Bush lied? What a surprise! (And kudos to the LA Times for covering a story the rest of our "free press" seems anxious to drop down the memory hole. No celebs involved, I guess).

Prospects for a quick municipal comeback peaked 17 days after the hurricane and flood, when Bush stood before St. Louis Cathedral in historic Jackson Square and told a national television audience that "there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again."

So, downhill after the first 17 days? We should have known the big weenie was coming. And what's the brand writ large on the big weenie's wrapper? Privatization.

What Bush said would be one of the largest public reconstruction efforts ever is becoming a private affair, leaving the tough choices to residents as their risks increase.

Is privatization going to rebuild New Orleans? Ask a Nobel prize winner.

"There is no market solution to New Orleans," said Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland, who won this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of the complicated bargaining behavior that underpins everything from simple sales to nuclear confrontations.

"It essentially is a problem of coordinating expectations," Schelling said of the task that Vignaud and her neighbors must grapple with. "If we all expect each other to come back, we will. If we don't, we won't.

"But achieving this coordination in the circumstances of New Orleans,'' he said, "seems impossible."

The situation in which residents find themselves is an extreme example of a trend underway for a quarter-century, a shift of economic risk from business and government to working families, and an increasing reliance on free markets to manage society's problems.

Safety nets such as unemployment compensation, employer-provided healthcare insurance and pensions, and, recently, effective disaster relief have been reeled in or removed. Increasingly, families from the working poor to the affluent are left largely to buy and sell their own way to safety even when their individual efforts seem utterly outgunned, as they do in the case of Katrina.

"There are classes of problems that free markets simply do not deal with well," Schelling said. "If ever there was an example, the rebuilding of New Orleans is it."

And why does Schelling say this?

According to Schelling, the key to making almost any kind of human activity work is "credible commitments." Buyers must make them to sellers. Governments must make them to citizens. Nations must make them to each other.

The credible commitment that virtually every resident of New Orleans wants more than any other is a pledge from the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild the levee system bigger and better than before Katrina.

"If they put back good levees to the [Category 3] level authorized before Katrina and we can get a commitment to build them slowly up to Category 5, people will come back," said Walter Isaacson, a News Orleans native, former editor of Time magazine, former chairman of CNN and co-chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, a new state board appointed by Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to oversee reconstruction. "It won't be a purely rational decision, but they'll come."

A credible commitment from a Republican? After Iraq? After the tax cuts for the rich? After Florida 2000? Please.

Remember Florence Jackson's question:

For 66 days now, 62-year-old Florence Jackson has been waiting for help from FEMA.
"I worked all my life," she says. "Where is my government? I'm so disappointed."

Boy, the Republicans must be having a good laugh at that one! Worked all her life? Work is for suckers!

Where's your government? Your government was drowned in the bathtub by Republicans. They said that's what they were going to so, and they did it.

Hey, build some company towns for the port and the refineries, put the refugees in trailers, then sell the French Quarter to Disney! What more do you need?