Yes, I have been extremely wayward in my blogging duties.

For the few of you who actually read this, I have decided to forego my blogging of the trip to the Brown land. Why? Because the next few days are extremely depressing posts detailing my fathers funeral and for now I'd like to stay out of therapy and subject all of you to it - no "Read my pain!" blogs right now. I know I will need some sort of therapy somewhere down the road for all the shitstorms I've faced in my life, but I have to remember that few of you are licensed therapists and after the trauma of the past few months, I need to pay all of you and my incredible support group and frankly, I don't have that kind of dough. Besides, I need something to talk to my future therapist about.

So some of you might actually say, "But why, Monkee, I've been very interested in your stories from the homeland?!" And I will answer, yes, someday I will scribe stories about the Philippines that will make you laugh and cry. But not today.

Things have been very hectic for me out here in the past few weeks. But there's big news: I HAVE A NEW JOB. Effective sometime they unclog the papers from the hopper in AFSCME Land. Those AFSCME employees who read this know what I mean. Basically, my old boss got a new job in DC and they needed someone to replace her. And I was the lucky one. So I expect in the next few days to be shuffled off to Buffalo (I've always wanted to say that, sort of) to work on the Mayor's race.

Right. I didn't actually tell you what I was going to be doing.

Basically, I'm moving to Albany. I'm still with AFSCME and this is a great position for a New Yorker like myself. I'll still be working on campaigns and doing the talking with legislators thing, except I get a fancy new title, pay raise, a hell of a lot more stability, a home base, and traveling mostly around my home state and the state I love the best (Maryland is a close second). So I'm excited for the new opportunity and to get back to the place I know very well and keep fighting the man.

Speaking of...

I've been busy because last week was a big week of activity for us left-of-center kids. So in usual Keeza fashion, I'm reclaiming my soapbox. I promise it won't be long. Too long, anyway.

See, with Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast and finally some honest discussion about the differences in economics (i.e. Poor People in this country who were left to fend for themselves during one of the worst hurricanes in history), we at AFSCME and other like-minded groups are rallying around the country to push the House and Senate to stop their assault on low-income and hard-working families with further budget cuts to essential programs such as food stamps and Medicaid and fighting against the $70 million in tax cuts to the wealthiest 2% of Americans.

Hi, I've been speechwriting for a week. Can you tell?

So we planned big "Speak-Out" events in targeted states across the country and AFSCME found members in Louisiana affected by the storm and these Katrina survivors agreed to travel across the country to tell their stories. It was amazing.

So we had this awesome survivor up in Delaware for a week - we had the luxury of spending lots of time with Michele. And finding her a wonderful and positive person, we felt okay to ask her some questions about Katrina and what happened, etc.
I found my Coro interview skills well at hand spending time with her. I found out some really important information about what actually happened on the ground out there. And it's the story we aren't hearing.

Before I actually get up on the soapbox to shake my fist at the Administration and Republican Leadership, I'm saving that for the next post. Let's just say that after last week and finding some free time on my hands ironing my laundry from two months, I've been watching a lot of Bill Maher.

Instead, I choose to impart this knowledge from Michele directly to you and then next post, I'll get into the usual ranting and raving. Mmmmkay?

So we took Michele to lunch and as usual, got on the topic of politics and the right. This was where we started asking the good questions. Here's what she told us:

1. Yes, the Administration and FEMA are definitely at fault. But the folks in Louisiana who were there will also give lots of criticism to the Mayor and the Governor. There's plenty of blame to go around. The folks in "power" in New Orleans made bad decisions and the President was too busy clearing bush on his ranch to be bothered. They all know this and they will be the first to say that blame starts with the Mayor of New Orleans, the Governor of Louisiana, the President of the United States, and FEMA. There's no other way to look at it. No blame can be assigned to one party or the other. Tragedies of this kind are usually the fault of many people failing to react in the proper ways.

2. Many people who stuck around New Orleans weren't just too lazy or too poor to get out of town. Many of them had reasons for staying, amongst them: family members in the hospital, entire lives wrapped around their homes, and the obvious: by the time they realized how bad it was going to be, it was too late. And here's where it becomes the problem of economic divide - people didn't have the means to get out quick enough before it hit. Nor were the resources available for them to leave.

3. The Mayor and Governor decided not to use all the school buses at their advantage. By the time the storm hit, the buses were under several feet of water and couldn't get out. So all those people who might have had a chance were never given a choice.

4. The day after Katrina hit and the levees broke, the water was rising rapidly - something we have all heard. But by this time, Army trucks had already started going around. At the point Michele saw them, she was up to her chest in water (and she's tall) and her and her husband were on top of their SUV, calling out to the folks in the trucks to come and help them. And get this: their answer was, "Sorry, we're not allowed to do that."

I'll just let that one sit for a minute.

5. The helicopters were only rescuing folks one at a time, unlike what their actual capacities can handle, which is drop a net and get several people to safety quickly. Why? No one really knows or understands, but the process was extremely slow and could have been much quicker (this is information we probably all know, but hearing it from someone on the ground confirms it).

I'm trying to remember all of the stuff, but here's the most fascinating and in my mind, egregious one:

6. Think this whole "poor" discussion about Katrina is bull? When the Army Corps was deciding which levees to blow up to alleviate the problem of the rising water and to let the water out, they made an interesting choice. Now many of us were relieved to hear that the French Quarter was not badly damaged. BECAUSE THEY MADE A CONSCIOUS DECISION, NOT BECAUSE IT IS ON HIGHER GROUND. Instead of blowing the levee above the French Quarter to help drain the water, they opted for the levee below it. The problem is the levee below it was keeping a lot of water out of East New Orleans, known as a very poor part of town. They made the decision to blow the lower levee, causing the water to flow out and further damage the area of town where they knew a majority of folks who didn't get out of town were. So in case you're unsure: INSTEAD OF SACRIFICING THE FRENCH QUARTER TO FURTHER DAMAGE AND PROBABLY SAVE MORE LIVES AND POSSIBLY PROPERTY, THEY DECIDED TO INSTEAD FURTHER DAMAGE THE FOLKS HARDEST HIT BY THE STORM AND LET THEM FEND FOR THEMSELVES.

I am not making any of this up. I know that the situation down there was dire and terrible, but looking at the decision-making process, one has to start asking some serious questions. Because I promise you, if this was Beverly Hills, or an affluent suburb of Michigan, I seriously doubt these decisions would be different. The difference would be that those folks who had the money would have been gone and they would have saved Rodeo Drive and wiped out Compton instead. I realize they're not in the same area, but you know what I mean.

It's like when they were cutting the budget in New York after 9/11 and got rid of the twice a week garbage pick ups in parts of Manhattan. Where did they cut the trash pickup from two to one first? Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, and parts of Harlem, USA. Basically anywhere the minorities and poorer New Yorkers live in neighborhoods. I asked then if such decision making was right and I ask again now.

And with the President and leading Republicans so good at the spin game, pointing the fingers and moving the discussion from poverty to "rebuilding" and "economic development" is it not hard to see what their plans are actually going to do? If the President has his way and creates these "economic zones" and "development zones" in rebuilt New Orleans, what happens to the 9th Ward (the Democratic stronghold in a mostly lower-income area)? What happens to the people who have had land in New Orleans from the sharecropping days handed down to them by generations of family who are technically just above the poverty line (a line they keep moving down to empirically state that poverty is on the decline)? They won't be able to afford "rebuilt New Orleans" at all, will they? And where do they go?

Katrina offers us a chance to make things better and to fix the problems. It shed light on the most stubborn residues of racism - economic inequality. And because of the turn in discussion, it was the shortest attention to poverty in this crazy 24-hour news cycle. I know it's depressing to talk about such things, but it is our biggest chance in decades to have an honest discussion about it.

And it shames me to know that it's already slipped many of our minds. Because we all know too well what happens when our attention moves from an honest discussion about poverty to Tomkitten.

I think it's up to all of us who really want change next year to fight to keep it in the forefront. We've got another storm approaching soon and can we please finally talk again about Global Warming? The President and the Republican leadership are finally getting slammed. When Ann Coulter (who is a man) and Andrew Sullivan say they can't trust the president again, we gotta push the issue. And we need to find the right voices to do it - I'm not afraid to pick fights with my own party here, either.

It's time to step to the plate, friends. And not let them forget it.

Oh. And Tom Cruise is gay, anyway. This whole Tomkitten thing was said best by SF this evening: "Either Katie Holmes is about to have an alien anti-christ child or it's gonna come out looking like Chris Klein because she's just Tom's beard." 'Nuff said. Let's get it off the front page now. And get back to the things that really matter.

Back soon to get on the soapbox, I'm just getting started.

That wasn't so long, was it?

Take care of yourselves. And each other.