Its been two years. Democracy Now recapped: “The storm made landfall south of New Orleans at 6:10 a.m. Aug. 29, 2005. The powerful hurricane ravaged the Gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and left over 1,600 people dead. More than 300,000 homes were destroyed and over 770,000 people displaced. It was the most powerful and expensive natural disaster to hit the country and one of the deadliest hurricanes recorded in US history.

Eighty percent of New Orleans was submerged under water after the storm surge caused several breaches in the city”s levees. In the aftermath of the hurricane, the federal government was nowhere to be found. Images of New Orleans residents piling into the Superdome and convention center pleading for food, water and aid were broadcast around the world.”

UPJ adds: “Today there are still tens of thousands of families without homes. 30,000 families are scattered across the country in FEMA apartments, 13,000 are in trailers, and hardly any of the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt. And this is just one of the many issues the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still dealing with.”

Kris Kromm of the Institute of Southern Studies”

“Of the $116 billion the White House claims it has spent, only 30 percent is aimed at fixing up schools and other long-term recovery needs, and less than half of that has been spent. … Over 60,000 are still living in FEMA trailers; houses and hospitals are still shuttered; and the levees of New Orleans aren’t scheduled to be rebuilt until 2011.

HOW NEWS DISSECTOR “COVERED” THIS CRISIS

Just to referesh our Mediachannel memories, I went back to an earlier Labor Day Blog. Its always fascinating to read the details of yesterdays news. How soon we forget.

I wonder what has changed? Surely, not much for the better.

POSTED LABOR DAY 2005 AT NOON

It’s hard to imagine or even discuss despair like this. In New Orleans two police officers took out their own service revolvers, pointed them at their heads and pulled the triggers. One was the Department’s own spokesman. New Orleans Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley says he doesn’t know how his officers have been able to cope.

Metaphorically, at points, I feel like doing the same thing as I read the news today, oh boy, and try to keep up with its flow. These are mind blowing times, and hopefully change making times.

In the middle of it all, the Bush Administration was given an opportunity to do what its does the best: change the subject. First, the death of Supreme Court Justice Rehyquist was lionized by media outlets with no idea of the disaster he’s caused in the Judiciary. Then, Bush quickly and with Rovian genius named the friendly face of hard core ideological conservatism John Roberts to take his place. Wam Bam, than you ma’am.

THE LATEST DISASTER

Doug Ireland reports on the consequences in his Direland blog:

“George Bush’s announcement this morning that John Roberts is his nominee to replace Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a clever move.The Senate Democrats have already thrown in the towel on confirming Roberts as an associate justice — there a few grumblings, but the Democratic leadership (and its troops) have their eye on the off-term legislative elections next year, Roberts is polling extraordinarily well (the
carefully constructed photo ops of the attractive Roberts and his family in the days following his first nomination played well in the country, which judges on image more than record — and the Democrats saw no political points to be made, when the country goes to the polls next year, in opposing Roberts for associate justice. There is not a single Democratic Senator who has as yet announced opposition to Roberts for that post — let alone the dozens that would be needed for a filibuster. So much for principle.

“Thus, Roberts’ confirmation as Chief Justice will be fairly easy sailing — rapid favorable action by the Senate, which is under pressure to give the Court a Chief before its fall term opens October 3, is a foregone conclusion; and the Democrats, eager to get this issue out of the way and resume beating up Bush on Katrina — will quickly fall into line in favor of the new Chief.

‘As horrific are the results of the Katrina disaster and Bush’s failure To prepare for or respond to it, in the long run it is the death of Rehnquist and the nomination of Roberts that are far more important and will have the most lasting impact on the country. By being able to fill two Court vacancies — Bush will soon nominate a new associate justice in Roberts’ stead — this most conservative White House since the Coolidge era will be able to put a conservative lock on the Supreme Court for decades..”

NINCOMPOOP

Michael Petralis reports:

“As many of us go over “everything” we can find on FEMA’s chief nincompoop Michael D. Brown, one December 27, 2004, Washington Post profile of him stands out for a number of reasons, beginning with this stunning quote.

“Florida was a giant terrorist event […] It’s just that Mother Nature was the terrorist,” Brown said.

“So this idiot looked upon the 2004 hurricane season as a terrorist event and the perpetrator, Mother Nature, as another Osama Bin Laden, and still he and his agency were woefully criminally unprepared for Katrina hitting Louisiana.

“The Post also reported that “[e]ven before the first hurricane hit Florida’s Gulf Coast, Brown dispatched people and equipment to the state, impressing the locals who had been frustrated by FEMA’s slow response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992.” (See Letter on Florida below)Dr. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, said Sunday that officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, including FEMA Director Mike Brown and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, listened in on electronic briefings given by his staff in advance of Hurricane Katrina slamming Louisiana and Mississippi and were advised of the storm’s potential deadly effects.

Mayfield said the strength of the storm and the potential disaster it could bring were made clear during both the briefings and in formal advisories, which warned of a storm surge capable of overtopping levees in New Orleans and winds strong enough to blow out windows of high-rise buildings. He said the briefings included information on expected wind speed, storm surge, rainfall and the potential for tornados to accompany the storm as it came ashore.

“We were briefing them way before landfall,” Mayfield said. “It’s not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped

THE “INSURGENCY?”

From Nola.com: “New Orleans Police officers sent up a cheer at one point Sunday at a report that their colleagues had engaged in a shootout with an armed group on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans, with several of the suspected marauders - but none of the police officers - being hit. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot eight people, killing five or six of them.”

… An Army soldier said it looked and felt like war, except it is being fought from a flotilla of boats with drivers and volunteers from around the country.

ON THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA

Jack Shafer wrote about the need for more focus on race and class issues last week on Salon.com. He saw some positive trends:

”The rebellion of the talking heads reached its culmination today as CNN.com contrasted “the official version” of events in New Orleans with its “in-the-trenches” account by its reporters and authoritative sources. Muted compared to the on-air growling, the Web story still portrays the government as a pack of liars, or worse, as bumbling idiots. The broadcasters’ angry dispatches break with the “public face” they usually give their work: polite, patient, neutral, generous. A steady diet of such confrontational reporting would probably be as edifying as a Jerry Springer show. But when the going gets this tough—when government incompetence and lies become so insurmountable—sometimes the only way to get the story is by getting mad.”

.

He also discussed one predictable knee jerk response:

” Get this: Rush Limbaugh called me a liberal on his show yesterday for my Wednesday column about the news broadcasters’ general neglect of race and class. Said Limbaugh, “The whole purpose of this story for Mr. Shafer and these stories on these lower level websites that hopefully they think will percolate to the mainstream press is to eventually indict the American way of life, to indict the American culture, to indict the American society as inherently unfair and racist.”

THE BUSH PHOTO-OP

The Blah website carried commentary on the way the Presidents visit was staged and spun:”

“There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

“ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

“The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

BUSH IN BILOXI

The First ‘Comforting Session’: Then it was off to Biloxi, MS to survey the damage. As Bush, Haley Barbour and others walked down a street, 2 women appeared seemingly out of nowhere for Bush to ‘comfort’ them. But it turns out that the two women didn’t even live in Biloxi, and had just come down for the day to try to ’salvage’ clothes from the area for one of the women’s son (were they looters?). But they were apparently reasonably telegenic and happened to be in the area, so they were recruited to represent an area where they didn’t even live. A number of threads at Democratic Underground discuss the weirdness of these women showing up in a disaster area. And a trandcript of the conversation between Bush and the women reads like a bad comedy skit:

Bush to women: “There’s a Salvation Army center that I want to, that I’ll tell you where it is, and they’ll get you some help. I’m sorry…. They’ll help you…..

Woman 1: “I came here looking for clothes…”
Bush: “They’ll get you some clothes, at the Salvation Army center…”
Woman 1: “We don’t have anything…”
Bush: “I understand…. Do you know where the center is, that I’m talking to you about?”
Guy with shades: “There’s no center there, sir, it’s a truck.”
Bush: “There’s trucks?”
Guy: “There’s a school, a school about two miles away…..”
Bush: “But isn’t there a Salvation center down there?”
Guy: “No that’s wiped out….”
Bush: “A temporary center? ”
Guy: “No sir they’ve got a truck there, for food.”
Bush: “That’s what I’m saying, for food and water.”
Bush turns to the sister who’s been saying how she needs clothes.
Bush to sister: “You need food and water.”

THE BACKDROPS

The ‘Recovery Efforts’: Wherever Bush went yesterday, it seemed as though people were already hard at work rebuilding the affected areas. Unfortunately for Bush, there were a few foreign journalists at his photo ops, and they pulled back the curtain on what we saw on TV to reveal that the ‘work’ was staged for the media. Here’s a translation from the German news show web site.

Christine Adelhardt live from Biloxi:

””Two minutes ago the President drove by with his convoy. What happened here in Biloxi during the day is really unbelievable. All of a sudden the rescue troops finally showed up, the clean-up vehicles; we didn’t see those over the last days here. In an area where it really isn’t urgent, there is nobody around, all the remaining people went to the city center.

The President is traveling with a press convoy, so they get wonderful pictures saying the president was here and the help will follow. The amount of this catastrophe shocked me, but the amount of set-up that happened here today is at least equally shocking for me.

Read it all: http://www.blah3.com/article.php?story=20050903214041794

RACE AND CLASS

There was some excellent and unexpected coverage of the racial and class issues, “That’s the big elephant in the room: the race and economic class of most of the victims, which the media hasn’t discussed much at all,” said Jack Cafferty on CNN.

Our friend Shebar Windstone sent me a piece from the Washington Post which made her wonder is she wasn’t reading a socialist newspaper

Jason DeParle wrote in the New York Times News of the Week in Review: “THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway…. 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 startlingly new..”

COMMENTS: HIS FATHER’S SON

George Roddy: “As New Orleans took on the atmospherics of a John Carpenter movie, George W. Bush, a man reluctant to distinguish between
desperation and lawlessness, much less make the connection between the two, proved at last he is his father’s son.

Thirteen years earlier George Bush the Elder saw a black population mired in poverty and alienation riot after a California jury
blithely acquitted the posse of Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King half to death. His response was to deliver an indignant speech
about law and order, proving only that he was blind to the nuances of plain justice. 

Last week, with the poor stranded on rooftops, then huddled, hungry and abandoned inside a leaking stadium and a sweltering
convention center, George the Lesser watched in seeming amazement when they ran riot. First came looting born of hunger and thirst
when a federal government adept at moving armies to a foreign desert for a fraudulent war proved incapable of shipping food and
medicine across state lines for a flooded city.

THE WORLD RESPONSE

Mexico’s El Universal

”The slowness with which the USA’s federal emergency services have joined the rescue operation has alreadygenerated great political tension… There is no doub that the lack of well-timed responses to assist the population will have political costs for President Bush’s Republican Party in the next federal elections.”

Argentina’s Clarin

”Katrina had more than the power of the wind and water because, now, when they have subsided, it can stil reveal the emptiness of an era, one that is represented by President George W Bush more than anyone.”

Spain’s El Pais

Up until Monday, Bush was the president of the war in Iraq and 9/11. Today there are few doubts that he will also pass into history as the president who didn’t know how to prevent the destruction of New Orleans and who abandoned its inhabitants to their fate for days. And the worst is yet to come.

Spain’s La Razon

”Proving that even the gods are mortal, it is clear that the USA’s international image is being damaged in a way that it has never known before. The country will probably be able to recuperate from the destruction,but its pride has already been profoundly wounded.”

France’s Liberation:

”As happened with 9/11, the country is displaying its vulnerability to the eyes of the world.”

”

LETS TALK ABOUT IT

Virginia Weldon writes:

”The Big Easy, for all intent & purpose, is a poster city for graft, greed, and good-ol-boyism. New Orleans is a poor city (among poor cities) made rich off the backs of the mainly black, Hispanic & poor white people who make the music, tend the bars, cook & serve the food, run the trolleys, work the docks, nurse the sick, nanny the children, and clean & sweep the city. Sounds kinda like the Ole South, ya’all.

“New Orleans is a poor city catering to rich tourists & investors. However, the people who live there work at minimum (or below)wage, live in rental property or apartments, have little to no insurance ride trolleys, bikes & busses to work and exist paycheck to paycheck, Shills in Vegas earn more for less!

“As if the unforgivable delaying quagmire of starving & dehydrating thousands of people for five long days, in beyond miserable conditions, wasn’t bad enough, the in-credible leap of rhetoric mouthed by officials espousing the glorious resurrection opportunity for raising N.O. from the dead and rebuildingit to a new glory was really over the top.”…

A VIEW FROM BRITAIN

Ovais Naqvi writes from London:

My thoughts for what they’re worth- as someone living abroad and observing from the outside - on events in the last week in the Gulf and Southern States:

* If this had been New York, California, Texas or Islamic terror-inspired, the Federal government’s reaction would have been exponentially faster and Bush would have been down there and on-the-ground, in a flack jacket, on the same day

* Instead it was Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama: poor, black,
Democrat-voting (if indeed on the register at all) and victims of natural
disaster, as opposed to turban-headed, quick to jump on, enemy states. So,
the “same shit different day” policy prevails. No votes to swing nor any to
retain and ultimately “they’re only black, so who cares”

* The fact that the esteemed Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was shoe
shopping in New York at the time, is African-American and born in Birmingham Alabama of all places (in 1954) shows how far it’s necessary to whiten-up - and quick - these days to get ahead if you’re of colour in America. I church in Mobile on Sunday, her shame was palpable and written large all over her features. She’s certainly got enough to be ashamed of being
apathetic, black and coming from the very region that’s been so devastated

* China and India offered reasonable assistance of $5 million each (why
should India offer more?), Chavez offered cheap oil, Germany offered
refrigeration equipment, Castro offered 1,100 doctors. The Arab brothers in
Qatar and Kuwait offered a whopping $100m and $500m in aid and assistance respectively. Not only would they not give a stuff at this level of cash if it was another less strategically important country, but it shows not just the magnitude of their indebtedness and sycophancy, but how much pressure the US exerts on them. Don’t think for a second that this aid was as a result of independent, cabinet-approved decision-making. This will have been orchestrated by the state department to the Ruler’s office. “Guy, make sure you pass on another rebate quick on the $5bn per month we’re spending to protect your brown asses in the Gulf”

* Additionally, the devastation of the US’s refineries in the Gulf of Mexico
will open up a flood of investment opportunities and project work for
private companies and oil industry players. The US (and other G7) countries
badly need more refinery capacity in any case to keep oil prices down and
reduce the dependence on the Arabs and Venezuelans. I am sure the Arab
contributions are not unrelated to the $70 per barrel oil price rise in
recent days and these plus other dynamics create real risk of turning the US
economy towards recession…

* CNN’s coverage very quickly shifted to (by the weekend) focusing on the
largely (white) nurses and doctors offering assistance, compassion and a
tight hug to anyone remotely black looking in the area. Whilst I am sure
those feelings were sincere, there was very clearly a real rearguard action
in play in the US media, to show those abroad, like me, just how black and
white coexist so peaceably in the US and that that’s the real spirit of 21st
century America. I wish I could believe it, just having spent 10 days in
LA/the Hollywood Hills and having interacted with exactly one “ethnic” person who wasn’t pumping gas or cleaning my bathroom (it was the sculptor, Robert Graham, who was born in Mexico City) in spite of numerous meetings and gatherings of the young, well to do and bright in the art and book businesses there.”

TEAM BUSH

Wendy Merimark writes:

In your Friday blog episode, my letter drew parallels between the helplessness of Homeland Security victims where Team Bush stole away Louisiana’s flood-prevention money, compared beside the also-predictable ‘peak oil’ victims where T.B. government is stealing public money, (well, ‘borrowing, with no plan to repay,’ which is kind of ’stealing’), for unnecessary and ridiculous foreign invasion(s), wasting soldiers, bombs, bullets, and blood committing war crimes against the world’s working innocents, to hog more oil, but which is running out anyway, when labors and leadership need during this time to be aimed at preventing catastrophically wrong energy collapse and economic collapse causing millions of deaths - MILLIONS — from starvation, exposure, disease, and civil chaos.

I offered that we could see in New Orleans’ crisis today, a glimpse of oil-bankruptcy ruin in the future if T.B. government goes on lying in denying what’s obvious. For Sunday’s NY Times, famous Frank Rich offered that we could see in today’s crisis a rerun of Team Bush’s character in the past: fear of and failure to face reality when masses are dying from Bush administration secrets and greed. Hurricane Katrina seems epic, for its holding both a lesson about the past and a warning about the future.

Sally Vitamas writes from Iowa:

” I did catch Carol Moseley Braun’s comments on CNN, Sunday morning. When the studio-bound anchor blandly suggested that
authorities were, after all, “doing their best”, considering the
unprecedented and “surprising” scope of the emergency, how refreshing
it was to hear her firmly respond, “No, no they are not.”

“The spinning of this mess by Chertoff (and everybody else tied to
those in power) is shameful. Worse is the near-certainty that many
US citizens continue willing to accept administration lies. Clearly,
it is more comfortable to believe in the benevolence and competence
of our government than it is to recognize its willingness to allow
thousands of citizens to risk death by drowning, thirst, hunger, and disease.

“We’ve the choice of two disparate views of reality: the comforting
spun-sugar version offered up by official spokespersons, and the
unpalatable and awful truth. Worse, our population has seemingly
been categorized by those in authority into two sets of humans: the
wealthy, power elite, and the disposable rest of us.

“I’d venture to bet, had anybody “important” been stranded at the
convention center, that rescue would have been effected within the hour.”

JAZZ FUNERAL IN NY

Connie Julian reports:

”“You missed a glorious day, our New Orleans jazz
funeral march took to the streets, including taking over 2 lanes of Broadway headed uptown and most buses and cars were actually happy to see us: people finally taking responsibility for standing up to this regime and the mass murder it is committing against people in New Orleans (I heard they actually shot people today) and not just watching the news stricken. We collected hundreds of people as we snaked thru downtown,wash sq park, union square and all the way to time square (from 2:30 till 9pm). We made 6 channels of evening news, 1,2,4,5,7,11, Air America, WBAI, and we have just begun. The cops at one point attacked us and
arrested 4 people, the people loved us.

Not Bad for one Blog. And also so sad. And Still even sadder. Infuriating, really. Another crime in prime time.