contributions

By Andy Sullivan
Bush administration funding cuts forced federal engineers to delay improvements on the levees, floodgates and pumping stations that failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters, agency documents showed on Thursday.
The former head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that handles the infrastructure of the nation’s waterways, said the damage in New Orleans probably would have been much less extensive had flood-control efforts been fully (…)

Has anyone noticed that Dick Cheney has not been interviewed or heard from.
yes Bush runs this country, but he also has a right hand man- Vice President Cheney.
Is it me or have I missed something here.
So I googled his name to see if he made some sort of show of support or denouncement of this tragedy and all I could find was articles about him and oil meetings in Canada and other places.
In fact all the other news links are about him and oil.
What’s really going on?
*** (…)

Beyond Incompetence Reading the news after the Katrina Hurricane
and the lack-of-response disaster,
a pattern began to emerge.
links to full articles all located on this page, with links to the source for two reasons: 1. easy to email 2. archived because some sources delete articles
Airboaters stalled by FEMA 500 Florida airboat pilots have volunteered to rescue Hurricane Katrina victims, transport relief workers and ferry supplies. But they aren’t (…)

Mainstream media ignores negative news to aid Bush administration
by Brian Richards
WASHINGTON, D.C. — (OfficialWire) — 09/04/05 — In the words of Gomer Pyle-Surprise, Surprise, Surprise. Just Google the name [Safia Taleb al-Suhail] for news and you will discover that very few members, if any, of the so-called mainstream media consider this lady’s most recent quote newsworthy and frankly, that’s newsworthy to me.
You may recall her-she was the Iraqi woman George W. Bush exploited (…)

This is a review of the performance of George W. Bush in tight times in this nation. It might explain the single solitary most catastrophic collapse of American government in all of our times. Mark ye well. This was the week when we turned a major American city into Haiti, and racism put its hand out and started to choke a nation, and it may not let go.
With the water coming from the sky and the bottom of the sea, driving with such ferocity that a major American city, New Orleans, followed (…)

A Declaration of The People of the United States of America Concerning the Present Crisis in the City of New Orleans.
In the name of the People of the United States of America, we declare:
That for the last four and a half years the President and his administration have served the interests of a few wealthy citizens and not the interests of the American People.
That he has acted with contempt for the People and for the Constitution and the laws of the United States.
That an edict of (…)

By William Fisher
Iraq “is failing, or perhaps already failed”, says an American contactor who continues to carry out economic development work there as the country descends into “expanded gang warfare” and “the saddest story since Vietnam”.
The contractor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described some of the missteps of U.S. and Iraqi authorities and of the daily power struggles among and between factions.
“The problem is the government and the country, which is failing, or (…)

by Jason Leopold
Why is President Bush more concerned with the state of marriage than the state of Louisiana?
That’s what the New Orleans City Business paper asked in early February, a couple of weeks after Bush’s State of the Union address, in which the president called for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages, upon learning that Bush’s budget proposal recommended slashing $34 million from the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, leaving the city (…)

By Daniel Patrick Welch
SALEM, U.S.A. ­ Four-year old Brandon Marrero awoke early and opened his eyes wide. “Is today Queen’s Day?” he asked his mom?
The preschooler at the Greenhouse School in Salem, Massachusetts (north of Boston) had been excited for weeks, and the day had finally arrived. He and his schoolmates at the small alternative school on Boston’s north shore were going to see a real, live Queen. The Nnabagereka, Her Highness the Queen of Buganda, was to visit the school. (…)

By JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON
THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.
What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn’t just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and (…)