The Daily Background

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post delivers again, this time with a piece on Katrina.

Last year, with most of the city still underwater, George W. Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised to rebuild New Orleans. He could have made good on that promise — this is the United States of America, after all, and we undertake to rebuild entire countries (Afghanistan, Iraq) and even continents (Europe after World War II). The White House says it has earmarked $110 billion for Gulf Coast reconstruction, but less than half that money has been spent. Even assuming New Orleans gets its fair share, that’s not enough to ever put this city back together again.

Call me cynical, but I didn’t really expect this administration to come up with serious Marshall Plan money to rebuild a poor, mostly black city that was already in decline before Hurricane Katrina and the Army Corps of Engineers administered the coup de grace. (They still toss in a lot of French words down here.)

Robinson concludes with regret that because the Administration has demonstrated absolutely no interest in making New Orleans what it used to be- one of the most vibrant cities in North America if not the world- it will instead become a “smaller, whiter city.”

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