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Pious Perverts See other Pious Perverts Articles Title: Bush Fiddles While Rome Burns Bush Fiddles While Rome Burns Judith Moriartyhttp://rense.com/general67/fiddles.htm noahshouse@adelphia.net 9-2-5 It was 2:00 am and I couldn't sleep. The house was quiet as I stood at the screen door taking in the whisper of the trees [they only talk at night], the smells of a brief summer shower, and the sounds of crickets singing peace on earth. I stood there in the dark and I cried. In the hush of a New England summer night, all seemed well with the world. New Orleans and the devastation of the Gulf States seemed to exist outside of time. I cried because I couldn't get the imagery out of my mind of the suffering humanity in the South. I had just finished reading, The Times Picayune, and going through their galley of photographs, of the tragedy in New Orleans [not shown on news]. On Aug 31, 2005, it was reported: "At 91 years old, Booker Harris ended his days propped on a lawn chair, covered by a yellow quilt and abandoned, dead, in front of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. " "Mr. Harris died in the back of a Ryder panel truck, as he and his 93-year-old wife, Allie, were evacuated from eastern New Orleans. The truck's driver deposited [like garbage] Allie and her husband's body on the Convention Center Boulevard. And there it remained. With so much need and so few resources, [in Super Power, U.S.A.] the weakest and frailest were bound to suffer the most. Seated next to her husband's body, 93 year old Allie Harris munched on crackers, seemingly unaware of all the tragedy unfolding around her." I cried thinking of a frail old Black woman munching on crackers with her spouse dead in a lawn chair! I thought of the other pictures, which showed the elderly, and wheelchair bound nursing home patients, left on an over-pass in the baking New Orleans sun. I watched a newscast of a Black woman sobbing inconsolably because her husband had died due to lack of oxygen. Thousands of people are still stranded in attics, on rooftops, and various housing projects throughout the town. Surrounded by water, some of it 20 feet deep, they are screaming and crying to helicopters to HELP THEM. I don't suppose President Bush on his fly-over in Air Force One, [gas-$6,030.00 an hour] back from vacation, could see this? He wouldn't know that doctors and nurses have been calling into news stations begging for help. They are trapped with their patients in various hospitals, with no water, no electricity and their emergency generators out of gas. FEMA and the contingency of some 180,000 Homeland Defense personnel will not arrive in time for the many that are dying. Bodies are lying in the streets. As the levees broke on Tues, Aug 25, 2005, trapping the poor, handicapped, elderly, and youngsters, in an Apocalypse scenario; President Bush was at the Naval Base, in Coronado, California, celebrating V - J Day. While refugees of, the beaded Mardi Gras, celebrations of old, stood in torrential rains, waiting to enter the Superdome; President Bush strummed on a guitar, presented to him at the VJ ceremony by Mark Wills. I thought of the elderly Harris couple dumped on a New Orleans street, and wondered if he was singing Mark's song, "Wish You Were Here"? "Wish you were here, wish you could see this place/Wish you were near, I wish I could touch your face/The weather's nice, in paradise/It's summertime all year and all the folks we know/They say, 'Hello', I miss you so, wish you were here". I thought of The Times Picayune, article, of June 8th-2004. "For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade. Mervin Morehier, who manages the 'Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity' levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers, says, 'I can't tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm. It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us. But I could tell you we would be better off if the levees were raised..and I think it's important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects." "The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2005 budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project. 'The challenge now, said emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri in Jefferson Parish and Terry Tullier in New Orleans, is for southeast Louisiana somehow to persuade those who control federal spending that protection from major storms and flooding are matters of homeland security'" "'It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Maestri said. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.' Levee-raising is only part of the flood-related work that has stopped since the federal government began reducing Corps of Engineers appropriations in 2001, as more money was diverted to homeland security, the fight against terrorism and the war in Iraq." "The New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bore the brunt of a record $71.2 million reduction in federal funding for fiscal year 2006. The Bush administration has been cutting funding for federal disaster relief funds since 2001. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program has been cancelled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half. Communities across the country must now compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars." "The Bush administration's move to merge FEMA [not being told by the media jm], with Homeland Security meant that the two had to compete for funding. Much of the Netherlands lies below sea level and after the 1953 flood which killed 1,800 people; the Dutch launched a major flood prevention program called the Delta Plan. Engineers fortified dykes and bolstered other water defenses against a future disaster and there hasn't been one since." Paul Joseph Watson "Patricia McDonald Gomez of Aunt Sally's Original Creole Pralines said, 'You're almost fatalistic. Living in a soup bowl will do it to you, like Romans dancing while Nero fiddled and the city burned' How do you rebuild the city of Stella, Blanche and Stanley, the city that to William Faulkner was the 'labyrinthine mass of oleander and jasmine, lantana and mimosa', the city of the Italianate mansions of the Garden District and the teeming housing projects like the one where the streetcar named Desire now arrives---a place that gave America most of its music, much of its literature, a cracked mirror glimpse of America exotica and a fair piece of its soul." New York Times And today, Sept 1, 2005, the city is imploding, and New Orleans is drowning/burning. Prisoners [maybe a reason for all the anarchy] were released from local jails. The editor of the Picayune, stated last night on the news, that five levees are broken. Looting is widespread with reports that some police have joined in the melee. Dr. Quigley from Memorial Hospital, on the phone to the media last evening stated, "There are no communications in the city between police, fire, and rescue personnel. The hospital is full we've had to turn people away. The poor couldn't leave, nor those in nursing homes, they had no means. Officials have advised citizens to take a boat to the Interstate. These people don't have cars let along boats. New Orleans has now become Haiti" It has also been reported that the police have no transportation, communications, and food or water themselves. One would be better off if they'd careened off a Vermont mountain, into a ditch. At least in a world of GPS they'd be rescued! The National Guard lost total control of the Superdome, and who can blame them? This was an untenable situation to put these men in. They are soldiers' not trained social or medical workers. You don't herd [mostly Blacks you might note] into a sports stadium with thousands of; special needs, nursing home patients, group home residents, those with chronic health needs, babies, and those who've lost everything, and expect a day in the park. A disaster plan, is not corralling people into arena seats, with the roof ripping off, no water, overflowing toilets, and no electricity! There's bound to be 'trouble in River City', with this explosive mixture of fear-despair-and physical trauma. I note that in this colossal disaster; that the good Reverend Jackson, who always has his mini-rap sermons ready for any occasion, is down in Venezuela being knighted or whatever. He'll be back after dying time is over; to give his Monday morning quarter-back sermon of how he would have handled things. I think it's about time the good Reverend [after child support payments], cough up some of the Rainbow millions he's extorted from corporate America; and give it to the poor, hungry, thirsty, sick, and homeless, like the good Word says ! With the billions, upon billions, being spent for; weapons, rockets, missiles, tanks, guns, prison camps, gas, clubs, barbed wire, tsar guns, bunker busters, scanners, ships, planes, spy satellites, fact finding missions to Bermuda, concrete barriers, cameras, Ninja outfits, obscene political pensions/full health care, fleets of SUVs, [armored-unlike Iraq vehicles], a Foggy Bottom Visitor's Center, exorbitant salaries, et al; one would think that somewhere in all this, someone might have thought about protecting the citizens [one of the few real jobs of government-duh]. And now we have anarchy because of; ineptness, stupidity and a legion of bureaucrats with their dumb ass volumes of policies, procedures and agendas! I'm not sure what more it will take to awaken people from their entrenched allegiance to an elephant and a jackass? The Democrats are just as useless as the Republicans, like tits on a bull. They're all slopping around in the public trough, grabbing what they can, for them and theirs, and piss on the people----! This section of the country; Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are amongst the poorest in the nation. Gosh-just everyone can't be a blackjack dealer, in a Mississippi riverboat casino. The shacks in the shadows of these temples of greed are destroyed. God help the poor here [like New Orleans], who wanted to leave and begged store owners for gas money [to no avail]. Moral being: Mandatory or not if you're poor you die. A life lost for want of a tank of gas. One would think, that the corporate oil hucksters, who've realized BILLIONS in profits these past few years, plus BILLIONS in subsidies, might have given these folks FREE GAS..as a patriotic gesture mind you. No matter now.they're buried somewhere in the rubble. "Great Babylon is come up before me", shuddered Andrew Jackson's wife Rachel upon encountering New Orleans a century and a half ago. "Oh, the wickedness, the idolatry of this place."
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#4. To: Coral Snake (#0)
As I said in another thread, the problem is simply federal excess, not federal stinginess. They have no reason to be involved in disaster prevention, that's a local responsiblity starting with each citizen. If you don't have guns, ammo and food for a week then you deserve every bit of shit that the federal government can dish out. What's the solution, vote in some other dumbass political party who will cut the appropriations to states with republican party senators, thereby leaving their cities vulnerable to floods or fires? No, the answer is completely removing the federal government from all local issues such as this flood control. The plain and simple fact is that NO can't be protected by any amount of money and I certainly don't want to pay for open ended pork to try to protect them. What happens when a cat 5 storm goes west of NO instead of a cat 4 to the east? Simple - a 30 foot surge washes over the swamp, takes out the mississippi levees and washes the entire city into the lake. There's nothing a bunch of damn federal pork is going to do about that. The obvious benefit of getting rid of this federal-fix-all mentality is that it empowers them to take control of every citizen's life, regulate the hell out of business, and micromanage everything that state and local governments do. The power of the federal government is what leads to wars in Iraq, not the diversion of money from local pork projects like fixing NO.
Oops, freudian slip in the last paragraph, I meant the benefit of getting rid of the federal disaster planning is to get rid of most other federal control, regulation and taxation. It is obvious from this disaster that we need a weaker federal government, not a stronger one.
I agree, but the states are so dependent on fed money that they are nothing but slaves to the central gov.. If any state or states would try and break away from the control of the fed, they would be isolated from certain needed agencies. Just like the Real ID act, if the state refuses to comply, the state along with the citizens are punished. Mark J.
Like what? I can't think of any federal agency that is needed around here. But like you said, the money is addictive, it can be used to build all kinds of infrastructure to stimulate the economy short and long term. It can also be wasted. But that's all great, for politicians. For everyone else it just slowly bleeds us to death.
http://www.hq .usace.army.mil/history/brief.htm#2imp Good luck with getting rid of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It dates back to before the beginning of the republic. Looks like it really began to assert control as early as the 1820s.
Corps of Engineers is part and parcel of the Commerce Clause provisions with it's work on the river systems to keep them navigable. The levee system is also a part of the work of the Corps in most areas. It's a tough nut to crack.
WHat the corps has done to keep the Mississippi navigable has created the disaster in N.O. I would let the developers take over, build the seawalls along resorts, hurricane-proof high rises, and whatever else they want. This could form a protective barrier south of N.O.
#22. To: purpleman (#17)
The common line of thought is that the levee system has caused larger deposits of silt to be deposited in the delta rather than flood waters enriching the flood plains. Also, the oil companies have been allowed to dig channels in the marshes in the delta and along the Gulf coast which has allowed salt water to encroach into the fresh water marshes, thus destoying them and removing much of the protectitive barrier associated with their existence. Allowing unrestricted commerical development is counterproductive to these natural barriers and ecosystems. What you suggest is implausible and unworkable from a common sense perspective. You should really do some looking around at some true conservation oriented issues, though if you have never done so and have no real idea of what conservation or conservationists are, it may be a bit difficult for you considering the spin and disinformation about environmentalists being put out by the neocons and others.
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