No Time to Give Up

Lindsay of Majikthise reflects on her trip to NOLA:

There was talk of a new New Deal for the entire Gulf Coast. Media watchers claimed that Katrina had awakened the obsequious press and ushered in a new era of aggressively critical journalism. People perched on cots in shelters talked animatedly about how they would rebuild their community--stronger, safer, fairer.

In retrospect, these projections seem naive. New Orleans drowned on Bush's terms. Now, it seems that the city will be rebuilt as another massive experiment in Republican crony capitalism: deregulation, cheap labor, environmental disregard, broken promises of assistance.

It's easy to be bitter about the situation on the Gulf Coast, but we can't afford to give up. The bad news is that the reconstruction process will take years. The good news is that we have time to turn the process around. We can only hope that the 2006 elections will begin to dismantle Republican power.

The links in the excerpt are Lindsay's. She found some good stories that you simply won't see explored in the corporate media.