After Katrina

Full coverage of the New Orleans disaster and its aftermath

Photo: AP/Wide World Photos

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Post-Katrina Aftermath: In Absence of Oversight, Reconstruction Workers Became Another Casualty
By Brian Beutler
After Katrina, the Bush administration relaxed worker protection rules, allowing companies tasked with rebuilding New Orleans to become predators in a lawless environment. Part one of a two-part series.
July 16, 2007

Post-Katrina Aftermath: How the Labor Department Fell Down on the Job
By Brian Beutler
The nation’s worker protection agency has been in slow decline for a generation, the consequences of which were evident in New Orleans, where predatory reconstruction employers were allowed to thrive. The conclusion of a two-part series.
July 18, 2007

Why Are They Making New Orleans a Ghost Town?
By Bill Quigley
The longer the poor and working class stay away, the more likely it is they’ll never return.
October 31, 2005

Hard Questions About the Big Easy
By Paul Rogat Loeb
The New Orleans disaster could yet change American politics—but only if we keep talking about it
October 31, 2005

Mother Jones Radio: America’s Least Wanted
Does the government want the poor back in New Orleans?
October 30, 2005

Gentrifying Disaster
By Mike Davis
In New Orleans: Ethnic Cleansing, GOP-Style
October 25, 2005

Hurricane Anything!
Cartoon by Mark Fiore
Thanks to hurricanes, you can do anything!
October 19, 2005

The Other Hurricane
By Mike Davis
Has the Age of Chaos begun?
October 7, 2005

Bayou Farewell
Mike Tidwell Interviewed By Erik Kancler
The Louisiana Bayou has been sinking for years, and now it’s almost gone—taking New Orleans and Cajun culture with it.
October 3, 2005

The Mysteries of New Orleans
By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot
Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy
September 28, 2005

A Category-Five Q&A from “Pond Zero”
By Bill Santiago
My exclusive interview with an anonymous high-ranking senior official
September 28, 2005

Katrina and Deficits: Right Topic, Wrong Questions
By Gene Sperling
What about the much worse fiscal damage done by Bush’s economic policies?
September 22, 2005

A Failed State
By JoAnn Wypijewski
With government unmasked as a hollow giant, and both parties equally accommodated to poverty in the midst of plenty, is it any wonder people look to God?
September 18, 2005

Corporations of the Whirlwind
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
The Bush-friendly companies that ate Iraq are preparing to do the same in New Orleans.
September 14, 2005

No Exit
By Alison Stein Wellner
Disaster evacuation plans throughout the US assume that people own a car. Too bad for the 23 million Americans who don’t.
September 13, 2005

We’re not counting on the government to take care of us anymore
By David Enders
Following Hurricane Katrina evacuees out of New Orleans.
September 12, 2005

A Moral Moment
By Al Gore
The Bible says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The Bush administration has no vision. So the people perish.
September 12, 2005

Mother Jones Radio: Katrina’s Lessons
What has the political saga around Hurricane Katrina taught politicians, the media, and American citizens?
September 11, 2005

Katrina’s Children
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Kids displaced by the hurricane shouldn’t be dumped into failing schools.
September 9, 2005

Choose to Make a Difference
By Arthur I. Blaustein
The disaster in New Orleans makes at least one thing clear — the importance of serving our communities and being there for one another.
September 8, 2005

Surviving New Orleans
By David Enders
Residents still stranded in the city — many of them poor, many of them minorities — find ways to scrape by.
September 7, 2005

Whoopsi Gras!
Cartoon by Mark Fiore
It’s a Carnival of Ineptitude. Come See the Parade!
September 7, 2005

Sucker’s Bets for the New Century
By Bill McKibben
The U.S. After Katrina
September 7, 2005

New Orleans: Iraq in America
By Tom Engelhardt
The Perfect Storm and the Feral City
September 5, 2005

Mother Jones Radio: Why Was Katrina’s Impact So Huge?
Despite what President Bush says, a disaster on the Gulf Coast has been predicted for years.
September 4, 2005

9/11 in New Orleans
By Paul Rogat Loeb
This time, will we draw the right lessons from a tragic disaster?
September 2, 2005

Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?

By Will Bunch
Times-Picayune Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues
September 1, 2005

Katrina’s Real Name
By Ross Gelbspan
It’s Global Warming
August 30, 2005

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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