Bush & 3rd world USA

Urgent International Appeal. U.S. troops in New Orleans are treating hurricane victims as members of "Al Qaeda." Reports coming to WMR report that the greater New Orleans area has been turned into a virtual military zone where troops threaten bewildered and hungry survivors who approach them for help.

September 6, 2005
You can't fool the precious few Americans who really know their country's history. They know that America's big talk (dating from Puritan times) about God's plan for America to redeem the world is largely the product of religiously inspired self-delusion or outright propaganda. They also know that, far too often, the big talk has been belied by extremely low-class performance. Now it's happening once again in the events surrounding hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.
"Third world" TV images beamed from the Crescent City—where the rich and white escaped Hurricane Katrina, while the poor and black suffered and died in apartheid—have exposed years of banana republic-like neglect by America's political elite, from President George W. Bush on down. Thus, those images mock America's incessant bragging about its mandate from God to redeem the rest of the world for democracy.
As the whole world now sees in New Orleans, America has miserably failed even to account for its poor and minorities, let alone "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility…promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"—as its much ballyhooed democratic Constitution promised.
One can credit the low-class, "enrichez vous" greed of corporate leaders and their political action committees, as well as the Presidents and Congressmen executing and legislating for...

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THE STORY OF THE HURRICANE COWBOY WHO FIDDLED WHILE NEW ORLEANS DROWNED
How Bush Spent His Summer Vacation
by Amanda Lang, PhD
Why did Bush vacation – cut wood, clear brush, bike, and read -- for days while the world watched Katrina develop then slam as a category 4 hurricane into the Gulf Coast? Just as he did on September 11, 2001, he froze. They don’t have cable or telephones in Crawford? The unfolding catastrophe has Bush leadership skills, or lack thereof, written all over it. He treats his own citizens with the same contempt and callousness as he does the Iraqi civilians – as “collateral damage.” If a category 4 hurricane is not a “bomb” dropping on American soil, what is? Bush remained on vacation one whole day after Katrina hit, WAITING FOR WHAT? The federal government was ‘missing in action’ and has failed its citizens abysmally. And Congress... where the hell are they? They rushed back to Washington over night for one woman’s feeding tube, but can’t seem to find the way back for a destructive hurricane that most likely killed thousands. Are these citizens too poor or not expounding the right religion to garner the attention the Trade Tower victims received? They all sat and watched this train wreck, now they are screwing up the rescue and salvage, probably busy searching for the ‘scapegoat’ du jour. Do the Bush administration and Congress want to create a situation where they could declare martial...

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WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.
Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.
Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub flooded New Orleans "Lake George."
None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by...

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Could this tragedy have been avoided? The U.S. Congress, at Bush’s request slashed $70 million from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers budget for strengthening the levees that protect New Orleans. For years, engineers have warned that a breach in the levees is a “disaster waiting to happen.” Bush and Congress turned a deaf ear. They needed that money to pay for the occupation of Iraq. They needed that money to pay for Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.

Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street

By DAN BARRY
Published: September 8, 2005
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.

The sight of corpses has become almost common on the mostly abandoned streets of New Orleans, as rescue and evacuation operations have taken priority over removing the dead.
Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.

The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On Sunday, for example, several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics store.

A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window to ask a soldier a question: "Hey, how do you get to the interstate?"

Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here - not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here - is rooted in the intensive news coverage of the hurricane's aftermath: floating bodies and obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation is numb with post-traumatic shock.

Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news conferences and search-and-rescue squads, has granted haunting glimpses of the past, present and future, with the rare comfort found in, say, the white sheet that flaps, not in surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St. Charles Avenue.

"We Shall Survive," it says, as though wishing past the battalions of bulldozers that will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and rearrange the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether different New Orleans.

Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed on these streets; where one of the many gag-inducing smells - that of rancid meat - is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed.

The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a soldier's boot print. The "take-away" signs outside restaurants taken away. The corner kiosk shouting the Aug. 28 headline of New Orleans's Times-Picayune: "Katrina Takes Aim."

Rush hour in downtown now means pickups carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses, S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters hungry for action, and the occasional tank. About the only ones commuting by bus are dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.

Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the portal to the Williams Super Market in the once-desirable Garden District. And who could blame them if all they wanted was food in those first desperate days? The interlopers took the water, beer, cigarettes and snack food. They did not take the wine or the New Orleans postcards.

On the other side of downtown across Canal Street in the French Quarter, the most raucous and most unreal of American avenues is now little more than an empty alley with balconies.

The absence of sweetly blown jazz, of someone cooing "ma chère," of men sporting convention nametags and emitting forced guffaws - the absence of us - assaults the senses more than any smell.

removing 30 bodies found in nursing home
Thousands of people remain in New Orleans

Thursday, September 8, 2005; Posted: 12:28 p.m. EDT (16:28 GMT)

St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish is surrounded by water. More than 30 bodies were found there.



NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- In a grim indicator of what may lie ahead, authorities were removing the remains of more than 30 people from a flooded nursing home in a suburban New Orleans parish.

The discovery at St. Rita's Nursing Home in lower St. Bernard Parish came as 25,000 body bags arrived at the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

Early Thursday, the official death toll along from Hurricane Katrina stood at 294, but that number is expected to rise dramatically.

Mortuary teams with refrigerated trucks began arriving Wednesday at the nursing home, where St. Bernard Parish Sheriff Jack Stevens said "30-plus" bodies were found. Between 40 and 50 other people were rescued from the facility, Stevens said. (See video on the gruesome discovery -- 2:02)

The parish is east of New Orleans, where between 10,000 and 15,000 people are believed to remain in the flooded city, and thousands are feared dead.

Deputies reported that floodwaters had reached a height of eight feet in some parts of St. Bernard. The nursing home was still surrounded by about three feet of water on Wednesday, as authorities began removing bodies.

Throughout New Orleans and its surrounding parishes, National Guard troops were going house to house to search for survivors and recover the dead -- marking the houses they searched with an "X" to avoid duplication, said Brig. Gen. Michael Fleming, commander of a Florida unit dispatched to New Orleans. (See video of soldiers aiding recovery -- 3:16)

FEMA set up a temporary morgue in the town of St. Gabriel, about 70 miles west of New Orleans. (Watch video on St. Gabriel's "warehouse morgue" -- 2:56)

Another temporary morgue is set up at the intersection of Interstates 10 and 610 inside the city, FEMA spokesman Bill Lehman said.

Underwater communities
Outside New Orleans, many residents have expressed concern and frustration at the slow pace of the relief effort and the lack of attention to their plight. (Full story)

Many Louisiana parishes were still largely under water on Wednesday, virtually inaccessible except by air. St. Bernard Parish President Henry Rodriguez said most of the structures there will have to be rebuilt.

Rodriguez said state and federal aid was slow in coming, and that his parish made it through the early days with the help of sheriffs from other states, a contingent of 50 Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other first responders.

Dan Hitchings, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said Wednesday that water was being drained from St. Bernard Parish, where engineers intentionally breached levees earlier this week to help the effort.

Dikes were also breached in a few places in Plaquemines Parish, which was heavily flooded. No pumps are operational in that parish, according to Hitchings. (See video on the largely submerged parish -- 2:35)

Pumping stations were operating in the towns of Meraux and Violet, but the water was still high. (Full story)

Jefferson Parish residents were still surveying the damage from the storm and trying to salvage what belongings they could find.

Many residents were already making plans to rebuild. (Full story)

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told NBC's Today show on Thursday that power will be restored by Saturday.

Authorities have confirmed 196 deaths in the state.

Not safe to stay
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has ordered a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, warning that it's not safe to stay in the city.

The floodwaters are contaminated with sewage, chemicals and decaying corpses. Nagin said those who remained faced the risk of water- and mosquito-borne disease and blazes caused by natural gas leaks.

Police Superintendent Eddie Compass said police would not start the forced evacuations until everyone who wants to leave is out.

"We're going to be respectful, talk to people, get counselors in to talk to people," he said. "A lot of people have been traumatized. We're going to do this with sensitivity. They have to understand, this water is polluted, it's dangerous, they could die."

The U.S. Coast Guard will help with those evacuations if needed, Vice Adm. Thad Allen told CNN on Thursday.

Active duty U.S. troops will not participate in forcible evacuations, said Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, commander of the military relief effort.

After last week's rampant looting, some holdouts fear authorities "cannot protect their property," City Council President Oliver Thomas told CNN.

Others were concerned about conditions in shelters or worried about their pets.

A blind and elderly woman who identified herself as Ms. Connie rejected authorities' efforts to coax her from her rundown rental home until they agreed to take her dog.

"My dog goes where I go," she said.

In the French Quarter, Deidre White said she felt "pretty safe" working at Johnny White's, a bar that even Hurricane Katrina did not shut down.

"We're here to help people out and feed them," she said. "I'm going to try and hold my ground and stay in my home as long as I can, because I love living here."

Other developments

Vice President Dick Cheney, his wife, Lynne, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales arrived Thursday in Mississippi to meet with local and state officials to view the damage. They were scheduled to visit New Orleans later in the day.


A bipartisan, joint congressional committee will review the response at all levels of government to Katrina and report its findings to Congress no later than February 15, the leaders of the House and Senate said Wednesday. (Full story)


The U.S. Postal Service has delivered 15,000 Social Security checks to people otherwise unable to receive mail in regions devastated by Hurricane Katrina. (Full story)


Public schools in St. Bernard Parish will be closed at least until January, St Bernard Parish President Rodriguez said, and the Rev. Torin Sanders, president of the Orleans Parish school board, said he hoped to open two schools not badly affected by January. (Full story)

--

The Associated Press
9/8/2005


BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Nearly a week after they were requested and with emergency systems taxed, the radio equipment and portable generators that Gov. Kathleen Blanco asked federal officials to supply have yet to arrive.

Those items were among several that Blanco requested Friday in a letter to President Bush to help out with Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

The governor asked for portable radios, equipment and tower crews to work on beefing up the communications grid that failed and kept rescue personnel, police and emergency workers from being able to talk to each other easily.

"The radio system that is currently operational in the greater New Orleans area was designed to support 800 users; there are currently 2,500 users. To address the radio communications requirements, we need additional frequencies," Blanco said in her letter.

She also requested 175 generators to help local parishes and emergency staff who are struggling without power or with flooded generators and the diesel fuel supplies to run them.

Federal officials haven't filled either request, according to state officials.

Those items would be helpful, said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, with the Louisiana National Guard, but he added, "The mission's getting done without all this."

FEMA officials on Thursday said they were tracking down the status of those items requested but not received.

"If the governor asked for it, we're going to get it for her," said FEMA Director Mike Brown.

The only thing "mighty" in the US is their love of wealth and war. (and extremism)