Dear Progressive Reader,

The story of the tragic recent floods in Texas continues to unfold. As of today, the confirmed death toll is 122, but more than 170 others remain unaccounted for. Many of these are young children. Much of the blame appears to point to county, state, and federal officials who did not enforce regulations for building in flood prone areas or failed to implement warning systems that could have saved countless lives. Even though President Donald Trump, during his visit to Texas on Friday, praised the work of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), it is clear that actions by his administration have severely depleted the resources and focus of that agency. Former FEMA officials, interviewed by The Guardian, describe “A mass staff exodus, plunging morale, and a loss of key leaders has left the main U.S. disaster-relief organization ill-equipped to cope with an anticipated deadly spate of storms in the current hurricane season.”

A little more than a month from now, on August 23, will be the twentieth anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. One of the top five deadliest storms in U.S. history, and the most costly, Katrina, too, was seen as a massive failure of FEMA to deliver on its mission of “helping people before, during, and after disasters.” In spite of then-President George W. Bush’s statement to FEMA director Michael Brown: “Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job,” the failures in response by the agency in 2005 are legendary. Writing in September 2005 in the online magazine Facing South, Chris Kromm noted, “The media is now stumbling to uncover what went wrong with FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina. But the fact is that the story of the Bush Administration's systematic undermining of the agency has been in plain sight for a while now. And it goes much deeper the incompetence of FEMA head Michael Brown and his coterie of political appointees. . . . Bush had undermined FEMA, especially when it was brought under the Department of Homeland Security, where its focus became national security, not responding to cataclysmic storms.”

Time today in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, is marked by “before Katrina” and “after Katrina.” New Orleans was transformed by the storm two decades ago. The population decreased by half in the month following the storm’s landfall, and even today is barely back to two-thirds of its former size. Following the storm, all of the schools in New Orleans were privatized (only last year did the area reauthorize a public school district). As Naomi Klein explained, New Orleans after Katrina became a model of “disaster capitailsm” where she “watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive.”

Now, as we head into another Hurricane season, fueled by global warming, there are justifiable fears that we will see more and more repeats of these tragic failures. Natasha Trethewey, former U.S. Poet Laureate, notes in her 2007 book Beyond Katrina (reissued in 2015 for the tenth anniversary of the storm), “This too is a story about a story—how it will be inscribed on the physical landscape as well as on the landscape of our cultural memory. I wonder at the competing narratives: What will be remembered, what forgotten?”

This week on our website, Ed Rampell reviews the new film by Robert Greenwald on the killing of journalists in Gaza; incarcerated writer Tariq MaQbool examines why so many of his fellow inmates support Trump; Jared Hillel looks at the movement for the ordination of women in the Catholic Church; Mike Ervin discloses the ways the Trump Administration is impeding the access of airline travelers in wheelchairs; and Matt Minton interviews Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin about a new documentary film detailing her career as a deaf actor in Hollywood. Plus, Robert Repino reports on why religious organizations support school vouchers; Amy Kerwin pens an op-ed on the need for sanctuaries for monkeys no longer being used in medical research; and Akilah Monifa opines on how we must learn to be more inclusive, not less.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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