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.

A year after the BP disaster erupted in the Gulf, Cherri Foytlin walked from her home in New Orleans to the White House, to let President Obama hear firsthand the suffering that continues to affect the residents of the Gulf Coast. Sadly, she couldn’t get an invitation to get past the gate. (Rubbing salt in her wounds — she got to watch Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles stroll past her on the sidewalk on their way inside.)

Meanwhile, BP and certain parts of the government continue to try to spin the news, limiting media access to heroic rescuers, limiting scientific access to spill sites, and otherwise trying to hide the record and avoid accountability.

Access. It’s the name of the game.

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day: “a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, International Women’s Day is a national holiday.”

It’s hard these days to keep faith in a progressive American future, but a lonely Mississippi ship’s whistle and Albert Camus’ advice that we “must imagine Sisyphus happy” help show the way.

I love New Orleans. I fell in love with the city as a little girl, just by reading stories set there. I watched in agony as Hurricane Katrina approached, prayed with friends that the city would be spared and wept when the levees broke and destroyed so many lives. I was given the opportunity to research and fact-check the city online post-Katrina, followed by two amazing, transcendent trips to NOLA in 2006 and 2007 for the Voodoo Music Fest and then Mardi Gras. I cheered when the Super Bowl was held there with U2 playing at halftime and whooped with ecstatic joy embracing a group of Orleans-loving friends when the Saints won last season. New Orleans is at once languorous and vital, seductive, dangerous, joyous, profound, sacred, nasty, naughty, glorious. She is the Holy of Holies, full of magic and mystery, charm and force; fierce and exuberant.

Following the first broadcast of this film a criminal complaint was filed against producer Matt Pascarella and reporter Greg Palast by the Department of Homeland Security. The charge, filming “critical infrastructure” was dropped.

Maybe DHS was annoyed because From Big Easy to Big Empty, filmed a year after Hurricane Katrina, is critical of infrastructure, specifically Innovative Emergency Management of Baton Rouge which was paid a half-million dollars in 2004 to deliver a emergency preparedness and evacuation plan of New Orleans–only no one could find the plan when it was needed–that’s pretty innovative; and of FEMA itself which at the time of the filming, in 2006, had displaced 73,000 residents into trailer parks. Palast interviews a resident who explains that there is only bus out of the ironically named, barb-wired ringed Camp Renaissance, and it just goes to the Wal-Mart.