President Boosh decided to visit the City of Noo Orleans but the mayor was less than impressed with the slow speed of help. Young non-drinking Boosh had also decided to enroll the services of his predecessors to pass the hat around to collect funds for the Vermillion Cross and other charitable orgs. He thus can do the parade duty

‘This President, who flew away on Monday to fundraisers in the west while the hurricane blew away entire towns in coastal Mississippi, is very much his father's son when it comes to the kinds of emergencies that used to call forth immediate White House action. Bush seems determined to show his successors how to holiday through an apocalypse. Consider the visible federal leadership presence in Louisiana on the day the levee broke, a full day after the hurricane hit. The government department charged with disaster preparation and response issued the usual promises. Bush urged people not to stay where they were, even if their evacuation residence might be the roofless, clogged-toilet Superdome.

On Wednesday, as Bush met by intercom with his emergency team and considered a return to Washington, intensive care patients were dying at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. They had languished for two days because overworked Coast Guard helicopter crews in New Orleans did not have time to reach them. 

As for the Superdome refugees, it fell to the Governor of Texas to announce that they could come to Houston's Astrodome. 

What other US president would fail to house these people in the decent barracks at the military bases scattered throughout the South?  

Jimmy Carter did a better job of housing the Mariel refugees from Cuba than Bush has done with the citizens of New Orleans. The church-going cultural populism of Bush has given the US an Administration that worries about the house of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die on foreign deserts.’

Howell Raines, former editor of the New York Times, cuts loose on the war president. 

A City Lost, A Family Saved

"We're going to help these communities rebuild.

Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house.

And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

(Laughter)

Bush On New Orleans Disaster

‘Why can't the U.S. government focus on America's needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?

 

How can the Bush administration be so incompetent as to expose Americans at home to dire risks by exhausting American resources in foolish foreign adventures? What kind of "homeland security" is this?

 

All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America's reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden's recruitment.

 

What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters.’

 

 

How New Orleans Was Lost

’My friend Les Evenchick, an independent Green who lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans in a 3-story walkup, reports that 90 percent of the so-called looters are simply grabbing water, food, diapers & medicines, because the federal & state officials have refused to provide these basic necessities.

 

Les says that: "it's only because of the looters that non-looters – old people, sick people, small children – are able to survive."

 

Those people who stole televisions & large non-emergency items have been SELLING THEM, Les reports (having witnessed several of these "exchanges") so that they could get enough money together to leave the area.

 

Think about it:

 

·                    People were told to leave, but all the bus stations had closed down the night before and the personnel sent packing.

 

·                     Many people couldn't afford tickets anyway.

 

·                    Many people are stranded & others are refusing to leave their homes, pets, etc. They don't have cars.

 

You want people to stop looting?

 

Provide the means for them to eat & to leave the area.

 

Some tourists in the Monteleone Hotel paid $25,000 for 10 buses. The buses were sent (I guess there were many buses available, if you paid the price!) but the military confiscated them (!) & would not let the people leave. Instead, the military ordered them to the now-infamous Convention Center.

 

HOW SIMPLE it would have been for the State & / or US government to have provided buses for people BEFORE the hurricane hit, and throughout this week. Even evacuating 100,000 people trapped there - that's 3,000 buses, less than come into Washington DC for some of the giant antiwar demonstrations there. Even at $2,500 a pop – highway robbery – that would only be a total of $7.5 million for transporting all of those who did not have the means to leave.

 

Instead, look at the human & economic cost of not doing that!

 

So why didn't they do thatt?

 

Why have food & water been BLOCKED from reaching tens of thousands of poor people?

On Thursday, the government used the excuse that there were some very scattered gunshots (two or three instances only) – around 1/50th of the number of gunshots that occur in New York City on an average day – to shut down voluntary rescue operations & to scrounge for 5,000 National Guard troops fully armed, with "shoot to kill" orders – at a huge economic cost.

 

They even refused to allow voluntary workers who had rescued over 1,000 people in boats over the previous days to continue on Thursday, using the several gunshots (& who knows WHO shot off those rounds?) to say: "it's too dangerous". The volunteers wanted to continue their rescue operations & had to be "convinced" at gunpoint to "cease & desist."

 

There is something sinister going down - it's not simply incompetence or negligence.

 

How could FEMA & Homeland Security not have something so basic as bottled drinking water in the SuperDome, which was long a part of the hurricane plan? One police officer in charge of his 120-person unit said yesterday that his squad was provided with only 70 small bottles of water.

 

Last year, New Orleans residents – the only area in the entire state that voted in huge numbers against the candidacy of George Bush – also fought off attempts to privatize the drinking water supply.

 

One of the first acts of Governor Kathleen Blanco (a Democrat, by the way) during this crisis was to TURN OFF the drinking water, to force people to evacuate. There was no health reason to turn it off, as the water is drawn into a separate system from the Mississippi River, not the polluted lake & purified through self-powered purification plants separate from the main electric grid. If necessary, people could have been told to boil their water - strangely, the municipal natural gas used in stoves was still functioning properly as of Thursday night!

 

There are thousands of New Orleans residents who are refusing to evacuate because they don't want to leave their pets, their homes or who have no money to do so nor place to go. The government – which COULD HAVE & SHOULD HAVE provided water & food to residents of New Orleans – has NOT done so INTENTIONALLY to force people to evacuate by starving them out. This is a crime of the gravest sort.

 

We need to understand that the capability has been there from the start to
DRIVE water & food right up to the convention center, as those roads have been clear - it's how the National Guard drove into the city.

 

Let me say this again: The government is intentionally not allowing food or water in.

 

This is for real.

 

MSNBC interviewed dozens of people who had gotten out. Every single one of them was WHITE.

 

The people who are poor are finally leaving the horrendous conditions in the SuperDome and are being bussed to the AstroDome in Houston.

 

Call them "People of the Dome."

 

If people open fire on the National Guard coming to remove them against their will, will New Orleans become the first battle in the new American revolution?'

 

Mitchel Cohen

Brooklyn Greens / Green Party of NY

No Bid Hero

The Advertiser reports today that initial work on the warship precinct has begun with environmental and geological assessments.  Minister Hill doesn't say which organisation(s) are carrying out the work.

If the company can be seen publically in so many places elsewhere, why not in Adelaide?