Popular Education

Popular Education | Dan Miller | Substack My personal Substack. Click to read Popular Education, by Dan Miller, a Substack publication. Launched 3 months ago.

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Hurricane Katrina at 20: What The Storm Revealed About America An introduction to our series on Hurricane Katrina that will explore how racial inequality, environmental neglect, and neoliberal policies shaped the disaster and its aftermath in New Orleans.

Katrina revealed what decades of racialized disinvestment, environmental degradation, and hollowed-out public institutions had already created. Our series traces this history—and how elites used the storm to push privatization and displacement.
populareducationblog.substack.com/p/hurricane-...

Defense stocks dropping because peace talks are progressing is the perfect summary of capitalism: good news for humanity is bad news for shareholders.

Auto repos up, debt up, defaults up — but stocks are up too, so apparently that’s what a "healthy economy" looks like now.

Imagine looking at record profits, record executive pay, and record inequality, and concluding: yup… the minimum wage is the problem.

Demographic Disparities: Victims of Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that structural inequalities, rather than nature alone, dictated vulnerability, evacuation, and post-storm recovery

Katrina gets called a ‘natural disaster,’ but the real disaster was decades of segregation, poverty, disinvestment, and a city where 35% of Black households couldn’t evacuate. This piece shows what actually drowned New Orleans.
populareducationblog.substack.com/p/demographi...

The American healthcare system where your survival depends less on your doctor and more on a hedge fund’s quarterly targets.

In the U.S., billionaires figured out it’s more cost-effective to buy elections than pay taxes. Apparently that qualifies as democracy.

Private equity paywalling kids’ sports is peak late-stage capitalism: even your kid’s memories are just another monetizable asset.

New Orleans: Geography, Growth, & Environmental Risk The growth of New Orleans reveals how strategic geography encouraged expansion despite inherent environmental risks.

Katrina was not a “natural disaster” — it was 300 years of choices that put profit and extraction ahead of the land. From plantations to oil canals, the catastrophe was built long before the storm hit.
Read how New Orleans was set up to fail:
populareducationblog.substack.com/p/new-orlean...

Median homebuyer age is now 56. Turns out if you suppress wages and let investors hoard housing, people can’t afford… housing.

The Failure of FEMA: The Political and Fiscal Choices Behind Katrina’s Devastation A critical examination of federal policy and fiscal decisions shaping FEMA’s readiness before Katrina

New Orleans didn’t drown from Katrina. It drowned because the Bush admin gutted flood protection while writing blank checks for Iraq. FEMA was reoriented toward counter-terror, not hurricanes. The disaster was political long before it was natural.
populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

Demographic Disparities: Victims of Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that structural inequalities, rather than nature alone, dictated vulnerability, evacuation, and post-storm recovery

"On a national level, 8% of the US population lives in a household that lacks access to an automobile. For comparison the rate in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina was over triple the national rate at 26%"
populareducationblog.substack.com/p/demographi...

The Failure of FEMA: The Political and Fiscal Choices Behind Katrina’s Devastation A critical examination of federal policy and fiscal decisions shaping FEMA’s readiness before Katrina

"New Orleans’ fate was sealed long before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Through years of neglect and austerity, the federal government delivered New Orleans a verdict of despair and Katrina merely carried out the sentence."
populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

The CEOs of everything. Larry and David Ellison are poised to become the Trump era’s reigning media moguls.

"Under the current regime of cronyism trickling down from the White House, billionaires like the Ellisons are coming out into the open, publicly chasing their personal agendas."
www.cjr.org/the_media_to...

Conservatives love to fearmonger about SNAP, but here are the facts:

- Most recipients work — or are kids, seniors, or disabled.

- Fraud rate: ~1%.

- Avg benefit: $6/day.

- <2% of fed budget, yet lifts millions from hunger.

- Every $1 in SNAP adds up to $1.50+ in local economic activity.

The Failure of FEMA: The Political and Fiscal Choices Behind Katrina’s Devastation A critical examination of federal policy and fiscal decisions shaping FEMA’s readiness before Katrina

ICYMI our newest article in our Hurricane Katrina series traces how budget cuts, the War on Terror, and FEMA’s shift under Homeland Security turned disaster relief into a casualty of fiscal and political priorities.

populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

Opinion | We’re Counting on Big Tech to Invent the Future. That’s a Bad Bet.

"The result is not just bad policy but also a cultural blindness: An entire generation has grown up thinking that extraction, as opposed to building, is the path to riches."
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/o...

The AI Circular Economy Big tech companies and wealthy investors are driving an AI bubble - but they won't be the ones feeling the pain when it bursts.

"Imagine if a car manufacturer invested in a taxi firm, which used the money to buy only that car manufacturer’s vehicles. The carmaker could claim rising sales, the taxi firm could say it was growing, and investors might conclude the sector was booming."
graceblakeley.substack.com/p/the-ai-cir...

The Failure of FEMA: The Political and Fiscal Choices Behind Katrina’s Devastation A critical examination of federal policy and fiscal decisions shaping FEMA’s readiness before Katrina

"Between fiscal years 2001 and 2005, federal funding was reduced by approximately 44% for flood and hurricane protection projects overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans."
populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

The Failure of FEMA: The Political and Fiscal Choices Behind Katrina’s Devastation A critical examination of federal policy and fiscal decisions shaping FEMA’s readiness before Katrina

populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

1️⃣2️⃣ Hurricane Katrina was not solely a natural disaster—it was the predictable outcome of decades of federal choices that prioritized foreign engagement over domestic safety.

1️⃣1️⃣ Years of austerity, funding cuts, and misplaced priorities meant FEMA’s capacity to respond was already compromised before the storm made landfall.

🔟 Nearby active-duty units were also constrained. The 101st Air Assault Division, home to the largest number of transport helicopters in any Army unit, was unavailable due to imminent deployment to Iraq.

9️⃣ Equipment shortages compounded the problem. Department of Defense practices left radios, trucks, and helicopters in Iraq. Non-deployed National Guard units had only ~34% of essential equipment; 88% of units had less than half of what was required to perform domestic missions.

8️⃣ Critical personnel were unavailable when Katrina struck: 3,000 Louisiana National Guardsmen and 4,000 Mississippi Guardsmen were deployed overseas.

7️⃣ The Iraq War further exacerbated these priorities. From 2003–2005, the United States spent $251B on military operations, diverting both funds and attention from domestic infrastructure needs.

6️⃣ In 2004, SELA requested $100M to strengthen levees—just $16.5M was provided. A separate project around Lake Pontchartrain requested $27M but received only $3.9M. These shortfalls directly increased vulnerability.

5️⃣ The Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA), initiated in 1995 after a rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes, illustrates the impact of these cuts. In 2001, the Bush Administration proposed funding only half of what was needed.

4️⃣ Between FY2001 and FY2005, federal funding for hurricane and flood protection projects in New Orleans dropped approximately 44%, severely impacting the Army Corps of Engineers’ ability to maintain levees.