Bush's response to Katrina/New Orleans (Part 2)

Original Title: Bush fiddles while New Orleans drowns (Part 2)

[color=red]Admin: [url=Bush's response to Katarina/New Orleans (Part 1) here[/url] for Bush’s response to Katrina/New Orleans (Part 1)[/color]

What is all this about? Care to prove any of this?[/quote]
Jeeezus, Fred, have you been living in a cave?

[quote]Nearly one-third of the city of New Orleans, for example, lives below the poverty line, while Louisiana and Mississippi, the two hardest-hit states have the highest childhood poverty rates in the nation – over 50 percent. . .

As in many developing countries, the U.S. poor are disproportionately made up of racial and ethnic minorities who have experienced a history of discrimination and repression.

As pointed out by the Center for American Progress (CAP), two- thirds of New Orleans’ population is black, but the Lower Ninth Ward neighbourhood, which was reportedly almost completely under water and is likely to have been the source of the greatest number of fatalities, was more than 98 percent black. . .

“The one thing that people miss,” noted Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, “is that a lot of blacks here don’t have their own means of transportation. So when you say ‘evacuate’ to a person who doesn’t even have a car, what are you saying? Most of these people were not able to go.”

Indeed, about one-third of New Orleans’ half million residents don’t own a car. Even those who did stayed home because, without a credit card or cash or a clear plan worked out by FEMA or local disaster agencies, in the words of Florida Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, “they never had no place to go”. [/quote]
ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=30125

[quote]One-third of New Orleans residents live below the poverty line, and many remained in the city when Katrina hit because they didn’t own a car, or have the money to buy a bus, rail or plane ticket to another location.

Middle class and wealthy Americans displaced by a natural disaster have the advantage of money, credit cards, insurance and a knowledge of how to use the network of government services to help them cope, said Robin Lovin, a Southern Methodist University professor in Dallas. The poor often don’t have the means to adjust to a completely new set of problems.[/quote]
newhouse.com/archive/lewis090205.html

[quote]BILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters). . . when Hurricane Katrina came ashore, leveling hundreds if not thousands of houses, stores and commercial buildings and killing scores of residents. . .

Many people didn’t have the financial means to get out,” said Alan LeBreton. . .

Many of the town’s well-off heeded authorities’ warnings to flee north, joining thousands of others who traveled from the Gulf Coast into northern Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia and other nearby states. . .

But others could not afford to join them, either because they didn’t own a car or couldn’t raise funds for even the cheapest motel.

“No way we could do that,” said Willie Rhetta, a bus driver, who remained in his home to await Katrina. . .

Class divisions, which often fall along racial lines in this once-segregated southern state, are not new to Mississippi. It traditionally is one of the poorest states in the United States.

In 2004, Mississippi had the second lowest median household income and the highest percentage of people – 21.6 percent – living in poverty, according to a report released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau[/quote]
news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u … poverty_dc

I disagree with Michael Moore. I am honest. I do not think he is asking some questions that really need to be asked and raising issues that need attention.

There. :unamused:

I disagree with Michael Moore. I am honest. I do not think he is asking some questions that really need to be asked and raising issues that need attention.

There. :unamused:[/quote]
OK, well there you have it. I see the error of my ways. :laughing:

[color=blue]That was then:[/color]
"The second priority of our government, a priority which will be reflected in my budget, is making sure we protect the people at home, homeland defense. And, therefore, I’ll be calling on Congress to pass a funding increase for homeland defense of 38 – an additional $38 billion. (Applause.)

This is double the pre-September 11th numbers. Thirty-eight billion dollars is the total request. Double over 2002. It’s the beginning of a homeland defense initiative which is going to last throughout my administration. It’s the beginning of a cooperative effort.

It shows and recognizes that, in the first minutes or hours after an attack, are the most hopeful minutes for saving lives – the first minutes, immediately. . . .

. . . in order to make sure that there is a strategy, one that you understand, one that the governors understand, one that the folks in Washington understand, I’m going to ask the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be the lead agency on coordinating efforts with the local governments.

It is the right agency to choose. They understand local disaster and the local emergency. They understand and have responded in the past, not only in this administration, but in other administrations, the need to work closely with mayors to make sure that we affect good policy."
Jan. 2002, George W. Bush

[color=blue]This is now:[/color]
Local and state officials are on their own for at least the first 72 hours of any regional disaster. We’re not responsible for anything. We’re just the federal government.

MT:

Nothing that you have posted shows that there is any intentional effort to provide assistance based on race. Now, that we realize that 98 percent of the Blacks live in the low-lying areas, then guess what? I guess we are not surprised that they are the ones most affected and therefore topography not race has the most important impact. Again, why not run tap water into bottles before the hurricane? Buy a few extra loaves of bread? Prepare canned food? How does this require having money?

Again, the mayor and city councilors are mostly Black and Democrat so why not organize an effort to get these people to safety? This is not in any city a federal decision or undertaking. It was not when I lived in Miami during Hurricane Andrew. It is not in Los Angeles. It is not in New York. Federal authorities only step in with funding and emergency aid when and if a locality cannot deal with a problem. That does NOT make the federal authorties responsible for primary contingency planning does it?

So all these figures mean what exactly? Blacks tend to be poorer than other ethnic groups? check. So what? How is that relevant to the point in question, which is that they are deliberately not being helped or the necessary measures were not put in place (by Black politicians!) because they are Black? What?

what the hell does Michael Moore have to do with this situation?

this is a tragedy. a society is only as strong as its weakest link. it is the job of EVERYONE to do what they can to assist the folks who are unable to help themselves…

what is this crap about “people taking care of themselves”…jesus, have you been watching the news???

so the folks in hospice care, the poor children should hike up their boot straps and get their act in gear???

is it the poor folks fault that they don’t have a car? is it tough luck for them? are we to write them off?

how freaking cold-hearted can you be?

No this is not about people. This is about politicizing what is going on in New Orleans to say that it Bush’s or anyone’s fault.

The warning came three days before the storm hit that this had the potential to be the Big One. What do you do if you fail to leave for whatever reason? Many of those who claimed to be in difficulties had cars and said that by the time they realized that this was going to be bad it was too late to leave. Also, why not prepare water and food. I do every time a typhoon comes to Taipei. OR fill up water bottles with tap water or buy a few extra food items to store up. This does not cost a fortune. Now, however, many of these people are suffering and they are tired and angry and they blame the government and that is all understandable. What is tiresome though is the media effort to paint this as a Bush failure when we all know that these contingency plans are primarily PRIMARILY formulated by local authorities. That has always been the case.

This is NOT therefore about doing nothing for the Blacks, the poor or anyone else. It is a natural disaster and a big one. It has nothing to do with global warming. These types of storms have been hitting the region every year for centuries.

so how does this compare with Andrew? Much better.

nationalreview.com/robbins/r … 020719.asp

[quote]So is the war in Iraq causing troop shortfalls for hurricane relief in New Orleans? In a word, no. A look at the numbers should dispel that notion. Take the Army for example. There are 1,012,000 soldiers on active duty, in the Reserves, or in the National Guard. Of them, 261,000 are deployed overseas in 120 countries. Iraq accounts for 103,000 soldiers, or 10.2 percent of the Army. That

Damned
Do
Damned
Don’t

Bottom line is this:

Local
then
State
then
Federal

Why is this such a difficult thing to grasp???

So things have improved in 13 years? I’d bloody hope so. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a total clusterfuck. Just less of a clusterfuck than it conceivably could’ve been if no-one had done anything in the past 13 years.

ah but let’s look at what happened during Hurricanes Ivan and George. And look we have the same people as governor and mayor… Oh dear. Looks like things have happened just as I said. It all boils down to the local officials and their abilities to deal with these events. Read on.

[quote]Just last year the Associated Press predicted all of the failures that have became part of the Katrina tragedy - but the story was about another hurricane, Hurricane Ivan. When Ivan aimed its fury at the Big Easy, the AP detailed what could happen if the hurricane slammed into New Orleans. In the case of Ivan, serious problems were caused by a lack of planning for a cataclysmic storm, yet with Katrina on the horizon, the lessons of Ivan were all but forgotten. A feckless state governor and New Orleans’ mayor repeated the same mistakes they made with Ivan, and hundreds of thousands of largely poor people were forced to endure conditions that one associates with the Third World - not the richest nation on the planet. The disaster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will come as no surprise to those who recall a September 19, 2004 Associated Press report. Wrote the AP: “Those who had the money to flee Hurricane Ivan ran into hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city had to find their own shelter - a policy that was eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the deadly storm struck land.”

Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome - where no food, water or living facilities were provided for the massive number of refugees expected to remain there for at least several days. Fortunately few arrived. Noted the AP then: “New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are significant flaws in the Big Easy’s civil disaster plans.” Noting that much of the city lies below sea level, only kept dry by a system of pumps and levees, the AP recalled that as Hurricane Ivan approached the Gulf coast from the Gulf of Mexico, the city - warned by forecasters that a direct hit could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over the city’s levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste - urged more than a million people to flee the wrath of the oncoming storm. But nobody told them how to flee Ivan. As happened before Katrina struck, residents who had cars took to the highways while the AP reported others wondered what to do. In the case of Katrina, there was huge fleet of school buses the mayor could have dispatched to aid in evacuating people unable to leave on their own. Instead, the buses sat in parking lots that later flooded, making them unusable when tens of thousands were stranded in the flooded city. More than 1 million people tried to leave the city and surrounding suburbs on Tuesday, creating a traffic jam as bad as or worse than the evacuation that followed Georges. In the afternoon, state police took action, reversing inbound lanes on southeastern Louisiana interstates to provide more escape routes. Bottlenecks persisted, however.

"Gov. Kathleen Blanco and [Mayor] Nagin both acknowledged the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans. But it appears that nothing had been changed by the time Katrina made its appearance in the Gulf. After Ivan, Blanco and other state officials boasted that, while irritating, the clogged escape routes got people out of the most vulnerable areas. After Katrina struck, however, escape routes out of the city were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic, leaving some motorists on the road when the Hurricane arrived. A new photo from AP shows a huge fleet of school buses lined up in a now flooded parking lot - what appears to be enough transportation sufficient to have evacuated many of those stranded in the city and left to endure unimaginable conditions - transportation that the mayor failed to use when there was still time to use it. The lessons of Ivan were never learned, and the people of New Orleans paid the price. [/quote]

newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005 … 2800.shtml

[quote=“Dog’s_Breakfast”]Of course, it will be argued that nobody saw this coming. “We couldn’t have known”.

So read this article from the October 2001 issue of Scientific
American:

Drowning New Orleans

[/quote]
To go along with that, it this National Geographic article that has the same warning.
I’m not blaming anyone, but it is something that we knew would happen sooner or later.

I agree with you Richardm. Let’s look at what happened and learn from it, but see the article above. There were plenty of opportunities to learn from the last hurricane. So many wasted opportunities. So many of the same mistakes. This is going to have to be looked into and it should not be politicized. One problem though is New Orleans is VERY corrupt. Why some of these people are in office is beyond me. It reminds me of Marion Berry’s tenure in DC. No matter how much he bungled things, he kept getting voted back into office. Eventually, the voters have to take some of the blame for this as well.

[quote=“Shin-Gua”]OK. I withdraw the comment, but you had better quit calling me a racist or I’m gonna squeal , like a pig :laughing:

You don’t even know what race I am. :smiley:

Look to your own attitude and see if it needs adjusting! :sunglasses:[/quote]

I never called you a racist or implied your are one. Implied and pointed out that your post was racist. Yet, if you are not expressing ideas that are not meant to be taken or interperted as racist, then sorry.

My attitude is fine, but when it comes to being rude to those less than fortunate or just kicking them when they are down, then I will say something.

The essential problem is that the Bush Administration and its supporters are zealots. Like all zealots they live in an artificial reality full of imaginary monsters, exaggerated threats and false absolutes while reality with all its actual dangers repeatedly eludes them.

So, because they were focused on an exaggerated threat from Iraq from the earliest days of the Bush presidency, they were blind to the true threat of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, despite abundant warning signs, and 3,000 Americans died. Their zealotry led them to false conclusions about the true nature and causes of Islamic fundamentalism and so, instead of reducing the hatred and suspicion in the world they’ve actually fueled it in the last four years while all but neglecting the country’s other real problems. And despite the fact that the real godfather of terrorism, Osama bin Laden, may still be on the loose, they rushed into a war in Iraq and were blindsided by reality once again when the “arsenals of weapons of mass destruction” turned out to be mirages and the Iraqi people, instead of welcoming occupation, turned to bloody insurgency and nearly 2,000 American soldiers have died so far.

This latest debacle in New Orleans is just more evidence they see the world through zealots’ tunnel vision and create cartoons of the world rather than realistic and effective plans and policies.

Let’s just hope these false prophets of neoconservatism are deposed before we all end up like the people of New Orleans, struggling for our lives and being scapegoated like an endless succession of scapegoats before us when their fantasies once again inevitably turn to dust in the face of reality.

They also have to abide by something we like to call The Constiution of the United States of America. Something quite a few people here seem unaware of.[/quote]

That’s what I mean in my post–they do their job in within the capacity they can. But sadly, politics isn’t about the days of “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” It’s more like “Where’s the Beef” at election time.

sounds to me like your post is an example of what you find most reprehensible about the Bush administration, no?

Nonsense. The al Qaeda plot to take down the World Trade Center started in 1993 when they bombed it the first time. Also, Bush was not looking to do anything about Iraq. He wanted to wash his hands of the Middle East and most foreign affairs to concentrate on domestic affairs. You are wrong. Read his policy position back then. This is merelhy your own paranoid persecution complex inventing facts as you go along. Otherwise, guess what? You can prove to me that Bush had a plan to invade Iraq in the early days before 911. You won’t be able to, but you can prove that the neocons did. When did they become influential. AFTER 911. Get your facts right.

Well, let’s see. That would mean that only Bush viewed Saddam as a threat. Do you want Tigerman to post the list of quotes again from all the Democrats and Europeans who also said he was a threat? the UN officials? inspectors? Support for al Qaeda and terrorism in the Middle East have dropped by 40 percent according to the latest Pew Report.

Not true. The insurgency is concentrated among fewer than 10 percen to the population. The Shias and the Kurds and some of the Sunnis support the efforts to go ahead. So you are saying that because 2 percent of Americans in certain areas of the country may support someone like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson or David Duke and his ilk that we must conclude that race relations in the US are an absolute failure?

Except that if you had read the above links, you would note first that the National Guard was not reduced because of deployments to Iraq. That was speculation. It was not borne out in fact. You would also note that the National Guard and federal structures were in place in three days rather than the nine days it took during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. You would also note that the same Democrat Mayor and Governor who failed to learn the lessons from Hurricane Ivan are still in office and no they did not come up with new plans to deal with the problem. How is this Bush’s fault? What was that you were saying about zealots again?

Well then spookie, why not run along and find some facts to show that the in another city with another disaster that the local authorities were not the ones chiefly responsible for contingency efforts? And show where the federal government responded faster or better in those cases? When you do we will talk but I think that you need to get over your obsessive hatred and paranoia regarding the neocons. Hurricane relief has nothing to do with it nor Iraq nor al Qaeda. Talk about zealotry.

Hollywood. I love it. :unamused:

[quote] EFFORTS by Hollywood actor Sean Penn to aid New Orleans victims stranded by Hurricane Katrina foundered badly overnight, when the boat he was piloting to launch a rescue attempt sprang a leak.

Penn had planned to rescue children waylaid by Katrina’s flood waters, but apparently forgot to plug a hole in the bottom of the vessel, which began taking water within seconds of its launch.

The actor, known for his political activism, was seen wearing what appeared to be a white flak jacket and frantically bailing water out of the sinking vessel with a red plastic cup.

With the boat loaded with members of Penn’s entourage, including a personal photographer, one bystander taunted the actor: “How are you going to get any people in that thing?” [/quote]

heraldsun.news.com.au/common … 02,00.html

Oh. And who came up with the name “Bushitler”?

Pot
Kettle
Black

But, wouldn’t white be like a target color? Seems to defeat the purpose of the flak jacket. .