michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Feb 22, 2006 8:05:38 GMT 4
"HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES"
Six months after Katrina we continue to hear ominous tales of the class of the helpless. "The flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds of wasted lives."
Back then, we heard surprise and wonder from government officials who did not know much about the poor in New Orleans, when in fact they live with us everywhere across the United States. They did not know because they did not care. Those on the top care little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those underneath, so long as they are able to hold them there and keep their own seat.
So now the rebuilding of New Orleans has begun and the poor cannot afford to live there anymore. "Think ye that building shall endure Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?".....Michelle Six Months After Katrina Who Was Left Behind Then and Who is Being Left Behind Now? by Bill Quigley www.dissidentvoice.orgFebruary 21, 2006 Nearly six months ago, my wife Debbie and I boated out of New Orleans. We left five days after Katrina struck. Debbie worked as an oncology nurse in a New Orleans hospital. She volunteered to come in during the hurricane so that other nurses with children could evacuate. There were about 2,000 people huddled in the hospital -- patients, staff and families of staff and patients. Plate glass windows exploded in the lobby and on crosswalks and on several floors. Water poured in though broken windows, ceilings, and down the elevator shafts. Eight feet of brown floodwater surrounded us. The entire city immediately lost electricity. Soon the hospital backup generators located in the basement failed. No lights. No phones. Even the water system stopped. No drinking water. No flush toilets. You can imagine a hospital with 2,000 people and no electricity, water, food, or flushing toilets. Breathing machines did not work. Cell phones did not work. Because the computers stopped working medicines were unavailable. Elevators in the 8-floor building did not work. We quickly ran out of food because the cafeteria and food were also in the flooded basement. The gains of 21st century medicine disappeared. Over 40 people died in the hospital over the next few days as we waited for help. Now imagine an entire city with no electricity, water, food or flushing toilets and tens of thousands of people left behind. Debbie and I left five days later by way of a small fishing boat, the back of a garden truck, and the kindness of strangers. We returned 15 weeks later. Many of those left behind then who evacuated with us have yet to return. The Katrina evacuation was totally self-help. If you had the resources, a car, money and a place to go, you left. Over one million people evacuated – 80 to 90% of the population. No provisions were made for those who could not evacuate themselves. To this day no one has a reliable estimate of how many people were left behind in Katrina -- that in itself says quite a bit about what happened. Who was left behind in the self-help evacuation? In the hospital, we could not see who was left behind because we did not have electricity or TV. We certainly knew the 2000 of us were left behind, and from the hospital we could see others. Some were floating in the street -- face down. Some were paddling down the street -- helping older folks get to high ground. Some were swimming down the streets. We could hear people left behind screaming for help from rooftops. We routinely heard gunshots as people trapped on rooftops tried to get the attention of helicopters crisscrossing the skies above. We could see the people trapped in the Salvation Army home a block away. We could hear breaking glass as people scrambled to get away from flooded one story homes and into the higher ground of several story office buildings. We saw people swimming to the local drugstore and swimming out with provisions. But we had no idea how many were actually left behind. The poor, especially those without cars, were left behind. Twenty-seven percent of the people of New Orleans did not have access to a car. Government authorities knew in advance that “…100,000 citizens of New Orleans did not have means of personal transportation.” Greyhound and Amtrak stopped service on the Saturday before the hurricane. These are people who did not have cars because they were poor -- over 125,000 people, 27% of the people of New Orleans, lived below the very low federal poverty level before Katrina. The sick were left behind. Some government reports estimated 12,000 patients were evacuated. I estimate at least an additional 24,000 people -- staff and families of patients -- were left behind in the 22 hospitals that were open at the time. The elderly were left behind. The 280 plus local nursing homes remained mostly full. Only 21% evacuated and as a consequence 215 people died in nursing homes, at least six people died at a single nursing home while they waited four days for busses. The aged who lived at home also certainly found it more difficult than most to evacuate as they were more likely to live alone, less likely to own a car and nearly half were disabled. Untold numbers of other disabled people and their caretakers were also left behind. There were tens of thousands of people with special needs in New Orleans. A physician reported hundreds of people in wheelchairs were in front of the Convention Center. A comprehensive study of evacuees in Houston shelters found one in seven physically disabled, 22% physically unable to evacuate, 23% stayed behind to care for someone physically disabled, and 25% had a chronic disease such as heart disease, diabetes or high blood pressure. There were no provisions made for their evacuations. Children were left behind. While there are no official estimates breaking out children left behind, I know from what we saw during our evacuation that many, many children were among those left behind. About one-fourth of the people living in the areas damaged were children, about 183,000 kids, including 47,000 children under the age of five. Over half of the children displaced were African-American and 30% of children in the damaged areas were poor, nearly double the 2000 national census rate for child poverty of 16.6%. These children were almost twice as likely to live in a female-headed home than children nationally. Prisoners were left behind. Local prisons held 8,300 inmates, most on local minor charges awaiting trial and too poor to post bond. Thousands were left behind with no food, water, or medical attention. Jails depend on electricity as much as hospitals do -- doors of cells and halls and pods and entrances and exits are electronically opened and closed. More than 600 hundred prisoners, one entire building, were left behind once the prisons were evacuated -- left in chest deep water, locked into cells. Ultimately as many as 40,000 people took refuge in the Superdome which lost power, lost part of its roof, the water system failed and the toilets backed up. Another 20-30,000 people were dropped off at the Convention Center. Conditions at the Convention Center were far worse than at the Superdome because the Convention Center was never intended to be used for evacuees it did not have any drinking water, food, or medical care at all. Ten people died in or around the Superdome, four at the convention center. Unfounded rumors flew about rapes and murders inside these centers – and the myth that rescue helicopters were fired upon -- have all been found to be untrue. But those rumors so upset military and medical responders that many slowed down demanding protection from the evacuees -- only to be greeted by “a whole lot of people clapping and cheering” when they arrived. Debbie and I left the hospital after five days. Helicopters finally came and airlifted out many patients, their families and staff. Others, like us, left in small fishing boats piloted by volunteers. The Coast Guard reported it rescued 33,000 people and the National Guard reported rescues of another 25,000 people. Louisiana Department of Homeland Security said 62,000 people were rescued from rooftops or out of water -- not including those already in shelters. Many, many others, like us, were rescued by volunteers in boats and trucks. Some people never made it out of metropolitan New Orleans. February 2006 reports from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals show 1,103 bodies were recovered from the storm and flood, with over 2,000 people still reported missing. About 215 people died in local hospitals and nursing homes. Where did the survivors end up? According to FEMA, evacuees ended up all over – applications came in from 18,700 zip codes in all 50 states -- half of the nation’s residential postal zones. Most evacuee families stayed within 250 miles of New Orleans, but 240,000 households went to Houston and other cities over 250 miles away and another 60,000 households went over 750 miles away. Who ended up in shelters? Over 270,000 evacuees started out in shelters. The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health surveyed 680 randomly selected adult evacuees in Houston shelters on September 10-12, 2005. The results of that survey illustrate who ended up in shelters: 64% were renters 55% did not have a car or a way to evacuate 22% had to care for someone who was physically unable to leave 72% had no insurance 68% had neither money in the bank nor a useable credit card 57% had total household incomes of less than $20,000 in prior year 76% had children under 18 with them in the shelter 77% had a high school education or less 93% were black 67% were employed full or part-time before the hurricane 52% had no health insurance 54% received their healthcare at the big public Charity Hospital The people who were left behind in Katrina were the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, children, and prisoners -- mostly African-American. Who is Being Left Behind Now? “Hurricane Katrina likely made one of the poorest areas of the country even poorer….Both those who were poor before the storm and those who have become poor following the storm, are likely to face a particularly difficult time in reestablishing their lives, have few if any financial resources upon which to draw.” -- Congressional Research Service 2005 Debbie and I ultimately ended up spending several months in an apartment in Houston while New Orleans started its recovery. Loyola Law Clinic, where I work, moved into the Disaster Relief Center in Houston and our clinic students interviewed and gave assistance to over a thousand evacuees. We were able to come back to New Orleans for good in mid-December because our house was located close to the University and only sustained roof damage. Very few of the people who were evacuated with us have been able to return. It seems clear that most of the same people who were left behind in the evacuation for Katrina are being left behind again in the reconstruction of New Orleans. In fact, now there are even more being left behind. Hundreds of thousands of people have not been able to make it back. Drive through the city away from the French Quarter, Central Business District and the St. Charles streetcar line and you will see tens of thousands of still damaged and unoccupied homes. Hundreds of thousands of people have not made it back. There were 469,000 fewer people in the metropolitan New Orleans area in January 2006 than in August 2005. Why? Many reasons. Most of the City was still without power in early 2006. About two-thirds of the homes in New Orleans did not have electricity in early 2006, even fewer had gas. Seventy-three percent of the homes in New Orleans were in areas damaged by the storm. But, as the Brown University study concluded, “ torm damage data shows that the storm’s impact was disproportionately borne by the region’s African-American community, by people who rented their homes and by the poor and unemployed.”
Poor people were hardest hit and are having the hardest time returning. “The population of the damaged areas was nearly half black (45.8% compared to 26.4% black in the rest of the region), living in rental housing (45.7% compared to 30.9%), and disproportionately below the poverty line (20.9% compared to 15.3%.”
Renters are not coming back because there is little affordable housing. With tens of thousands of homes damaged, the cost of renting has skyrocketed. An apartment down the block from my house rented for $600 last summer -- it now rents for $1400. Trailers have not arrived because of federal, state and local political misjudgments. Over 10,000 trailers were still sitting unused on runways in Hope, Arkansas in February 2006. In my interviews with evacuees who were renters, few were protected by any insurance -- most lost everything.
The little reconstruction that has started is aimed at home-owners. Louisiana is slated to receive $6.2 billion in Community Development Block Grant money and the Governor says $1 billion “could be used to encourage the rebuilding of affordable housing.” So with 45% of the homes damaged occupied by renters, affordable housing “could” end up with 16% of the assistance.
Public housing is politically out of the question in early 2006. There is no national or local commitment to re-opening public housing in the city. U.S. Congressman Richard Baker, a longtime critic of public housing in New Orleans, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal after the storm saying "We finally cleaned up in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
As the Brown study politely observed “people who previously lived in public housing seem to have the least chances to return, given current policy. All public housing has been closed (and special barriers bolted to the doors)…plans for reopening the projects or for constructing new affordable housing have not become public.”
Debbie lost her nursing job when her hospital failed to reopen. She is not alone. There are now 200,000 fewer jobs in the area than in August. When I teach about the working poor, I tell my students to look for the working poor at the bus stops in the morning and in the evening. The working poor have not returned. As the Brookings Institution Katrina Index tells us pre-Katrina public transportation in New Orleans averaged 124,000 riders per week; in January 2006 there were 11,709 a week, only 9% of the pre-storm number.
The sick are not likely to return anytime soon. Healthcare in New Orleans is now difficult even for those with insurance but nearly impossible for the poor without it. While there were 22 hospitals open in New Orleans in June, in early 2006 there were seven, a 78% reduction. Before Katrina there were 53,000 hospital beds in the area, in February 2006 there were 15,000 -- waits of more than 8 hours in emergency rooms are not uncommon. With so many hospitals closed, people needing regular medical care like dialysis or chemotherapy cannot expect to return. Worse still for the poor, there is no public hospital in New Orleans any more -- the Charity Hospital that over 50% of the people in shelters went to has not been reopened.
Many of the disabled are still in the areas where they evacuated to, causing financial and medical concerns in those states. Others of the disabled, who lived at home prior to the evacuation, fear being institutionalized. Children have not returned to New Orleans. Most public schools remain closed or have been converted into charter schools. Before the storm there were 117 public schools with 60,000 students. In January 2006, there were 19 open, including 8 new charter schools, serving about 13,000 students. Houston alone has nearly 20,000 evacuated students. The failure to reopen public schools in New Orleans has prompted litigation to force the charter and public schools to accept children.
Prisoners have again been left behind. Some of those evacuated were kept in jail long after their sentences had run. Only 7 of 42 public defenders have returned to represent the thousands still held in jail. Even among homeowners, it is much more likely that white homeowners will have the chance to rebuild than black homeowners because of deep patterns of racial disparities in income -- white median income is $61,000 compared to black income of $25,000. Black businesses were severely impacted by Katrina. Rebuilding by homeowners in mostly black low-lying neighborhoods is much less likely at the time of the writing of this article because of bulldozing plans by the city and because rebuilding in those areas depends heavily on planning and homeowners insurance and flood insurance issues, many of which have yet to be resolved.
As a result, because renters, poor people and those without work are overwhelmingly African-American, “New Orleans is at risk of losing 80% of its black population.”
"New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again," Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, told a Houston audience. Recall some of the characteristics of people who ended up in shelters, then compare to the situation currently in New Orleans:
64% were renters -- now rents have skyrocketed and public housing is mostly closed;
22% had to care for someone who was physically unable to leave -- now there are many fewer hospital beds;
52% had no health insurance -- now the main center of public healthcare is closed;
76% had children under 18 with them in the shelter -- most public schools are closed;
93% were black – the areas hit hardest were black and poor;
67% were employed full or part-time before the hurricane -- there are now 200,000 fewer jobs than before the hurricane.
The people left behind in the rebuilding of New Orleans are the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, children, and prisoners, mostly African-American. Again left behind.
The television showed who was left behind in the evacuation of New Orleans after Katrina. There is no similar easy visual for those who are left behind now, but they are the same people.
Conclusion
There is not a sign outside of New Orleans saying “If you are poor, sick, elderly, disabled, children or African-American, you cannot return.” But there might as well be.
The people left behind in the evacuation of New Orleans after Katrina are the same people left behind in rebuilding of New Orleans -- the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, and children, mostly African-American.
Now that we are back from Houston, Debbie has just started a new job at another hospital. I am fortunate enough to work at one of the universities which was not severely physically damaged by the storm and floods.
We are back. But where are our neighbors, the people we rode out of the city with? Where are the hundreds of thousands of our neighbors and will they ever be allowed to return? Where is New Orleans now, and more important, where is it going to be?
Finally, if all levels of government and corporate power allow this to happen in New Orleans, do you think it will be any different in your city?
Bill Quigley is a civil and human rights lawyer and Professor of Law at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. He can be reached at: Quigley@loyno.edu.
Bill’s suggestions for further reading on this topic include:
* “A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina,” U.S. House of Representatives. February 15, 2006.
* “Hurricane Katrina: Social-Demographic Characteristics of Impacted Areas,” CRS Report for Congress, November 4, 2005, Summary.
* “Katrina Index,” Brookings Institution, updated monthly.
* John R. Logan, “The Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods.”
* “Survey of Katrina Evacuees,” This survey of 680 randomly selected adult evacuees in Houston shelters was conducted September 10-12, 2005 by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, questions 11a and 62.
Other Articles by Bill Quigley
* Prison Meeting with Pere Jean-Juste (12.13.05) * Rights Leaders Call for Freedom for Jean-Juste, Neptune and Haitian Political Prisoners * No Home for the Holidays: Stop Evictions of Katrina Evacuees * Why Are They Making New Orleans a Ghost Town? * New Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again!
www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb06/Quigley21.htm
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Anwaar
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Speak the truth and keep on coming.
Posts: 463
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Post by Anwaar on Mar 2, 2006 10:24:24 GMT 4
Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina Thursday March 2, 2006 6:01 AM, AP Photo WX110 By MARGARET EBRAHIM and JOHN SOLOMON A Guardian Report WASHINGTON (AP) - In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage. Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: ``We are fully prepared.'' The footage - along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press - show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster. Linked by secure video, Bush expressed a confidence on Aug. 28 that starkly contrasted with the dire warnings his disaster chief and numerous federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm. A top hurricane expert voiced ``grave concerns'' about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome. ``I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe,'' Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall. The White House and Homeland Security Department urged the public Wednesday not to read too much into the video footage. ``I hope people don't draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing,'' presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said, citing a variety of orders and disaster declarations Bush signed before the storm made landfall. ``He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times.'' Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said his department would not release the full set of videotaped briefings, saying most transcripts - though not the videotapes - from the sessions were provided to congressional investigators months ago. ``There's nothing new or insightful on these tapes,'' Knocke said. ``We actively participated in the lessons-learned review and we continue to participate in the Senate's review and are working with them on their recommendation.'' New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a critic of the administration's Katrina response, had a different take after watching the footage Wednesday afternoon from an AP reporter's camera. ``I have kind a sinking feeling in my gut right now,'' Nagin said. ``I was listening to what people were saying - they didn't know, so therefore it was an issue of a learning curve. You know, from this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware.'' Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response: - Homeland Security officials have said the ``fog of war'' blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. ``I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done,'' National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast. ``I don't buy the `fog of war' defense,'' Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. ``It was a fog of bureaucracy.'' - Bush declared four days after the storm, ``I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees'' that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. He later clarified, saying officials believed, wrongly, after the storm passed that the levees had survived. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm - and Bush was worried too. White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Brown discussed fears of a levee breach the day the storm hit. ``I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One,'' Brown said. ``He's obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he's asking questions about reports of breaches.'' - Louisiana officials angrily blamed the federal government for not being prepared but the transcripts shows they were still praising FEMA as the storm roared toward the Gulf Coast and even two days afterward. ``I think a lot of the planning FEMA has done with us the past year has really paid off,'' Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director, said during the Aug. 28 briefing. It wasn't long before Smith and other state officials sounded overwhelmed. ``We appreciate everything that you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that you realize that what's going on and the sense of urgency needs to be ratcheted up,'' Smith said Aug. 30. Mississippi begged for more attention in that same briefing. ``We know that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be rescued, but we would just ask you, we desperately need to get our share of assets because we'll have people dying - not because of water coming up, but because we can't get them medical treatment in our affected counties,'' said a Mississippi state official whose name was not mentioned on the tape. Video footage of the Aug. 28 briefing, the final one before Katrina struck, showed an intense Brown voicing concerns from the government's disaster operation center and imploring colleagues to do whatever was necessary to help victims. ``We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event,'' Brown warned. He called the storm ``a bad one, a big one'' and implored federal agencies to cut through red tape to help people, bending rules if necessary. ``Go ahead and do it,'' Brown said. ``I'll figure out some way to justify it. ... Just let them yell at me.'' Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him. Neither asked questions in the Aug. 28 briefing. ``I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm,'' the president said. A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security's operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina's reach, for a bird flu event. One snippet captures a missed opportunity on Aug. 28 for the government to have dispatched active-duty military troops to the region to augment the National Guard. Chertoff: ``Are there any DOD assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them?'' Brown: ``We have DOD assets over here at EOC (emergency operations center). They are fully engaged. And we are having those discussions with them now.'' Chertoff: ``Good job.'' In fact, active duty troops weren't dispatched until days after the storm. And many states' National Guards had yet to be deployed to the region despite offers of assistance, and it took days before the Pentagon deployed active-duty personnel to help overwhelmed Guardsmen. The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun. ``I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,'' Mayfield told the briefing. Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated. ``They're not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they're leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about that,'' Brown said. Despite the concerns, it ultimately took days for search and rescue teams to reach some hospitals and nursing homes. Brown also told colleagues one of his top concerns was whether evacuees who went to the New Orleans Superdome - which became a symbol of the failed Katrina response - would be safe and have adequate medical care. ``The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level.... I don't know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane,'' he said. Brown also wanted to know whether there were enough federal medical teams in place to treat evacuees and the dead in the Superdome. ``Not to be (missing) kind of gross here,'' Brown interjected, ``but I'm concerned'' about the medical and mortuary resources ``and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe.'' Link : www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5657406,00.html
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 3, 2006 0:41:36 GMT 4
Dean: New Katrina Video Confirms Disturbing Pattern of Deception3/2/2006 3:04:00 PM Contact: Karen Finney of the Democratic National Committee Staff, 202-863-8148 WASHINGTON, March 2 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following was released today by the Democratic National Committee: A new video released by the Associated Press of the briefing President Bush received days before Hurricane Katrina struck, contradicts statements the President later made in defense of his Administration's failed response. As Katrina hurled towards the Gulf Coast on a path that would eventually kill 1,300 Americans and leave hundreds of thousands stranded and their homes destroyed, federal officials met via video conference offering the President dire warnings about what was to come. During the briefing, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield told the President that the integrity of the levees was "a very very grave concern," which the President appears to have ignored. Just days later, the President misled the American people when he claimed that no one anticipated the failure of the levees that flooded New Orleans. (Knight-Ridder, 3/2/06) (AP, 3/2/06) Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean issued the following statement on the Bush Administration's disturbing pattern of not telling the American people the truth:"These latest revelations make two things perfectly clear: this President can't tell the truth to the American people, and this Republican Congress has failed to uphold its constitutional duty to hold him accountable. Republicans in Congress have consistently stonewalled Democrats' efforts to hold a thorough investigation of what happened in the run up to Hurricane Katrina, and during the disastrous federal response. No wonder there's a collapse in confidence in the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Washington. The American people know the President disregarded vital warnings, and later misled them about it. The message this video sends to the Republican leadership in Washington is that the facts will get out. Democrats will continue to fight to make sure that continues to happen, and to restore leadership in Washington that tells the American people the truth."Americans are also being invited to watch the video and decide for themselves: www.democrats.org/katrinavideo----- TOP TEN BUSH DECEPTIONS1: BUSH MISLED ABOUT TRUE COST OF MEDICARE BILLBush Deception: Drug Bill Would Not Exceed $400 Billion "Bush had pushed hard for the Medicare drug benefit, but said he would not sign anything that exceeded $400 billion," according to the Boston Globe. (Boston Globe, 1/30/04) o Fact: Bush's Medicare Reform Will Cost Almost Double What He First Claimed According to the Chicago Tribune, "The federal government plans to spend more than $700 billion during the next 10 years to provide drug coverage under Medicare as part of a landmark bill signed by President Bush in December 2003." Originally, Bush's prescription drug plan was to have cost $400 billion over 10 years.(Chicago Tribune, 2/26/06; Washington Post, 1/29/04) o Fact: Bush Administration Intentionally Hid Cost of Plan To Win Votes in Congress In late January 2004, the Administration announced they had underestimated the total cost of the package by $135 billion. Bush relied on a $400 billion figure for the first decade of the prescription drug benefit in persuading fiscal conservatives to support the plan last November. But less than two months after signing the legislation, and two years before the benefit becomes available to seniors, the Department of Health and Human Services revised the number up to $535 billion. According to the Washington Post, "Among a small group of lawmakers who negotiated the bill's final version, 'it was an open secret' that administration officials believed 'there is no way this is $400 billion.'" (New York Times, 1/30/04; Washington Times, 12/8/03; Washington Post, 1/31/04; Boston Globe, 1/30/04; New York Times, 2/2/04) o Fact: Bush Administration Threatened to Fire Medicare Expert If He Revealed True Cost of Plan Prior to the congressional vote on the Medicare prescription- drug plan, Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, produced a $551 billion estimate for the bill which was at odds with Bush's publicly- proclaimed estimate. Foster sent an email to colleagues on June 26, 2003 stating that he would be fired if he revealed the higher estimate to lawmakers. (Knight Ridder, 3/11/04) --- 2: BUSH MISLED ABOUT SIZE OF BUDGET DEFICITBush Deception: Budget Deficit Will Be Short-Term Bush: "Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term." (Bush, State of the Union, 2002) o Fact: Deficit Will Be Largest In History and Will Exceed $400 Billion Every Year For Next Ten Years The deficit will exceed $400 billion every year through 2014. By 2014, the deficit will reach $708 billion. At the same time the president renewed his call for Congress to make his tax cuts permanent even as his blueprint projected a widening of the federal deficit to $423 billion this year. (Congressional Budget Office, 1/26/04, 2/27/04; Center on Budget & Policy Priorities, 1/21/04, 2/1/04; Reuters, 2/6/06) Bush Deception: He Promised to Lock Up Social Security Surplus Bush: "In my economic plan, more than $2 trillion of the federal surplus is locked away for Social Security. For years, politicians in both parties have dipped into the Trust Fund to pay for more spending. And I will stop it." (Bush Speech, Rancho Cucamongo Senior Center, "A Defining American Promise," 5/15/00) o Fact: Bush Budget Spends Entire $2.6 Trillion Social Security Trust Fund Bush will spend the entire $2.6 trillion on-budget (Social Security) surplus over ten years. USA Today reported, "The White House is backing away from its pledge to protect every cent of Social Security reserves in the face of a report today that the government is tapping Social Security taxes for other programs." (CBO, An Analysis of the President's Budgetary Proposals for 2004, Table 1, 3/7/03, http://www.cbo.gov; USA Today, 8/28/01) --- 3: BUSH MISLED ABOUT IMPACT OF TAX CUTS ON BUDGET DEFICITSBush Deception: Tax Cuts Will Not Lead to Budget Deficits Bush: "Tax relief is central to my plan to encourage economic growth, and we can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits, even if the economy softens." (Bush Remarks at Western Michigan University, 3/27/01) o Fact: Bush Posted Deficits Due Largely to Tax Cuts In 2002, due largely to Bush's tax cuts, the federal government posted a deficit of $158 billion and returned to deficit for the first time since 1997. In 2004, Bush's three tax cuts over as many years reduced revenues by $270 billion. Over 35 percent of the $9.9 trillion deterioration from 2002-2011 is due to Bush's tax cuts. By 2014, tax cuts will account for 40 percent of the deterioration. Despite Bush's claims to the contrary, only 6 percent of the $477 billion deficit in 2004 is due to the lackluster economy. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 10/21/03; Congressional Budget Office, 3/04; CBO, Historical Budget Data, Table 1 http://www.cbo.gov; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 10/27/03) --- 4: BUSH MISLED ABOUT THREAT OF IRAQ'S NUCLEAR WEAPONSBush Deception: Iraq Posed a Nuclear Threat Bush: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." (Bush Remarks, Cincinnati OH, 10/7/02) o Fact: Saddam Did Not Have Chief Requirements For Nuclear Weapons The Washington Post reported, "What Hussein did not have was the principal requirement for a nuclear weapon, a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And the U.S. government, authoritative intelligence officials said, had only circumstantial evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain those materials." Inspectors in postwar Iraq have "found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a 'grave and gathering danger' by President Bush and a 'mortal threat' by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s." (Washington Post, 8/10/03, 1/7/04) --- 5: BUSH MISLED, SAID "W.M.D." WERE FOUNDBush Deception: Weapons of Mass Destruction Found "In an interview with Polish television on May 30, Mr. Bush cited the trailers (found in postwar Iraq) as evidence that the United States had 'found the weapons of mass destruction' it was looking for." (New York Times, 6/26/03) o Fact: State Department Said Bush Rushed To Judgment The New York Times reported, "The State Department's intelligence division is disputing the Central Intelligence Agency's conclusion that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons, United States government officials said today. In a classified June 2 (2003) memorandum, the officials said, the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said it was premature to conclude that the trailers were evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program, as President Bush has done. Administration officials said the State Department agency was given no warning that the C.I.A. report was being produced, or made public." (New York Times, 6/26/03) 6: BUSH MISLED ABOUT IRAQ'S SUPPOSED PURCHASE OF URANIUM FROM AFRICABush Deception: Claimed Saddam Was Purchasing Uranium From Africa Bush: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (Bush, State of the Union, 1/28/03) o Fact: White House Repeatedly Warned Not To Cite Niger Report In March 2002, both the CIA and State Department learned that evidence linking Iraq to Niger was unfounded. In October, CIA Director Tenet personally intervened with Condoleezza Rice's deputy National Security Advisor to have the charge removed from Bush's speech to the nation. Rice herself was sent a memo debunking the claim. In January, just days before Bush uttered the false charge CIA officials tried again to remove the language, but the White House insisted it remain-with added the caveat that they had received the information from British sources. (Bush, State of the Union, 1/28/03; Time, 7/21/03 Issue; Hadley/Bartlett Gaggle, 7/22/03; New York Times, 7/13/03; Washington Post, 7/20/03; NPR, 6/19/03) o Fact: Three Separate Reports Debunked Niger Transaction Prior to State of the Union When asked about Bush's claim in the State of the Union, Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been charged by the Bush Administration to investigate the possibility of the Niger transaction, said, "I believed, at the time (I) effectively debunked the Niger arms uranium sale." Ambassador Wilson also noted that Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, US Ambassador to Niger, and her staff had already concluded the intelligence was false by the time he arrived in the country. The U.S. embassy had alerted Washington of those conclusions. Separately, Four-Star Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr. had met with Niger president in February 2002 to check the security of the country's uranium. Fulford reported that he was "convinced it was not an issue," and passed his findings to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. (Washington Post, 7/15/03; Joseph Wilson Op-Ed, New York Times, 7/6/03; The New Republic, 6/30/03; Nicholas Kristoff Op-Ed, New York Times, 6/13/03; The New Yorker, 3/31/03; NBC "Meet the Press," 7/6/03) --- 7: BUSH MISLED ABOUT HIS KNOWLEDGE IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING KATRINABush Deception: No One Could Have Anticipated The Breach Of The Levees "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm, but these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded, and now we're having to deal with it and will." (ABC, 9/1/05) o Fact: Bush Was Warned Of Breach On Video Conference. Recently released video and transcripts of a video conference, called into question Bush's assertion that no one could have anticipated the problems caused by Hurricane Katrina. According to The Associated Press, the transcripts showed that Bush was warned by the head of the National Hurricane Center about the potential for breached levees. The transcripts also show that FEMA Director Michael Brown warned the participants that the Super Dome was under water and could become a "catastrophe within a catastrophe." (AP, 3/2/06) --- 8: BUSH MISLED ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH JACK ABRAMOFFBush Deception: I Did Not Know Abramoff You're asking about pictures. I had my picture taken with him, evidently. I've had my picture taken with a lot of people. Having my picture taken with someone doesn't mean that I'm a friend with him or know him very well. . My point is, I mean, there's thousands of people that come through and get their pictures taken. (Bush Press Conference, 1/26/06) o Fact: Bush Met With Abramoff At Least A Dozen Times In emails between Abramoff and Washingtonian Magazine editor, Kim Eisler, Abramoff described his relationship with Bush, claiming to have met with Bush on almost a dozen occasions, even turning down one invitation to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Abramoff's account directly contradicted the claims of White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellan and Bush when asked about the White House's relationship with the former Republican Lobbyist. In his email Abramoff wrote, "he has one of the best memories of any politician i have ever met. it was one if (sic) his trademarks, though of course he can't recall that he has a great memory! the guy saw me in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. perhaps he has forgotten everything. who knows." (Los Angeles Times, 2/22/06) o Fact: Photograph Shows Bush At Meeting With His Clients, Bush, And Rove At The White House "Now, finally, the first such photo has come to light. It shows a bearded Abramoff in the background as Bush greets an Abramoff client, Raul Garza, who was then the chairman of the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas; Bush senior advisor Karl Rove looks on. The photograph was provided to TIME by Mr. Garza. The meeting took place in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House on May 9, 2001." (Time, 2/11/06) o Fact: Abramoff Arranged Meeting For Malaysian Leader With Bush Through Rove. "Three former business associates of Abramoff, who worked with the lobbyist in various roles between 2001 and 2004, told The Associated Press that Abramoff routinely mentioned Rove when talking about his influence inside the White House. One said he was present when Abramoff took a call from Rove's office to confirm a White House meeting had been approved between Malaysia's prime minister and Bush in May 2002. Abramoff was being paid by Malaysia for helping it in Washington, according to evidence the Senate has made public." (AP, 2/15/06) --- 9: BUSH MISLED ABOUT WILLINGNESS TO INVESTIGATE 9-11Bush Deception: He Promised to Provide Full Information About 9-11 Bush: "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson September the 11th." (Bush 11/27/02) o Fact: Bush Initially Opposed Independent 9-11 Commission Bush opposed an independent inquiry into 9/11, arguing it would duplicate a probe conducted by Congress. In July 2002, his administration issued a "statement of policy" that read ".the Administration would oppose an amendment that would create a new commission to conduct a similar review (to Congress's investigation)." (Statement of Administration Policy, Executive Office of the President, 7/24/02; Los Angeles Times, 11/28/02 o Fact: Bush Stonewalled 9-11 Commission The independent bipartisan 9-11 commission first threatened to subpoena daily intelligence reports from the White House before an agreement was finally struck. The renewed threat of a subpoena results from the White House's refusal to let three members of the commission share their notes on the information with the seven others. The White House has cited executive privilege. "'Angry' is not the right word," the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in describing his recent negotiations with the White House over access to the notes. "'Frustrated' might be a better word. We feel as a commission -- unanimously, I think -- that all commissioners are equal, that they should all have the same information." (New York Times, 2/5/04) --- 10: BUSH MISLED ABOUT BEING A UNITERBush Deception: He is a Uniter Bush: "I'm a uniter not a divider." (Austin American- Statesman, 7/30/00) o Fact: He is a Divider The Washington Post reported, "As Bush begins the final year of his term with Tuesday night's State of the Union address, partisans on both sides say the tone of political discourse is as bad as ever -- if not worse." One senior administration official said, Bush could have built "trust and goodwill" by pursuing more broadly appealing initiatives. One former Bush aide said the White House "relished the 'us versus them' thing." (Washington Post, 1/18/04) o Fact: Bush Officials Leaked CIA Agent's Name for Revenge After former Ambassador Joseph Wilson publicly challenged Bush's claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, his wife--a covert CIA operative--was exposed by columnist Robert Novak. Novak said her identity was given to him by senior administration officials. "A senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife... 'Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,' the senior official said of the alleged leak. Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility." (Washington Post, 9/28/03) o Fact: Bush Ordered Partisan Attacks on Daschle Bush called on senior White House advisers and the Republican Party leadership to wage attacks against Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. According to the Washington Times, "The White House is escalating its attacks against Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle... (W)ith polls showing the Republican Party is losing some support in its handling of the economy, President Bush last week ordered senior advisers to take the gloves off and sharpen their rhetoric." (Washington Times, 12/7/01)
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 3, 2006 15:14:22 GMT 4
It's Time to Censure Bush Send your letter to Congress at this link; it is gaining momentum across the US. Sign your name to the letter, or, by all means, compose your own. Thanks to the release of the video and mainstream reporting to the American public, anger and disgust with Bush is at an all time high. We must seize this moment; it has offered us an advantage to force Congress to take action. Please send your letter today and pass on to all you know....MichelleBush lied. And now there's proof. Video just released by the Associated Press shows that the day before Hurricane Katrina hit, experts personally warned Bush about the coming disaster. He knew about the levees, and he knew about the Superdome. But he did nothing. Four days later, Bush maintained that the storm caught everyone by surprise, going as far as saying, "I don't think anybody could have anticipated the breach of the levees." While Bush failed to act 1,300 people died, and thousands more have suffered unimaginable trauma and loss. This is a dereliction of duty, compounded by a sloppy attempt to mislead the public. It's time for Congress to censure the President. Add your voice now!Here is the letter that we'll send to your representative and your Senators, unless you create your own. The letter will have your name on it.Dear [Senator/Representative], I find it deeply disturbing that President Bush would maintain that Hurricane Katrina caught everyone by surprise -- especially his statement that no one could have anticipated the breach of the levees in New Orleans. The Associated Press video proves that isn't true. Top experts personally warned the president about this possibility before the storm hit. It's a dark day when the president proves more concerned with covering his political backside than with truth and personal responsibility. The President's job is to keep us safe. His failure to protect the people of the Gulf Coast, and his subsequent attempt to cover that failure up, are a clear dereliction of duty. It's unacceptable. Congress must send the American people and President Bush a message that it will not tolerate this behavior--that it will defend integrity and honesty in government. Congress must censure the President. Sincerely, [Your name here] www.colorofchange.org/bush/?org=l
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 9, 2006 10:54:10 GMT 4
Democratic Leaders Request Investigation of Wasteful Katrina Contracts and Slow Pace of Recovery
3/8/2006 1:05:00 PM
Contact: Brendan Daly or Jennifer Crider, 202-226-7616, both of the Office of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi
WASHINGTON, March 8 /U.S. Newswire/ -- House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi joined other House Democratic leaders at a press stakeout this morning after the Democratic Caucus meeting to discuss their recent trip to the Gulf Coast region. The leaders also released a letter they sent today to the General Accountability Office (GAO) requesting an investigation into wasteful spending for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and the slow pace of recovery.
Below are Pelosi's remarks, followed by the text of the letter:
"As you are probably aware, over the last weekend we had a bipartisan delegation that went to the Gulf Coast, where Hurricane Katrina struck. I was pleased to lead the delegation with Speaker Hastert.
"What we saw there challenged the conscience of our nation. Six months after the hurricanes, people are still not able to have access to their homes, if their homes even exist at all. What we saw there challenges the conscience of this Congress. To meet this challenge, we have come to ask for some answers.
"When Mr. Clyburn talks about $400 an hour and $65 an hour for contracts, that's what FEMA has been charged. We don't know what the people delivering the service were paid. And that was a constant theme when we were there. Time and money have been spent by contracting and subcontracting instead of just hiring someone to get the job done, engaging the services of a local firm to get the job done. I think this borders on a scandal. But we don't know. That is why we are asking the GAO to look into this. I think the American taxpayer is being ripped off. But more importantly, the people of the region are not being served. The American people are compassionate and generous, and we have a responsibility to the taxpayer. We want these answers.
"I think it is important to note the scale of this so people know how vast it is. For example, when we went to the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish, you think of it as a neighborhood, but it is the size of the island of Manhattan. Think of Manhattan with no homes and no businesses up and running. Let me correct myself. In St. Bernard Parish, they had 27,000 homes; three of them are habitable. So it's not 100 percent -- 27,000 minus three, if that gives you any scale. And from Galveston to Florida, the scope of hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma devastated an area the size of Great Britain. So we are not talking about a few people. We are talking about a huge part of our country, where we have not met the needs of the people.
"Six months later, not only are people not in their homes, they are being kicked out of hotels. This is not a statement of the values of the American people. We are asking for the GAO to expedite and look into this and get back to us as soon as possible."
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March 8, 2006 The Honorable David Walker Comptroller General U.S. Government Accountability Office Washington, D.C.
Dear Comptroller General Walker:
From March 2-4, 2006, many of us went on a bipartisan Congressional Delegation tour of the Gulf Coast to survey the region's recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
The three-day tour revealed a battered landscape littered with mounds of debris, destroyed infrastructure, and few public services. Little progress appears to have been made toward recovery and rebuilding along the Gulf in the six months since Hurricane Katrina made landfall. This lack of progress is particularly troubling considering the $62 billion that Congress has appropriated to provide the 1.8 million displaced residents temporary relief and long-term assistance to begin the long process of rebuilding their lives and redeveloping the areas devastated by the storm.
The extraordinary devastation caused by Katrina should have called forth an equally extraordinary response. But the lack of progress toward recovery in the Gulf raises fundamental questions about the competence of the federal response.
We are particularly concerned by the evident waste of funds through improper and inefficient contracting decisions. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina depended heavily on the use of private contractors to conduct routine relief and recovery activities such as furnishing and delivering ice, water, food and other supplies, removing debris, providing temporary coverings for roofs and arranging temporary housing. The absence of Administration oversight of contracting appears to have permitted grossly wasteful and inefficient spending to continue, even as urgent needs of Gulf Coast communities remain unmet.
From investigations conducted by inspectors general, Congressional committees, and the GAO, we know that the government has spent:
-- $3 million for 4,000 base camp beds that were never used;
-- $10 million to renovate rooms in a military barracks that were used to house only 6 people;
-- $236 million to lease cruise ships that were never fully occupied by evacuees, and
-- $857 million for 25,000 manufactured homes for which there are current deployment plans for only 5,000.
These examples alone depict a breakdown in the normal process of disaster recovery. They are further exacerbated by recent findings by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE) that nearly 600 Katrina related contracts have been awarded on a no-bid /sole source basis.
Meanwhile, Gulf Coast communities lack adequate housing and public infrastructure so that residents may return and rebuild. That is unacceptable.
We understand that GAO is reviewing the efficiency of government contracting for the Katrina recovery effort. Having witnessed firsthand the devastation along the Gulf and the slow rate of recovery and rebuilding progress, we request that you expedite your review in this area and report your findings to Congress as quickly as possible. A full accounting of the use of no-bid awards and irregular contracting practices will help our efforts to rein in waste and inefficiency and jump start the stalled rebuilding and recovery effort.
We further ask that the GAO examine how the Administration was caught so unprepared to efficiently contract for Katrina reconstruction, repeating the mistakes that were discovered in contracting for Iraq reconstruction. We also ask that your review identify the most wasteful contracts, so we can take immediate steps to end them and spend the money properly to benefit Gulf Coast residents.
Sincerely,
Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Leader
Steny Hoyer, Democratic Whip
James E. Clyburn, Democratic Caucus Chair
John B. Larson, Democratic Caucus Vice Chair
Henry A. Waxman, Ranking Democrat, Government Reform
Bennie Thompson, Ranking Democrat, Homeland Security
Remarks by the President and Mrs. Bush in Visit to New Orleans Area 3/8/2006 12:35:00 PM Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2580
WASHINGTON, March 8 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following is a transcript of remarks by the President and Mrs. Bush in a visit to the New Orleans area: Industrial Levee Canal New Orleans, Louisiana 10:33 A.M. CST
THE PRESIDENT: I want to thank you all for coming. I want to thank Colonel Setliff for the tour that he just gave the Governor and the Mayor and myself, along with Laura and part of our party. I want to thank Colonel Wagenaar for the aerial tour. We just flew over affected parts of Orleans Parish and Jefferson Parish and St. Bernard Parish, and getting a view of the progress that is being made.
I particularly want to thank my friend, Don Powell, for his hard work in coordinating federal efforts with the Governor and the Mayor. Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin have been by my side when I've come down here, and I really appreciate them being a part of the recovery efforts. I want to thank Walter Isaacson and David Voelker, the members of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. They were on Air Force One today to make sure I fully understood -- understand the strategies that the local folks are putting in place to help the good people of this part of the world recover from the devastating storm.
You know, we just came from a neighborhood where people are fixing to -- are in the process of cleaning up debris. We went there because the Mayor and the Governor thought it was important for me to see firsthand the devastation of the storm in certain neighborhoods and the progress that is being made for cleaning up the debris. There's still a lot of work to be done, no question about it. And obviously, as the plan gets laid out and as the housing plan I'm fixing to discuss comes to fruition, people will feel more comfortable in granting the local authorities the right to remove debris from their homes to be cleaned up.
But I want to share a story about a fellow, Romalice Harris (phonetic), I met. He was there -- was part of the construction crew. I asked him, I said, where were you during the storm? He said he felt like he could ride it out. He heard the evacuation orders, but thought it would be all right to ride out the storm. He lived on the third floor of an apartment complex. And he described to me and the Governor and the Mayor what it was like to see the water start to rise up to the second floor of the building. He and his three children and his wife and another relative were finally rescued by a boat.
I said, what happened to you? He said, "Well, I went to Salt Lake City, Utah." In other words, his is an example of what happened to the good folks in this part of the world. He watched the rising waters, and then he just had to abandon the part of the world he loves.
From there the federal government helped fly him to Chicago, where he had some relatives -- or a relative. He now has come back to work in the city he loves, New Orleans, with the hopes of rebuilding his life. His wife and children are still in Chicago; they're going to school there. But as he told us, he says he looks forward to bringing them home, bringing them back to Louisiana, to have his children educated right here. And I'm convinced he'll succeed. And our job at all levels of government is to provide the confidence and the help necessary so that people like Romalice Harris come home.
I appreciate the determination by the folks down here to rebuild. I fully understand, and I hope your country understands, the pain and agony that the people of New Orleans and Louisiana and the parishes surrounding New Orleans went through. But I think people would be impressed by the desire of the people in this part of the country to pick up and move on and rebuild. And that's why I'm so pleased that the Governor and the Mayor have joined me, so we can discuss the importance of implementing a strategy that will help this part of the world rise again.
The first part of the strategy is to make sure these levees are strong, and we fully understand that if the people don't have confidence in the levee system, they're not going to want to come back. People aren't going to want to spend money or invest. I just got a briefing from the Army Corps of Engineers that said we're on schedule to repair the damage by the June 1st deadline. They're identifying and correcting design and construction deficiencies so, as we go into the start of the hurricane season, the levees will be equal or better than what they were before Katrina.
The Corps is identifying areas that weren't damaged, but that need additional attention. Over here you can see one of the -- one of the walls that are being built. I mean, there's a lot of concrete and a lot of steel being put in the ground to protect the levee system. By September of next year, additional improvements will be completed, bringing the entire levee system up to the full authorized design height, making it better and stronger than before.
Congress heard our message about improving the levees, but they short-changed the process by about $1.5 billion. And so, in order to help fulfill our promise on the levees, Congress needs to restore the $1.5 billion, to make this a real commitment, to inspire the good folks down here that they'll have a levee system that will encourage development and reconstruction.
As I mentioned, we went by the Ninth Ward to see the debris removal that was taking place. The vast majority of debris on public property has been removed. About 80 percent of the debris not related to demolition has been cleared. Most of the remaining debris is on private property, in yards or inside houses that need to be gutted or demolished. To get the debris, the residents need to give permission, in most cases, to the local authorities. And so they need to get back to their houses, so they can decide what to keep and what to remove.
The problem is, obviously, many homeowners are still displaced. And that's why we're working at all levels of government to encourage evacuees to inspect their properties and to salvage what they can and to make decisions about the future.
Of course, the decision-making for the individual homeowners is going to be made easier when Congress funds the $4.2 billion that I asked them to fund for the state of Louisiana for housing purposes. Now, this $4.2 billion is in conjunction with $6.2 billion of CDBG money for housing grants. The $4.2 billion request was done in a coordinated effort with state and local authorities.
The reason I thought this number made sense is because the number fits into a well-thought-out plan that has been put together by the local folks. The housing plan has been coordinated by state authorities with local authorities, as well as with HUD authorities. In other words, we've all been working together to figure out how to come up with a housing plan that will restore the confidence of the people of this important part of our country. And in order to make sure that housing plan meets its goals, Congress should make sure that the $4.2 billion I requested goes to the state of Louisiana.
I'm also confident that this plan is solid right now, it's well-thought-out, and when it's submitted to HUD, because there's been close coordination, it should be approved on a timely basis.
And so, again, I want to thank you all for inviting me to come back. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Louisiana. Some of you might recall I grew up across the line, over there in Texas, and really enjoyed my stay here when I came. I was pleased to see that the Mardi Gras parades went well, Mr. Mayor. As the Mayor and the Governor described to me, it was as much of a homecoming as anything else. A lot of folks came back, came home. And that's what we want. We want people coming home. And the federal government will do our part, in conjunction with our state and local partners.
I ask for God's blessings on the people of this part of the world, and thank the hardworking folks here for working around the clock to get this part of the country up and running again. Thank you. (Applause.)
Now, Laura is traveling with me. She's got a very important announcement she'd like to make, as well.
MRS. BUSH: Thanks a lot. I want to talk about schools just briefly, and particularly about school libraries. In July 2001, I founded a foundation, the Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries. The foundation is a private organization that provides grants to school libraries to expand their book collections. Over the last four years, the foundation has awarded 428 grants totaling more than $2 million in 49 states.
In September of last year, the leadership group -- the leadership council of the Laura Bush Foundation met for what was going to be our very last meeting. We had raised the money we wanted to raise for the foundation and we were going to disperse our leadership council. And instead, everyone unanimously wanted to continue to work to raise a specific amount of money for Gulf Coast libraries.
We've established a special fund to help the schools in the Gulf Coast region. The Gulf Coast School Library Recovery Initiative is the name of it. The initiative will help Gulf Coast schools that were damaged by the hurricanes rebuild their book and material collections. And the task is very large. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 1,121 public and private schools in the Gulf Coast region were damaged or destroyed.
The basic initial cost of building a book collection for an elementary school library is $50,000. And the cost for a secondary school library is at least $100,000. So the Laura Bush Foundation website, which everyone can go to -- laurabushfoundation.org -- has a simple application that schools can use to apply for funds. Again, the website is laurabushfoundation.org.
The foundation already uses a competitive grant process to distribute annual grants, and will use the same process for the Gulf Coast funds. Some schools should receive awards by late April or early May. Additional grants will be distributed throughout the year as more schools are rebuilt and ready to stock their libraries.
The Laura Bush Foundation will continue to provide its annual grants to schools throughout the United States. And you can find the details about those grants on the website. But these special grants for the Gulf Coast rebuilding are for schools that were damaged or destroyed by the hurricanes and want to rebuild their library collections.
We all know that schools are at the center of every child's life, and the routine of going to school gives children a sense of comfort that's more important than ever for boys and girls who've endured trauma. The sooner children are back in their own school, the happier and healthier they'll be.
So I want to thank everyone who is working hard to help the Gulf Coast recover. I urge all the Gulf Coast schools that are rebuilding to go to the laurabushfoundation.org website and apply for a grant for your school library. Thanks everybody. (Applause.) END NOTE TO LAURA BUSH: You were a libraian for what, one year? Government funding to our public libraries has been drastically cut; they are scrambling to stay afloat. As for our schools, now book publishers are selling directly to the children during their bookfests. This cuts out any booksellers as the middleman. The Harry Potter books were shamelessly sold to children at the schools, before release [orders were taken at full price, around $35], and when the book was released, it was offered by bookstores at up to 35% off. Nice job rippin' off little kids!!!.....Michelle
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 8, 2006 15:42:32 GMT 4
Liberal Bad Faith In The Wake Of Hurricane Katrinaby Adolph Reed and Stephen Steinberg May 4, 2006 From: The Black CommentatorSNIP:So, Barbara Bush was right after all when she said, “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.” And Rep. Richard Baker, a 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge, was right when he was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” The publication of both statements elicited public condemnation and was followed by a flurry of hairsplitting denials. But it is now clear that their only transgression was to say in unvarnished language what many pundits, politicians, and policy wonks were thinking. Since then, there has been a stream of proposals in more circumspect language, first by conservatives and then by a liberal policy circle at Harvard, that also envision the resettlement of New Orleans’ poverty population far from the Vieux Carré, Garden District and other coveted neighborhoods of the “new” New Orleans. READ THE REST: tinyurl.com/kt94c
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Aug 19, 2006 15:38:31 GMT 4
Report: Rampant 'Disaster Profiteering' Abuses Needlessly Slowing Rebuilding of New Orleans, Gulf Coast After Katrina8/17/2006 12:03:00 PM Contact: Patrick Mitchell, 703-276-3266 or pmitchell@hastingsgroup.com for CorpWatch NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- While "disaster profiteers" -- including Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and Bechtel Group Inc. -- double dip to add to their profits from the also troubled reconstruction of Iraq, local companies and laborers in New Orleans and the rest of the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast region are systematically getting the short end of the stick, according to a major new report from the nonprofit CorpWatch.A CorpWatch analysis of FEMA's records shows that "fully 90 percent of the first wave of (the post-Katrina reconstruction) contracts awarded -- including some of the biggest no-bid contracts to date -- went to companies from outside the three worst-affected states. As of July 2006, after months of controversy and Congressional hearings, companies from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had increased their share of the total contracts to a combined 16.6 percent." The CorpWatch analysis shows that more federal reconstruction contracts have gone to Virginia and Indiana -- usually large, politically connected corporations -- than to any of the three Katrina-devastated states. Titled "Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast," the CorpWatch report also exposes abusive "contracting charge pyramids" where the companies doing the actual reconstruction work often get only a tiny (and insufficient) fraction of the taxpayer money awarded for projects and widespread non-payment of local companies and laborers, including what has been alleged to be the deliberate and systematic exploitation of immigrant workers, including undocumented individuals.CorpWatch Director Pratap Chatterjee said: "One year after disaster struck, the slow-motion rebuilding of the Gulf Coast region looks identical to what has happened to date in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see a pattern of profiteering, waste and failure -- due to the same flawed contracting system and even many of the same 'players.' The process of getting Katrina- stricken areas back on their feet is needlessly behind schedule, in part, due to the shunning of local business people in favor of politically connected corporations from elsewhere in the U.S. that have used their clout to win lucrative no-bid contracts with little or no accountability and who have done little or no work while ripping off the taxpayer." "Big, Easy Money" report author Rita J. King said: "The devastation of the Gulf Coast is tragic enough, but the scope of the corporate greed that followed, facilitated by government incompetence and complicity, is downright criminal. Sadly, disaster profiteering has become commonplace in America. Well connected corporations are growing rich off of no-bid contracts while the sub-contractors -- the people who actually perform the work -- often do so for peanuts, if they get paid at all." KEY REPORT FINDINGS-- A familiar (and disturbing) cast of characters: Many of the same "disaster profiteers" and government agencies that mishandled the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the failure of "reconstruction" of the Gulf Coast region. The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same "contract vehicles" in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" open-ended "contingency" contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also "cost-plus" contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend. The report lays out these astronomical charges in details. Using non-local companies means that the job is expensive and often botched, as happened in Iraq. Bechtel's reconstruction of schools in Iraq in the summer of 2003 was a case study in unfinished work and overcharging. Also in the summer of 2006, the Pentagon canceled a Bechtel contract to build a hospital in Basra because it was hopelessly behind schedule and had tripled in price. It is perhaps less than surprising that the person in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers today, Lieutenant General Carl A. Strock, is the very man who was in charge of the Halliburton contracts in Iraq. The Army Corps has a less than impressive record in the Mississippi Delta; they are after all, the agency that masterminded the system of levees that have ruined the Delta and failed one year ago to protect area residents. " -- Abusive "contracting pyramids that leave the actual subcontractors doing the work with only a tiny amount of the money paid by the federal government. AshBritt's $500 million contract for debris removal amounted to about $23 for every cubic yard of debris removed. AshBritt, in turn hired C&B Enterprises, which was paid $9 per cubic yard. That company hired Amlee Transportation, which was paid $8 per cubic yard. Amlee hired Chris Hessler Inc, which received $7 per cubic yard. Hessler, in turn, hired Les Nirdlinger, a debris hauler from New Jersey, who was paid $3 per cubic yard -- less than the cost of doing the work. "Operation Blue Roof" another example; FEMA paid $6.6 million to All American Poly to make the blue tarps that cover so many storm-damaged roofs in the worst-hit areas. FEMA then gave the tarps and the contracts to install them to Shaw Group and Simon Roofing and Sheetmetal of Ohio. Those companies then subcontracted much of the actual work, and those subcontractors further subcontracted. The final cost for each tarp averaged out to almost $2,500 per tarp -- almost enough to pay for a new roof in many cases -- even tough the tarps were only designed to last 3 months. The workers who actually tacked the tarp onto the roof (a two-hour job) were making closer to minimum wage. -- Local companies go unpaid ... or are frozen out of the process altogether. Even if a contract is awarded to a small local business, it does not necessarily mean the company ever got paid. Coastal Environments, Inc. (CEI) was paid $150,000 on a $3.1 million contract. In another case, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a no-bid $39.5 million contract to Alaska-based Akima Site Operations, a firm based more than 3,500 miles from where Katrina made landfall, to provide 450 portable classrooms to Mississippi. A local businessman suing the federal government and Akima has filed papers claiming that he submitted a bid at half the price but was rejected by the Corps of Engineers. -- Laborers -- particularly immigrant workers -- are not getting paid. Victoria Cintra of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Association (MIRA) said that her small volunteer organization has successfully fought for over $300,000 in pay owed to workers, but the battle is unending. The subcontracting layers are a major part of the problem; each can't pay the next until it gets paid, meaning the laborers on the bottom rung get paid last -- if at all. In one case, a contract was granted to Kellogg Brown & Root in Mississippi to rehab the Seabee Naval Base. KBR subcontracted with a company called Tipton Friendly Rollins, which subbed the work to Kansas City Tree, who passed the duties on to a small construction company. The small firm finally hired the workers, many of whom were immigrants, to do the job. The owner of the firm promised food and board, in rickety trailers "not fit for rats," according to Cintra. But after paying her employees for one week's work, the owner of the construction company claimed that she couldn't pay or feed the laborers until she was paid by Kansas City Tree. In the dead of night, she reportedly entered the trailers and awakened the laborers and warned them that immigration agents were on their way. Many of the workers fled. MIRA traced the chain of contracts back to Halliburton and delivered its research to the U.S. Department of Labor. Eventually MIRA won the $141,000 in back pay for the construction company's laborers, but many fear deportation or have no permanent addresses, and cannot be found. Rosana Cruz, Gulf Coast field coordinator for the National Immigration Law Center, said: "The level of assault against workers feels like war. There's vulnerability in each successive layer of subcontracting. ... It's shocking that there aren't millions of people across the United States demanding accountability. This is a microcosm of what's happening around the world. If you're poor and you're brown, we can do whatever we want with you."-- No good local deed seems to go unpunished. The Vietnamese neighborhood in New Orleans once known as Versailles (for the nearby housing project) has struggled to its feet, with little help from any government agencies. Of the community's 53 businesses, an estimated 45 have opened their doors. Ninety-five percent of the homes have been gutted. The remarkable transformation of the neighborhood was so astonishing that a group affected by the tsunami came from Thailand in June 2006 to find out how it was accomplished so they could put those skills to work at home. The community was so focused on the rebuilding effort that news of a landfill between them and the largest urban wildlife refuge in the nation, Bayou Sauvage, was an unwelcome disruption -- but not a complete shock. "If you look around the country," said local pastor Vien the Nguyen said, "every landfill is near minority people." For detailed report findings, go to the CorpWatch Web site at www.corpwatch.org------ ABOUT CORPWATCHThis is the third in a series of CorpWatch reports on major reconstruction projects done in the last five years covering Afghanistan, Iraq and now the Gulf Coast of the United States. CorpWatch Director Pratap Chatterjee authored "Iraq, Inc.," the first book look at the U.S. occupation after the initial 12-month period. CorpWatch's Afghanistan report titled "Afghanistan, Inc." was released in May 2005. The Oakland, Calif.-based CorpWatch investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, fraud and corruption around the world through reports and Web sites: www.corpwatch.org and www.warprofiteers.com. It works to foster democratic control over multinational corporations by undertaking original cutting-edge research and reporting on companies' behavior and impacts in the United States and across the globe. It complements this investigative journalism with public education, network-building and media activism, working in strategic coalitions to support campaigns that promote peace and sustainability by making the public and policy makers aware of the need for stronger corporate regulation and monitoring, and to catalyze efforts to tackle offenders------ EDITOR'S NOTE: A streaming audio replay of the CorpWatch news event will be available on the Web at www.corpwatch.org as of 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT on Aug. 17.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Feb 15, 2007 20:27:53 GMT 4
Unmasking Our Pain in New OrleansThis is my last post today [honestly!] Today, I feel the need to heap on futher awareness of how our sad sack of governmental officials and institutions abandon our people. We must NEVER forget or let up the pressure on what happened before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. For in truth, the plight and problems of this area and its population are the same for all of the United States....MichelleUnmasking Our Pain in New OrleansBy Lolis Eric Elie Sunday, February 11, 2007; B01 The rush begins approximately right now. Even as I write this, thousands of Americans are packing away their inhibitions and preparing to come to my city and go native. They will arrive in the French Quarter uninhibited, as they imagine we are. They will remove their clothes. They will empty their beer-filled guts onto each other's shoes. They will clown for hungry cameras and for journalists eager to capture New Orleans as some distant editor has imagined it. Invariably, the networks will set up their shots in the French Quarter, though none of the major parades and few of the emblematic Carnival activities take place there. Neither the journalists nor the revelers seem to care that our lives, local lives, are elsewhere. For us, Mardi Gras is family time. We gather on our favorite corners to watch parades with parents and cousins and picnic lunches prepared by grandmothers (then) or bought from fast-food dispensaries (now). We don masks. We drink. We dance. We drink. We yell loudly. We drink. This we do, ever aware that the people on our right and on our left are the same people we will see during more sober times at work, school and church. America would recognize us in family mode, but we may never be seen that way. Hurricane Katrina confirmed for now, and perhaps forever, the sense that New Orleans is a foreign place attached to the United States by geography, but distant from it in every meaningful way. We are more European, more African, less serious. And we lack the good sense God gave a goose. Why else would we raise our kids among girls gone wild in a hurricane magnet of a city that lies largely below sea level? When Hurricane Katrina hit, our nation offered us sympathy. Millions of Americans accepted us into their cities. They sent 18-wheelers heavy with goodwill and provisions. Others came here, donned hazard suits and helped us. But I fear this compassion is wearing thin. It has been nearly 18 months. By now, the thinking goes, real Americans, self-reliant Americans, would have picked themselves up by their stiff upper lips and gotten on with life. They wouldn't be waiting for a government check. They would rebuild their homes and their lives with money and fortitude held in reserve. My mother is a real American. Her difficulties have been minor compared with the setbacks suffered by others in our city. She's 72 years old. A decade ago, she moved into a new house she chose specifically because she thought it was on high, safe ground. She put her all into renovating and decorating it. On Aug. 29, 2005, it was inundated by four feet of water. Her blood pressure began to rise. Her borderline diabetes crept across the border. A pain developed in her left leg. Like many ailments these days, hers seemed stress induced. From her sister's home in Dallas, she rebuilt. The first contractor she hired disappeared with the down payment. The first doctor said the back pain would go away. The first call to an insurance office put her in touch with a Ms. Bear. From her office somewhere in America, Ms. Bear insisted that my mother could just knock the insulation and roofing materials to the side and sleep in the filth of her waterlogged bed. That's what a Bear would do. The second contractor was moving quickly among his various jobs, but slowly on my mother's house. Then he developed cancer and stopped moving much at all. (Was it his men who stole the ladder and the toilet and broke that glass table we'd carefully salvaged?) The second doctor recommended back surgery. The insurance company asked for more photos. Several doctors, two chiropractors, one surgery, a dozen letters and scores of phone calls later, my mother is back in her house. About a quarter of her neighbors have returned. It's lonely there. My mother speaks to her friends long-distance. Somehow, when people look at us and our city, they don't see my mother. They see the desperate brown faces at the Superdome or hear the otherly accented voices from St. Bernard Parish. They don't see the old man in the Lower Ninth Ward, gutting his house by day and sleeping in it by night because he has nowhere else to stay. They don't see the families cramped in trailers because they have nowhere else to live. They don't see the fishermen in Plaquemines Parish begging to get back to work. Those men need government help to move their boats from the land, where the floodwaters left them, back to the bayous, where they can again ply their trade. That's not the kind of work the Federal Emergency Management Agency is allowed to do. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the federal government did a terrible job. No doubt about that. Americans stranded on roofs. Americans without food and water. People in war-ravaged, dysfunctional nations looking at us on television saw that our country could be just as dysfunctional as their own. Domestic politics demanded that our misery be seen as the result either of Democratic Great Society programs or Republican social Darwinism. In fact, neither was apt. Make no mistake -- the devastation in New Orleans and southern Louisiana was a government-enabled disaster. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed and built the levees and floodwalls that were supposed to protect us. The failure of these structures resulted in the devastation of our city. This is not the crank conspiracy theory of angry New Orleanians. This is the conclusion that the Corps reached in a 6,600-page report, released June 1. Hurricane Katrina was no more than a Category 2 storm when it hit New Orleans. The levees and floodwalls were supposed to be able to withstand a Category 3 storm. The Corps acknowledged that the flood-control system was badly designed and badly built. "For the first time the corps has had to stand up and say we had a catastrophic failure with one of our projects," said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the commander of the Corps. You may expect that an admission by a government agency that its poor work was responsible for the destruction of an American city would have been big news. But the story of the Corps' admission, released on a Thursday, didn't live long enough to make the Sunday talk shows. The confession was irrelevant. The nation had already concluded that the death of New Orleans was a suicide caused by our irrational desire to live in harm's way. This blame-New-Orleans attitude has been devastating for us. Though Louisiana suffered far more damage per capita than did Mississippi, our neighbor to the east has received a disproportionate share of federal funding. But neither of us was treated fairly. Six weeks after the storm, Congress passed legislation allowing low-interest loans for Gulf Coast communities to use to pay public employees. But the White House and the Republican leadership in Congress specifically required that the money be paid back, even though such federal disaster loans have generally been forgiven for the past three decades. "Notwithstanding section 417 of the Stafford Act, such loans may not be canceled," the offending passage reads. In its zeal to punish Louisiana for sins that are largely not of our own making, the federal government has twisted our national priorities so radically as to render them unrecognizable. In this era when homeland security is the nation's paramount concern, there is no enthusiasm for protecting American land along the coast of Louisiana. For the past several decades, we've lost an average of 24 square miles of territory every year. About 40 percent of U.S. wetlands are in Louisiana, but my state experiences 80 percent of the nation's coastal wetlands loss. This loss is crucial to us because hurricanes lose strength when traveling over this land and are thus less powerful when they reach populated areas. Fewer wetlands means more hurricane damage. Two years ago, before Katrina, the Corps of Engineers and the state of Louisiana estimated that it would take $14 billion to stem the tide of coastal erosion. In December, the lame-duck Congress allocated 34 percent of the federal oil royalties collected off our shores to Louisiana to combat coastal erosion. But we won't get the full amount for 17 years. For the next decade, we will receive about $20 million a year to combat a $14 billion problem. The latest forecast by coastal experts gives us about 10 years to restore the territory that has been lost south of New Orleans. If we fail to do that, those communities will have to be written off in a couple of decades. If, say, Cuba or Venezuela had seized 24 square miles of American territory, the call to arms would have been immediate and decisive. But because coastal erosion is an enemy neither foreign nor domestic, we seem willing to surrender to it. We've retreated behind the excuse that New Orleans can't be saved. We've abandoned our can-do pride. In the Netherlands, the Dutch have managed to craft a flood-control system that protects the huge percentage of that nation's land that lies below sea level. These days Americans lack the money, the ingenuity, the patriotism, the humanity of the Dutch. Much of the wealth of Louisiana lies in our culture. This is the state that gave the nation jazz and Louis Armstrong, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. We created two of the nation's signature regional cuisines, Creole and Cajun. Our architecture is some of the oldest and most distinguished in the nation. But it seems that our country views our culture not as a national treasure worth saving, but as further evidence that we are not real Americans at all. But this view could change. Earlier this month the Corps released the locations of 122 levees that are at risk of failing. They are located in 27 states and the District of Columbia. We New Orleanians have suffered much in the past 18 months. We wouldn't wish such devastation on anyone. But I would like to remind my nation that according to this list, the problems of my home town are not so foreign after all. I may seem like a foreigner to you when I scream for an independent commission to study government failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or when I decry the plodding incompetence of FEMA. I may seem like the stereotypical welfare cheat when I argue that the federal government has not invested nearly enough in protecting my state from an even greater future disaster. Indeed, mine may seem like a voice emanating from a distant Southern wilderness. But in truth, the problems of Louisiana are the problems of the United States. Or, as Ralph Ellison wrote, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"lelie@tpmail.com Lolis Eric Elie is a columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.Source: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020901916_pf.html------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Also, see this VERY revealing 10 min video:Levees and evacuations Criminally negligent homicide AKA mass murder in New Orleans Greg Palast is one of the finest US journalists working today which means, of course, he can’t find a job in the US so he writes for UK publications and makes his own films. Some people believe levees in New Orleans were blown to clear black neighborhoods for development. The simple truth is far more sinister: The levees were built like crap, the Army Corps of Engineers knew it and - note carefully - the federal government sat on the information they had about the levee collapses for twelve long hours before disclosing it to state and local authorities. Why? Ask Bush’s spinmaster Karl Rove. He closely stage-managed every aspect of the White House response down to and including launching smear campaigns against Louisiana’s governor in the days immediately after the levee breaks. Is it possible that post-levee collapse chaos was actually cultivated deliberately to draw attention away from one basic, undeniable fact, that the destruction of New Orleans was caused not by Katrina, but by the failure of the federal levee system? Based on what we know about the Bush administration, you tell me. Excerpts from the Greg Palast film “Big Easy to Big Empty”… Buy the video direct from Greg. Info at the end of the video: Go to: foodmusicjustice.com/2007/02/01/levees-and-evacuations/
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 14, 2007 14:29:57 GMT 4
The Bush Family members are nothing but parasitic opportunists. Here, we look at GW and Jeb and their money making schemes, selling crap equipment, all at the expense, and lives, of the people of New Orleans....MichelleNew Orleans pumps were faulty By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer Tue Mar 13, 6:52 PM ET NEW ORLEANS - The Army Corps of Engineers, rushing to meet President Bush's promise to protect New Orleans by the start of the 2006 hurricane season, installed defective flood-control pumps last year despite warnings from its own expert that the equipment would fail during a storm, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The 2006 hurricane season turned out to be mild, and the new pumps were never pressed into action. But the Corps and the politically connected manufacturer of the equipment are still struggling to get the 34 heavy-duty pumps working properly. The pumps are now being pulled out and overhauled because of excessive vibration, Corps officials said. Other problems have included overheated engines, broken hoses and blown gaskets, according to the documents obtained by the AP.Col. Jeffrey Bedey, who is overseeing levee reconstruction, insisted the pumps would have worked last year and the city was never in danger. Bedey gave assurances that the pumps should be ready for the coming hurricane season, which begins June 1. The Corps said it decided to press ahead with installation, and then fix the machinery while it was in place, on the theory that some pumping capacity was better than none. And it defended the manufacturer, which was under time pressure. "Let me give you the scenario: You have four months to build something that nobody has ever built before, and if you don't, the city floods and the Corps, which already has a black eye, could basically be dissolved. How many people would put up with a second flooding?" said Randy Persica, the Corps' resident engineer for New Orleans' three major drainage canals. The 34 pumps — installed in the drainage canals that take water from this bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city and deposit it in Lake Pontchartrain — represented a new ring of protection that was added to New Orleans' flood defenses after Katrina. The city also relies on miles of levees and hundreds of other pumps in various locations. The drainage-canal pumps were custom-designed and built under a $26.6 million contract awarded after competitive bidding to Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla. It was founded in 1926 and supplies flood-control and irrigation pumps all over the world. MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.MWI has run into trouble before. The U.S. Justice Department sued the company in 2002, accusing it of fraudulently helping Nigeria obtain $74 million in taxpayer-backed loans for overpriced and unnecessary water-pump equipment. The case has yet to be resolved. Because of the trouble with the New Orleans pumps, the Corps has withheld 20 percent of the MWI contract, including an incentive of up to $4 million that the company could have collected if it delivered the equipment in time for the 2006 hurricane season. Misgivings about the pumps were chronicled in a May 2006 memo provided to the AP by Matt McBride, a mechanical engineer and flooded-out Katrina victim who, like many in New Orleans, has been closely watching the rebuilding of the city's flood defenses. The memo was written by Maria Garzino, a Corps mechanical engineer overseeing quality assurance at an MWI test site in Florida. The Corps confirmed the authenticity of the 72-page memo, which details many of the mechanical problems and criticizes the testing procedures used. About a dozen of the 34 pumps on order were already in place in New Orleans when Garzino wrote her report, according to Bedey. In her memo, Garzino told corps officials that the equipment being installed was defective. She warned that the pumps would break down "should they be tasked to run, under normal use, as would be required in the event of a hurricane." The pumps, 60 inches in diameter and capable of moving 200 cubic feet of water per second, are run by pressurized hydraulic oil. The supercharged oil cranks up a hydraulic motor, which in turn spins water-moving propellers. The pumps failed less-strenuous testing than the original contract called for, according to the memo. Originally, each of the 34 pumps was to be "load tested" — made to pump water — but that requirement for all the pumps was dropped, the memo said.
Of eight pumps that were load tested, one was turned on for a few minutes and another was run at one-third of operating pressure, the memo said. Three of the other load-tested pumps "experienced catastrophic failure," Garzino wrote. The memo does not spell out what would have happened if the pumps had failed in a storm. But the Corps has acknowledged that parts of New Orleans could be hit with serious flooding if the floodgate pumps could not keep up. Garzino, a Corps employee with the agency's Los Angeles district, was one of many personnel brought in after Katrina. Her memo was sent to Col. Lewis Setliff III, head of a task force assigned to rebuild the flood defenses. Setliff did not return a call for comment. Garzino declined to discuss the memo. MWI vice president Dana Eller said Garzino's conclusions about the pumps were premature. "She was there when we turned on the switch," he said. "If you put your garden hose on and it's leaking a bit, you'd tighten the garden hose. So that's what we did." Bedey said some of what Garzino wrote was alarming and "caused me to ask a series of questions" about the reliability of the pumps. But he said they would have pumped water if they had been needed last hurricane season. Just in case, the Corps brought in numerous portable pumps last year and plans to do the same thing this year, officials said. In the meantime, the Corps has paid MWI $4.5 million for six additional pumps, and will use them to troubleshoot the defective ones, Bedey said. The Corps said MWI has paid for all other expenses incurred in fixing the pumps — shipping them back and forth from a facility in Gray, La., and installing and reinstalling them. After Katrina, Congress gave the corps $5.7 billion to make New Orleans safe from hurricanes. The Corps rushed to fix broken levees and floodwalls and make good on Bush's promise that the city would be protected "better than pre-Katrina by June 1." Katrina's storm surge caused water on Lake Pontchartrain to back up into the city's drainage canals. The canal walls gave way, and about 80 percent of New Orleans flooded. Nearly 1,600 people in Louisiana died in the storm and its aftermath. After the storm, the Corps decided to install floodgates at the mouths of the major canals. While that would keep water from Lake Pontchartrain from backing up in the canals, it would also prevent water pumped out of the city from flowing into the lake. So the Corps installed pumps behind the floodgates to move water into the lake when the gates were closed. Each pump is designed to push about 200 cubic feet of water a second. "We didn't have the luxury to go through a two-, three-year design and planning phase," Bedey said. "We had to get closure structures in place." Source:news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070313/ap_on_re_us/katrina_faulty_pumps
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jul 20, 2007 11:30:10 GMT 4
Workers of the united States! Pay attention to what is currently happening in New Orleans! Too busy with your own life to notice, to care? Go ahead and try and tell me that the Bush crew isn't breaking the backs of the American workers. Hello, North American Union.....Hello, American peasants!....Michelle In the Lawless Post-Katrina Cleanup, Construction Companies Are Preying on WorkersBy Brian Beutler, Media Consortium July 16, 2007 After Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, tens of billions of dollars in federal and private contracts, the largest of which went to companies like Bechtel, Halliburton, and its then-subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root, were dispatched to New Orleans. The alleged goal was to fund a clean-up effort President Bush said would require "a sustained federal commitment to our fellow citizens." That, of course, never came to pass. Thanks to its initial disastrous rescue effort, today, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) receives most of the blame for chaos in New Orleans. But it wasn't just FEMA. The anatomy of the failed reconstruction is complicated, but understanding what went wrong requires examining the Department of Labor (DOL). The DOL has been in decline for a generation, suffering from long-term decreases in funding even as the number of people whose livelihoods it is supposed to protect has grown. Those problems have been exacerbated through the six and a half years of the Bush administration. But the consequences have never been more appalling than in New Orleans, where the failure of high-level DOL officials to require proactive oversight of reconstruction employers led to an endless string of abuses. After Katrina, employers, unfettered by rules, became less concerned with the task at hand than with profiting at the expense of workers without protection. They became predators in a lawless environment. In the two years since the disaster, there have been thousands of testimonials -- issued to both government officials and private advocates -- about a wide taxonomy of abuses. The most frequent complaint workers cite is withheld wages, but almost as numerous are accusations of employee intimidation, toxic and hazardous working conditions, immigrant abuse, trafficking, exploitation and monetary extortion.On June 26, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee in the House of Representatives, convened a hearing to investigate the origins of the abuses perpetrated by subcontractors and other employers against those working to clean up New Orleans. The subcommittee heard testimony from advocates, attorneys, organizers, DOL officials, and a man named Jeffrey Steele. Now 49-years-old, Steele says he traveled from Georgia to New Orleans in the first weeks after the hurricane out of both a sense of duty and the hope that he could earn enough money to cover debts and, perhaps, collect some savings at the same time. A subcontractor he identified as the Reverend Carroll Harrison Braddy had recruited Steele and others in Georgia, promising $10 per hour, free food and lodging. Soon after he arrived, in a van full of similarly minded men, he learned that none of his employers were willing to pay him the full wage, or provide him with the sanitary living conditions, he had been promised.
Steele worked for more than a week before his first employer belatedly provided him the vaccines he needed to avoid illnesses like tetanus and hepatitis B that were idling in the toxic stew fermenting throughout much of the city. Most nights he slept on floors in houses and hotels with about seven other men, sharing a bathroom and scrounging for Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) that the National Guard had trucked in for workers and residents. After his first two weeks on the job -- 12 hour shifts, seven days a week -- he was owed $1,400, not including overtime. He was paid $230.Steele's story was hardly uncommon. Forty-four year-old Tyrone Wilson, known as "Coach" to his friends, worked for Phoenix & Global, a company subcontracted by a different company called ECC, which was paid in turn by the Army Corps of Engineers to help clean up debris. This sort of subcontracting chain could be of any length and often ran many companies deep, with each additional tier masking more potential fraud and making lost pay harder to reclaim. Wilson's job with Phoenix & Global entailed removing heavy trash -- refrigerators and other appliances -- from city grounds. The employers of his "foul smelling" job, he said, "would hold pay a week back on us. I worked three weeks and nothing was paid. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for three weeks. I got paid less than half of what I deserved. Mexicans got even less. I think they got paid three- or four-hundred dollars." On December 30, 2005, Wilson received $865 in pay for the 94 hours of work he did from November 20, through Dec 7. For a similar stretch between January 5 and January 18, he was paid only $206.10. In each case, he should have been paid about $1,500.Yet Wilson and Steele are, in some ways, the lucky ones. Unlike many others, they, at least, had jobs. Because the Bush administration suspended affirmative action and immigrant-worker documentation requirements and at the same time stopped requiring employers to pay regionally standard rates (prevailing wages), many local black workers and the out-of-town poor found themselves underbid by foreign workers. These immigrants came from countries as close as Mexico and as far off as Thailand, and were either unaware of standard pay-scales or susceptible to deportation if they complained too loudly. Saket Soni is a 29-year-old organizer with the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice. He points out that many of the policies the administration adopted vis-à-vis workers were mutually contradictory. Immigration is a perfect example of this. While the federal government did not require employers to demand documentation from their workers, they also, at the request of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), sent hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into town with the authority to deport anybody working without proper papers. The result was astounding. On payday, subcontractors, faced with undocumented workers seeking cash, often called ICE to report their own operations, causing frightened workers to either scatter or face deportation to their home countries without pay. This, Soni says, was routine practice. His group -- one of several -- fielded at least a dozen such reports. Likewise, employee recruiters, dispatched by subcontractors to foreign countries, would offer often-destitute men and women the promise of good work and fair wages at any number of reconstruction jobs in New Orleans. Enticed by that promise, the workers would pay the recruiters a flat fee, cover the costs of their own transportation, and then arrive in a city where they were at best exploited, and at worst left abandoned without lodging or jobs.One female recruiter, according to Soni, approached members of the White Mountain Apache Nation of Arizona, promising jobs to about 20 poor, able-bodied male members of the tribe. "The tribal government raised money to pay her," Soni said, "and sent a lot of young men with her. They paid a flat fee for getting them jobs and another for transportation. When they arrived [in New Orleans] in vans, there was no sign of the recruiter. The jobs she promised either didn't exist or had vanished, so the van dumped them in front of a FEMA office. FEMA directed them to a local church where a pastor sent them to City Park. They lived in the park, in toxic conditions, paying subcontractors a rate of $300 per month per tent, four people sharing each tent."In an environment where so many labor standards had been sacrificed, it becomes unclear whether practices like this were against the law. In New Orleans, after Katrina, there were almost no legal standards by which to judge employer behavior or almost anything else. Certainly, some companies, contractors, and individuals did make sure that their workers were documented. But many of them also took advantage of the temporary (H2B) visa program for the purposes of selling the services of their employees for large sums of money. One case involved an agency that brought Bolivian workers into the country and handed them to an American subcontractor who had been approved for H2B visas. The company promptly leased the immigrants to other contractors instead of providing them with the jobs they had been promised. It was a situation that landed middle-aged women -- women who expected to be working as receptionists in hotels or offices -- in factory jobs intended for 18- to 25-year-old men. At the Congressional hearing, Kucinich disclosed that another man named Matt Redd, "filed with the Department of Labor to sponsor guest workers from countries such as Mexico. But he apparently lied when he stated that these 'H2B' workers had jobs waiting for them. Rather, he was a human trafficker, and he rented those unfortunate migrant workers out to garbage collection companies and restaurants at an hourly wage." These were what the abuses looked like. They are what occur when the option of instilling a regulatory order is eschewed in favor of implementing a favorable climate for business interests. Which is why we must take a look at the failures of the federal agency responsible for regulating and overseeing those businesses in order to understand why this all happened. By contrast, the worker abuses grew out of two preventable -- and intertwined -- circumstances. Many of the incidents resulted directly from policies written at the highest levels of government. Most others stemmed from the reckless milieu that those policies created.That's not to suggest that pre-Katrina labor standards were flawless, or even decent. Louisiana, like many other Southern states, had unusually weak state-level protections long before its biggest city was destroyed. But even small adjustments in priorities at the federal level could have forestalled employer abuse. "There was a significant way it could have been mitigated," said Catherine Ruckelshaus, who directs litigation at the National Employment Law Project in New York City. "When large amounts of federal dollars are put in a region, they come attached with pretty basic standards: environmental standards, labor standards, community-impact standards. In New Orleans there just weren't any." Famously, that's not what the federal government did. Instead, it upended many of the most sweeping federal and state worker protection laws, in some cases by fiat. The administration fully suspended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which requires almost all federally funded public works projects -- whether administered by government entities or private firms -- to pay its workers the prevailing wage. (If the DOL disagreed with this suspension, it didn't voice its dissent publicly.) The DOL chose not to enforce Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) protections.Six months after the hurricane, Davis-Bacon was restored. And yet all employers whose contracts were awarded before that date -- the vast majority -- were allowed to continue to ignore the wage requirement as if the restoration had never happened. Understanding why the nation's highest labor-advocacy organization stood by while policies like these were implemented -- or in some cases encouraged them -- requires understanding the Department of Labor as an agency in both long- and short-term decline, currently headed by managers with a history of subverting labor protections.A 2003 study by Annette Bernhardt and Siobhán McGrath of New York University's Brennan Center for Justice found that the budget for the DOL's Wage and Hour investigators -- the officials who are tasked with protecting workers from exploitation -- decreased by 14 percent between 1975 and 2004. Over the same period of time, enforcement actions decreased by 36 percent. At the same time, the number of workers and establishments covered by provisions that fall within the Wage and Hour oversight increased 55 percent and 112 percent respectively. Under President Bush, the decline has become more pronounced. This year, the DOL's Wage and Hour enforcement budget is 6.1 percent less than it was before Bush took office in 2001. On June 26, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee in the House of Representatives, convened a hearing to investigate the origins of the abuses perpetrated by subcontractors and other employers against those working to clean up New Orleans. One of the men who testified at the Kucinich hearings was Paul DeCamp. When Katrina struck, DeCamp, then a senior policy advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment Standards, became one of the architects of the DOL response. Last summer, DeCamp became administrator of the Wage and Hour Division. While in the private sector, he worked as an attorney with Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, where he co-authored a white paper that suggested a variety of ways in which employers could legally mitigate the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) -- a fundamental worker and wage protection law which is one of the strongest on the books. Today, he is the chief enforcer of that act, but in 2002, he wrote, "The FLSA presents unique challenges to employers. From the standpoint of compliance, the only risk-free way to manage exemption decisions is to designate all employees as non-exempt and to pay them on an hourly basis, but that option is inconsistent with sound business practices." In other words, complying with the law is bad for business. The DOL's office in New Orleans was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina. According to Jennifer Rosenbaum of the Southern Poverty Law Center, its five-person staff shut down for nearly four months, even as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and non-profit groups had fully staffed operations up and running in the city by October 2005. When the Wage and Hour division finally resuscitated its operation in late 2005, it focused more on employer compliance assistance than on proactive oversight like targeting high-risk industries and performing unannounced inspections. At the hearing, Kucinich noted that "the number of DOL investigations in New Orleans decreased from 70 in the year before Katrina to 44 in the year after Katrina, a 37 percent decrease." Workers and advocates said that many workers -- men and women seeking to file claims -- never met a single DOL enforcement officer in the field, never heard back from the officials with whom they made their claims by phone, and found that their claims had been lost or inexplicably delayed. These hurdles have consequences. With a two-year statute of limitations on the claims over which Wage and Hour has jurisdiction, a great bulk of the infractions will have become permanent injustices by 2008. And yet, going forward, the DOL is retaining its focus. Though its Wage and Hour division is capable of debarring the general contractors when their subsidiaries fail to pay their workers, they do not make it a standard practice. In response to a question from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) during DeCamp's confirmation hearing to become Wage and Hour administrator, DeCamp said, "My understanding is that several are in process, where the remedy is being considered. And I believe it's at least two or three." None of the advocates asked about this could name a single example. Today, the DOL's FY 2006-2011 Strategic Plan for enforcing workers rights laws relies more heavily on passive measures than on proactive ones, and, like so many Bush-era reports, speaks overwhelmingly of goals instead of strategies. In the lone paragraph of this 100-plus page plan that is devoted to ensuring that workers receive the wages due to them, it states that, "the Department will continue its outreach and education efforts to increase awareness of employment laws among employers, employees and other stakeholders. Other strategies include using quantitative and qualitative performance indicators and targets to increase performance, conducting independent reviews of the program to identify opportunities for improvements, and improving data collection processes, especially those related to wage determination." By comparison, a 1999 plan released by the Clinton-era DOL Wage and Hour division laid out an approach that included hiring dozens of additional investigators and targeting high-risk industries with preventive inspections, noting that inspections based solely around worker complaints "are not effective in securing widespread substantial compliance within an industry as a whole." The debacle in New Orleans has sunk well below the point at which minor changes at the federal level could redress even a small percentage of the worker grievances of the last two years. It serves as a reminder, though, that an unprepared or unmotivated federal government can have serious consequences for the citizens that rely upon it. According to Ruckelshaus, in the case of the DOL, many of the necessary changes are practically revenue-neutral. "The federal DOL has had community outreach arms before," she says. "They don't require huge staffs. What we need first is more strategic uses of existing resources." Only when the department revamps its approach will workers, in both the United States and from abroad, be able to trust that their rebuilding efforts in disaster zones will be met with just rewards. © 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: www.alternet.org/story/56958/
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Aug 17, 2007 7:08:50 GMT 4
Lessons of Katrina Bill Moyers Journal t r u t h o u t | Programming Note
Airdate: Friday, August 17, 2007 at 9:00 p.m. EDT on PBS. (Check local listings at www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/about/airdates.html.)Two years after Katrina, Bill Moyers Journal examines the lessons of the disaster and what they say about American culture and values. As the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, Bill Moyers gets two views on what the disaster and its aftermath says about American culture and values, with Princeton's Melissa Harris-Lacewell and author and environmental journalist Mike Tidwell. Also on the program, one of the country's leading historians, Martin E. Marty, who has spent a lifetime unraveling the mysteries of the world's religions, discusses his latest book on the mystery of childhood and what adults can learn from it. And, Bill Moyers bids farewell to Karl Rove. Source: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081607U.shtml
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Sept 5, 2007 14:30:06 GMT 4
“We didn’t do this to ourselves”August 27th, 2007 The federal government took over the levees - and then let them fail. The oil companies extracted tens of billions of dollars worth of oil and in the process chewed up the wetlands that shield New Orleans from the full effects of storm surges. Now the federal government says it doesn’t have the money to make good on its promise to help residents rebuild. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seeking Bush video from New OrleansAugust 26th, 2007 On his recent “we’re doing a great job” visit to New Orleans, George Bush gave a speech in which he admitted the levees were a federal responsibility. Given that Bush is now “The Decider” and the Supreme Leader of the former republic known as the United States, his word is instant law. By making this remark, Bush assumed total moral and legal liability on behalf of the federal government for the destruction of the homes, property and livelihoods of several hundred thousand New Orleanians.Case closed. The only challenge is getting the good news to all the right wing wackos (and US Congressmen) who still insist that the federal government has done “all it can” for New Orleans and are blocking the rebuilding funds.When you get behind the wheel of a car blind drunk and coked up (something this President has first hand experience with) and run someone over, there is no end to your liability. Similarly, when you knowingly fail to maintain mission critical infrastructure that you’ve taken in ample tax dollars for and your willfull negligence causes the death of over 1,000 people and the destruction of 80% of a major American city, you haven’t done “all you can” until:1. Every levee is properly rebuilt to the 100 year storm standard 2. Every flood damaged home, business and school is rebuilt at federal expense 3. Everyone who lost income and possessions (and loved ones) is made whole. Now here’s the challenge… Bush admitted the federal government’s liability once, it appeared on TV the day he said it, and the video has never been broadcast again.Do you have a video copy of his speech where he said this? Or, failing that, do you know exactly when this speech was broadcast and on what channel so we can buy a copy from a news clipping service? If you don’t have the answer to this question, can you research it and let us know find out or explain to us how to do the research. Thanks. From: foodmusicjustice.com/2007/08/26/seeking-bush-video-from-new-orleans/----------------------------- Found the Bush video:www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-29-bush-katrina-sidebar_N.htm?csp=1
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Mar 10, 2008 15:40:41 GMT 4
Half of New Orleans's Poor Permanently Displaced: Failure or Success?Concerning the following report, I cannot help but go back to a snip I wrote earlier here at this thread: Re: Hurricane Response « Reply #15 on Feb 22, 2006, 8:05am »-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES"
Six months after Katrina we continue to hear ominous tales of the class of the helpless. "The flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds of wasted lives."
Back then, we heard surprise and wonder from government officials who did not know much about the poor in New Orleans, when in fact they live with us everywhere across the United States. They did not know because they did not care. Those on the top care little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those underneath, so long as they are able to hold them there and keep their own seat.
So now the rebuilding of New Orleans has begun and the poor cannot afford to live there anymore. "Think ye that building shall endure Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?".....Michelle Half of New Orleans's Poor Permanently Displaced: Failure or Success? By Bill Quigley t r u t h o u t | Perspective Thursday 06 March 2008 Government reports confirm that half of the working poor, elderly and disabled who lived in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina have not returned. Because of critical shortages in low-cost housing, few now expect tens of thousands of poor and working people to ever be able to return home. The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) reports Medicaid, medical assistance for aged, blind, disabled and low-wage working families, is down 46 percent from pre-Katrina levels. DHH reports before Katrina there were 134,249 people in New Orleans on Medicaid. February 2008 reports show participation down to 72,211 (a drop of 62,038 since Katrina). Medicaid is down dramatically in every category: by 50 percent for the aged, 53 percent for the blind, 48 percent for the disabled and 52 percent for children. The Social Security Administration documents that fewer than half the elderly have returned. New Orleans was home to 37,805 retired workers who received Social Security before Katrina; now there are 18,940 - a 50 percent reduction. Before Katrina, there were 12,870 disabled workers receiving Social Security disability benefits in New Orleans, now there are 5,350 - that's 59 percent fewer. Before Katrina, there were 9,425 widowers in New Orleans receiving Social Security survivors benefits; now there are less than half that many - 4,140. Children of working-class families have not returned. Public school enrollment in New Orleans was 66,372 before Katrina. Latest figures are 32,149 - a 52 percent reduction. Public transit usage numbers are down 75 percent since Katrina. Prior to Katrina, there were frequently over 3 million rides per month. In January 2008, there were 732,000 rides. The Regional Transit Authority says the reduction reflects that New Orleans now has far fewer poorer, transit-dependent residents. Figures from the Louisiana Department of Social Services show the number of families receiving food stamps in New Orleans has dropped from 46,551 in June 2005 to 22,768 in January 2008. Welfare numbers are also down. The Louisiana Families Independence Temporary Assistance Program was down from 5,764 recipients (mostly children) in July 2005 to 1,412 in the latest report. While there are no precise figures on the racial breakdown of poor and working people who are still displaced, indications strongly suggest they are overwhelmingly African- American. The black population of New Orleans has plummeted by 57 percent, while white population fell 36 percent, according to census data. Areas that are fully recovering are more affluent and predominately white. New Orleans, which was 67 percent black before Katrina, is estimated to be no higher than 58 percent black now. The reduction in poor and low-wage workers in New Orleans is no surprise to social workers. Don Everard, director of social service agency Hope House, says New Orleans is a much tougher town for poor people than before Katrina. "Housing costs a lot more and there is much less of it," says Everard. "The job market is also very unstable. The rise in wages after Katrina has mostly fallen backwards and people are not getting enough hours of work on a regular basis." The displacement of tens of thousands of people is now expected to be permanent because there is both a current shortage of affordable housing and no plan to create affordable rental housing for tens of thousands of the displaced. In the most blatant sign of government action to reduce the numbers of poor people in New Orleans, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is demolishing thousands of intact public housing apartments. HUD is spending nearly $1 billion with questionable developers to end up with much less affordable housing. Right after Katrina, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson predicted New Orleans was "not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again." He then worked to make that prediction true. According to Policy Link, a national research institute, the crisis in affordable housing means barely two in five renters in Louisiana can return to affordable homes. In New Orleans, all the funds currently approved by HUD and other government agencies (not spent, only approved) for housing for low-income renters will only rebuild one-third of the pre-Katrina affordable rental housing stock. Hope House sees 400 to 500 needy people a month. "Most of the people we see are working people facing eviction or utility cutoffs, or they are already homeless," reports Everard. The New Orleans homeless population has already doubled from pre-Katrina numbers to approximately 12,000 people. Everard noted that because of FEMA's recent announcement that it was closing 35,000 still-occupied trailers across the Gulf Coast, homelessness is likely to get a lot worse. United Nations officials recently called for an immediate halt to the demolition of public housing in New Orleans, saying demolition is a violation of human rights and will force predominately black residents into homelessness. "The spiraling costs of private housing and rental units, and in particular the demolition of public housing, puts these communities in further distress, increasing poverty and homelessness," said a joint statement by UN experts in housing and minority issues. "We therefore call on the federal government and state and local authorities to immediately halt the demolition of public housing in New Orleans." Similar calls have been made by Senators Clinton and Obama. Despite these calls, the demolitions continue. The rebuilding has gone as many planned. Right after Katrina, one wealthy businessman told The Wall Street Journal, "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically." Elected officials, from national officials like President Bush and HUD Secretary Jackson to local city council members, who are presumably sleeping in their own beds, apparently concur. Policies put in place so far do not appear overly concerned about the tens of thousands of working poor, elderly and disabled who are not able to come home. The political implications of a dramatic reduction in poor and working - mostly African-American - people in New Orleans are straightforward. The reduction directly helps Republicans, who have fought for years to reduce the impact of the overwhelmingly Democratic New Orleans on statewide politics in Louisiana. In the jargon of political experts, Louisiana, before Katrina, was a "pink state." The state went for Clinton twice and then for Bush twice, with US senators from each party. The forced relocation of hundreds of thousands, mostly lower-income and African-American, could alter the balance between the two major parties in Louisiana and also change the opportunities for black elected officials in New Orleans. Given the political and governmental officials and policies in place now, one of the major casualties of Katrina will be the permanent displacement of tens of thousands of African-Americans, the working poor, their children, the elderly and the disabled. Those who wanted a different New Orleans rebuilt probably see the concentrated displacement as a success. However, if the test of a society is how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members, the aftermath of Katrina earns all of us a failing grade. -------- Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans. He can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com Interested persons can contact Hope House through Don Everard at deverard@bellsouth.net.Source: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030608J.shtml
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Mar 16, 2008 6:39:57 GMT 4
Guarding the Indians
This post is a bit different for this thread; different, but not without merit. What happened and what is still going on in New Orleans is intrinsically linked to larger picture in the united States and the world at large, for we truly are 'All For One and One For All.' This Sunday, I'm asking any who read here to picture a different outcome, a positive one, rather than what is being reported below.....MichelleSubject: FoodMusicJustice: Guarding the Indians Date: 3/13/2008 2:34:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: ken@foodmusicjustice.com Michelle It's one of the many perversities of official New Orleans. Instead of supporting positive cultural activities in the neighborhoods like second line parades and Indian "tribes," police have apparently been ordered to harass them which they do with regularity. A few months ago, two musicians were arrested in the Treme for *singing* during a funeral parade! (They didn't have a permit.) The Mardi Gras Indians have often been the target of police harassment so often that ACLU legal observers have become part of the Super Sunday tradition. If you'd be interested in participating, here's some information about how you can help this Sunday, Super Sunday, March 16th, one of those rare days when the Indians come out. foodmusicjustice.com/2008/03/13/legal-observers-needed-for-super-sunday/ Ken Ken McCarthy FoodMusicJustice ----------------------- 14 North Road Tivoli, NY 12583
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Mar 26, 2008 13:32:43 GMT 4
Hunger in Post-Levee failure Louisiana....and..... Engineer society accused of cover-upsIf you have never experienced hunger, it can sometimes be hard to imagine. We who read here have been graced with abundance yet many are in great need. What kind of people are we who allow grotesque disparities to exist between the affluent and the impoverished? How is it we allow one quarter of our human family to be doomed to a hopeless and unremitting battle for survival, while others of us are over-clothed, over-housed, and so overfed that we have to go on special diets to lose weight? If this statement has caused any amount of moral discomfort in you, may I suggest the following opportunity to relieve such discomfort? After you take the 'cure,' read on how two organizations worked together to promulgate misleading studies and statements, to subvert appropriate independent investigations on, not only the failure of New Orleans's levees, but also the World Trade Center collapse...So MANY interesting connections in our world, eh? MichelleHunger in Post-Levee failure Louisiana Source: foodmusicjustice.com/2008/03/24/hunger-in-post-levee-failure-louisianna/“It’s hard to look into the faces of your friends, mothers and fathers. They were fine before the storm, but now, they’re begging for food.” - Randy Millet. St. Bernard Food Pantry.Second Harvest now distributes TWICE as much food as it did before the levee failures.The storm and levee failures demolished food warehouses, warehoused food, crops and closed numerous supermarkets that used to donate from their shelves. The Louisiana Food Bank Association is appealing to the state for $15 million in emergency funds, a radical turn of events for this organization which never applied for government aid before. It remains to be seen whether the state will provide the funds. Last year, they managed a grant of only $5 million. The Food Banks buy food from local farmers, fisherman and food vendors to distribute locally.Here’s info for the Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana: [where you can donate]www.no-hunger.org/Engineer society accused of cover-ups By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer Tue Mar 25, 4:48 PM ET NEW ORLEANS - The professional organization for engineers who build the nation's roads, dams and bridges has been accused by fellow engineers of covering up catastrophic design flaws while investigating national disasters. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the federal government paid the American Society of Civil Engineers to investigate what went wrong. Critics now accuse the group of covering up engineering mistakes, downplaying the need to alter building standards, and using the investigations to protect engineers and government agencies from lawsuits.Similar accusations arose after both disasters, but the most recent allegations have pressured the organization to convene an independent panel to investigate. "They want to make sure that they do things the right way and that they learn lessons from the studies they do," said Sherwood Boelhert, a retired Republican congressman from New York who heads the panel. He led the House Science Committee for six years. The panel is expected to issue a report by the end of April and may recommend that the society stop taking money from government agencies for disaster investigations. The engineering group says it takes the allegations seriously, but it has declined to comment until completion of the panel's report and an internal ethics review. In the World Trade Center case, critics contend the engineering society wrongly concluded skyscrapers cannot withstand getting hit by airplanes. In the hurricane investigation, it was accused of suggesting that the power of the storm was as big a problem as the poorly designed levees.The group has about 140,000 members and is based in Reston, Va. It sets engineering standards and codes and publishes technical books and a glossy magazine. Members testify regularly before Congress and issue an annual report on the state of the nation's public-works projects.The society got a $1.1 million grant from the Army Corps of Engineers to study the levee failures. Similarly, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid the group about $257,000 to investigate the World Trade Center collapse.The engineers were not involved in investigating last year's bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The society issued a report last year that blamed the levee failures on poor design and the Corps' use of incorrect engineering data. Raymond Seed, a levee expert at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the first to question the society's involvement. He was on a team funded by the National Science Foundation to study the New Orleans flood. Seed accused the engineering society and the Army Corps of collusion, writing an Oct. 20 letter alleging that the two organizations worked together "to promulgate misleading studies and statements, to subvert appropriate independent investigations ... to literally attempt to change some of the critical apparent answers regarding lessons to be learned."Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the corps' director of civil works, disputed Seed's allegations at a December meeting in New Orleans. "He talks about the supposed cover-up," Riley said. "Well, our people live here in New Orleans ... We don't stand behind our work. We live behind our work." In 2002, the society's report on the World Trade Center praised the buildings for remaining standing long enough to allow tens thousands of people to flee. But, the report said, skyscrapers are not typically designed to withstand airplane impacts. Instead of hardening buildings against such impacts, it recommended improving aviation security and fire protection. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer and forensics expert, contends his computer simulations disprove the society's findings that skyscrapers could not be designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner.
Astaneh-Asl, who received money from the National Science Foundation to investigate the collapse, insisted most New York skyscrapers built with traditional designs would survive such an impact and prevent the kind of fires that brought down the twin towers.
He also questioned the makeup of the society's investigation team. On the team were the wife of the trade center's structural engineer and a representative of the buildings' original design team. "I call this moral corruption," said Astaneh-Asl, who is on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Gene Corley, a forensics expert and team leader on the society's report, said employing people with ties to the original builders was necessary because they had access to information that was difficult to get any other way. Corley said the society's study was peer-reviewed and its credibility was upheld by follow-up studies, including one by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "I hope someone looks into the people making the accusations," Corley said. "That's a sordid tale." ___ On the Web: The American Society of Civil Engineers: www.asce.org Raymond Seed's letter: levees.org/WFMarcusonIII.pdf Executive summary of the ASCE and FEMA study of the World Trade Center: www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_execsum.pdf ASCE study of New Orleans' levees: www.asce.org/files/pdf/i_33.pdfSource: news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080325/ap_on_re_us/embattled_engineers
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