PUBLIC RAPED BY FALSE STORIES
MEDIA: WHAT ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT?
DEMOS MARKS YEAR 5

Today is the day of the tomato. In 1820 on this date, the tomato was publicly proven safe when Robert Johnson ate a bushel (24 kg) of tomatoes in Salem, Massachusetts. Medicinal cannabis was banned on this date in the UK back in 1971. In 1973 on this date, the ITT building in New York City was bombed to protest ITT’s involvement in the September 11, 1973 coup d’état in Chile. And it’s also Brigitte Bardot’s 71st birthday.

Yesterday, Michael Brown, a/k/a Brownie, the FEMA official praised by President Bush as all hell was breaking lose in New Orleans, told a Congressional Committee that the problem was the local and state officials. They, not Brownie, were “dysfunctional.”

The U.S. claims it killed al-Qaida’s #2 in Iraq, and Lynndie England was sentenced to three years for her role as part of the supporting cast in Abu Ghraib prison. In New Orleans, homeowners learned that if they have too much mold, their homes may have to be destroyed.

RAPES NEVER HAPPENED

And speaking of New Orleans, remember all those stories of rape? Guess what? They weren’t true. The Associated Press reports:

A month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.

‘Rumors become improvised news’

They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are believed to have been murdered.

One of those victims — found at the Superdome — appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/27/katrina.urban.rumors.ap/index.html

London’s Independent has a more thorough report on the poor reporting:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article315511.ece

THE NEWS NOT IN THE NEWS

Democracy Now reports 500 people still missing:
http://www.alternet.org/katrina/26073/

And now the spraying? Sarah Meyer asks if it’s safe:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Meyer0927.htm

Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences
http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/

THERE WAS A MURDER, THOUGH

It was the city itself that was killed, argue Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot in an essay on “The Mysteries of New Orleans:”

Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn’t the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy.

Where outsiders see simple “incompetence” or “failure of leadership,” locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect — the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are 25 of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible…

Comments Tom Englehardt, whose TomDispatch.com carries Davis and Fontenot’s essay:

Right now, we’re watching the ridiculous spectacle of the woefully incompetent former FEMA head Michael Brown being thrown to the Republican wolves in the House of Representatives, while the two national figures most in charge of the Katrina debacle, Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, remain remarkably untouched by their acts.

Fred Burks sends along a URL tracking stories on Katrina-related corruption:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/050927hurricanecoverupcorruption

Another site is aggregating people’s stories:
http://KatrinaStoriesProject.org

INVISIBLE WAR

While the winds were blowing and the hurricane was stirring, 19 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq over the past eight days. Did you know that?

I’ll bet you didn’t know this, either, from WayneMadsenReport.com:

September 24, 2005 — Hurricane evacuees don’t see FEMA or Red Cross, but military recruiters show up in force. According to a number of sources familiar with the Gulf Coast evacuation situation arising from Hurricane Katrina, military recruiters appeared at hurricane evacuation centers across Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and other states long before evacuees ever saw anyone from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or the Red Cross. Military recruiters, aware that a number of young, poor, and long-term or hurricane-related unemployed and homeless African American and white men were housed at evacuation shelters, took advantage of the disaster to recruit additional cannon fodder for Bush’s war in Iraq.

MORE ON THE BULLETS STORY:
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_lefti_archive.html#108485775432116959

ECONOMY NEWS

Tom Lewis notes:

The comments below on Alan Greenspan’s remarks on the housing market, home mortgage debt, and consumer spending are very much worth reading. Anyone who talks to ordinary people, and listens to them as opposed to talking at them as politicians do, would have concluded six months ago what Greenspan concludes below. The point, however, is that Greenspan makes his conclusion with the benefit of an analysis of data. His conclusion is not good news. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Where Housing Market Goes So Goes Consumer Spending

Through all the economic ups and downs of recent years, the housing market has been the most relentlessly formidable growth area of the U.S. economy. And Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan yesterday suggested home mortgage debt has become the “final source of funding” for a big chunk of Americans’ consumer spending — meaning a corrective rise in long-term interest rates and a deceleration in home sales could seriously cut into consumption growth.

informationclearinghouse.info/article10407.htm