Good Bye New Orleans, I Hardly Knew Thee

Their anger, which had seethed below the surface for so long, erupted. That's what's happening now in New Orleans.
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I didn't know gang rapes were the result of class struggle.

Which the article succeeds in contradicting itself on:

Nagin blamed the outbreak of violence and crime on drug addicts who have been cut off from their drug supplies, wandering the city, "looking to take the edge off their jones."
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LOL BLACK STRUGGLE
 
If you take lawlessness and crime as a consequence, not of class struggle but of inequality and poverty, than perhaps it is.

In many ways New Orleans is starting to look a lot more like Haiti than the 23rd largest city in the US.

High populations of very poor people, especially those in societies that suffer great inequality + Low police penetration of society = lawlessness.

I actually think Nagin is only part right here. Consider, the people in New Orleans has one of the lowest average life-spans in the US- in part because of the climate, the weather, the poverty and the diet (compared to Seattle- one of the highest- despite the suicide rates- in part because of Seattle's prosperity, lower crime rates, and generally healthier diets). In New Orleans you have an awful lot of diabetics who can't get their medicine and who are dieing off. You've had a lot of folks not getting water or food, but are baking in the sun (and New Orleans is damn hot this time of year)

SO you got a lot of folks not only getting their regular meds, but also food supplies. Chances are the informal/illegal forms of commerce are also being cut. And remember, New Orleans is a very popular port of commerce for narcotics.

If you're a heroin addict/ crack head and can't get your fix, you'd be pretty pissed off too.
 
Of course, but the writer is drawing racial angst concerning Rodney King and tieing that in with the chaos following a Natural Disaster in New Orleans. As if it was a Black thing.

I also don't think it's fair to compare evacuation efforts with Cuba. A nation much smaller than the United States, where almost all aspects of one's life are controlled by the state. Most of the people killed by this hurricane are idiots that refused to leave their homes.

What exactly is it that Bush is supposed to do anyways? He's most definitely at fault concerning budget allocation, but in crisis, the President is mostly a figurehead, and lacks much practical pull coordinating the actions of State and even Federal agencies. Though, he had organized a task force to help provide relief in the sea the day after the storm, how much reassuring can he do for people that have no electricity?

Also, to clarify, I do believe that almost all aspects of relief, and the actions of state and federal leadership have been horrifyingly incompetent. The police and National Guard can't do their jobs without support. I just don't think that using Cuba as an example to follow is realistic.
 
Except that Cuba is tremendously poor, but like New Orleans, is destined to get hit by a big hurricane (and actually regularly does so). Cuba has also been under economic sanctions for a damn long time. It's also not that small- it's a pretty damn big island.

The difference is that at least the Cubans are prepared and their country was tried to safeguard them.

And on this point, I don't fully blame Bush. Ok, since 9/11 has changed the focused to terrorism, of the hundreds of scenarios Homeland Security and FEMA have tested, only two involved hurricanes and those actually involved terrorist incidents. So ok, the buzz workd is "war against terrorism" but the more likely disaster is a hurricane to hit the coast because that happens virtually every fucking year.

(Never mind that the average American has more chance of dieing from a bee sting than a terrorist attack.)

But this was something that New Orleans, Lousianna and the Federal Government should have seen coming for a long time. But for most of the past week the problem in New Orleans has been left to municipal authorities.

Sure the wetlands surrounding New Orleans are disappearing at a rate of acreage the size of Manhattan each year, and that those wetlands are supposed to protect New Orleans. OK, so those wetlands are dieing largely because big oil is slowly destroying them.

But at the same time, the flooding in New Orleans came because the levies collapsed in part because the waters of nearby lake overfilled. That could have been prevented. Drainage could have been prevented that flooding. Planning might have better prepared those levies from breaking.

And I agree, this is not a Black Thing. There are white looters there too, just like there are white folks that were not evacuated, and there are white crackhead/junkies.

But Bradylama, come on- the overwhelming population that was left behind in New Orleans was black and they didn't fail to leave because they were too stupid, but because they didn't have the means to escape.

Likewise, a lot of the folks who got washed out along the Gulf Coast were too poor and didn't own the means to get out.

What could W do? I mean is it so hard to set up a landing strip and airdrop supplies into New Orleans- or where there not enough helicopters to do both rescue and aid? ANd if there were not enough helicopters why not? I mean we can respond to global emergencies better than we could respond to one in the 23rd largest city in the US?

Incompetence. And it has cost many lives. What is the current death toll? Hundreds, perhaps thousands? How many died after the hurricane blew through?

If the problem was that there was not enough National Guard resources to go around (because some were sent to Iraq) why weren't supplies brought in before?

And to be fair, there was planning and mobilization. The first person that I know of to die from Katrina in the US, died in Virginia when his rig went off the road and flipped over on Highway 81- he was bringing supplies to New Orleans before the hurricane even hit landfall.

But why weren't the National Guard more mobilized to go? Where were all the cops needed to provide security in a city that had lost 3/4 of its population? I mean it was only last year that three hurricanes swept through Florida- you think they might learn something?

This is fuck up. And the irony of this fuck up is that one of the few that won't be so badly hurt is the oil companies that are making a killing on the price of oil that has just shot up.

And the fact that the Cubans could do better, that New Orleans is looking like Haiti, is a national embarrassment.

Figurehead? The guys the fucking Commander-In-Chief. He can invade Iraq but he can't prepare or respond to a refugee crisis in New Orleans?
 
If there`s another major terrorist attack on the US i`m now pretty convinced that you`re screwed. You just aren´t prepared for such big crisis, not in leadership nor on know-how. I hope you can prevent the attacks, because if not you´re in serious trouble.
 
Not so sure Briosafreak-

FEMA and Homeland Security have been thinking a lot about hypothetical terrorist incidents.

And this is New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, kind of third worldish.
 
Awaiting Orders

Awaiting Orders




Heard part of a discussion today,
one of the reservists at work parried a comment I didn't hear
with this rhetorical,

"'Do you expect the military to move without orders?""

..........


All those military bases in the South, all that Federal infrastructure, and it appears that Americans can not expect, the potential of, 'relief' from these assets.
Unless, until days later, some one gives an order.

A commander appears necessary, not politicians spinning to keep the sh't from sticking on their resumes.

America we seem to be in a war on two fronts, and lack the resources, "the boots", maybe even the "guts", for either.
There maybe no shortage of pep rally spun sugar of 'staying the course'.

On one.
This administration has made the first couple sets of 'administrators "disappear",
on that other front,
Iraq ,
when things did not go as spin-ed.

On two.
Can we expect a similar draconian attrition for those in command positions on this other front, THE HOME FRONT?



Thursday.
This Home ''front'' Secretary Michael Chertoff did not know about the neglected convention center in New Orleans until he was in the middle of an interview.
Chertoff's FIRST IMPULSE WAS SPIN. He belittled the "possibility" as rumor.
The NPR interviewer countered that these reports of squalor and death were from
experienced reporters, and named them, started to go into their world wide, world wise experience. Chertoff backed off the ""party line"".

From what i've heard since, this Chertoff , he sounds like a CHEER LEADER.

Ready to wave his evasive hands, poot out the smoke and pass the buck.

Is he in a command position? Or just another talking - appointed - head, feeding one line, sound bite sized, sanctimoniousness to a public growing tired of ass covering political platitudes.



Two front war.
Are half of the National Guard's 'high water' vehicles REALLY in Iraq, ... swimming in the ancient rivers and sunning themselves in desert sands?

................

Brady-man! Commie Cuba weathering a category FIVE storm with ZERO,immediately related, deaths may not relevantly apply to our American situation.

but,

BUT,

it appears a dirty enough stick to get the attention of the politicians. A ""water mark"" of what can be aspired to, with effective planning.




4too
 
This Home ''front'' Secretary Michael Chertoff did not know about the neglected convention center in New Orleans until he was in the middle of an interview.
Chertoff's FIRST IMPULSE WAS SPIN. He belittled the "possibility" as rumor.
The NPR interviewer countered that these reports of squalor and death were from
experienced reporters, and named them, started to go into their world wide, world wise experience. Chertoff backed off the ""party line"".
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I saw that, and the CNN USA reporter briefing the FEMA director for the area on where the displaced people were, and almost screaming with him while asking "how don`t you know this?!"

Welsh i know how Americans operated in the immediate days after the fall of Bagdad, and many other messes, from Liberia to Afghanistan. They were faster in helping out on the tsunami, but mainly with the raising of funds (on wich they still beat the Europeans, to be fair)and displacement of troops, planes and boats, but the help on the ground was given in an amateurish way. They don`t understand prcedures in massive scale crisis, and all they had to do is to read the UN documentation on the subject.

Now what i wasn`t expecting, mainly because of how gigantic Homeland Security is, was the fact they comitted the same mistakes in their own soil. Mark my words, they aren`t ready, your best chance is the intelligence work to try to stop an attack before it happens.
 
it appears a dirty enough stick to get the attention of the politicians. A ""water mark"" of what can be aspired to, with effective planning.
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Didn't think about it that way.

But this was something that New Orleans, Lousianna and the Federal Government should have seen coming for a long time. But for most of the past week the problem in New Orleans has been left to municipal authorities.
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They did see this coming. In fact, FEMA and local authorities have been rehearsing for a situation like this for the past two years, but FEMA dropped the ball. The Governor's worst mistake in this situation, might be that she assumed FEMA was keeping on top of things. They weren't. In fact, one of those idiots declared that New Orleans "dodged the bullet" when they avoided a direct hit. Dodged the bullet!? If the center moves east of New Orleans the storm surge on the Ponchatrain levees would have been greater than in a direct hit! The focus, it seems, was on Mississippi and Alabama, which received direct hits from the storm, while the levees broke and New Orleans turned to shit.

Of course, now they're covering their ass. I recall Tom Brokaw talking to a FEMA head in Baton Rouge about the dead bodies in the convention center, and he actually said they had two guys "on the ground" to confirm that people had died. "On the ground?" As in they're not already there?

But Bradylama, come on- the overwhelming population that was left behind in New Orleans was black and they didn't fail to leave because they were too stupid, but because they didn't have the means to escape.
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I didn't say that they could, but if this is because I said most of the people who are dead stayed at their homes, that's exactly the case. I said they "refused to leave their homes." If somebody that can't leave their home "refuses to leave" then it's mostly an empty gesture. Most of the people that will be found dead are entire families that drowned in their houses as the flood waters rose.

The guys the fucking Commander-In-Chief.
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Of the military. The president should never achieve the kind of clout that would allow him direct influence in disaster relief.
 
Re: Awaiting Orders

4too said:
Awaiting Orders




Heard part of a discussion today,
one of the reservists at work parried a comment I didn't hear
with this rhetorical,

"'Do you expect the military to move without orders?""
Click to expand...

As sad as it is, your co-worker is correct. Local commanders cannot mobilise their units without orders. And unfortuneately, No one in a position to issue those orders seemed willing untill a bit late in the game. As a professional soldier, I an not happy with the apparent lack of C&C that has been recently displayed.
 
Sorry Brady, but when I see people dieing on the sidewalk of dehydration, or the lack of medicine, and the National Guard going in with M-16s pointing every direction 4 days after the catastrophe, part of me can't help but wonder- "where the fuck were all the helicopters to airlift supplies to those people in the city."

Ok, so maybe most of them were doing rescue- but come on, are you telling me there weren't enough helicopters in US hangers?

And then when I hear about the difficulty of getting into New Orleans but Anderson Cooper and Harry Conick Junior can get in, I mean, you got to think this is a lot of bullshit.

And ok, so someone ways, "We can't get in supplies because of people are shooting."

Fuck! Are you going to tell me that a few snipers is going to keep the National Guard out of the city?

Ok and a bit here about the division between race and class-

What Happens to a Race Deferred
By Jason DeParle
The New York Times

Sunday 04 September 2005

The white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed.

"This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society - in a literal way," said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised images from his office at Harvard. Surprised to have found himself surprised, Mr. Jencks took to thinking out loud. "Maybe it's just an in-the-face version of something I already knew," he said. "All the people who don't get out, or don't have the resources, or don't believe the warning are African-American."

"It's not that it's at odds with the way I see American society," Mr. Jencks said. "But it's at odds with the way I want to see American society."

Last week it was how others saw American society, too, in images beamed across the globe. Were it not for the distinctive outlines of the Superdome, the pictures of hovering rescue helicopters might have carried a Somalian dateline. The Sri Lankan ambassador offered to help raise foreign aid.

Anyone who knew New Orleans knew that danger lurked behind the festive front. Let the good times roll, the tourists on Bourbon Street were told. Yet in every season, someone who rolled a few blocks in the wrong direction wound up in the city morgue.

Unusually poor (27.4 percent below the poverty line in 2000), disproportionately black (over two-thirds), the Big Easy is also disproportionately murderous - with a rate that was for years among the country's highest.

Once one of the most mixed societies, in recent decades, the city has become unusually segregated, and the white middle class is all but gone, moved north across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish - home of David Duke, the one-time Klansman who ran for governor in 1991 and won more than half of the state's white vote.

Shortly after I arrived in town two decades ago as a fledgling reporter, I was dispatched to cover a cheerleading tryout, and I asked a grinning, half-drunk accountant where he was from, city or suburb. "White people don't live in New Orleans," he answered with a where-have-you-been disdain.

For those who loved it, its glories as well as its flaws, last week brought only heartbreak. So much of New Orleans, from its music and its food to its architecture, had shown a rainbow society at its best, even as everyone knew it was more complicated than that.

"New Orleans, first of all, is both in reality and in rhetoric an extraordinarily successful multicultural society," said Philip Carter, a developer and retired journalist whose roots in the city extend back more at least four generations. "But is also a multicultural society riven by race and class, and all this has been exposed by these stormy days. The people of our community are pitted against each other across the barricades of race and class that six months from now may be last remaining levees in New Orleans."

No one was immune, of course. With 80 percent of the city under water, tragedy swallowed the privilege and poor, and traveled spread across racial lines.

But the divides in the city were evident in things as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15 percent among whites.

"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," said Craig E. Colten, a geologist at Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's vulnerable topography. "They didn't have buses. They didn't have trains."

As if to punctuate the divide, the water especially devastated the Ninth Ward, among city's poorest and lowest lying.

"Out West, there is a saying that water flows to money," Mr. Colten said. "But in New Orleans, water flows away from money. Those with resources who control where the drainage goes have always chosen to live on the high ground. So the people in the low areas were hardest hit."

Outrage grew as the week wore on, among black politicians who saw the tragedy as a reflection of a broader neglect of American cities, and in the blogosphere.

"The real reason no one is helping is because of the color of these people!" wrote "myfan88" on the Flickr blog. "This is Hotel Rwanda all over again."

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by legal segregation laws?" wrote Mark Naison, director of the urban studies program at Fordham, on another blog.

One question that could not be answered last week was whether, put to a similar test, other cities would fracture along the same lines.

At one level, everything about New Orleans appears sui generis, not least its location below sea level. Many New Orleanians don't just accept the jokes about living in a Banana Republic. They spread them.

But in a quieter catastrophe, the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds of Chicagoans, blacks in comparable age groups as whites died at higher rates - in part because they tended to live in greater social isolation, in depopulated parts of town. As in New Orleans, space intertwined with race.

And the violence? Similarly shocking scenes had erupted in Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal of white police officers charged with beating a black man, Rodney King. Newark, Detroit, Washington - all burned in the race riots of the 1960's. It was for residents of any major city, watching the mayhem, to feel certain their community would be immune.

With months still to go just to pump out the water that covers the city, no one can be sure how the social fault lines will rearrange. But with white flight a defining element of New Orleans in the recent past, there was already the fear in the air this week that the breached levee would leave a separated society further apart.

"Maybe we can build the levees back," said Mr. Carter. "But that sense of extreme division by class and race is going to long survive the physical reconstruction of New Orleans."
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Ok, so maybe most of them were doing rescue- but come on, are you telling me there weren't enough helicopters in US hangers?
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Not at all. The first supplies brought to people at the Community Center was dropped from a bridge by National Guard. Of course, half of the stuff was destroyed as they dropped it, and the Guardsmen wouldn't let anybody get near them since they were paranoid from the looting and violence.

Perhaps they were afraid that by simply lifting in supplies, there would be no way to distribute them in an organized manner, and it would have caused a frenzy. Then again, why couldn't they have had armed personel lifted in with the supplies? It's all a huge mess that'll be sorted out, and heads are guaranteed to roll.

Also, as an aside. I fucking hate the term "blogoshpere."

"The real reason no one is helping is because of the color of these people!" wrote "myfan88" on the Flickr blog.
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Hilarious.
 
Hobbesian makes a nice adjective for the situation.

Anyway, if the police shot back and killed the gunmen, I would suppose the contractors had a escort (and it was this escort that shot back). If that's the case, I again suppose that the gunmen might have felt threatened by the police presence (and not understood who the contractors were and what they were trying to accomplish).
 
Kotario said:
Hobbesian makes a nice adjective for the situation.

Anyway, if the police shot back and killed the gunmen, I would suppose the contractors had a escort (and it was this escort that shot back). If that's the case, I again suppose that the gunmen might have felt threatened by the police presence (and not understood who the contractors were and what they were trying to accomplish).
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Granted, however isn't that an indictment of people in and of itself if they felt 'treatened' by police officers escorting others away that they are somehow compelled to shoot at them? I do not think that absolves these 'gunmen' nor does it impart any sort of pity on me whatsoever.

"Where the fuck are they going?"

"Fuck it" *bang*
 
The cops portrayed on the news didn't all have cop uniforms. Sure, they had the guns and armor, but most had white T-shirts, blue jeans and sunglasses. Same thing with the contractors really, and those guys are nutcases. I could've thought they were organized looters and mercenaries, especially with the extreme situation.
 
Maphusio said:
Sri Lanka just donated 25,000 USD for this... Wow thats... thats well lets just say we better be nice and invade them next to "straiten" out things there.
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About 30,000 Sri Lankans died during the Tsunami disaster and the US was the first to react, so despite their own problems, they're bound to help

Murdoch said:
And yes, I know he cut his vacation off and flew over the scene (at 30,000 feet probably, lot of good that does) to respond, but where the fuck is the first response?! FEMA?!
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Cutting off his holiday once the disaster started is irrelevant. He was not working during the days leading up to it, days when everyone knew it was going to be bad. He was still relaxing. Ey.

Layle said:
Side note: they should have never developed the city of new orleans as it stands, it was "asking" to be a lake.
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Should've could've didn't. Half of Holland including most of its population AFAIK is under sea level too.

welsh said:
article
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Weren't you the one arguing against Europe's integration policy and pro that of the US, where people are kind and everyone gets equal oppertunity? How does this fit in there? Or was that just about muslems?

Brady said:
Of course, but the writer is drawing racial angst concerning Rodney King and tieing that in with the chaos following a Natural Disaster in New Orleans. As if it was a Black thing.
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True, this is false, but it is interesting to see that two situations which are seperate of each other make an interesting combination here; most victims of such natural disasters are poor. Most poor people in NO are black. Point one is the result of social inequality, which is something we've all learned to accept, so what is point two? Racism? Just the way it is?

And when point 1 and 2 combine, what you effectively get is the slaughter of the darkies. By natural causes, 'course

Brady said:
I also don't think it's fair to compare evacuation efforts with Cuba. A nation much smaller than the United States, where almost all aspects of one's life are controlled by the state. Most of the people killed by this hurricane are idiots that refused to leave their homes.
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Cuba evacuated 1.5 million people and their goods with apparent ease. Explain to me how Cuba being a small country matters, then.

And no, most people killed by this hurricane were people with nowhere else to go, too poor to move anywhere else even temporarily. How did you suppose homeless people were supposed to escape? Or those too poor to afford a simple bus ticket, let alone real transport?

No, Cuba is a good measuring rod. Yes, the situation is different, but Cuba shows the result of a lack of short-term political thinking. It *knows* a hurricane will hit it, so it spends time and effort in planning and investing ahead for this. Years, decades go into this. It's like Holland since the North Sea Flood of 1953, that flood resulted in us designing and building what still stands as one of the most ingenious systems of levies ever made and all cities in the Netherlands still have detailed, well-planned and well-invested disaster plans, not just for floods either even if that's the only thing left to fear

Brady said:
What exactly is it that Bush is supposed to do anyways? He's most definitely at fault concerning budget allocation, but in crisis, the President is mostly a figurehead, and lacks much practical pull coordinating the actions of State and even Federal agencies. Though, he had organized a task force to help provide relief in the sea the day after the storm, how much reassuring can he do for people that have no electricity?
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He *might just have* cut his vacation short about 3 days in advance and spent some time planning and co-ordinating post-disaster relief. But that might just be me and my odd conception that the head of a country should do something about disasters, while you seem to think he can stand idly by.

And he might've possible said to Canada, the Netherlands and other neighbours offering help "yes, please, we're in trouble, send whatever you can spare", so that the Dutch warship, full of personel trained in disaster relief, could've left from the Netherlands Antilles earlier or so that the Canadians could've actually sent in their ships too.

welsh said:
Except that Cuba is tremendously poor
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Tremedously poor? No it isn't. It's in the high-standard portion of the HDI list of the UNDRP, number 52, above Mexico and Belarus, above Russia and Brazil.

Briosafreak said:
but mainly with the raising of funds (on wich they still beat the Europeans, to be fair)
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What? Not true. Though they beat the Portuguese, to be sure...

A quick calculation puts EU foreign aid, not counting all memberstates but just those in the top-33 donors, at roughly 4650 million USD, compared to the 1981 million USD from the US.

The private donation of the US (1031 million USD) amount to 0.09% of the GNP. Other percentages for private donations: up to .41% for the Netherlands, .92% for Ireland, .22% for Germany, .15% for Finland, .10% for Austria. I do not see how the US has got the EU "beat"

What the US did for the Tsunami was not raise funds for long-term reactions. That's what the EU did. The US was instrumental in a quick military reaction for first-minute aid.

Bradylama said:
I didn't say that they could, but if this is because I said most of the people who are dead stayed at their homes, that's exactly the case. I said they "refused to leave their homes." If somebody that can't leave their home "refuses to leave" then it's mostly an empty gesture. Most of the people that will be found dead are entire families that drowned in their houses as the flood waters rose.
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Most of those people found drowned in their own houses were desperate people, unable to leave and who, as human instinct dictates, felt that home was the safest place to remain. The house was solid, they'd have at least some supplies.

I don't know why you feel so honour-bound to protect the Prez in this, but you should watch out for treading on the ridiculous, which includes blaming the deaths on the dead.

Bradylama said:
Of the military. The president should never achieve the kind of clout that would allow him direct influence in disaster relief.
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Disaster relief is probably one of the only situations that exist were democracy really needs to shove over in favour of immediate aid. Let him declare a state of emergency and march in the fucking troops, why not?
 
Kharn- HDI- Human Development Index measures many things. And on that the numbers are a bit fudged. At a per capita income of around $2,900 Cuba is ranked below India. At $4,000 (a generous estimate) they are about at Guatemala.

Those are really damn poor countries.

But that goes back to the point- if a poor country like Cuba could do it, what's the matter with US.

As for integration- for immigrants in the US it has been fairly easy. Muslims are still among the most affluent ethnic groups in the US. The racial issue between whites and blacks- which I think is more a class issue than a racial issue-is terrible. And New Orleans has been an example of the problem of poverty and race in the US for a long time.
 
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