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Banned
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The financially downtrodden in NOLA left in the cold, By wealthy America
To their credit, two of your favorite "news" sources actually carried reports of this....but we'll begin with this column, first.....to set the "tone"....
Examine your own culpability if you've supported and defended this........
Friedman's observations, over the past three years, have been a lot more relevant and accurate than the contents of white house press briefings.
Quote:
http://nytimes.com/2005/09/14/opinio...iedman.html?hp
Op-Ed Columnist
Singapore and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 14, 2005
Singapore
There is something troublingly self-indulgent and slothful about America today - something that Katrina highlighted and that people who live in countries where the laws of gravity still apply really noticed. It has rattled them - like watching a parent melt down............
.......The discipline that the cold war imposed on America, by contrast, seems to have faded. Last year, we cut the National Science Foundation budget, while indulging absurd creationist theories in our schools and passing pork-laden energy and transportation bills in the middle of an energy crisis.
We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.
Speaking of Katrina, Sumiko Tan, a columnist for the Sunday edition of The Straits Times in Singapore, wrote: "We were shocked at what we saw. Death and destruction from natural disaster is par for the course. But the pictures of dead people left uncollected on the streets, armed looters ransacking shops, survivors desperate to be rescued, racial divisions - these were truly out of sync with what we'd imagined the land of the free to be, even if we had encountered homelessness and violence on visits there. ... If America becomes so unglued when bad things happen in its own backyard, how can it fulfill its role as leader of the world?"
Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.
"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."
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After you've discounted and dismissed the account above, here's another report about Americans coming together......
Foxnews actually corroborates the following UPI report, six minutes into the video available here:
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2678976?htv=12
Links to Foxnews Shepar Smith's reporting about Gretna, which can been seen six minutes into the eight minute video, linked above.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...na&btnG=Search
Quote:
http://washtimes.com/upi/20050908-112433-4907r.htm
United Press International
Front Page > UPI Page
Cops trapped survivors in New Orleans
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Sep. 9, 2005 at 10:48AM
Police from surrounding jurisdictions shut down several access points to one of the only ways out of New Orleans last week, effectively trapping victims of Hurricane Katrina in the flooded and devastated city.
An eyewitness account from two San Francisco paramedics posted on an internet site for Emergency Medical Services specialists says, "Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot."
"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.
"All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.
The bridge in question -- the Crescent City Connection -- is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.
Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.
He added that the small town, which he called "a bedroom community" for the city of New Orleans, would have been overwhelmed by the influx.
"There was no food, water or shelter" in Gretna City, Lawson said. "We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.
"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."
But -- in an example of the chaos that continued to beset survivors of the storm long after it had passed -- even as Lawson's men were closing the bridge, authorities in New Orleans were telling people that it was only way out of the city.
"The only way people can leave the city of New Orleans is to get on (the) Crescent City Connection ... authorities said," reads a Tuesday morning posting on the Web site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, which kept reporting through the storm and the ruinous flooding that followed.
Similar announcements appeared on the Web site of local radio station WDSU and other local news sources.
"Evidently, someone on the ground (in New Orleans) was telling people there was transport here, or food or shelter," said Lawson. "There wasn't."
"We were not contacted by anyone" about the instructions being given to survivors to use the bridge to get out of town, he said.
The two paramedics, who were trapped in the city while attending a convention, joined a group of people who had been turned out by the hotels that they were staying in on Wednesday. When the group attempted to get to the Superdome -- designated by city authorities as a shelter for those unable to evacuate -- they were turned away by the National Guard.
"Quite naturally, we asked ... 'What was our alternative?' The guards told us that that was our problem, and no, they did not have extra water to give to us.
"This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile law enforcement."
As they made their way to the bridge in order to leave the city "armed Gretna sheriffs (sic) formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads."
Members of the group nonetheless approached the police lines, and "questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge ... They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City.
"These were code words," the paramedics wrote, "for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans."
The authors say that during the course of that day, they saw "other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated."
Efforts to contact the authors of the Internet posting were unsuccessful, but UPI was able to confirm that individuals with their names are employed as paramedics in San Francisco.
Lawson says that his officers "acted in the manner they were instructed to" and defends the order to close the bridge as "the right decision."
He said that in addition to his security concerns, an unmoored vessel on the river "raised the threat that it might crash into and breach the levee, which would have flooded Gretna."
He says that his officers did assist about 4000 people who "arrived at the doorstep of (Gretna City)" either by crossing the bridge before it was closed or approaching from another route.
"We commandeered public transit buses and we took them to higher and safer ground" at the junction of Interstate-10 and Causeway Boulevard where "there was food and shelter," he said.
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Quote:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/ema...2570710012D2D2
St. Louisans survive lawlessness in French Quarter
By Tom Uhlenbrock
Of the Post-Dispatch
Friday, Sep. 02 2005
A St. Louis lawyer and his wife spent most all of four days in a French Quarter
hotel while the streets outside were filled with looters. Finally, they escaped
New Orleans in the back of a pickup.
At one point, Tim Scheer and his wife, Judy, were among some 500 hotel guests
who paid $22,500 for 10 buses to rescue them from the city. However, the buses
were commandeered by police just minutes from the hotel and were redirected to
help to evacuate people waiting at the Superdome................
...........A group of about 200 Monteleone guests decided to try to walk out of the city to the east, and got to the on-ramp at the Crescent Connection bridge, where they were met by Gretna, La., police with shotguns. "They told us the bridge was closed to foot traffic," Scheer said. "Some locals had joined us and became extremely unruly, threatening to rush the officers. They fired their shotguns into the air."
The Scheers and the three other couples began walking to the west down a highway, where they flagged down two locals in a pickup who offered to drive them to a shelter about 12 miles away in Kenner, La., to meet Scheer's cousin.
"Bottom line, we're in the back of the pickup, riding like hell through the rain," Scheer said. "They didn't want anything, but we forced several hundred dollars on them. Those guys saved our ass."
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Quote:
http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/...elays001.shtml
2theadvocate > News > Mayor Nagin, Blanco irate about delays 09/02/05
Mayor Nagin, Blanco irate about delays
Advocate staff report
.........."We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Isaac Clark, 68, said outside the Convention Center, where corpses lay in the open and he and other evacuees complained they were dropped off and given nothing -- no food, no water, no medicine.
About 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at the convention center to await buses grew increasingly hostile. Police Chief Eddie Compass said he sent 88 officers to quell the situation at the building, but they were quickly beaten back by a mob.
In hopes of defusing the unrest at the convention center, <b>Nagin gave the refugees permission to march across the Crescent City Connection bridge to the west bank, which was not flooded, for whatever relief they could find.</b>
But the bedlam at the convention center made leaving difficult.
A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet up and flew away..............
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Now it is "out there" for the entire world to observe, and, if you want to check, you can see the scant coverage of how affluent, powerful, mostly white America, first in N.O., where they packed up their SUVs and drove out of town....without offering rides to their less resource rich, fellow citizens.
Then consider your president, and his FEMA and DHS chieftains, with the reports above easily accessible to them, if they wanted to look, react, help people....what they could have done to open the bridge to Gretna.
Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin, reluctant to bite the hands that enable their politcal careers....danced around the issue...failing to openly criticize wealthy white citizens in and around New Orleans.....
This is your America today folks, your tax cuts for the rich at work. The "trickle down" that you advocates of Bush's selfish and destructive agenda is "shit", just like the stuff that the lower castes were left to drown in around the superdome. Almost five years into your POTUS's reign, observe the thirty percent poverty rate in the Mississippi delta region.
Your priorities are "less government", income tax cuts, elimination or inheritance taxes, "self empowerment", and $200 billion plus to bring "freedom" to the Iraqi people, except for Iraqi women, non-shiites, and non-kurds.
I want to remind you that your "God of the rapture", made the children that the policies you advocate and the politicians that you voted for, helped force into circumstances that for a week, you would not let your own dog ever be subjected to.....
When roachboy describes an American political system of two parties, that are two "right" wings....do you even fucking consider what he might be talking about? |