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Catastrophes

  • GOD IS PUNISHING US FOR BUSH
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    GOD IS PUNISHING US FOR BUSH’S PRIDE
    By Peter Fredson
    September 3, 2005
    I went to the local grocery store to get some hot-dog buns. While there I greeted an old lady, a Baptist neighbor. “How are you doing today,” I asked.
    “Not too good. I’ve been watching the TV news about the terrible hurricane on the Gulf Coast, and I’m all upset.”
    “Yes,” I said, in agreement with her, “All that death and destruction is terrible news, and our officials seem to be stumbling in the dark about (…)

  • Katrina Compounded
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Matthew Rothschild
    The scope of the disaster that goes by the name Hurricane Katrina is difficult to fathom at a distance. All the video on TV and all the photographs and words in newspapers, magazines, and on-line cannot adequately describe the loss. A million people homeless, a death toll likely to rise over 1,000, a great city submerged, a region devastated-the enormity was too great to take in.
    Even in the first seventy-two hours after Katrina came ashore near New Orleans, it (…)

  • The Victims, ’Largely Poor and Black’
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    By DAVID GONZALEZ
    The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African- American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society.
    The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in (…)

  • Big oil’s bigtime looting
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    By Derrick Z. Jackson
    PRESIDENT BUSH yesterday told ABC-TV, ’’there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."
    Zero tolerance is meaningless when the White House lets the biggest looters of Hurricane Katrina walk off with billions of dollars.
    We are not referring to the people you currently see in endless footage, (…)

  • A Can’t-Do Government
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    3 comments

    By PAUL KRUGMAN
    Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
    So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After (…)

  • Kucinich hammers administration"It is time for America to come home and take care of its own people"
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    WASHINGTON - Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) gave the following speech today on the House floor during a special session to provide relief money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina: “This amount of money is only a fraction of what is needed and everyone here knows it. Let it go forward quickly with heart-felt thanks to those who are helping to save lives with necessary food, water, shelter, medical care and security. Congress must also demand accountability with the appropriations. (…)

  • New Orleans : ’It reminds me of Baghdad in the worst of times’
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Julian Borger in New Orleans
    The sprawling convention centre in New Orleans was no doubt once a source of civic pride, but yesterday the concrete and glass edifice was a symbol of national shame, giving out a stench that could be smelt two blocks away.
    A dense mass of people - perhaps 20,000, almost all of them black - packed the cavernous building and filled the surrounding pavement, sitting amid debris left by Hurricane Katrina and the rubbish accumulated in four days of waiting for (…)

  • United States of Shame
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    3 comments

    by MAUREEN DOWD
    Stuff happens.
    And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
    America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it’s happening in America.
    W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn’t dry. Bye, bye, (…)

  • No one can say they didn’t see it coming"
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
    By Sidney Blumenthal
    Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of (…)

  • While Bush prevaricates, Venezuela offers help to US poor
    3 September 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    6 comments

    by Jorge Martin
    Venezuela was the first country to offer help to the United States in dealing with the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Chavez has offered money and personnel to help in the relief operations. The answer of an unnamed "senior State official" was that “unsolicited offers can be counterproductive." They would rather some of their own people died than have the people of the USA see Venezuela for what it is, a country where its people are challenging the very capitalist system (…)