, was the city that housed, fed and mended more than 150,000 survivors in a herculean effort that won national acclaim. Houston officials mounted what is believed to be the biggest shelter operation in the country's history, including MASH-like megaclinics that took on problems ranging from emergency care to eyeglass prescriptions. Then, just as quickly, officials disbanded those facilities to usher evacuees into more-permanent housing, offering them generous vouchers that covered rent and utilities for a year. "No other city really provided the resources and assistance Houston has," says Angelo Edwards, vice chair of the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association. "If not for Mayor [Bill] White and his administration, a lot of us would've been lost."
But six months after the evacuees arrived, the city's heart seems to be hardening. The signs of a backlash are sometimes subtle. "You'll hear little snide remarks," says Edwards. "People will say, 'The reason you can't get a job is because you can't talk right'." Other times, the reaction is more venomous. Among the nasty examples Dorothy Stukes, an evacuee, cites: graffiti blaring F--- NEW ORLEANS in her apartment complex, schoolkids taunting her grandchildren to "swim in that Katrina water and die" and shopkeepers muttering about survivors' sucking the public coffers dry. Stukes, chair of the ACORN KSA, has become so concerned that when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin came to town recently, she begged him to hire a public-relations firm to repair the evacuees' image. But given all that Nagin has to contend with amid his own run for re-election, that is not likely to land high on his list.
Katrina continues to be a destructive force. The Bush administration found itself engulfed once again last week, after the release of some footage of the president at an August video briefing on the hurricane. The tape revived discussion of some of Bush's darkest days, when he seemed either uninformed or unable to respond to a national disaster unfolding on TV. But the tape wasn't the only thing fueling Katrina's return to the news. Stoked by congressional investigators, new details have emerged about the government failures that left so many people in mortal danger. Late last week retired Marine Corps Brigadier Gen. Matthew Broderick resigned his post as Homeland Security's operations chief amid ac ulating evidence that the command post he directed as Katrina hit misjudged the early damage to New Orleans. (Homeland Security said Broderick left to "spend more time with his family.")
Yet as devastating as Katrina has been for the administration, its impact has been far more visceral in those communities that received tens of thousands of evacuees overnight. In cities stretching from Atlanta to San Antonio, good will has often given way to the crude reality of absorbing a traumatized and sometimes des ute population. In Baton Rouge, which added 100,000 people to a pre-Katrina population of 225,000, residents bemoan the loss of the city's small-town feel and worry that trailer-park settlements will become permanent fixtures of blight. In Dallas, the city housing authority began offering rent vouchers to some of its 20,000 evacuees, only to become quickly overwhelmed and fail to pay landlords, prompting a number of eviction notices.
But perhaps no city has been as convulsed as Houston, which took in the greatest number of survivors. As some see it, the city is suffering from "compassion fatigue." Public services are overwhelmed, city finances are strained and violent crime is on the rise. When city leaders in New Orleans made comments two weeks ago suggesting that they wanted only hardworking evacuees to return, some Houston city-council members erupted in protest—fearing that politicians in the Big Easy were trying to stick Houston with their undesirables. "We extended an open hand to all kinds of people," says Councilwoman S ey Sekula-Gibbs. "If they want to return home, it's their right." And if they want to stay, she adds, they "need to stand up, get on their feet and get jobs."
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Sounds to me like these people are unproductive citizens - and they don't seem in any hurry to return to New Orleans! Why? maybe it's because they have no jobs or houses to return to!
She's the 'write-in'/special election candidate for the wingnuts for Delay's seat.Councilwoman S ey Sekula-Gibbs
How convieeeenient!
For people who don't own cars, I imagine finding and keeping a job in a city like Houston (car-centric, spread out) would be remarkable difficult. Having little or no prior job history probably doesn't help much either."...And if they want to stay, she adds, they "need to stand up, get on their feet and get jobs."
It's best not to dwell too much on it though; it's much easier to throw a blanket generalizations like "lazy" and "undesireables" on them.
Last edited by PixelPusher; 08-31-2006 at 02:47 AM.
I put it in Bold, let me start:
1. Turn off the TV.
2. Read,
3. Talk to people that were there.
100,OOO stayed?
Why?
Some stayed, because it was there friggen job.
Nurses, Doctors, Firefighters, Police, EMS, etc
Some stayed because the couldn't get out.
Some stayed because the didn't believe it was going to be that bad.
and Maybe about 10,000 stayed because the were just stupid/hard headed.
IMO if NO was mostly white,or filled with a lot of non-liberals, it would have been rebuilt a lot faster, and it would be a lot better off today. Mississippi is better off, but they have H. Barbour and all of his connections.
Last edited by BIG IRISH; 08-31-2006 at 05:32 AM.
There are some who think that the slow pace of rebuilding (or even cleaning up) in places like the Lower Ninth Ward is really an effort at eventually forcing the gentrification of that area -- that people are trying to capitalize on the misfortune of others by buying up that property at ridiculously low prices, having the whole place re-zoned and making it a commercial haven; and that the government is a willing accomplice in that effort. They think that government has wanted to redevelop that land for years but could never truly afford to condemn the property (for both economic and political reasons). Now, they think, that government doesn't have to buy up the land, because entreprenuers will and that the entreprenuers can buy up that land at far better costs if it remains in shambles. I'm sure the truth is somewhere between the extremes -- that rebuilding hasn't occurred because people aren't coming back and that people aren't coming back because there is no rebuilding.
The concern that government is seeking to remedy blight by gentrification -- as well as the abject poverty and other sub-standard socido-economic conditions that were endemic to the Lower Ninth -- doesn't exist in some of the places that are bouncing back more quickly. If you buy the argument, it might further explain the difference, at least to some degree.
Houston and Houstonians have bent over backwards to find the evacuees work, and to accomodate their situations with transportation. Those who want to work have found jobs paying far more than they could have gotten in New Orleans. It has pulled them from the working poor into the lower middle class. And that group that has shown the initiative to work does represent the sizable majority of evacuees. One hears a lot of Louisiana Creole accents among nurses and support staff in the Medical Center these days.
But there is a minority who simply have no interest in working, and are simply looking to see how long they can string out local generosity to freeload. Public transportation schedules have been altered to accomodate the complexes where large numbers of evacuees needing work were staying. It got to the point where evacuee job fairs would be held with shuttle buses running to and from the apartment complexes where evacuees were staying. Maybe half a dozen people would go. I know it is fashionable liberal thing to make excuses, but at some point it becomes obvious that there are people who aren't working because they do not want to work.
That's good to know (haven't lived in Texas since 1993). And it's true, there are some people who simply don't want to work, but my experience is that it's also a fashionable conservative excuse for anyone who's unemployed.
In the U.S., in order to be considered "unemployed," one has to be actively pursuing work, so if that excuse is used to explain unemployment rate, it is a non sequitur.
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