When we talk about the impacts of climate change in the United States, and in particular the racial dimension of those impacts, there is no escaping Hurricane Katrina. The 2005 storm that burst the levees in New Orleans remains the costliest hurricane ever to hit the U.S., as well as perhaps the worst humanitarian crisis of the past century to take place on American soil.

In the almost 20 years since Katrina, academics and demographers have conducted reams upon reams of research about the political and social impacts of the storm, both on New Orleans itself and on the tens of thousands of New Orleanians who never moved back. Studies have explored how the storm impacted trust in the government, how it affected turnout rates in later mayoral elections, and whom storm victims were most likely to blame for the botched emergency response, to name just a few.

But Katrina also had a profound impact on the cities where evacuees fled. In Houston, 300 miles to the west, more than 200,000 victims arrived after the storm, many coming in on evacuation buses and camping out on the floor of the Astrodome. Knowing that it would take months or years for New Orleans to rebuild, the government of Houston undertook a massive resettlement effort to find those evacuees long-term housing in Texas rather than put them up in trailers or hotel rooms. Many of them later chose to settle down in Houston for good.

This resettlement effort earned Houston mayor Bill White national praise, but it also caused significant local backlash. Longtime residents of Houston soon started to complain that evacuees had imported old gang conflicts from New Orleans, causing the city’s murder rate to spike in 2005 and 2006. There was little data to support this fear, but a moral panic exploded in the city regardless, with dozens of newspaper articles stoking concerns about evacuee crime. The White administration, facing a looming reelection campaign, responded by beefing up enforcement of low-level traffic and drug offenses, arresting some evacuees, and pushing others back to New Orleans. This fear of a crime wave had an obvious racial dimension — New Orleans had a much larger Black population than Houston at the time — and it created a prejudice against New Orleanians who were seeking jobs or trying to acclimate to local schools.

The anti-evacuee sentiment mellowed out in later years, but the political backlash to the Katrina resettlement holds lessons for the future of climate displacement. As climate disasters worsen, forcing thousands of people from their homes every year, they create huge political upheavals for the communities that receive those displaced people. Even in a city as large as Houston, which had the room and resources to accommodate an influx of evacuees, the Katrina diaspora created a social panic. For other communities — like Duluth, Minnesota, which some have speculated could be a “climate haven,” or Boise, Idaho, which has absorbed many victims of the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California — the backlash could be even more significant.

In order to navigate future climate disruptions, politicians will have to be prepared to deal with concerns about housing, jobs, and crime — concerns that may cross over into outright racism or xenophobia. It’s one more way in which climate disasters have scrambled political attitudes and altered the beliefs that bring people to the ballot box.

You can read more about how Katrina changed Houston’s politics in our full story here.

P.S. Have you just joined us in this newsletter? Back issues of State of Emergency are available here, and you can also read all the reporting in this series.

A barrage of disasters

The city of Houston and surrounding Harris County helped resettle thousands of evacuees from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but since then Houston has seen a string of costly disasters, from Hurricane Harvey’s epic rainfall to a deadly ice storm in 2021.

Above: A person looks out towards the flooded interstate after Hurricane Beryl swept through the area on July 8, 2024 in Houston, Texas. Brandon Bell / Getty Images

What we’re reading

Climate change supercharged wildfires: New research has found that many of last year’s worst wildfires — including blazes in Canada, Greece, and the Amazon rainforest — were made more dangerous by climate change. My Grist colleague Sachi Mulkey has a story breaking down the disturbing new data.
Read more

Will Hawaiʻi tighten building codes?: After the Lahaina fires, Hawaiʻi has an opportunity to prevent future blazes by imposing stricter building codes — but these efforts can become “political dynamite” if they make rebuilding more expensive or force other homeowners to make costly upgrades, reports Civil Beat.
Read more

Storm damage on Long Island: Governor Kathy Hochul of New York declared a disaster emergency in Suffolk County on Long Island after a recent storm, and she also offered $50,000 rebuilding grants for homeowners who suffered damage from the event. The Long Island suburbs are home to one of the nation’s swingiest congressional seats.
Read more

Frost turns up the heat: Maxwell Frost, a Florida congressman and the youngest member of the House of Representatives, spoke about climate impacts in his state at the Democratic National Convention, citing hurricane-induced flooding and heat waves that endanger agricultural workers.
Read more

Ernesto knocks out Puerto Rico’s power: Tropical Storm Ernesto sliced past Puerto Rico more than a week ago, but thousands of residents still haven’t seen their electricity come back on, in another demonstration of how fragile the island’s power grid has become.
Read more

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Lessons from Houston’s Katrina response on Aug 27, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Within a few months, Sanyika and his wife had set up in an apartment provided almost for free by the administration of Houston mayor Bill White, a Democrat, and funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The Texas city staged an unprecedented resettlement effort after more than 200,000 displaced people arrived post-Katrina, many of them crowded into the Astrodome sports stadium. White’s evacuee rehousing program earned Houston nationwide praise, and it was so successful that tens of thousands of displaced storm victims chose to stay in the city for good. 

Sanyika and his wife were two of those people. They had a deep connection to New Orleans, but had no idea how long they would have to wait for their hometown to recover. When they started looking for apartments in Houston, however, Sanyika encountered a surprising stigma: When he told potential landlords that he was living in an apartment paid for with Katrina recovery money, they shied away from renting to him. Only once he and his wife stopped mentioning the recovery money did they manage to secure an apartment in a new development on the southwest side of the city, later purchasing a house just down the road.

“A lot of property owners had basically an aversion to that,” said Sanyika. “Once we dropped FEMA aid, then the market opened up in a different kind of way.”

By then, Sanyika had founded an organization, the New Orleans Association of Houston, to keep tabs on all the storm survivors in the city, and he was hearing similar stories of discrimination. Job applicants couldn’t get calls back if they had a 504 area code, and Sanyika said students faced harassment at school from teachers and peers who believed they were criminals and gang members. Local papers fanned this sentiment with thousands of lines of text about evacuees committing crimes, blaming them for a spike in the city’s murder rate. 

Faced with this publicity crisis and a looming re-election campaign, the welcoming Houston government changed course and stepped up policing in the areas where evacuees were living, arresting numerous evacuees and pushing more back to New Orleans. The tenor of this response was always racial: New Orleans’s population was more than two-thirds black when Katrina hit, compared to less than a quarter in Houston, and many Houstonians projected racial prejudices onto the arriving evacuees. 

“The dynamics of race and ethnicity and apprehension toward immigrants drove largely antagonistic beliefs about the mostly poor, mostly black new arrivals,” wrote the authors of a study that analyzed Houston’s response to Katrina.

Local ire about the Katrina evacuees faded as time went on and they merged into the city’s social fabric. Sanyika said he rarely heard about outright discrimination in later years, at least among the members of his organization. But the difficulties of the Katrina diaspora in Houston represent a profound warning for the future of climate displacement: Despite the city’s excellent resettlement process, and despite the fact that the evacuees didn’t make life harder for most native Houstonians, the city’s longtime residents still soured on them, confronting them with the same attitudes that international migrants often face upon arriving in the United States.

It also demonstrated that climate disasters can be a political liability for communities that receive disaster victims, just as much as for the communities that suffer the disasters themselves. 

Bill White was less than two years into his first term as Houston’s mayor when Katrina broke the levees in New Orleans as a Category 3 storm. He later said he supersized Houston’s hurricane response out of compassion for the storm victims, reflecting that “you should treat your neighbors the way you’d want to be treated.” As the city’s Astrodome filled with evacuees, who arrived by the busload after New Orleans vacated its own infamous stadium, FEMA offered to help White secure thousands of temporary trailers and hotel rooms for them. But he and his administration declined, instead asking them to reimburse the city  for long-term housing in apartments.

“We knew it was going to be a while before they could go back,” White told Grist. “The Red Cross-style shelters that [FEMA was] set up to do, that obviously wouldn’t work for an event of this magnitude.”

Wary of federal bureaucracy, White set up a bespoke housing voucher program with aid from the private sector, cajoling hundreds of apartment landlords across the city to donate units to the cause. Nonprofits and faith organizations such as the Catholic Charities volunteered to help evacuees with case work as they applied for disaster assistance or sought temporary jobs. White had no guarantee from FEMA that the agency would reimburse him, but he promised the landlords that he would convince the feds to pony up, and in time he did. This tremendous act earned the city national praise. Even the local newspaper in its cross-state rival, Dallas, named Houston the “Texan of the Year” in 2005.

But despite White’s efforts, the city’s goodwill was not unlimited. Because large landlords could choose which apartment complexes to house evacuees in, most ended up clustered in older buildings, many of them in worse-off parts of the city, said Sanyika. The majority didn’t yet have jobs or cars, let alone any familiarity with Houston geography. As city politicians tell it, these conditions led to flare-ups of the old gang conflicts that had divided New Orleans’s largest public housing complexes. 

In August 2006, a 64-year-old man named Rolando Rivas was shot and killed at a car wash in southwest Houston, after what appeared to be a robbery gone wrong. A few days later, police arrested three teenagers in connection with the crime, all of whom had left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The car wash murder was an isolated event, but it supercharged a media narrative that had been building for months. The Houston Chronicle and several national newspapers blared with negative headlines — “Houston ties murder increase to Katrina,” “Katrina evacuees wearing out welcome in Houston,” “Katrina Evacuees Exporting Violence to Houston.” 

“As it relates to murders, there’s a definite Katrina effect,” Captain Dale Brown, a high-ranking officer in the Houston Police Department, told the Houston Chronicle in 2006. The police would later claim that they tied 60 murders that took place in 2006 to Katrina evacuees.

But studies have since cast doubt on the idea that evacuees were to blame for the short-lived crime spike in Houston. The city saw almost 400 murders in 2006, a 13 percent rise from the previous year, but violent crime in the city had already been rising for years, and many types of crime, such as assault and burglary, never rose even after the evacuees arrived. Moreover, other cities like San Antonio that took in evacuees didn’t see similar trends.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Criminal Justice, led by the law enforcement expert Sean Varano, found that the displacement of Louisianans into nearby major cities — including Houston, San Antonio, and Phoenix — caused “only modest effects” on crime. Varano and his colleagues theorized that the city’s police department might have played up the impact of Katrina to direct attention away from the fact that the department had been dealing with staffing shortages caused by a wave of officer retirements.

Tanya Settles, a political science expert and government communications consultant who has studied Houston’s response to Katrina evacuees, said that the city’s concern over crime was a classic moral panic, with a response far out of proportion to the facts.

“There was a political interest in trying to make sure that [the evacuees] left,” she said.

These details didn’t seem to matter at the time. The very popular White administration started to take flak for the perceived crime wave, with reporters crowding press conferences and residents showing up at meetings to yell at council members. The complaints about crime also amplified other concerns about whether the city could handle the influx of evacuees: The Houston school district had to enroll 4,700 new students and hire almost 200 new teachers after Katrina. One study found that the arrival of evacuees reduced local wages by around 2 percent as evacuees and locals competed for jobs. According to an annual public opinion survey conducted by the Kinder Institute at Rice University, the percentage of Houstonians who thought accepting Katrina evacuees was a bad thing rose from 47 percent to 70 percent between 2005 and 2008.

“The evacuees had a large footprint, but they were assimilated into a very, very large metropolitan area, so for most people there wasn’t a sense of being overwhelmed by strangers,” said Stephen Klineberg, the Rice University sociologist who ran the study. “But the crime thing was kind of a surrogate for all these anxieties, about, ‘why are these people coming here?’”

Michael Moore, who served as White’s chief of staff, says that a deluge of media coverage distorted residents’ views about the effect evacuees were having on Houston, which he maintains was minimal.

“There were probably 10 bad stories to every good story,” said Moore. “There were a lot of tough press conferences and community meetings where we said we were getting a handle on it, but there’s nothing you can do that really can alleviate people’s fears until that number goes down.”

Even so, White changed tack — at the time, Houston mayors served two-year terms, so he was up for reelection in 2007. He instructed his police chief to crack down on crime among evacuees. Cops stepped up enforcement of low-level offenses like drug possession and conducted random traffic stops around apartment complexes housing Katrina victims. 

“I said repeatedly at the time that we had a special housing program for law-abiding citizens, which was the vouchers,” White recalled. “We also had a program for those who violated our criminal laws. And it was called the jail.” (The Houston Police Department has said it never tracked how many Katrina evacuees it arrested.) Later on, when the federal government tried to extend housing aid for Katrina survivors in Houston, White pushed back, saying it was time for evacuees to either support themselves or leave the city. 

By the four-year anniversary of the hurricane, the supposed crime spike had faded and murder rates had declined. It’s almost impossible to be certain about the causal relationship: Maybe the evacuees who were committing the crimes moved back to New Orleans, Maybe many of them ended up in jail, or crime rates ticked back down the way they often do. Or maybe residents ceased to worry about evacuees after the news media moved past the issue. Most Houstonians had never directly encountered the evacuees anyway, so it didn’t take long for them to forget about the problems the displaced community had supposedly caused. When White ran for re-election in 2007, he won handily. 

Even so, there is some evidence that the experience may have left scars on Houston’s psyche. The last time researchers at the Kinder Institute asked a question about evacuees in their Houston survey, in 2009, 57 percent of respondents said the evacuees had been a bad thing for the city, down from an earlier peak, but still much higher than just after the storm. Even more concerning, the share of residents who said that ethnic diversity made the city stronger dropped from 69 percent to 60 percent. Even 10 years later, many Katrina evacuees reported having trouble getting jobs when they called potential employers with a New Orleans area code. One study concluded that native Houstonians perceived the evacuees the same way they did immigrants from other countries, treating them as unauthorized interlopers, and indeed some angry residents at the time referred to evacuees as “Katrina illegal immigrants.”

The arc of events in Houston raise concerns for future displacement crises, which are being made more frequent by climate change and intensifying extreme weather. The ambition and execution of the city’s humanitarian effort after Katrina won national praise, but it also led to local criticism, stoked in part by the media, which later resulted in an aggressive police crackdown on a largely Black community, followed by years of marginalization and social pressure.

“It seems like the perception of the city’s efforts to rehouse the evacuees was colored by people’s perception of the people themselves,” said Settles.

It seems unlikely that Houston would be as generous to evacuees if another Katrina happened tomorrow. Even though the city still has a liberal mayor, White’s rehousing response relied to a great extent on help from the state government, which has veered even farther to the right since the storm. Settles points out that Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who as a first-term attorney general during Katrina tried to stoke panic about sex offenders being among the New Orleans evacuees, has now garnered national attention for bussing immigrants to liberal cities like New York and Chicago.

For another thing, Houston itself has been battered by several climate disasters in the years since Katrina. Hurricane Rita hit Houston later the same year; Hurricane Ike three years after that. After back-to-back years with disastrous floods, Hurricane Harvey dropped 50 inches of rain on the city in 2017,  displacing former Mayor White and thousands of other residents. Then the city lost power for days in 2022 when its electricity grid froze during Winter Storm Uri. It lost it again this year when Hurricane Beryl downed hundreds of electricity poles. 

Robert Stein, a political scientist at Rice University who also studied crime among the city’s Katrina evacuee population, says he doubts Houston would welcome evacuees again, in part because keeping Houstonians safe from climate change has become hard enough. 

“If that happened again, I’m not certain that the city and the county would be reaching out,” he said. “It’s because of the experience of helping Katrina evacuees, but also the context of, we’re suffering too, and we’re having trouble providing basic services ourselves.”

Indeed, many places once considered resilient to climate disasters, from Vermont to Colorado to the Pacific Northwest, have suffered devastating impacts from floods, fires, and extreme heat, and have languished for years while waiting for federal funding to rebuild. 

For Sanyika’s part, the last decade of climate disasters in Houston hasn’t made him want to leave. His home is relatively new, and built well out of a flood zone, away from major rivers and bayous. Plus, he looks around the country and sees disasters everywhere. At 81, he doubts that he could get any safer by moving inland or farther north.

“You have to ask the question, is there some place where you will not be at risk, and there’s just no place you can go,” he said, “so we didn’t have any problem with just staying here. But we didn’t expect the weather events to be as bad as they were.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline They settled in Houston after Katrina — and then faced a political storm on Aug 27, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

We speak with The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel about the prisoner swap between Russia, the United States and several other countries on Thursday that saw the release of 24 people, with 16 prisoners in Russia traded for eight Russian nationals held in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere. It was the biggest exchange of prisoners between Russia and the West since the Cold War era. Among those released are Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. marine Paul Whelan and Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Vadim Krasikov, a convicted Russian assassin who was in German custody after the 2019 killing of a Chechen dissident in Berlin, was also released and sent back to Moscow. Vanden Heuvel says it was “an extraordinary swap” that could pave the way for more diplomacy to wind down the war in Ukraine. “Negotiations and diplomacy are not about capitulation. They're about improving the conditions of a world which is too militarized and at war.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A petition urging the New Zealand government to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people has been tabled in the House.

More than 200 people gathered on Parliament’s forecourt today and they were met by MPs from Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

Member of the Palestinian community Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab presented Labour MP Phil Twyford with the petition, signed by more than 16,000 people.

• READ MORE: ‘Clock tick­ing fast to­wards famine’ as Is­rael bom­bards Gaza, blocks aid
• Other War on Gaza reports

Twyford said Labour unequivocally supported the call for special humanitarian visas for families of New Zealanders currently trapped in Gaza.

“We created a special visa for the families of Ukrainian Kiwis so they could sponsor their families to escape the war zone. To not do so for the people of Gaza is a disgraceful double standard,” he said.

Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick reiterated her party’s support for special visas.

“The Minister of Immigration has patronisingly said that the government do not want to offer what they call false hope to the people of Palestine. Let us say, that’s for the people of Palestine.

‘Offer consistency’
“It’s not for politicians in this place to patronise the people in Gaza and tell when what they should or shouldn’t hope for. The very least we can do is offer the consistency that we have to those affected in Ukraine by Russia’s aggressions.”

Last week, the government was urged to create a special humanitarian visas for Palestinians in Gaza who have ties to New Zealand.

It followed more than 30 organisations — including World Vision, Save the Children and Greenpeace — sending an open letter to ministers asking they step up support and help with evacuation and resettlement efforts.

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford acknowledged there was an “unimaginable humanitarian crisis in Gaza” but said issuing special visas would not assist people.

“Those people in Ukraine were able to leave. They were able to get on a plane and get to New Zealand. The situation in Gaza is that they cannot leave.

“I’m not going to be issuing visas, which is issuing false hope, for people on a great scale who cannot leave. As and when the situation changes, we will reconsider our position.”

Labour MP for Nelson Rachel Boyack, a Christian, said she was calling on MPs of all faiths in Parliament to stand up for Palestine.

‘War about land, power’
“Our religion and our faith has been used to fight a war that is fundamentally about land and power. I said in the House earlier this week in the debate that as a Christian, it pains me greatly to see other people of faith misuse their faith to kill and harm other people.”

Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced plans to attend a NATO meeting in Brussels, and meet with counterparts in Egypt, Poland and Sweden.

The urgent humanitarian situation in Gaza will be a focus of the trip, with Peters saying New Zealand was part of an “overwhelming international consensus demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.

“This travel will allow us to share information and perspectives with a range of interested parties and coordinate on broad international action,” he said.

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said Peters did not need to travel to the region to understand the need for further humanitarian support.

“it’s good to hear the minister talking about some support but we can do it now,” sdhe said.

“It’s right now that people are starving and dying without water and medical supplies. We can actually see that from here and that decision can be made right now to use all of the levers to get that kai and food and medical supplies through.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

President Biden delivered his State of the Union address Thursday night. In it, he made his case for a second term ahead of this year’s presidential election, criticizing Republican front-runner Donald Trump without mentioning him by name, and highlighting his administration’s policies to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, reinstate reproductive rights and provide support to Ukraine. Our guest Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher of The Nation, describes current U.S. foreign policy as a “Cold War redux moment” that threatens the success of populist economic policies that have recently taken hold in the Democratic Party after decades of trickle-down, neoliberal economics. She calls for “ending the policing and the global policing which the establishment believes is their right,” warning that “if you don’t have a transformative foreign policy, you will end up with military Keynesianism.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

At today’s NATO summit in Lithuania, member countries are expected to debate Ukraine’s request to join the military alliance, which would provide additional military support for its war with Russia. Opponents to Ukrainian membership, however, warn that such a move would needlessly escalate what Russia sees as a proxy war with the United States against NATO encroachment on its western border. For more, we speak to journalist Katrina vanden Heuvel, whose recent piece for The Guardian, co-authored with James Carden, is headlined “Now is not the time for Ukraine to join NATO.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This article was produced in partnership with Verite and WWL-TV along with The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, which was part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2022. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Lisa Ruiz was at her home in Eden Isle, Louisiana, a community of about 8,000 nestled on the eastern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, when her mother called.

“You need to turn on the news!” her mother said that afternoon in early February. “The governor just announced the state is forgiving all the Road Home lawsuits.”

Ruiz’s heart skipped. Maybe she would get her money back.

Three years earlier, the state had sued Ruiz, saying she had misused a $30,000 grant meant to elevate her home to protect it from future flooding after Hurricane Katrina. The grant came as part of Road Home, the largest disaster recovery program in the country’s history. Like others, Ruiz said she had been told by Road Home representatives that she could use the money for repairs, and she did.

When the state came after her, Ruiz was afraid she could lose her house, so she withdrew $31,000 from her retirement account and sent it as repayment.

It wasn’t an easy decision, she said. That money was supposed to go toward the care of her severely autistic son after she dies. But rather than hiring an attorney to fight the suit or ignoring the demand and facing the possibility of a lien being placed on her home, she decided paying back the grant was the right thing to do.

“Everything I do, working 12-hour shifts for the past 15 years, is to put money into that account for my son because he’s going to require 24-hour care after I’m gone,” said Ruiz, a nurse for three decades, as tears streamed down her face. But, she added, “I’m an honest person. If it’s a debt I owe, I’m going to pay it.”

Then, in February, she got the call from her mother and thought for a moment that the state would fully reimburse her.

That hope was quickly dashed. Under threat of being sued, 425 people had made partial or full payments — totaling $6.8 million — to the state. But while thousands more would now be freed from legal peril, no longer required to pay what the state said they owed, officials said those hundreds who had already paid would not get refunds.

Ruiz was outraged.

“It’s not fair for people who were trying to do the right thing when there was no benefit for doing the right thing,” she said.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’ Feb. 16 announcement that the state was no longer pursuing about 5,000 lawsuits against homeowners who allegedly misused recovery grants after hurricanes Katrina and Rita officially ended the 17-year odyssey of Road Home.

Of those lawsuits, about 3,500 specifically targeted families who received grants to elevate their homes to safe levels but failed to do so.

The program had been beset with problems from the start. An investigation by The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, WWL-TV and ProPublica last year found that the $30,000 grants provided to homeowners like Ruiz were not enough to elevate a house, which was a requirement of the grant. At the time, it cost at least three times that amount to put a home onto raised footings, something the state acknowledged later.

The state also failed to double-check whether people were eligible to receive the grants, or that their homes needed to be elevated, before sending out the money. When some of those homeowners contacted the state to say they didn’t need or want to elevate their homes, they were told by Road Home representatives they could use the funds for repairs, so that’s what they did, according to court records and the news outlets’ investigation.

Ruiz said she was quoted as much as $160,000 to elevate her home, which was more than she could afford. But Road Home representatives, she said, told her she could instead use the elevation grant to finish rebuilding.

“We were in a heck of a shape. So it was very easy to take those words and say, ‘OK, wonderful. This is a blessing.’ So that’s what we did,” she said.

At least five appeals court rulings support homeowners’ contention that they were told they could use the grants for repairs. But state officials said homeowners have been unable to identify who told them they could use the money for repairs.

Years of mismanagement of the recovery program left Louisiana on the hook to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funded Road Home, for nearly $300 million in misspent grants, about $103 million of that for the elevation grants alone. Under pressure from the federal government to recoup that money, the state sued thousands of storm victims.

The suits drew criticism from residents, housing advocates and elected officials, and the state and HUD spent years trying to negotiate a way out of them. The biggest question was how much the state would have to repay to satisfy its debt to the federal government. Only then could it close out the Road Home program and drop the lawsuits.

“It’s been a miserable thing for the state of Louisiana to pursue these individuals, because we knew the vast majority of them were never going to pay,” Edwards said in February.

The deal that the state and HUD eventually brokered allowed the state to repay just $32.5 million in misused funds and release homeowners from “unpaid judgments and payment plans,” according to a HUD spokesperson.

To pay off the $32.5 million, Louisiana is using two separate pots of money: $12 million from a settlement with ICF Emergency Management Services, the third-party contractor the state sued for mismanaging the recovery program; and an anticipated $20.5 million appropriation by the state legislature in the current session.

Ruiz questioned why the state can’t appropriate additional funds to reimburse her and others, but state Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne said doing so would likely run afoul of the state constitution, which explicitly prohibits public money being “loaned, pledged or donated to or for any person.”

State Rep. Jerome Zeringue, R-Houma, chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, echoed Dardenne’s sentiments. The legislature could seek an opinion from the attorney general approving the appropriation of additional money, but there is a good chance such an opinion would be challenged and overturned by the courts, he said.

Asked whether the legislature is even considering such a move, Zeringue said, “It hasn’t been brought up until you asked about it.”

As part of the deal reached with the federal government, the state will also forgo receiving $37 million in unused Road Home funds from HUD. That money, however, can’t be used to reimburse those who already paid back their grants, a HUD spokesperson told the news organizations.

John Lovett, a professor at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, called the state’s argument “weak” and a “perversion” of the state constitutional clause’s true intent, which is to prevent the use of public funds for influence peddling and cronyism: “The state collected this money it really shouldn’t have collected in the first place.”

He said restoring funds to the 425 residents who paid back money under threat of being sued is “a kind of reparation that seems appropriate to me.” If the legislature were to authorize compensation, “that would be a perfectly legitimate use of state funds,” Lovett said.

Dardenne said that by dropping the lawsuits, the state was not admitting they were illegitimate or that the money was wrongfully collected. He pointed to numerous cases in which the courts ruled in the state’s favor and against homeowners as proof the suits were on solid legal ground. “If the premise had been faulty, then all the lawsuits would have been thrown out,” he said.

Nonetheless, Louisiana is certainly not short on money, entering the legislative session with a $1.5 billion surplus, Lovett said. At his February press conference about the suits, Edwards acknowledged this. "Thank goodness we have excess money in the state of Louisiana today, which we didn’t have when I became governor," he said.

New Orleans attorney Chris Szeto, who represented more than 300 families sued over their Road Home grants, said reimbursing homeowners who already repaid grants is exactly what the state should do.

“You can’t say to one group of people, ‘We don’t think you should have to pay this money back anymore.’ And to this other group, ‘All that money you paid? That’s too bad. We’re not giving it back,’” Szeto said. “It’s disgraceful. It’s morally wrong. And it shows a lack of concern for the average citizen.”

Szeto has not ruled out filing legal challenges on behalf of his clients the state refuses to reimburse. “We’re looking at all possible solutions,” he said.

Last May, just weeks after the news outlets reported on the lawsuits, the state announced that it was pausing collections. By that point it had received about $5 million. But it failed to notify homeowners who had ongoing monthly payment plans. So the checks continued to pour in, and Shows, Cali & Walsh — a law firm representing the state — continued to cash them, generating an additional $1.8 million, about a quarter of the total repaid by residents under threat of suit by the state.

The state has paid Shows, Cali & Walsh $11.1 million since 2009 to litigate claims of fraud and waste for all Road Home programs, including the elevation lawsuits.

Judy Baptiste started sending the state $400 a month in March 2018to pay down about $23,000 the state claimed she owed for misspending her elevation grant. It wasn’t easy, she said. Her sole source of income — Social Security payments — was less than $1,100 a month. After paying the state, she said, she rarely had enough left over for food or utilities and had to rely on friends and family to help her financially.

Still, she didn’t feel as if she had a choice.

“They just kept sending me letters in the mail, telling me that if I didn’t pay them that they would put a lien on my house,” she said of Shows, Cali & Walsh, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Even after the state paused its collection, Baptiste, who lives in Seabrook, a lakefront subdivision of New Orleans East, continued to make her regular payments, ultimately sending the state $3,083.38 after the announcement was made.

“I followed the rules. I was never late paying them on time, every month,” Baptiste said. “They never called and told me, ‘Ms. Baptiste, you have to stop paying.’ They just were taking the money.”

Angie and Kevin Tillman, who live in the Gentilly neighborhood in New Orleans, agreed to a plan that required them to make monthly payments of $250 for five years plus a balloon payment of about $15,000 at the end. She later learned the state had paused its collection efforts back in May, but afterwards still cashed four of their checks, totaling $1,000.

Her husband called the state’s actions “reprehensible.”

“The state held us hostage financially, and they would have continued to take our money and not said a mumbling word,” he said.

When asked why the state continued to accept monthly payments from homeowners after the state paused its collection efforts, Dardenne said those payment plans were court-ordered, so the state had no choice. “Those were legal judgments that had been rendered,” he said. “And so, we determined that we couldn’t stop what was in place. But we stopped everything going forward.”

But that wasn’t the case with either the Tillmans or Baptiste. The state never filed suit against them. Their payment plans were out-of-court agreements signed by notaries that said nothing about the state being required to accept the payments.

Lovett, the law professor, called the state’s argument that it couldn’t stop collecting monthly payments “very strange.” Any debt collector can choose to forgive a debt, he said.

“I think the argument about their inability to stop collecting, even on a court judgment, is just a technicality, is putting form over substance,” Lovett said. “There was no reason they should have continued to collect once they knew it was wrong because they stopped trying to pursue other people.”

Sitting in her one-story ranch-style home that was left submerged in 3 feet of water by Katrina, Angie Tillman questioned whether she and her husband made the right choice to stay in New Orleans after the storm.

“New Orleans is our home. We returned with a commitment to rebuild. We invested in our community. And then you come back and nickel-and-dime us?” Angie said. “It’s disheartening.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Richard A. Webster, Verite, and David Hammer, WWL-TV.

This article was produced in partnership with Verite, WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, which was part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2022. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The state of Louisiana is dropping thousands of lawsuits against homeowners who received grants to elevate their homes after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 but used the money to make repairs instead.

Many of those homeowners said they had been told by representatives of Road Home, the grant program, that they could use the money for repairs, according to an investigation by The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, WWL-TV and ProPublica.

“It’s about damn time,” said attorney Shermin Khan, who represented more than 50 of the 3,500 people who were sued over elevation grants.

Despite what homeowners were told, grant agreements said the money — federal grants that were managed by the state — had to be used to raise homes. Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to recoup grants that hadn’t been spent properly, the state sued homeowners, seeking repayment of $103 million.

Many of those sued were older and poor. Several homeowners preemptively declared bankruptcy, according to their attorneys. Others failed to defend themselves in court, so the state placed liens on their properties.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards announced that the lawsuits would be dropped as he joined federal and New Orleans leaders Thursday morning at a community center in the Lower Ninth Ward to mark the official end of the Road Home program, 17 years after it launched. It was the largest housing recovery effort in U.S. history.

Edwards acknowledged that the $30,000 grants were “insufficient in size to actually elevate people’s homes.” At the time, it typically cost at least three times as much to lift a house and put it onto raised footings.

“It’s been a miserable thing for the state of Louisiana to pursue these individuals because we knew the vast majority of them were never going to pay,” Edwards said.

Edwards said about 5,000 people were sued or could have been for being out of compliance with grant rules. That includes grants for repairs as well as for elevation.

Homeowners sued by the state were living a “nightmare,” HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said, worried they wouldn’t be able to pass their homes on to their children.

“I decided on my watch it was going to be over,” Fudge said. “The federal government is doing something that it has never done before for the people of Louisiana.”

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-La., said in an interview that the news outlets’ reporting was instrumental as he tried to convince Fudge to find a way to stop the collection efforts.

“A program that was designed to pull people out of the storm should not put them back into the storm,” Carter said. “Unfortunately, Road Home did that to many.”

Dropping the lawsuits will allow people to go on with their lives, he said. “This gives us an opportunity to at least remedy as best we can the mistakes that were made.”

The state will halt collection efforts related to all Road Home grants and drop any liens placed on homes through the litigation. But people who made partial or full payments will not be reimbursed, officials said.

“There’s only so much we can do,” Carter said. “There won’t be an opportunity for a refund if you’ve already paid back.”

The state paused collection efforts in May after the news outlets found that a law firm it hired had accelerated the pace of legal filings. By then the state had collected about $5 million from 425 families.

After an initial delay, the elevation grant program was launched in 2008, when the state sent letters to 40,000 homeowners telling them they could get $30,000 each to raise their houses to reduce flooding in the future. About 32,000 homeowners participated.

Once the state Office of Community Development received an application, it sent the money to homeowners, according to testimony in one of the lawsuits by Jeff Haley. He helped administer the elevation grant program as an official with ICF Emergency Management Services, the contractor Louisiana hired to run Road Home, from 2006 to 2009.

But no one double-checked before the money went out that homeowners were eligible or that their homes needed to be elevated, said Haley, who is now with the state Division of Administration. The state simply “didn’t have time,” he said. There was pressure to “get the funds out into the community as fast as possible.”

The state told the news organizations that it aimed the elevation grants at people whose homes were in flood-prone areas and who had already received another Road Home grant. It was up to homeowners to determine how much they needed to raise their homes, officials said; if they learned they were already at the correct height, they should have returned the money.

But when homeowners informed Road Home representatives, sometimes in writing, that they didn’t plan to elevate their houses, some were verbally told that they could use the money for repairs, according to eight families and eight attorneys representing more than 200 homeowners.

Wallace and Kristy Styron received a $30,000 elevation grant even though their home in southwestern Louisiana’s Cameron Parish was already above the required height. After the state sued them, Wallace Styron testified that he repeatedly told a Road Home representative that he didn’t need to raise his home and even said he had submitted paperwork to prove it. But the person insisted he accept the grant, he said, telling him he could use it for repairs.

A Road Home document outlining the benefits Styron initially qualified for, dated Dec. 2, 2006, said he was not eligible for an elevation grant. Forms for two other homeowners reviewed by the news organizations said the same. Another three homeowners indicated on forms that they didn’t want the elevation money. Yet all those homeowners received grants, and all were subsequently sued for repayment.

After HUD flagged many grants for being spent improperly, the state changed the rules twice between 2013 and 2015 to allow spending on repairs and other expenses. But by then, so much time had passed that many homeowners couldn’t prove how they had used the money.

HUD considered those to be overpayments and would not close out the Road Home program until Louisiana returned the money. Though state officials told the news organizations in 2022 they didn’t want to sue their fellow citizens, they had been paying attorneys to do just that for about five years.

Days after the news outlets published their investigation, local elected officials and housing advocates called on the state to drop the lawsuits. Two weeks later, Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne announced he was ordering a pause to all collection efforts. He said the state had reached a settlement in a related lawsuit against ICF over how it managed Road Home, and that negotiations had begun with HUD to accept money from that settlement instead of homeowners.

ICF did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but spokesperson Lauren Dyke said in May the firm “worked within the policies put in place by the state.”

The state plans to use $12 million from the ICF settlement to pay off its debt to HUD, plus an anticipated $20.5 million appropriation by the state Legislature and $37 million in unused Road Home funds.

Cameron Parish attorney Jennifer Jones said the elevation lawsuits were a nightmare for her clients. She won four lawsuits in which homeowners testified that Road Home representatives told them they could use the grants to fix their homes, only to be sued later for doing so.

The majority of elevation grants were for properties in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color, as were the lawsuits that followed, according to an analysis by the news outlets.

The $30,000 the state sought from her clients “might as well be $1 million,” Jones said. “They just don’t have it.”

Gentilly homeowner Donna Hilliard was ecstatic to hear the judgment the state filed against her for her $30,000 elevation grant would go no further and the lien against her house would be canceled. She said she was intimidated into making two monthly installment payments of $250 by attorneys working for the state, but she decided to stand her ground after sharing her story with the news organizations.

Pat Forbes, executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development, which oversaw the Road Home program, said in May he has “no reason to believe” the state’s attorneys threatened anyone or insinuated the state would take their home.

Celeste Matthews, 68, received $30,000 to raise her Gert Town home and was later sued when she failed to do so. The same day she was featured in the news story detailing the lawsuits, the law firm representing the state notified her that it would pursue a default judgment against her, which could result in a lien on her property. Matthews was facing financial ruin.

Upon hearing the news that the state was dropping the lawsuits, Matthews said: “Thank you, Jesus, thank you. I am elated. Now I can relax.”

If you received a Road Home elevation grant and have already repaid the money, we'd like to hear from you. Contact Rich Webster at Verite.

Mark Ballard of The Times-Picayune | The Advocate contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by David Hammer, WWL-TV, and Richard A. Webster, Verite.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Rebuilding a home in a poor neighborhood can cost a lot more than the house is worth on paper. So after Hurricane Katrina, when the U.S. government decided that home values would factor into rebuilding grants, it left many Louisiana homeowners short.

Why the federal government required that has long been a mystery. It had rarely, if ever, allowed home values to be used to calculate rebuilding aid after a disaster. It doesn’t allow it anymore.

But it did for Katrina. That formula hurt poor neighborhoods, most of which in New Orleans were majority Black, according to an investigation published this week by WWL-TV, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, and ProPublica.

Now, the news organizations have pieced together what led officials to use home values to calculate aid for Road Home, the largest housing recovery program in U.S. history. In Congress and the White House, leaders were worried about federal spending and how Louisiana corruption would come into play, the news outlets found.

So when Louisiana officials negotiated with congressional leaders and the White House, they settled on pre-storm value as a way to achieve two goals: Help Louisiana rebuild after an unprecedented disaster, but limit the size of the check.

In doing so, they created a system in which many poor homeowners would get less money than they needed to rebuild, perpetuating long-standing inequities in New Orleans.

“The tension was always, are the American taxpayers paying more than what the value was worth and what the current market held?” said Don Powell, President George W. Bush’s coordinator of Gulf Coast rebuilding.

“One man’s accountability,” he said, “is another man’s red tape.”

The back-to-back 2005 hurricanes of Katrina and Rita devastated south Louisiana, damaging or destroying 305,000 housing units. Most homeowners didn’t have sufficient insurance to cover all rebuilding costs. Louisiana leaders were concerned that without a massive injection of federal housing aid, communities would never recover.

In December 2005, Congress allocated $11.6 billion to Louisiana and Mississippi. Louisiana got $6.2 billion, of which state leaders said they would use about $4.5 billion to rebuild owner-occupied housing.

Those leaders said that wasn’t enough even to start a housing recovery program; the Louisiana Recovery Authority estimated it needed at least $14 billion to run what would later become Road Home.

State officials worked to convince the federal government to give them more. Powell was the intermediary.

“I was a fiduciary trying to represent the American taxpayer and trying to make sure that the people along the Gulf Coast were taken care of,” said Powell, now 81 and retired.

The negotiations were intense, he recalled, in part because of the fraught relationship between then-Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, and the Republicans who controlled the White House and Congress. Blanco, who died in 2019, had complained loudly when GOP-led Mississippi got almost half of the initial aid package, despite having just 20% of the damaged housing units.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., presented the biggest obstacle to getting more money, former Powell aide Taylor Beery said. Just days after Katrina, Hastert suggested large parts of New Orleans should be “bulldozed” and said spending billions of dollars to rebuild the city “doesn’t make sense to me.” (He later backtracked, saying he meant the city should be rebuilt in a way that protected residents.)

Louisiana’s reputation for graft also worked against it, according to former LRA officials. State leaders repeatedly promised to be good stewards of federal aid.

Beery and former LRA staffer Adam Knapp said factoring in the value of homes was raised in a series of meetings as a way to limit the price tag.

In January 2006, Powell said, three LRA board members — Xavier University President Norman Francis, shipbuilder Boysie Bollinger and investment banker David Voelker — went to Powell’s home in Amarillo, Texas, to make their case for more money.

Powell recalled that “several folks,” including “some staff members in Congress,” suggested using homes’ pre-storm value to limit grants. He doesn’t know exactly who first mentioned it, because federal and state staffers had already addressed a lot of those details beforehand.

Bollinger, a Republican who acted as a liaison between the Bush and Blanco teams, confirmed that pre-storm value was first brought up during those tense negotiations, but he doesn’t remember who raised it. Francis, who is 91, was not available to comment, and Voelker died in 2013.

Powell indicated there was no discussion about how using pre-storm value could lead to unequal impacts. “I think that’s one of the misfires,” he said.

When Louisiana leaders returned from Texas, they had a commitment from Congress to provide $4.2 billion more in recovery aid. Combined with the initial appropriation, Louisiana now had enough to run a $7.5 billion housing recovery program. (It ended up being a $10 billion program.)

LRA Executive Director Andy Kopplin and Walter Leger, who headed the LRA’s housing task force, introduced the housing plan a month later, in February 2006, with a presentation that read, “Louisiana contributes up to pre-storm value” to cover home repairs.

Without another disaster program to model it on, Leger said the LRA took cues from the Victim Compensation Fund set up after the Sept. 11 terror attacks — which was also designed to compensate people for their losses.

In order to get money to people as quickly as possible — and follow federal rules — Louisiana officials ended up compensating people for their losses even before they rebuilt, rather than reimbursing them for repairs as work was completed. HUD had to issue a waiver from its disaster aid rules to allow Louisiana and Mississippi to do that.

When HUD later approved similar waivers for Louisiana and Texas after hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, the Federal Register entry said there was little data on how compensation money had been used during previous programs. The only examples it cited were the programs run by Mississippi and Louisiana after Katrina and Rita.

The U.S. government now forbids state and local governments from using HUD’s disaster recovery grants to compensate people for losses after a disaster, so home values are no longer a factor. Since 2010, HUD has required states to reimburse people for approved expenses, including repairs.

HUD made that decision after it and Louisiana settled a federal lawsuit in which Black homeowners and housing advocates alleged discrimination by Road Home.

“After the Road Home settlement, HUD made the decision that, for future disasters, it would not permit its recipients of disaster relief to distribute ‘compensation for loss’ directly to homeowners as an eligible use of that money,” De’Marcus Finnell, deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said in a written statement.

“HUD and other federal partners recognized the shortcomings of the federal response in Louisiana,” Finnell said, “and have worked to improve those programs in the 15 years since.”

Even after Road Home launched, the LRA changed how it would calculate grants several times, which resulted in larger grants. Each formula still capped initial awards at a home’s pre-storm value.

Under the final formula, approved in November 2006, damage assessments would be done on every home. Grants would be based on the home’s pre-storm value or its damage assessment, whichever was lower. Road Home would subtract any payments from insurance or FEMA, plus a penalty for those who didn’t have insurance. The maximum award was $150,000.

In interviews, former LRA board members and staffers said they realized factoring in home values would mean some people would get more help than others, but they thought an affordable loan program for low- to middle-income homeowners — later converted to a grant — would eliminate the gaps.

The news organizations’ analysis of state data found those additional grants helped. But even with that extra money, people in the poorest areas of New Orleans had to cover an average of 30% of their rebuilding costs after Road Home, FEMA aid and insurance. In the wealthiest areas, where residents had far more resources to draw on, the shortfall was 20%.

The state Office of Community Development took issue with the analysis, but none of the points it raised affected the news organizations’ findings. Leger and Kopplin said they found the findings troubling.

The first to make waves criticizing how grants were calculated was Melanie Ehrlich, a genetics professor at Tulane University School of Medicine. She had founded a grassroots organization, Citizens Road Home Action Team, to advocate for Road Home applicants.

In October 2006, she emailed Leger to ask him to allow applicants to choose whether their grants would be based on pre-storm value or the cost of rebuilding. By then, nine months had passed since that meeting in Amarillo.

Leger shot her down, saying the Road Home “has always contained a grant cap of the lesser of pre-storm value or $150,000.” He wrote, “Neither the limited budget nor time would allow for change in the cap.”

Later that month, Ehrlich sent Leger and other officials a chart showing that using pre-storm value on homes with lower appraisals meant people who needed the most help “are given the least help.”

Leger said he agreed and took her complaint to HUD officials. He got HUD to allow the state to include land values in property appraisals, but he said the agency still insisted that initial calculations had to be capped at the property value.

At the next LRA meeting in December 2006, Leger reported that HUD had insisted on limiting grants to pre-storm value, according to board minutes.

“This wasn’t and isn’t the way America should fund major disaster recovery,” Knapp said in an interview. Political battles led to budget shortfalls in Road Home, he said, and “budget was always the problem to the program design.”

Leger said he didn’t remember any of the 16 other LRA board members, including the eight Black members, ever raising concerns about inequitable impacts of the grant formula.

Two Black former board members, Francis and Virgil Robinson Jr., said in 2010 they never realized the formula could end up being discriminatory. This month, another Black former board member, Calvin Mackie, said he raised concerns about using home values but they were lost in the shuffle.

“Everyone was rushing to get a workable solution,” he said, “and get the money out the door.”

His father, whose home in the Gentilly neighborhood flooded in Katrina, didn’t get anything from Road Home, he said. “My dad died in the process of fighting for the money, and in the end we got $0,” Mackie said. “For me, it’s real. I’m still living it.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by David Hammer, WWL-TV.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

We look at the life and legacy of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91. Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991 and has been credited internationally with bringing down the Iron Curtain, helping to end the Cold War and reducing the risk of nuclear war. Inside Russia, many say his policies led to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse in the standard of living for millions. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation and a friend to Gorbachev, remembers him as a “believer in independent journalism” and credits him with introducing the “fairest and freest presidential and parliamentary elections to Russia.” Joining us from Moscow, Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, says she knew Gorbachev as “an absolute democrat in comparison to anybody who came before him, including Nikita Khrushchev,” and his policies allowed her the freedom to pursue her academic career in the U.S. as a Russian expat.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Russian missiles struck Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv for the first time in over a month on Sunday. This comes as Russian and Ukrainian forces continue to battle over control of the eastern city of Severodonetsk and Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning Western nations against supplying longer-range missile systems to Ukraine. “The longer this war goes on, the much more difficult it is to end it,” says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine and columnist for The Washington Post. Vanden Heuvel says U.S. corporate media is responsible for what she calls a “one-sided debate” on Ukraine, which is greenlighting unprecedented spending on weapons over the importance of negotiations.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post The Loop Current, a Fueler of Monster Hurricanes, is Looking a Lot Like It Did in 2005, the Year of Katrina appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Shay.

The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, who has reported on Russia for decades, says many observers were “shocked” that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, calling it an “indefensible” decision. President Biden ordered strong sanctions on Russia in response, but he has also heeded critics’ warnings not to send troops to Ukraine in order to avoid a world war. Vanden Heuvel says that it’s vital that instead of further military escalation, there be a “diplomatic escalation” to resolve the crisis and end the war.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As President Biden warns of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, France has secured a commitment from both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet at a summit in an effort to defuse the escalating tension. We speak to veteran journalist Katrina vanden Heuvel, whose latest article for The Washington Post, “A path out of the Ukraine crisis,” argues both leaders must work to avoid a catastrophic war. “There’s a bluffing that could be taken more lightly, except this is the most dangerous confrontation between the United States, NATO and Russia in decades,” says vanden Heuvel.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.