Under the Clean Zone Ordinance and Guide established by the City of New Orleans, holding banners and signs with the above slogans in the Clean Zone during Super Bowl week would have been prohibited and punishable by a $500 fine and 6 months in jail.

Because no members of Occupy The Stage (or Occupy NOLA) are official NFL sponsors, and none of our proposed signs, flags, or banners contain any NFL branding, one of us asked the Court to intervene preenforcement and protect the First Amendment Rights of the citizens of New Orleans.

Since the Occupy movement began, many have attempted to position the group in opposition to electoral politics. Occupy in its purest form is nonpartisan, and since the beginning of the movement this has been a source of criticism.

If we want to really make a difference, we were told time and again, we should organize similarly to the Tea Party and begin to field candidates for office. When occupiers protested Mitt Romney or other hyper-conservative politicians, they’d be accused of being in bed with Barack Obama. If the movement protested neo-liberals like Obama, we were accused of being traitors to all that was good in the world because we obviously wanted Romney to win (Carnacing is not limited to blogs). Most of all, occupiers got accused of being disconnected from what their critics perceive to be real politics — we were lazy hippies who didn’t understand how the world works and worst of all we don’t vote.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot issue a license for the construction and operation of a new nuclear reactor in Maryland–that is the ruling of the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) handed down Thursday.

Michael Mariotte, Executive director of NIRS, called Thursday’s decision “a blow to the so-called ‘nuclear renaissance,’” noting that back in 2007, when permit requests were submitted for Calvert Cliffs 3, the project was considered the “flagship” of a coming fleet of new reactors. “Now,” said Mariotte, “it is a symbol or the deservedly failed revival of nuclear power in the US.”

A symbol, yes, but far from the only symbol.

Hurricane Isaac has made landfall in Louisiana, but it is basically hovering over the Gulf Coast, moving very slowly. The slowness of the storm and the circulation of much of it over water means that it will probably continue for some time, which means days of rain and more flooding over a broad coastal region. Wind speeds have weakened to 75mph, but this is still a big, wet storm.

After Hurricane Katrina washed over New Orleans, many survivors had virtually nothing left to lose. But the city’s teachers were then hit by the storm’s ripple effect: the loss of thousands of jobs in the tattered school system. Recently, a civil district court ruled that the state had effectively robbed thousands of school employees of funds that were supposed to help tide them over as the city recovered.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in August and September of 2005, upending the lives of 1.5 million people and putting Black folks’ lack of political and social power front and center for all the world to see.

The storms magnified racial disparities in the U.S., and no place demonstrated this more clearly than New Orleans, where 80% of the city was submerged after Katrina.

Palast takes us on a fast paced, kick ass narrative that globe trots from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, to the coast of Alaska, to New Orleans, to Liberia, to Azerbaijan, to Fukushima, Japan. It’s the real-deal investigative reporting of corporate irresponsibility. As Greg Palast said himself in an interview,” This book is a story of the 1%. It’s why we occupy.”

Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans sent in police early this morning to crack down on Occupy NOLA, evicting the occupiers despite a scheduled court hearing on a TRO. Meanwhile, Occupy Homes Day of Action continues across the country.

Fixed, says a better writer than I am, is not unbroken.

I went to New Orleans this year for Rising Tide with the memory of the city four years ago fresh in my mind. With the memory of the bravery of its people, with the shell-shock and desperate stretched smiles wide, fresh in my mind. I was prepared for that, for the rage that swept over me at the abandonment of this place to hit me like a wrecking ball again.

And there she was, standing on the lawn.

Sometime today, the US Army Corps of Engineers will open the Morganza Floodway in Louisiana for the second time in its history. The object is to divert some of the huge flow of water coming down the Mississippi away from the usual path that streams past Baton Rouge and New Orleans into the Mississippi delta, and into a largely agricultural region of Louisiana instead. It’s a Hobson’s choice, where agricultural fields and various small towns will be flooded in order to help save many the lives and livelihoods, and communities of millions of Louisiana residents nearer to the Mississippi’s regular pathways.

This is Katrina in reverse, with the water coming from the north rather than from the Gulf. Let’s hope the lessons learned from flooding in the past that led to the creation of the floodways will help, and that the post-disaster recovery efforts that failed so spectacularly with Katrina have been improved this time around.