Give to the Human Fund... Happy Festivus!
Posted on 09/27/2005 7:16:39 PM PDT by Libloather
Twice victimized
September 3, 2005
GLOBE EDITORIAL
IN DISASTER movies, people flee. In real disasters, thousands of people have nowhere to go. In the land of SUVs, they don't have cars or enough cash for a bus ticket.
Just as the need for levee repairs was forgotten, the poor in New Orleans were long overlooked, ignored until Hurricane Katrina left them stranded in a drowned city and awash on national television.
The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, knew that poverty would hinder the evacuation of the city's 445,000 people. He asked churches, relatives, and friends to help poorer residents leave -- a noble but grossly inadequate request. In Katrina's wake, New Orleans has been swallowed by water, and residents who had little now have virtually nothing.
New Orleans is a legendary city of jazz, Mardi Gras, and Mardi Gras-fueled indulgences. The city also has deep economic problems, including a 2004 poverty rate of 23 percent, nearly twice the national rate of 12.7 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
In December, the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, convened a poverty summit, asking ''residents from all walks of life to join her for a solution-oriented discussion." Participants in the summit trotted out the damning statistics. One-third of the jobs in Louisiana pay below-poverty wages. Sixteen percent of births are to teenage mothers. Blanco promised to devise a road map for ending poverty. Now the state needs a road map plus thousands of lifeboats.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
New local coalition takes aim at poverty
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer
A newly formed coalition in Orleans Parish held its first meeting Tuesday morning to address solutions to the state's staggering poverty predicament.
"It is time to move from conversation to action," said Tom Costanza, of the region's Catholic Charities. "These are faces of people. They are not just numbers."
Nearly 100 people gathered at St. Maria Goretti Church in eastern New Orleans to brainstorm and network in an effort to help poor families in the New Orleans region, at the request of Gov. Kathleen Blanco and a statewide poverty reduction effort begun in December.
The crowd included public housing residents, many of whom took the bus from near downtown New Orleans to get to the church at 7300 Crowder Blvd.: Cyndi Ngyuen, who runs a nonprofit child-care center for working parents; Earl Truvia, who was recently freed from prison after serving 27 years on a murder charge that was tossed out, represented the B.W. Cooper development's residents; and parish leaders such as Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman.
"We know this is going to be a long-term process," Costanza said.
Blanco held a poverty summit in December to develop ideas on how to confront Louisiana's nation-topping poverty statistics. In 2003, the number of families living in poverty in Louisiana was about 181,000. Nearly 30 percent of people younger than 18 in Louisiana live in poverty, while almost 15 percent of its citizens 65 and older also are below the poverty line. Those figures are close to double the national averages.
Blanco's "Solutions to Poverty" summit, held in Monroe, ordered each parish to form its own group of experts in the worlds of nonprofits, business and faith-based initiatives, along with other volunteers to start at the local level. The New Orleans region includes Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. Orleans has a 34 percent poverty rate while St. Bernard's is more than 17 percent.
Among the statewide issues targeted by the governor's poverty network:
-- In Louisiana last year, 93,000 households failed to take advantage of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, amounting to some $81 million in savings that was lost.
-- Some 57,000 children in Louisiana who are eligible for "La Chip," a health-care program for low-income families, have not been enrolled.
Peter Dangerfield, of Total Community Action, outlined a plan for Tuesday's meeting, calling for New Orleans' leaders to form a specific policy on poverty reduction. "Poverty is the most intractable problem in this country," Dangerfield said.
The Rev. Don Boutte, of St. John Baptist Church, also spoke Tuesday, before the audience broke into groups of 10 to share experiences and develop plans.
Gee then New York Lies subsidary,Boston Globe, why then did the City of NO's own evacuation plan, which calls for the city to use their own trasportation assest to move those who could not move themselves, fail to get executed by the very people like Nagin and Blanco who set it up???
What's Boston's plan to evacuate their poor?
Thought so.
They keep their buses on higher ground in Boston.
"Although the country never decisively won President Johnson's war on poverty, it's time to renew the battle."
Sure. Throw more trillions of dollars down that rathole with nothing to show for it.
Sounds to me as if Blanco punted. Her 'solutions' were so great that they got their own title!
Blanco's "Solutions to Poverty" summit, held in Monroe, ordered each parish to form its own group of experts in the worlds of nonprofits, business and faith-based initiatives, along with other volunteers to start at the local level.
The owners of the St Rita (sort of ironic) nursing home defense is going to be that the State and Parishes didn't follow their own evacuation plan.
Why haven't the New Orleanians who survived overrun the Mayors office and the Governors office with pitchforks and taken care of the problems they elected?
The Boston Globe, through this orphan editorial (without an author named how can you call this editorial anything but an orphan?) has a plan. And it is more than just evacuate the poor.
In the eighth paragraph, the third from the bottom is their solution:
“Although the country never decisively won President Johnson's war on poverty, it's time to renew the battle.”
That’s right, after all of the trillions of dollars (a trillion dollars is $1,000,000,000.00 for those who need to see the amount) spent in the world’s longest running wealth redistribution program (the Russian Revolution of 1918 was probably the most expensive) all the Boston Globe can come up with is more of the same.
As you can see I call things the way they actually are. A “war on poverty” was never a war; it is a politician trying to rally his or her base. What it was, and remains, is a penalty levied upon the successful by the privileged class so they, the privileged class, can sleep at night knowing that they have done something good with someone else’s money.
I have said the same thing about the “war on drugs” too. For in both cases there has never been a desire to “win the war”. I think both “wars” have become stalemates and buzz words. And, in doing so, have cheapened our language and made the word “war” into something much less than what our parents and grandparents knew it to be.
Boston will route their poor through the badly leaking "Big Dig" for evacuation.
Give to the Human Fund... Happy Festivus!
Drug and poverty wars have long been converted to profit for many and power grabs for more than a few. And in both cases, Americans have been the losers, not only in specie, but our freedoms.
Well........Duh.......proverty and turning great cities into welfare states and centers for crime .....make anything hard even education......DUH
lbjgal
What's this? We elect compasionate representatives who spend our money like water over breached dikes and they don't bother to inform the people of the programs? Where's Mathew Lesko?
If Hillary gets her way we will all get La Chip.
But if you eliminate poor people, does that not eliminate poverty?
But if you eliminate poor people, does that not eliminate poverty?
Certainly is a much more reasonable explanation for the State of LA pathetic response in the aftermath of Katerina then any I have heard from Blanco! Thanks Paleo.
Because none of them are currently in NOLA.
Somebody tell Farrakhan...Blanco blew up the levees for multi-billion dollar revenue stream.
Spare us the Bravo Sierra, Boston Globe.
The Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan specifically outlined exactly how these low-income citizens were to be evacuated and sheltered outside the storm surge danger area:
"5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating."
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