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Catastrophes

  • Watch Who’s Cleaning Up- War Profiteers switch gears to Katrina Catastrophe
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    Charlie Cray is the director of The Center for Corporate Policy in Washington, D.C., and co-author of The People’s Buisness: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2004).
    Some of the same crony contractors who cleaned up in Iraq are beginning to sign big contracts with FEMA. Moreover, the same inexperience and bureaucratic ineptitude that handicapped the agency’s initial response threatens to convert the agency into “an oversized entitlement program,” as former (…)

  • Questions raised about whether Red Cross provided adequate relief-directed funds to Katrina victims
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    Top Red Cross official Bush appointee, donor
    New information surrounding relief efforts by the American Red Cross in New Orleans raises questions about whether the organization provided adequate relief and whether funds are actually being directed to Katrina victims, RAW STORY has found.
    Previous investigations have shown that the Red Cross mishandled its 9/11 fund, attempting to divert more than half into a "war fund" before Congress intervened, and moved $10 million from a fund in 1989 (…)

  • Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq- It is time for a debate on our Nation’s priorities
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    Senator Byrd on Tuesday called for a national debate on America’s priorities. "I call upon the leaders of this country to come together and to work together to repair our storm- ravaged Gulf Coast and help salvage the lives of its victims, but more than that. I call upon the Congress to inventory our homeland with an eye to the future," Byrd told his colleagues. His prepared remarks are below.
    Chapter 3, Verses 1-8 of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible begins, “To everything there is a (…)

  • Congressional report finds Governor Blanco took necessary steps before Katrina, Bush caught napping
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    Nonpartisan congressional research report finds Louisiana governor took necessary steps
    John Byrne
    The Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report Tuesday afternoon asserting that Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco took the necessary and timely steps needed to secure disaster relief from the federal government, RAW STORY has learned.
    The report, which comes after a request by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to review the law and legal accountability relating to Federal action in (…)

  • From a psychologist First-hand reaction to Katrina refuges
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    There are so many words that come to mind. As a scholar I am thinking Diaspora, social displacement, systemic disruption, mass trauma, pandemic and unbelievable chaos. As a clinician, I am looking at something that we have never been trained to handle in this country — a level of victimization and its resultant psycho-social ripples that mandate a whole new field of clinical practice-mass victimology. Katrina kicked the top off of a racist and social termite’s nest that has been growing (…)

  • Over 100 trucks await orders from FEMA to bring water to NOLA“They’ve got their thumbs up their ass"
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    Food Not Bombs volunteers from Prescott and Tucson serve their first meals to a group of FEMA-contracted truckers and refugees at the Baton Rouge convention center.
    After receiving word that over 100 truckers were sitting in a Target parking lot in east Baton Rouge, the AZ Food Not Bombs mobile kitchen showed up with several pots of beans, chili and rice.
    We spent a couple hours talking with the semi drivers, who were operating under FEMA to bring water and food into New Orleans - but, (…)

  • FEMA, La. outsource Katrina body count to firm implicated in body-dumping scandals
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    Miriam Raftery
    The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Kenyon International to set up a mobile morgue for handling bodies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina, RAW STORY has learned.
    Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses.
    Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco (…)

  • As bodies recovered, reporters are told ’no photos, no stories’
    14 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    New Orleans — A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans’ Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter.
    Recovery team members wearing white protective suits and black boots stopped at houses with spray painted markings on the doors designating there were dead bodies inside.
    Outside one house on Kentucky Street, a member of the Army 82nd Airborne Division summoned a reporter and photographer standing nearby (…)

  • Let’s Make Sure President Bush Doesn’t Survive Katrina
    13 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    11 comments

    We’ve all loved New Orleans, and the Big Easy has loved us right back. We’ve partied there, gambled perhaps, gorged on the delicacies and had a good time to the point of embarrassing ourselves. Losing yourself in the revelry was par for the course in this uniquely American city, a town where anything goes and all is forgiven.
    Today New Orleans represents a national disgrace that is unforgivable. The devastating loss of life and human dignity in the Gulf Coast region must forever live in (…)

  • Out of the Deadly Waters of New Orleans a New Awareness Rises
    13 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    6 comments

    Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? By ANNE RICE La Jolla, Calif.
    WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?
    Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?
    The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and (…)