anotherlimey

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4230372.stm

Any comments on the article?

Patrick

The good news is that Michael Brown resigned. Completly unqualified for the job he was hired because he is a friend of a friend of GW. Maybe it shouldn't be Michael Browns fault he was incompetant at his job, maybe the person who hired someone so unqualified for the job should bare some responsibility.

As for the article, it is too early to say what social effect it will have on Americans, already they seem bored with Katrina and are moving on to the next thing.

My favorite bit is the dickhead that commented

That's PRESIDENT George Bush, not GW. We do not refer to your Queen as Elizabeth and I would like to see the same respect shown for our leader.
Kim Wells, Oklahoma

When GW does something that we should give him some respect for then we will call him President.

BritGuyTN

GW = Great W@nker

Francisco

Quite apart from the various government departments and agencies incompetant and slow response to the effects of Katrina, two key things stick out like a sore thumb; the second one relates to 9/11:

1. In another thread on this site, recently, I followed the link to the article written by experts about 3 years ago, stating very clearly the devasting impact of a huge natural disaster on that area, and the potential loss of life, if action was not taken to shore up the defences to flood wateretc. I haven't got the link here but it is worth reading. For Bush to make comments about not expecting the levees to fail is patently disingenuous(?), ill informed or a complete lie. They were hoping they wouldn't have to be tested so severely, and look at the results. The cost/benefit analysis had been done.

2. One of the TV programmes in the UK for the anniversary of 9/11 showed individuals and their stories of despair and tragedy. One guy, and sadly I have forgotten his name, perhaps someone can help me on that, was the chief of security for Morgan Stanley.

He was convinced that the twin towers were a very serious terrorist target, and tried to convince MS bosses to actually relocate out of the towers to a safer place. His warnings were ignored, no doubt because all the people with the power to do something believed, or hoped, that these predictions could never, or would never come true. How terribly wrong they were. (yes I know its a bit much to expect a large company to act on the fears of just one man, but hopefully lessons have been learnt by some). He did the only thing he could do, which was to train the staff, indoctrinate them even, in what action to take in the event of a terrorist attack. Most of them, when the planes struck, did exactly what they had been trained for, and 2,700 got out alive. Only six of the MS staff died, the guy himself being one of them. His widow said she was immensely proud of him, and rightly so.

I only mention these two things because it always seems to me that, in many countries including the UK and the US, some very heavy lessons are learned after the event, probably because the cost/benefit analysis showed up too many dollar or pound signs.

Perhaps Mr Bush could commission a financial expert to produce a 'profit and loss' statement - improved levee or other defence costs on one side, the valuation of hundreds of dead citizens and rebuild costs on the other.

Or am being overly critical of the poor Pres?

snowbunny

Hmmmm.... can a female be a dickhead?

Anyway, you can call the current British monarch Elizabeth R. or even ER, can't you? I've seen it on various government-issued things. Ah well, not that Kim Wells in Oklahoma would probably known that, but.........

tony126

I am not defending GWB in any way but it always amazes me at the one eyed perspective people have of events when it comes to bashing GWB. I said before and I will say again an independant investigation is required and lets see how Louisiana State Government come out. Here is another persons view reprinted.

This is a post from Bill Weiler, freelance journalist, over in Merritt

Island,

Florida, who has been researching what went on before the storm hit.

These are

the author's comments.

--
Politics over Duty

I think all of New Orleans' Mayor Nagin's pomp and posturing is going to

bite him hard

in the near future as the lies and distortions of his interviews are

coming to light.


On Friday night before the storm hit Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane
Center took the unprecedented action of calling Mayor Nagin and Governor
Blanco personally to plead with them to begin MANDATORY evacuation of NO
and
they said they'd take it under consideration. This was after the NOAA buoy
240 miles south had recorded 68' waves before it was destroyed.

President Bush spent Friday afternoon and evening in meetings with his
advisors and administrators drafting all of the paperwork required for a
state to request federal assistance (and not be in violation of the Posse
Comitatus Act or having to enact the Insurgency Act). Just before midnight
Friday evening the President called Governor Blanco and pleaded with her to
sign the request papers so the federal government and the military could
legally begin mobilization and call up. He was told that they didn't think
it necessary for the federal government to be involved yet. After the
President's final call to the governor she held meetings with her staff to
discuss the political ramifications of bringing federal forces. It was
decided that if they allowed federal assistance it would make it look as if
they had failed so it was agreed upon that the feds would not be invited
in.

Saturday before the storm hit the President again called Gov. Blanco and
Mayor Nagin requesting they please sign the papers requesting federal
assistance, that they declare the state an emergency area, and begin
mandatory evacuation. After a personal plea from the President, Nagin
agreed
to order an evacuation, but it would not be a full mandatory evacuation,
and
the governor still refused to sign the papers requesting and authorizing
federal action. In frustration the President declared the area a national
disaster area before the state of Louisiana did so he could legally begin
some advanced preparations. Rumor has it that the President's legal
advisers
were looking into the ramifications of using the insurgency act to bypass
the Constitutional requirement that a state request federal aid before the
federal government can move into state with troops - but that had not been
done since 1906 and the Constitutionality of it was called into question to
use before the disaster.

Throw in that over half the federal aid of the past decade to NO for levee
construction, maintenance, and repair was diverted to fund a marina and
support the gambling ships. Toss in the investigation that will look into
why the emergency preparedness plan submitted to the federal government for funding and published on the city's website was never implemented and in fact may have been bogus for the purpose of gaining additional federal funding as we now learn that the organizations identified in the plan were never contacted or coordinating into any planning - though the document implies that they were.

The suffering people of NO need to be asking some hard questions as do we
all, but they better start with why Blanco refused to even sign the
multi-state mutual aid pack activation documents until Wednesday which
further delayed the legal deployment of National Guard from adjoining
states. Or maybe ask why Nagin keeps harping that the President should have
commandeered 500 Greyhound busses to help him when according to his own
emergency plan and documents he claimed to have over 500 busses at his
disposal to use between the local school busses and the city transportation
busses - but he never raised a finger to prepare them or activate them.

This is a sad time for all of us to see that a major city has all but been
destroyed and thousands of people have died with hundreds of thousands more
suffering, but it's certainly not a time for people to be pointing fingers
and trying to find a bigger dog to blame for local corruption and
incompetence. Pray to God for the survivors that they can start their lives
anew as fast as possible and we learn from all the mistakes to avoid them
in the future.

--END--

anotherlimey

It seems not many people knew the author actually lives in the US and has done for the past 20 years.

NJ_Dave

No, in fact you'll probably be applauded for it

tony126

Then try this report which probably gives a more acccurate reason for how this ended up being such a disaster. This was something which sooner or later was going to happen which in my opinion does not exonerate previous Governments, both Federal and State.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005

Robert Tracinski is the editor of The Intellectual Activist magazine and of
TIA Daily, which offers daily news and analysis from a pro-individualist
perspective.
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because
it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there.
The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are
confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is
obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to
evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the
flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural
disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people
pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors,
nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do
is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are
suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not
expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but
about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel
has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen
over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane
Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in
an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other
> emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying
that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what
we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They
work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize
to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We
are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather
than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this
a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light
had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve
as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and
large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives
and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police
and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in
to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas> National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she
said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know
how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary
and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an
armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid,
listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks
exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an
orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm
the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to
drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the
doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the
South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of
the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects,"
as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable
squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff
of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational
phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave
some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New
Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or
so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing
projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early
reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating
all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them
loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two
populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in
the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from
two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected,
over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness.
The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent
administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the
city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted
by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of
handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not
to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some
are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example,
for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted
an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from
the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos
on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the
chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the
welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is
behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the
difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the
government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a
disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving
their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do
they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they
are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before.
Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a
way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and
encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that
has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

Robert Tracinski is the editor of The Intellectual Activist magazine and of
TIA Daily, which offers daily news and analysis from a pro-individualist
perspective.

anotherlimey

Oh yeah the evil welfare state, that's a good one.

I was hoping for comments relating to the article rather than just the usual TIO debate.

Dimsie

Pro-indiviualist perspective ?? Then Lord help us from Pro-individualists!!!!!

tony126

You can read into the reports whatever you want to. People usually do and who am I to say they are wrong. Comments have been passed on GWB as though he is responsible for what happened (my interpretation). What I am saying for the last time is there is going to be load of shit stirred up on this one and a whole load of people should be held accountable.

paddingtongreen

I went in search of this man's credentials, I found several other people doing so. There is no trace of him or documentation.

There is no certainty that Nagin had the authority to order mandatory evacuation or to take over the buses.

The papers that the Feds wanted Blanco and Nagin to sign included signing over all authority to the feds, even though they had no feet on the ground. They would be controlling city and state police, firemen and the National Guard, all first responders in fact, from a distance and with people unfamiliar with the city.

The outbreak of crime is usual in circumstances like this, the only difference I can see is that some have agreed that starving people breaking into a closed supermarket to get food is not "looting".

snowbunny

I am watching this closely. The outcome will say a lot about current-day America.

snowbunny

HOW MANY BLOODY TIMES

There has NEVER been organised, free transpo on a large scale out of ANY area under a hurricane warning. PERIOD, END OF STORY. There have NEVER been pre-emptive shelters opened a significant distance away from an area under a hurricane warning. PERIOD. Who would have paid the very substantive cost? and who could have authorised such an expenditure if it wasn't a private donation?

Why the ***** do people die in the thousands in typhoons? Cos they're stuck in low-lying areas, that's why, with nowhere to go and no money to get there. It ain't like there is no news or telly in these areas.