Archive for the ‘Natural Disasters’ Category
By Thomas E. Brewton
New Orleanians born and bred in the welfare-state seem honestly believe that they are not required to do anything to help themselves.
A large number of people, most of whom apparently are residents of New Orleans, have favored me with four-letter-word denunciations of The god That Failed New Orleans.
A common allegation was that I had written that New Orleans deserved its fate. No one, however, cited specifics, for good reason: I wrote nothing to that effect.
For example:
And do they want the levees to break? I guess it depends if you are (as a New Orleans blogger commented to a brain-dead Repug at the link) "a f_ckmook" who believes New Orleans deserved it (and there are, sadly, many more like this)…My thought is that they … don't care. We're the last major city port at the mouth of the largest river system in the United States, and they don't give a rat's ass. We have some of the best food, culture, history and characters to be found, and are unique unto ourselves in this world, but they pretty much summed it up with Dennis Hastert's comment: "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed."
In other words, New Orleanians don't need to exert themselves rebuilding the city. They're entitled to have the taxpayers of the nation do it for them, because New Orleans has all sorts of things that cater to sensual appetites.
No emailer advanced a single argument to counter the specific points I made, which were that New Orleans, a once great commercial city, had become after 1927 mired in hedonism and dependence upon the welfare state.
By Thomas E. Brewton
Why does much of New Orleans still look as if the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina had occurred just a few weeks ago?
Huge areas of New Orleans still are wastelands. New Orleans's liberal-progressive-socialist Senator Mary Landrieu has grabbed far more than her share of Congressional pork. Hundreds of millions of Federal dollars spent for rehabilitation have produced far too little beneficial result. People were without electric power for months; the police department contained more thieves than honest law enforcers; drug-dealing and prostitution remain major enterprises; and the city still retains its crown as the nation's murder capital.
One of the city's few "legitimate" businesses is casino gambling.
City and state administrations have yet to coordinate rebuilding plans, as politicians fight over who gets what share of the spoils.
The best that the city's Mayor Nagin can do is to demand that the Democratic-socialist Party presidential candidates pledge to send even more pork to New Orleans.
What accounts for this dismal record?
The answer is simple. New Orleans abandoned God and personal moral responsibility, turning instead to worshipping the atheistic, secular political state. That secular god has failed miserably, notoriously so in the aftermath of Katrina.
Mayor Nagin's ranting on a recent 60 Minutes about rebuilding New Orleans has created a buzz in the news scene. The following piece is from www.scrappleface.com and it says it all about the blunt style of Mayor Nagin. And the truth abounds.
(2006-08-25) — New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who this week answered criticism about the speed of his administration’s reconstruction efforts by noting that the World Trade Center site in New York still sits vacant, today pledged that his city would be fully restored faster than two other devastated metropolitan areas. “New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed in five years,” Mr. Nagin said, “and look at Atlantis and Babylon — still a mess more than a generation later. We’re on pace to finish the job well before either one them.” Mr. Nagin refused to answer any more questions on New Orlean’s recovery delays “until Mike Wallace sits down with the mayors of those two towns and holds them accountable for their mismanagement.”
At a cost of over $236 million, FEMA has contracted the services of three Carnival cruise ships to help house displaced evacuees from Katrina. Yet, Greece offered two of their cruise ships for service for FREE. And to this day, all three ships sit nearly empty costing us taxpayers $2-3 million per day!
Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill are asking for an investigation on FEMA's action. They are also calling for a chief finance officer to oversee the spending related to Katrina.
It makes us wonder what other wasteful spending of our taxpayer's money that FEMA and other government agencies is occurring during the recovery period of Katrina and Rita.
Shortly following Katrina's landfall, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco began ripping the Federal government and blaming President Bush on the slow response to the major disaster in Louisiana. They both had ample time to react themselves as per law. Instead one of the most damaging catastrophe occurred without any proper evacuation.
A the post in FreeRepublic.com, Why Didn't Louisiana Follow its Required Emergency Plan?, it clearly illustrates the time-line of events and the laws in effect for evacuation and other action to be taken by local and state governments in major catastrophes. It clearly shows the the President did respond in a very timely manner and that Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco themselves did not respond to President Bush's request for help or by following the established State and local laws.
Some of the documents used as evidence that illustrates the lack of concern and failing duties of Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco are: Louisiana State Emergency Operations Plan – 2005, Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan, Southwest Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan, and the Shelter Plan.
And the evidence clearly shows there was no lack in response by President Bush. The White House Declarations: the August 27, 2005 Emergency Declaration and the August 29, 2005 Major Disaster Declaration by President Bush clearly shows his concerns for Louisiana and th impending disaster.
There are ten major questions raised in the FreeRepublic.com post that are not addressed by the main-stream media:
1) Why Didn't Louisiana Follow it's Emergency Plan? Why isn't anyone talking about this?
2) Why hasn't anyone mentioned that a Pre-Requisite for a Federal Response BY LAW is that State Law is Executed and the Emergency Plan is Executed FIRST?
3) Why did the Governor abandon the City of New Orleans for the Safety of Baton Rouge, before the Plan was Executed?
In the aftermath of the Huston area evacuation during the threat from Hurricane Rita, lessons were learned. But these same lessons were experience just one generation ago. Too bad no one took in consideration the possibilities of a massive evacuation.
I remember in the 1980s, when the cold war was at its peak Connecticut was identified as a nuclear target by the Russians. All the major cities developed evacuation plans which everyone would evacuate. Sister communities were designated, that were likely to be targeted.
The towns of Burlington, Connecticut and Becket, Massachusetts, however, decided in September 1982 to put FEMA's CRP plan to a test. But the Burlington Organization for the Movement of Bodies to Safety (BOMBS) and the Becket League to Assist the Scorched and Terrified (BLAST) set about in a less serious fashion than perhaps FEMA would have preferred. After a cablegram was sent to the Soviet government, advising it that Burlington's actions would not be a prelude to nuclear attack, about 150 spirited Burlington residents drove the 65 miles up Route 8 to Becket, halting on two occasions because autos ran out of gas. Upon reaching the host community, residents were welcomed with the sign, "Water contaminated, cold beer ahead" while two teenagers in surgical masks ominously scanned entrants with Geiger counters. The citizens of Becket saluted the evacuees for carrying out the exercise in less than three of the allotted four hours, as well as executing the requirement to haul innumerable portable toilets and boxes of diapers.
Participants, of course, realized that the host community of Becket was located 12 miles from a General Electric plant that produced parts for the Polaris missile, making it a prime target for nuclear attack. Recognizing the futility of it all, Mrs. Bill Tomaney, one of the BOMBS organizers, said that if there really was an attack, Becket residents "would all be in Canada by the time we got there." Still, such sober thoughts were not allowed to puncture the euphoric spirit of a block party. The drill was followed by a parade and the presentation of a charred key to the city of Burlington. In this nation-wide debate, civil defense was considered so fantastic, so impossible to implement, that it became a subject to be ridiculed as much as be debated. (The Civil Defense Debate in the 1980s)