From the Institute for Southern Studies

An interactive feature in the New York Times looks at life in New Orleans over the past two years, since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and the region.

While ILCA takes place in New Orleans, city residents will go to the polls Oct. 20 to elect a new city council member.

August 31st Broadcast from Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans, August 30th New Orleans School Privatization

National Public Radio interviews FEMA trailer park residents who feel isolated and abandoned.

Seven thousand workers at defense company Northrop Grumman's Pascagoula, Mississippi shipyard went on strike March 8, following their rejection of the company's proposed contract. . . .

When the New Orleans levees broke in those awful early days after Hurricane Katrina, the country was riveted to its TV's watching a slow moving disaster unfold before our eyes.

Two years after Katrina, the Gulf Coast is still recovering, and thousands of personal stories remain unheard. Experience them here. Tell us yours.

25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes About Hurricane Katrina And Its Aftermath

How AFT members worked over the summer on projects in New Orleans

The New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice was founded after Katrina/Rita in response to the stark exclusion of African American workers and the brutal exploitation of immigrant workers.

Apparently, it took Hurricane Katrina to get America talking about race and politics--and revolution.

Who will pity the soulless Republican Party now that Katrina is mauling their regime?

Cornel West says to recover from Katrina, we need a "Marshall Plan for the South."

"Magic" Johnson may have summed it up best: "Bush is a travesty."

A man who spent five days on the streets after Hurricane Katrina describes what he saw.

The AFL-CIO, two SEIU locals and allies including the NAACP staged a mass rally in Baton Rouge in 2005 to blast worker abuse in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

The New Orleans Survivor Council leads citizens in the fight to save their homes and their livelihoods.

Two retirees from Duluth, Minnesota, lend their muscles and their expertise to the Hurricane Katrina rebuilding effort.

Hands hired to clean up the Big Easy have been subjected to wage theft, exposure to dangerous substances, layoffs, tough discipline and discrimination

A columnist for the Louisiana Weekly lays out the steps that were -- and were not taken -- to destroy New Orleans.

After Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, construction companies have squeezed billions out of federal contracts with few labor regulations and almost no oversight, allowing outrageous worker abuses to occur.

To draw attention to the flood protection inequity, several hundred neighbor residents and labor activists will form a human levee along the canal’s bank.

A special report on Katrina and education.

Robert Jackson's house looks like a skeleton. Yellow joists stand out like pale exposed ribs against a background of his neighbor's dingy white and grey house. "I want you to move here," the 34-year-old general contractor says with a lopsided grin. "New Orleans is a great place to live!"

Poetry about the New Orleans experience.

As Katrina's waters began receding, leaving bloated corpses and ruined dreams in their fetid wake, not everyone mourned. Tod Linberg, editor of the right-wing flagship "intellectual" journal Policy Review rejoiced.

The federal government has promised more than $116 billion in recovery aid, but residents of the still-devastated Gulf Coast wonder whether the check bounced.

Incorrect report cards weren't the worst problem at Joseph T. Clark High School, one of approximately twenty-five schools that were operated during the past school year by the State of Louisiana in the so-called Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans.

This short YouTube video makes the case for passing a major federal bill to aid Hurricane Katrina recovery.

Videos, essays and more on life today in New Orleans.

Columnist Paul Krugman writes, "Two years ago today, Americans watched in horror as a great city drowned, and wondered what had happened to their country."

In the big business media's "two years after Katrina" coverage, there was one glaring omission -- the story of the utter bankruptcy of the so-called Black leadership, in particular, the Black Democratic Party establishment.

A union member seeks election in New Orleans.

Her new book, The Shock Doctrine, details the rise of disaster capitalism with painstaking care, showing how big business often steps in after global misery.

This CorpWatch report, by Eliza Strickland and Azibuike Akaba, tells the story of corporate malfeasance and government incompetence two years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

Nothing I can blog here can say more than this outstanding video, produced by Campaign for America's Future's Anne Thompson:

The AFL-CIO today announced a $1 billion Gulf Coast Revitalization Program to build badly needed affordable housing, spur economic development and create family-supporting union jobs in Gulf Coast communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina last year.

UTNO/AFT President Brenda Mitchell says President Bush’s recent trip to New Orleans was just a PR ploy.

For decades, residents of the Tremél/Lafitte and Tulane/Gravier communities in New Orleans watched economic development go on all around them, never touching or improving their poor, blighted communities. Now, through the efforts of the AFL-CIO and Catholic Charities, these two neighborhoods could become models of how to rebuild the Crescent City one year after Hurricane Katrina.