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