Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Sept 15, 2005 14:21:24 GMT 4
Here Lies Vera, God help Us All
By Anwaar Hussain
A woman's body lay at the corner of two roads in the lower Garden District of the storm smashed New Orleans. Unclaimed for days, people covered the corpse with blankets or plastic sheets. By last Sunday, a short wall of bricks had risen around the body, holding down a plastic canvas. On it, someone had spray-painted a cross and the fateful words, "Here lies Vera. God help us."
No other six words, however eloquent, could so powerfully describe the devastating plight and the utter hopelessness of the victims. The forlorn feelings of despair and of having been abandoned by their government, that these words radiate, hit one like a ton of bricks. Not even the images from the calamity struck area of people trying to survive by scavenging like wild animals and dead bodies stuffed in corners of the Superdome or floating face down in the putrid sea water move one with such intensity. Those six words say it all.
And while that wall was rising around Vera’s body brick by brick, the President of United States was either fiddling or partying or addressing gullible Americans trying to resell the lost war of Iraq, on every chance that he got, with worn out clichés like ‘terror’, 9/11, ‘freedom’ and ‘sacrifice’ etc.
Does the man never learn? Does he not know that apart from the human toll of hurricane Katrina, the infrastructure and other damage that Katrina has done to his country is going to be needing every penny that he could muster to rebuild that region? He knows fully well that he has already spent $250 billion of American taxpayers’ money on his Iraq misadventure with the running costs now amounting to $6 billion a month, and his further five years stay there estimated to cost more than $1.3 trillion, or $11,300 for every household in the United States.
Does he not take lesson from the conduct of his past predecessors in the duration of similar American misadventures?
Does he not know that like him, during the Vietnam War, President Kennedy too had said: ". . . we want to see a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence…we believe strongly in that. We are not going to withdraw from that effort.”...and that Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson expressed similar notions while in office?
Does he not know that he repeatedly echoes President Richard Nixon who, in his ‘Silent Majority’ speech on November 3, 1969, had said: “for the future of peace, precipitate withdrawal would thus be a disaster of immense magnitude.”…and that “I [reject] the recommendation that I should end the war by immediately withdrawing all of our forces”?
Does he need reminding that like him, to prove themselves right, those Presidents let loose upon that unfortunate country over 70 million tons of bombs, about three-and-a-half times the total tonnage dropped on Germany during World War II, and amounting to 1,000 lbs for every Vietnamese man, woman and child. Not to leave success to chance, they also sprayed almost 18 million gallons of poisonous chemicals on Vietnam?
Does he recall that when the United States did finally withdraw ending the longest war in its history (11 years), and prove all four United States presidents categorically wrong, close to three million people were killed in that war with over 58000 of these being Americans...and that of those Americans, almost 11,000 were teenagers…not to mention the living dead, the 10,000 American amputees that the war left in its wake?
Does he need a lesson in history that later, their agent and the real peddler of Vietnam War, Robert S. McNamara, the then American Secretary of Defense, had to apologize for that brutal war, though it was not just his war? It was also Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles' war, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's war, and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's war—just as the current Iraq war, and the likely Iran war, is going to be George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s war as much as Donald Rumsfeld’s and Paul Wolfowitz’ s war.
Can he not imagine that years later, after a similar human catastrophe, if and when one of these current American leaders ever decide to tender a similar apology, this war too will then be explained by the failed ideology of a generation of US policymakers and a disastrous set of policies that these leaders pursued in chasing a mirage?
To the President of United States of America and his cabal, therefore, one has only this to say;
The world has finally taken off the blinds of 9/11 and now seen through your plot. Your ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedom’ clichés are working no more. You stand dishonored at home and abroad. Because of your failed policies, the dislike for the Americans is at the highest point since the birth of your great country…a fact now well beyond dispute.
Hurricane Katrina, a tragedy of immense proportions for thousands, now offers you a godsend opportunity. This is the very last chance that you can honorably withdraw form Iraq and go back to your own country with the face saving excuse of America now needing her troops, money and efforts like never before. This is the very last point for aborting your hideous dreams of Empire building and of your ‘perpetual war’ to achieve that.
Grab this chance Mr. President.
You need to remember that Benito Mussolini too had once said, “War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.” He was hung from a pole for believing in that, albeit having already abetted in the killing of millions by then.
As to the rest of us, one can only say that our continued passivity is taking us down a course where the addition of a single word to the six words on Vera’s makeshift grave will turn these into a portentous message for us all.
Here lies Vera. God help us all.
Think.
Anwaar Hussain
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Sept 16, 2005 7:56:52 GMT 4
International Aid for Katrina Recovery
(Sept. 13) - Dozens of nations have pledged assistance for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, European governments agreed to release the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves.
Other forms of aid include:
AFGHANISTAN: Offered $100,000.
ALBANIA: $300,000 pledged.
ARMENIA: $200,000 pledged.
AUSTRALIA: Donating $8 million to American Red Cross.
AUSTRIA: Offered tarps and camp beds.
AZERBAIJAN: tarps, camp beds
BAHAMAS: Pledged $50,000.
BANGLADESH: Offered $1 million and said it would send 160 disaster management experts, including doctors, nurses, engineers and others.
BELGIUM: Offered medical teams, generators, water pumps.
BRITAIN: Sending 500,000 ration packs.
CAMBODIA: The king donated $20,000 to match the $20,000 government donation.
CANADA: $5 million pledged to relief fund; sending planes, three warships and coast guard vessel with supplies, helicopters, search and rescue and security teams.
CHINA: Offered $5 million to aid survivors, 1,000 tents, 600 generators, bed sheets. Said it would help with medical care and epidemic prevention if needed.
CUBA: Offered 1,100 doctors.
CYPRUS: Offered $50,000.
CZECH REPUBLIC: Ready to send rescue teams, field hospital and pumps and water processing equipment.
DOMINICA: Offered police to monitor hard-hit areas.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Offered rescue workers, doctors and nurses.
DJIBOUTI: Offered $50,000.
EQUATORIAL GUINEA: Pledged $500,000.
EL SALVADOR: Offered soldiers to monitor disaster areas.
FINLAND: Sent a 30-member rescue team and three Red Cross logistics experts. Offered 300 tents, a water purification unit, sterile gloves, bed sheets, pillow covers, tarps and first aid kits.
FRANCE: Flying in tents, blankets, cots, medical kits, generators and other supplies. Offered aircraft, ships and helicopters.
GABON: Offered $500,000.
GERMANY: Sending emergency food rations and water pumps. Offered medical supplies, vaccination teams, water purification equipment, medical evacuation aircraft and crisis management experts.
GREECE: Offered two cruise ships to help house homeless, relief supplies and rescue crews.
GUYANA: Organizing a telethon to raise money for victims.
HONDURAS: Offered 135 flooding and sanitation experts.
HUNGARY: Pledged $5,000 and offered to send in five doctors.
ICELAND: Offered $500,000.
INDIA: Donated $5 million to American Red Cross. Sent tarps, blankets and hygiene kits.
INDONESIA: Offered 45 doctors and 155 other medical staffers and 10,000 blankets.
IRAQ: $1 million pledged to Red Cross via the Red Crescent.
IRELAND: $1.2 million pledged.
ISRAEL: Sending medical team. Offered hundreds of doctors, trauma experts and other medical staff as well as field hospitals and other relief.
ITALY: Sent military transport plane with blankets, cots and bed supplies for 15,000 people, plus inflatable dinghies, water purifiers and first-aid kits.
JAPAN: Contributing $200,000 to American Red Cross. Prepared to provide up to $300,000 worth of tents, blankets, generators, portable water tanks and other equipment.
KENYA: Offered $100 million plus an additional $400 million in petroleum products.
KOSOVO: $490,000 pledged.
KUWAIT: Providing $500 million worth of oil and other aid.
LATVIA: Offered a disaster relief team.
LUXEMBOURG: Sending five aid experts, two jeeps and 1,000 camp beds and 2,000 blankets.
MALAYSIA: Pledged $1 million to Red Cross.
MALDIVES: Sending $25,000 to Red Cross.
MAURITANIA: Promised $200,000 to Red Cross.
MEXICO: $1 million. Offered two navy ships, 15 amphibious vehicles, two helicopters, 15 heavy trucks, health brigades and rescue teams. Sent 45 truckloads of supplies and two field kitchens.
MONGOLIA: $50,000 pledged.
NATO: Ferrying supplies.
NETHERLANDS: Sent navy frigate with helicopters, medical supplies, boats and marines. Sent levee inspection team, water pumps.
NEW ZEALAND: Pledged $1.4 million to Red Cross. Offered search specialists and victim identification team.
NIGERIA: Pledged $1 million.
NORWAY: Promised $1.54 million in cash and supplies.
OMAN: Pledged $15 million.
ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES: Donated $25,000 to American Red Cross.
PAKISTAN: $1 million pledged to Red Cross, offered to send doctors and paramedics.
PALAU: $50,000 pledged.
PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Promised $10,000 to Red Cross.
PERU: Offered medical team of 80 to 100 people.
PHILIPPINES: Philippines Red Cross donating $25,000. Government offered to send 25-man relief team.
PORTUGAL: Offering tents, mattresses, blankets, hygiene kits. Lending 2 percent of its strategic oil reserve, equivalent to 500,000 barrels of oil.
QATAR: Offered $100 million.
ROMANIA: Sending two teams of medical experts.
RUSSIA: Sending three transport planes with generators, food, tents, blankets, drinking water and medical supplies.
SAUDI ARABIA: Promised $5 million from Aramco, $250,000 from AGFUND.
SINGAPORE: Sent three transport helicopters and 38 soldiers.
SLOVAKIA: Promised blankets, beds, first aid kits.
SOUTH KOREA: Donating $30 million in government and civilian assistance and sending search team and relief supplies.
SPAIN: Sent 16 tons of supplies, including food rations, tents and blankets. Also contributing a naval ship to a NATO-led operation.
SRI LANKA: Pledged $25,000 to American Red Cross.
SWEDEN: Sending plane stocked with water-treatment equipment, plastic jugs, water-purification experts. Offered aircraft to help distribute supplies.
SWITZERLAND: Offering 40-50 tons worth of supplies, including large tents, wool blankets, hygiene kits. Offered to send four doctors, two water experts, one environmental expert.
TAIWAN: Pledged $2 million, supplies.
THAILAND: Dispatching at least 60 doctors and nurses along with rice.
TURKEY: Promised $2.5 million in cash and aid.
UGANDA: $200,000 pledged.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: $100 million pledged.
VENEZUELA: Offered 1 million barrels of gasoline, $5 million in cash, water purification plants, rescue volunteers and more than 50 tons of canned food and water. Venezuela's Citgo Petroleum Corp. pledged $1 million.
VIETNAM: Pledged $100,000.
YEMEN: $100,000 promised to Red Cross.
Sources: Governments, U.S. State Department.
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Sept 16, 2005 8:09:16 GMT 4
John Harwood, Wall Street Journal, wraps up both the latest polls and their significance for bush .
Excerpt: A bare 43%-40% plurality rates him positively for having "strong leadership qualities," down from 52%-30% in January.... Fully 75% of Americans now say the U.S. isn't adequately prepared for a nuclear, biological or chemical attack, up from 66% who expressed that concern in 2002...by a 58%-38% margin, Americans say they are dissatisfied with the Bush administration's response to the Katrina catastrophe ... and some 60% say rebuilding the Gulf Coast should be a higher national priority than establishing democracy in Iraq .
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dana
Junior Member
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Post by dana on Sept 18, 2005 1:08:05 GMT 4
The clincher to understanding the destruction in New Orleans will be the verdict as to why the levees failed.
A great number of "interests", both federal and commercial, will have been served by the failure of levees. An independent study of the matter must be demanded.
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dana
Junior Member
Posts: 30
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Post by dana on Sept 18, 2005 1:22:55 GMT 4
PS: the Gulf Coast swarms with the most unsavoury business people and practices, some of the phenomenal benefits of which find their way back into Republican election coffers [ see Abramoff and SunCruz, for ex ]. Others seem to go to covert operations.
In sum, there are any number of organisations that would be keenly interested in the destruction and reconstruction of Louisiana.
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james
Full Member
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Post by james on Sept 22, 2005 10:56:15 GMT 4
Unfortunately for Vera. Vera is one of "Them" and until Vera is one of "us" nothing is going to change.
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Sept 28, 2005 19:32:28 GMT 4
Poor, Black, and Left BehindBy Mike Davis The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath. New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to evacuate but couldn't. Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome. In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness toward poor Black folk endures. Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population -- blamed for the city's high crime rates -- across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans -- one big Garden District -- with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits. But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians once called "the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities." The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor. On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference. Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans -- structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police brutality, disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools -- the present presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s. But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the former slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility of people of color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition. The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat cats back to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had fatally divided Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by marginalizing civil rights agendas and Black leadership. African-Americans, it is cynically assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless of the treasons committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages. Thus the sordid spectacle -- portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 -- of white Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support of the Black Congressional Caucus's courageous challenge to the stolen election of November 2000. The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course toward oblivion. No Democratic presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy's run in 1968 has shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats' most loyal and fundamental social base. While Condoleezza Rice hovers, a tight-lipped and constant presence at Dubya's side, the highest ranking, self-proclaimed "African American" in the Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz ((born and raised in white-colonial privilege). This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's semi-suicidal reluctance to mobilize Black voters. As Rainbow Coalition veterans like Ron Waters have bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish about financing voter registration drives in African-American communities. Ralph Nader -- I fear -- was cruelly accurate when he warned recently that "the Democrats do not win when they do not have Jesse Jackson and African Americans in the core of the campaign." In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as he can from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in America's equally ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue, of course, is unspeakable socio-economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder and catastrophic plant closures. But inequality still has a predominant color, or, rather, colors: black and brown. Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of color will not be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff appointments. Nor will it be compensated for by his super-ardent efforts to woo Reagan Democrats and white males with war stories from the ancient Mekong Delta. A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the poor in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth. Source : www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=1849
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hagall
New Member
May what's truth in your eyes, always be as real as the truth in mine.
Posts: 12
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Post by hagall on Sept 29, 2005 8:04:11 GMT 4
The Mysteries of New Orleans Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration. Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city. In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible. 1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities? 2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward -- the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history? 3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods? 4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city? 5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an "Incident of National Significance" until August 31 -- thus preventing the full deployment of urgently needed federal resources? 6. Why wasn't the nearby U.S.S. Bataan immediately sent to the aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants, helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200 sailors eager to join the rescue effort. 7. Similarly, why wasn't the Baltimore-based hospital ship USS Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5? 8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making public his "severe weather execution order" that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame to state and local governments? 9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority -- eventually flooded where they were parked -- not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less residents? 10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city? 11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves" -- white business leaders led by Reiss -- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city? 12. Everyone knows about a famous train called "the City of New Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not? 13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital were left to suffer and die? 14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water, potable toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a deliberate decision -- as many believe -- to force poorer residents to leave the city? 15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn't officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.) 16. City Hall's emergency command center had to be abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat or equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital generators located in basements that would obviously flood? 17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals? 18. Why weren't evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews? 19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River bridge -- an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated? 20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater? 21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television. 22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross? 23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city? 24. As politicians talk about "disaster czars" and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed "new urbanism" in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city's ordinary citizens in their own future? 25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy? www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=24875
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Oct 2, 2005 4:09:13 GMT 4
The Guardian Snip : Abort all black babies and cut crime, says Republican George Bush has distanced himself from comments made by a leading Republican crusader on moral values who declared that one way to reduce the crime rate in the US would be to "abort black babies". Speaking on his daily radio show, William Bennett, education secretary under Ronald Reagan and drugs czar under the first George Bush, said: "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." The rest here : www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1582351,00.html
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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 Oct 2, 2005 17:03:16 GMT 4
Just a note here: Keep your children away from anything William Bennett endorses. He edited the book, "The Children's Book of Virtues", this was a very big seller. He also has introduced a home-school curriculum on the internet. If you are homeschooling, you are most likely dissatisfied with the educational system provided by the government. If so, why would anyone choose a curriculum offered by Bennett?
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
Posts: 428
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Post by DT1 on Oct 3, 2005 21:01:05 GMT 4
Re: Angry Girl's Amazing Facts « Reply #8 on Today at 12:04pm »
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I found this in the Buzzflash mailbag and thought I would share: Subject: America You Don't Know Me, But I Know You
America, you don't know me, but l know you. You see, for over seventy looong years I have been watching you. Laboring and languishing inside your bowels, I am seeing the results of all of your thoughts, words and misdeeds that are festering inside your belly and about to explode.
Poor, black and living under wretched conditions in a most affluent part of America, I saw that nobody cared about us. You knew that I was hungry because you saw me picking through your trash cans - at four years of age. You looked out of your elegantly draped windows and watched me piling up newspapers and dirty rags inside a broken down baby carriage. You watched me and my sister struggle up the hill to the redemption center to exchange our haul for money. You saw us when we gleefully ran to the market for bread and cheese and run all the way home to my starving mother and siblings. You knew we were thirsty because sometimes I had to borrow buckets of water from you. You knew my father couldn't find work and my sweet, sweet, beautiful mother was having mental breakdowns and babies every year. Sometimes there was no heat nor electricity or gas. I could tell from a very young age that nobody cared about us because nobody came to see about us or to help us.
I was able to go to classes with the children from a society that was closed to me. Because I was black, dirty and smelling unwashed, nobody wanted to sit next to me or play with me. However, when it became apparent that I was always the top student, the rich guys would bribe those who were forced to sit near me so that they could be in a position to steal my answers at test time. I got no money but I didn't care. It made me feel like a big deal. Imagine how I felt when I learned that these same guys became pillars of your society while I became a high-school dropout. I was hurt and angry. I felt used and taken advantage of. I decided to do something about it. I earned my high school diploma and went to college. After graduating magna cum laude, I went on to continue serving in the development of your Head Start program. I have had many startling revelations in my life, but none so startling as my discovery that our children are incredibly brilliant. For years, I watched you as you intentionally and systematically dumbed them down in your attempts to turn them into toys for your use in your shenanigans - like warfare for instance.
Before the advent of the Columbine era, I exposed your system very publicly in 1991. At that time I warned you that no attempts to save it would be successful. It must be totally dismantled. Our children are bright enough to be able to go directly into their particular chosen fields of endeavor upon graduation from high school. As is customary, they are still being conditioned to fail. I warned the world that "Like one tediously and tenderly examining the innards of an oyster, we must be searching for the many pearls that are lodged in the bowel of our civilization. At that time, I told you that, "It is my educated opinion that they will either lead us to our total destruction or to a magnificent renaissance. It all depends upon how they are treated." I also warned you that "...the storms are raging and the flood waters are rising," and that "If anyone loses, all will lose." My last words to you were that time is of the essence and that the clock is ticking. As is usual, nobody listens to me and so here we are today.
I must go now, but there is so much, much more I need to say.
Peace,
Sage Garland Philadelphia, PA
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