McCain on Hagee's Katrina remarks: "Nonsense!"

During presidential candidate John McCain's visit to New Orleans yesterday, reporters asked him about Pastor John Hagee's statements that Hurricane Katrina was God's judgment against New Orleans for a gay pride parade. While Hagee has endorsed McCain -- an endorsement McCain has said he's glad to have -- the Arizona Senator wants to make it clear that he does not endorse Hagee's remarks. Here's what he had to say:

"It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense. I don't have anything additional to say. It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, I don't have anything more to say….it's nonsense. I reject that categorically."

But McCain's rejection of Hagee's Katrina comments didn't stop him from getting in a dig at Sen. Barack Obama's relationship with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who by the way will be the guest tonight on the PBS show Bill Moyers Journal. Asked about whether commenting on surrogates and endorsers is interfering with the campaign, McCain answered:

I didn't attend Pastor Hagee's church for 20 years. There's a great deal of difference in my view between someone who endorses you and other circumstances.

Televangelist repeats Katrina-as-punishment-for-gay-pride comments

Remember Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, the televangelist who told a radio show that Hurricane Katrina was God's judgment against New Orleans for a gay pride parade? Well, he's back at it. Think Progress reported on comments Hagee made this week on another radio show when asked to clarify his earlier remarks:

The topic of that day was cursing and blessing. … What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God, in time if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city it can become it may in time be called a blessing. But at this time it's called a curse.

Hagee, you may recall, is the same religious leader whose endorsement presidential candidate John McCain solicited, accepted, and said he's still "glad to have." We wonder if Hagee's remarks will come up during McCain's visit today to the still-recovering city. We also wonder if North Carolina's GOP leaders gave any thought to Hagee's statements when they decided to run ads linking Obama to the controversial comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright over McCain's protests.

P.S.: Well, apparently Hagee's comments will come up during McCain's visit to New Orleans, thanks to MoveOn.org.

Katrina's homeless hit hard psychologically, study finds

New Orleans residents who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina were five times more likely to experience serious psychological distress a year after the disaster than those who did not.

That's among the findings of a new study presented earlier this month at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in New Orleans. The research was conducted by Narayan Sastry of the University of Michigan and Mark VanLandingham of Tulane University. They examined the mental health status of New Orleans' pre-Katrina residents one year after the disaster.

Blacks reported much higher rates of serious psychological distress than whites. Almost one-third of blacks were found to have a high degree of distress, compared to just 6 percent of whites. Those with higher incomes and more education were much less likely to experience serious psychological distress, while those born in Louisiana were much more likely to suffer serious distress.

"Our findings suggest that severe damage to one's home is a particularly important factor behind socioeconomic disparities in psychological distress, and possibly behind the levels of psychological distress," Sastry said. "These effects may be partly economic, because, for most families who own their home, home equity is the largest element of household wealth."

The researchers note that severely damaged or destroyed housing may also prevent people from returning to their community, which in turn affects social ties and employment. Given the magnitude and permanence of a housing loss, they say, the psychological consequences of the experience could be profound and lasting.

(FEMA photo of destroyed homes in New Orleans by Marvin Naumann)

The new HUD nominee and the Katrina housing crisis

On Friday, President Bush announced his nominee to replace outgoing Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who resigned while under investigation for illegal partisanship and cronyism in the provision of contracts. Jackson was also criticized by low-income housing advocates for pushing a plan to tear down public housing complexes in New Orleans that were barely damaged by Hurricane Katrina and replace them with mixed-income developments with less room for the poor -- a plan that's now faltering due to the credit crunch.

Bush's choice is Steven Preston, currently head of the Small Business Administration and a former executive with ServiceMaster and an investment banker with Lehman Brothers. Preston came to the SBA in 2006, at a time when the agency was under fire for its slow response to requests for loans from small businesses and homeowners impacted by Katrina. Shortly after he took over, the backlog of loan requests fell by 80 percent and its response times increased by 90 percent, as Bush noted during the press conference announcing the appointment:

Steve Preston is an experienced manager who knows what to do. He knows how to tackle a problem, devise a solution and get results. That's exactly the kind of leadership I was looking for.

The nomination was met with cautious praise from the U.S. Senators representing Louisiana. Democrat Mary Landrieu called Preston a "willing and able partner" and said she hoped HUD would be a "better partner" under his leadership, while Republican David Vitter said he was "encouraged" by Preston's "track record as a reformer and problem solver."

But others in Congress were less optimistic about Bush's choice. Noting that the United States faces the biggest housing crisis in recent history, Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, said the nation needs a leader with expertise in housing issue, "yet the President’s choice has no apparent housing background, which raises questions." Rep. Nydia Velazquez, a New York Democrat who chairs the House Small Business Committee, was even less charitable in her assessment of the nomination:

Trading one troubled agency for another is short-sighted, and it could not come at a worse time for the American people. HUD’s crisis must be resolved without delay. But the fact remains the agency Mr. Preston has been responsible for leading is still plagued by serious problems of its own. Large businesses continue getting small business contracts, SBA’s Katrina disaster relief program is a failure, and morale of the agency’s personnel is one of the lowest in the federal government.

Indeed, while the President focused on Preston's achievement in reducing the backlog of Katrina-related loan requests, the SBA under his leadership was lax in preparations for future disasters. In a report on the agency released last February, the Government Accountability Office acknowledged improvements under Preston but noted that the SBA still lacked a timetable for completing a disaster management plan.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine, National Low Income Housing Coalition Director Sheila Crowley discussed the serious problems with housing since Katrina, including Jackson's poor handling of the region's federally assisted housing. She shared her wishes for what Preston's priorities would be:

I have high hopes he'll roll up his sleeves and dig into the Katrina mess, given that he has knowledge from another agency perspective. We'd also like to see immediate attention to issues related to getting adequate funding for public housing agencies. What HUD has lacked for the past eight years is an agency secretary who is an advocate for the agency's programs and who cared that the programs they worked for served the American public. And what we're looking for in a secretary is someone who has that commitment.

Will Preston be that someone? Time will tell.

(Photo of Preston and Bush from www.whitehouse.gov)

FEMA trailer toxin linked to Lou Gehrig's disease

Earlier this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that trailers the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided to families displaced by Hurricane Katrina were contaminated with dangerously high levels of formaldehyde. Now, a new study suggests that the chemical -- which has already been linked to cancer and respiratory illnesses -- carries another risk: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

ALS is a progressive disease that causes damage to nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and leads to paralysis and death. There is no cure or effective treatment for the condition.

The study's lead author is Marc Weisskopf, an assistant professor of epidemiology and environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health. He and his colleagues analyzed data from an American Cancer Society study of more than 1 million people who were monitored for 15 years, finding that 617 men and 539 women died of ALS during that time. Only those who reported formaldehyde exposure had a higher risk -- 34 percent -- of developing the illness.

At this time, neither the CDC nor FEMA have any programs in place to help trailer residents with medical expenses incurred as a result of living in unsafe housing.

"This is like Baghdad": Accused teen acquitted in killing of popular New Orleans musician

The December 2006 murder of Hot 8 Brass Band drummer and high school music teacher Dinerral Shavers shocked New Orleans. Followed a week later by the killing of filmmaker and Food Not Bombs activist Helen Hill and coming amidst mounting violence in the storm-ravaged city, the incident sparked protest marches and official promises to crack down on crime. The initial failure of District Attorney Eddie Jordan to bring charges for Shavers' shooting, which took place while he was driving down a public street in broad daylight, was also part of the controversy that led to Jordan's resignation last year.

David Bonds, 19, was eventually charged with Shavers' murder. But after a four-day trial this week during which teenage witnesses proved reluctant to finger Bonds, a jury voted to acquit him of second-degree murder. Bonds allegedly shot Shavers by mistake while aiming for the man's teenage stepson because he did not "belong" in the neighborhood.

As the trial concluded, Judge Jerome Winsberg offered his personal commentary to the courtroom, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

"This is like Baghdad," Winsberg told the jury after reading their verdicts aloud. "It is appalling...It is shocking."

People shooting each other over neighborhood alliances, the veteran judge noted; children not only raising themselves, but being left to care for toddlers and babies in the 2200 block of Dumaine Street.

Winsberg said he wasn't commenting on the verdict, only on the four days of testimony that preceded it. A subset of New Orleans unfolded in court, the judge said, one in which no one seems to live with their parents, but guns and "beefs" and threats are ever-present.

Also commenting on the trial was Silence Is Violence, an anti-violence campaign founded following the murders of Shavers and Hill:

The world our young people are living in came to terrifying light through the fearful testimony of witnesses, justifiably afraid; through the defendant's assertion that he sells drugs in order "to help my family" (this forming part of the defense in this trial); through the repeated references to petty but clearly deadly turf wars being fought by children too young to drive from one neighborhood to another.

Scandal-plagued HUD chief quits, but affordable housing crisis continues in the Gulf

This week brought the news that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson would resign effective April 18 to "attend more diligently to personal and family matters." Those personal matters probably include staying out of jail, since Jackson is currently under investigation for political favoritism and corruption in the awarding of contracts as well as for lying to Congress.

President Bush, a longtime friend and former neighbor of Jackson, accepted the resignation with regret. "I have known Alphonso Jackson for many years, and I have known him to be a strong leader and a good man," he said.

Jackson's legal troubles started two years ago with a remark made at a minority real estate forum in Dallas. He told the story of an African-American man who finally won a HUD contract after years of trying -- but when the man thanked Jackson, he also mentioned he didn't like President Bush. The secretary nixed the deal. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president?," he said. "Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

Apparently, Jackson was unaware (or unconcerned) that awarding contracts based on partisan politics is a violation of federal law. His remarks led to an investigation by HUD's Inspector General, which found that Secretary Jackson personally intervened against prospective contractors with Democratic affiliations. The IG also examined the political contributions of 29 companies that got HUD contracts and found that officers and key staff members at the winning firms gave more than twice as much to Republican candidates as Democrats.

When hauled before a Senate panel, Jackson testified, "I don't touch contracts." From there the investigation broadened, with the IG's investigators joining forces with the FBI, Justice Department, and a federal grand jury to examine improprieties in a number of HUD contracting decisions -- including several involving the controversial redevelopment of public housing in New Orleans.

Long itching to tear down New Orleans' traditional public housing complexes and replace them with mixed-income developments with less space for the poor [PDF], HUD and the HUD-controlled Housing Authority of New Orleans used Hurricane Katrina to fast-track those plans. This was no quiet conspiracy, however: Soon after the storm, Jackson announced publicly that New Orleans was "not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again." His agency then championed a plan to reduce the number of public housing units in four complexes across the city from more than 5,000 before Katrina -- most of them occupied by African-American families -- to only 2,000.

Residents filed a class-action lawsuit to stop HUD's demolition plans, but a federal court denied all legal challenges. The lawyers have appealed to the U.S. Fifth Circuit, but a decision isn't expected for months. Officials from the United Nations have criticized the teardowns, saying they would force mostly black residents into homelessness. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, who has been blocking House-approved legislation to replace demolished public housing units, responded by denouncing the U.N. as a "wasteful international organization" hell-bent on "expanding the dependency of people on government." With Vitter's blessing as well as the New Orleans City Council's, HUD has already begun demolition at three of the complexes, with work at the fourth expected to begin soon.

HUD has also chosen the firms to carry out the redevelopment -- and one of them is now implicated in the scandal surrounding Jackson. As it turns out, the $127 million contract to rebuild the St. Bernard complex in New Orleans was awarded to Atlanta-based Columbia Residential, a company that owes Jackson somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 for past work. Columbia has been one of the few private developers to land significant HUD contracts in recent years, including a major public housing redevelopment project in Atlanta. Investigators are now looking at Jackson's involvement in the Columbia deal in New Orleans, as well as whether he arranged high-paying contract work for two friends -- one of whom ended up with a $485,000 gig at HANO.

As the various probes of Jackson continue, there's still no word on who might replace him at HUD. The Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that filed a lawsuit against HUD on behalf of New Orleans public housing residents, said the secretary's resignation "should be a call to action for HUD to reverse decisions made in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. With the change in leadership, HUD now has the opportunity to fulfill its mission and provide affordable housing for families who are still in desperate need."

And the need is clearly desperate: A PolicyLink analysis [PDF] of HUD's progress in restoring subsidized housing in post-Katrina New Orleans found that the agency has approved resources to rebuild just over a third of those homes. Meanwhile, rents in many parts of the city have doubled, with affordable rentals that once were common now almost impossible to find. At the same time, federal recovery programs are projected to restore only 43 percent of the city's total rental losses, which includes everything from public housing for the poor to market-rate rentals. It's no wonder the city's homeless population has doubled since the storm.

But addressing the dire housing situation in New Orleans will take more than just a change in the top leadership at HUD -- it will also require deeper policy changes. For one thing, if HUD and other government agencies are going to continue to rely on private contractors, then they must strengthen oversight of contracting decisions to prevent improprieties and abuses, since the problem is much larger than Jackson. To date, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has identified at least 25 federal contracts related to Hurricane Katrina -- and 187 federal contracts in total, many relating to Iraq -- that involve significant waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement. And the problem is not limited to the federal government or one political party: Former Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco is currently under investigation for secretly increasing payments to Road Home contractor ICF International shortly before she left office, while New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has come under fire because his family business landed a contract installing countertops for a new Home Depot at the same time it was negotiating tax breaks with the city.

Even more fundamentally, though, a solution to the housing crisis in New Orleans and elsewhere across the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast will demand a new approach at all levels of government that treats affordable housing as what it really is: a basic human right that must not be denied, come hell or high water.

(HUD photo of Secretary Alphonso Jackson and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin)

NOLA public housing advocates bid good riddance to HUD chief, urge policy change

The following statement is from the Advancement Project, a civil rights group that filed a lawsuit against U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson on behalf of New Orleans public housing residents shut out of their homes after Hurricane Katrina. Under investigation for alleged corruption and cronyism in contracting decisions, Jackson announced yesterday that he is resigning April 18. The Advancement Project points out that while the Katrina disaster caused the worst affordable housing crisis in recent history, HUD responded by demolishing thousands of habitable public units accessible to the poor and championing a redevelopment plan that replaces only 20 percent of them:

Alphonso Jackson will be most remembered for having turned his back on the people of New Orleans. We are glad to see him go, but the damage has been done. The people suffering, without a place to call home, are the people of New Orleans; the thousands of families who lived in public housing before Katrina and the working poor, many of whom remain displaced outside the city they used to call home.

While it is HUD's mission to provide affordable housing across the country, the exact opposite took place in the recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans. It therefore comes as no surprise that Jackson is under criminal investigation for his post-Katrina dealings. HUD agents, city officials, and developers appeared to have colluded in the largest Black removal in U.S. history. HUD's intent in New Orleans was never to bring back the majority-black and working poor residents of New Orleans. In the storm’s aftermath, when Jackson said that "New Orleans was not going to be as black as it had been for a long time, if ever again," we realized that we had to fight for people's right to return home.

In addition to the lawsuit filed by the Advancement Project, residents organized themselves and met with members of Congress, including Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who took the lead to pass the Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007 in the House. The legislation, opposed by HUD and now stuck in the Senate, would provide for one-for-one replacement of demolished units.

Secretary Jackson's resignation and tarnished tenure as the nation's housing chief should be a call to action for HUD to reverse decisions made in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. With the change in leadership, HUD now has the opportunity to fulfill its mission and provide affordable housing for families who are still in desperate need.

(Photo by Craig Morse courtesy of survivorsvillage.com.)