Dear Left Hook Readers,

November is almost over and we still have a long way to go to hit our second anniversary fund drive goal- if we don't meet it by the end of this month, we'll have to severely curtail and scale back our work here.

Left Hook started out as and remains the only independent leftist youth journal in this country. And by leftist, we don't mean the kind of "pander to the conservatives" politics you see from the Democratic Party and its hangers-on.

From the very beginning - far before it became popular - we took a principled stand against the war in Iraq, predicting the emergence of serious resistance early as November 2003. We've been publicizing and projecting the anti-war movement from the front lines, publishing countless ground reports, highlighting cases of abuse, interviewing student anti-war activists and veterans of the Iraq war, and demolishing pro-war arguments.

Young writers here have taken up a much wider range of important issues as well: from the oppression of Palestinians to the drastic costs of higher education in America, from the administration's malice in Katrina to the larger role of capitalism and neoliberalism in producing such tragedies, it's all been covered here in political analysis, cultural commentary, interviews, ground reports, and more.

And our material here is fresh, original, and from a unique youth perspective: not the same standard fare stuff reprinted and recycled all over the internet.

Of course, you already know all that - otherwise you wouldn't be reading this space right now, where we receive hundreds of visitors daily thanks to word of mouth and larger sites constantly linking to our material.

But you undoubtedly also know that, as a small, independent leftist site, we cannot continue without the financial support of our readers - that means you! There's just two of us students here at the helm, and though the cost of Ramen noodles remains relatively stable, we have to maintain our (pretty modest) funding goals to keep bringing you the quality and content you've been regularly enjoying here.

So please help keep Left Hook alive and donate today! Be it $10 or $100 - every bit that you chip in helps. Thank you.

Sincerely,
The Editors
Derek Seidman and M. Junaid Alam

Rita: A Perspective From On the Ground

By Dimitrije Kostic

Rita has yet to inflict her wrath on Texas as of this writing (noon on Friday). People in this area remain tense. Stores are struggling to stock their shelves with essential commodities--water, canned goods, batteries, toiletries, medical supplies, etc. Rita is not expected to hit my area as hard as others--yesterday's predictions said Rita's eye would pass through my county bringing a roughly Category 1 storm, but now the predictions claim the eye will shift eastward, away from this area. Nevertheless, we are still anticipating 50-70 mph winds, up to 10 inches of rain, and perhaps power and water shortages for several days, in the worst case scenario.

Highway 6, one of the main roads to Houston, lies almost within walking distance from where I sit now. It, like all those roads, is clogged with traffic. Were people--even in Texas, I believe--not so saturated with fear, we would see that the biggest failure so far to respond to Rita is our own cultural addiction to the automobile. What this country needs as much as a single-payer health care system is a strong, affordable, national transit system that should be the primary method of intercity and interstate travel (for individuals, at least).

Aside from making it easier to plan and schedule these kinds of mass evacuations, such a system would bring numerous other advantages. It would be more pleasant--after all, would you really rather drive for hours on end instead of sleep, read, talk on your phone, do your homework, etc? It would be safer, because repairs would no longer be the responsibility of individual drivers and there would be nothing to fear from drunk or uninsured drivers. It would be cheaper, because it would transfer the individual costs of purchasing, maintenaning, and insuring vehicles to a collective cost for one system we all use. It would be more efficient and faster, for obvious reasons.

One can hope that these changes will be implemented, and I'm sure that the devastation wrought by this hurricane will reveal many other problems that the Bush administration and its successors must soon confront.

If you found this piece useful, please keep us alive by making a donation to our second anniversary fund drive .

Dimitrije Kostic, 26, is at Texas A&M;, where he co-edits the Touchstone Magazine (a local magazine of progressive politics).