Author's Note: Dispatches From Disaster will be Sean West's posts from New Orleans. All comments will be routed to him through Greg Kato.

Today we cleaned out Keith's house along the same avenue as Eddie's. Keith is a mid-thirties white security guard with both ears pierced, who grew up in the house we were tasked to clean out. Unlike Eddie's house, Keith's had not been touched since the hurricane seven months ago--making for more work but also telling a story with each room entered.

Water gets into everything. It seeps into all nooks and crannies, invading all it touches. And once the water recedes, mold grows and it develops this stench... we inhaled an indescribable stench. I couldn’t place it until later when I was talking to the owner. He had six dogs, five of which did not make it with him out. They had survived in the house for a while before eventually perishing before he returned. This is what made up the one inch layer of what we thought was mud in the back of the house. We were smelling a combination of brackish water, feces, mold, and dead animal. It was the smell of death...

Author's Note: Dispatches From Disaster will be Sean West's posts from New Orleans. All comments will be routed to him through Greg Kato.

For those of us who still read newspaper stories about Katrina victims (many begin to block out catastrophes after a measured level of mourning), there a few common themes: Looting, unemployment, insurance hassles, FEMA ineptitude, destroyed lives and feeling of helplessness. It adds texture to have one of these individuals in front of you telling the story.

Enter Eddie: A tall African-American in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a forlorn smile.

Today has been filled with great experiences. We met Eddie, an electrician and homeowner who had water up to two inches below the ceiling on his ground floor. We learned about how he built the back addition to his house and the care he used in building it to withstand the forces of nature. We also got a taste of the frustration and anger people are feeling down here from the perspective of our host.

Hello from the Camp Algiers Internet Café in New Orleans, LA!

Arrived in New Orleans today for a Spring Break helping folks who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. A classmate at GSPP has been working with Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN for the semester. She had kindly hosted us for some home gutting and meeting folks affected by this disaster.

I’m eager to get started.

The Chinese growth miracle can’t last forever. But it may last long enough to slaughter some sacred cows about the relationship between democracy and economic growth.

Marco Antonio Firebaugh, a former California Assemblyman, died on Tuesday March 21 at the age of 39 after a long illness. His obituary can be found here.

Firebaugh was chair of the Latino Caucus and majority leader in the Assembly before being termed out in 2004. He had planned on running for Senate this year.

He was a UC Berkeley graduate in 1990 and spent time as a staffer for Richard Polanco before embarking on his own political careeer.

The College Board recently disclosed that about 4000 students received incorrect scores from the October sitting of the SAT Reasoning Test.

Oops.

Of course, the incident has generated outrage from students and parents. While I agree that it is completely unfair that students get the wrong grade, I'm a bit cynical. Systematic differences (as in across racial or socioeconomic groups) are routinely written off as sour grapes.

In one of my favorite episodes of Sports Night, Robert Guillaume’s character said that he didn’t worry that money he gave to the a panhandler would be spent on beer. In fact he hoped it would be spent on beer because he didn’t have any illusions about his dollar changing that person’s life. That attitude strikes me now as blind to half the problem. What can be done to change the life for about the same amount of money.

A few months ago I heard about a program that gives free voice mail to the homeless to help them find jobs. Fifteen years ago Community Voice Mail started in Seattle realized that one of the greatest barriers to lifting yourself off the streets is the difficultly in getting a job. When a potential employer can’t get in touch with the applicant, her chances of getting the job disappear. The same holds for when she reveals her homeless. An employer’s discrimination against homelessness may be based on a firmer foundation than gender and racial discrimination. I especially like how the strategy helps obscure the person’s negative characteristics.

If we’re lucky, the death of Slobodan Milosevic will bring renewed American and European focus on the fate of the western Balkans, which is still recovering from the dictator’s deadly legacy. After 10 years of battlefield defeats, genocide, repression, and warlordism, Serbians overthrew the Butcher of the Balkans amid street protests in 2001. Milosevic died humiliated in a Dutch prison, on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The region faces still lingering ethnic and religious tension; and any final resolution of the region’s political conflict is still some ways off.

Cuts to student aid passed by Congress in February has created a storm of backlash. The Budget Reconciliation Act of 2005 barely passed due to concerns about how it achieved $39 billion in federal savings. In addition to cutting Medicaid and Medicare, students and parents will face $12 billion more in student aid costs.

Stafford Student loans will go from variable rates to a 6.8% fixed rate, the highest rate since 2001. PLUS Parent loans will go to 8.5%. The Act also reduces incentives for lenders.

Perhaps most unpopular is that the federal savings from the Act will go to deficit reduction. With the tax cuts on the books, it lends the appearance of students and parents being asked to pay for tax cuts to the rrich. Not usually a winning proposition.

While watching the Academy Awards tonight, the President of the AAMPS mentioned that six movies are being filmed in New Orleans employing over 600 locals. It was news to me. I wouldn't have thought of filmmaking as part of the recovery effort. But just like tourism it was (is?) a flourishing source of revenue in the city. At the state level is the Governor's Office of Film & TV, appropriately part of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, and the city has the same bureaucracy. The state offers tax incentives to productions that spend over $250,000 in Louisiana within a 12 month period. One of interesting conditions is that the production must pay all state sales tax on purchases made in connection with production. Without knowing more about the LA tax system I won't venture a guess as to how the city of New Orlaesns shares the revenue. But of course production revenue doesn't stop with tax revenue, since the crew takes full advantage of local economy.