Senate committee wants input on NOLA reconstruction

Urgent! Senate committee wants Katrina input - deadline TODAY 9/11



The Senate H.E.L.P. Committee (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) has been requesting input on Katrina reconstruction. The deadline was changed from Friday 9/9 to Monday, 9/12 (but presume 9/11, by the end of today) to allow more input. . It's a great opportunity to help influence the treatment of survivors and the fate of the Gulf coast.

The email for public input is listed below. These emails are going to start being reviewed by committee staff tomorrow (Mon, 9/12). I heard about this on a CNN radio rebroadcast of the Senate H.E.L.P. Committee roundtable (of disaster experts) on 9/8, but could not get this posted until now.

Email: katrina_comments [at] help.senate.gov
Senate H.E.L.P. website: http://help.senate.gov /
(The ranking Democrat is Sen. Edward Kennedy.)

more info from Naomi Klein...
With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify New Orleans
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=8202
For a people’s reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the centre of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster’s starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them.

"We had no caretakers," he says. That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi - many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood - need our support now"

Dennis Kucinich has been attempting to legislate this as well...

"But restrictions on the rule governing debate and amendments made it impossible for us to debate an amendment to require contractors receiving federal Hurricane relief dollars to hire locally and pay a living wage."

"It is not enough to just throw federal dollars at the region," stated Kucinich. "We must also provide the opportunity for the people of the region to rebuild their lives and provide for themselves and their families."

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=8193