Katrina Plus Ten

How time flies. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, here are some developments I’m sure we all could have predicted ten years ago.

1. Hundreds of crooks and grifters soaked up Katrina relief money. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

2. Whites got a lot more help from relief money than blacks. Inequality really is built into the system. See also Why New Orleans’s Black Residents Are Still Underwater After Katrina.

3. Since so many schools were damaged in the storm, the for-profit school grifters moved in and took over the school system. Since then there’s been all kinds of  happy talk about how well this is going, along with the occasional story about New Orleans kids being taught that cave men lived alongside dinosaurs. A New Orleans mother and educator complains that what New Orleans really got was colonialism, not reform.