Landrieu Blasts Bush on Katrina Response
U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La: “I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims – far more efficiently than buses – FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.
“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity..."
Dutch television viewer: 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.
Why So Few First Responders in New Orleans? They're in Iraq!
Nature’s assault on the Gulf Coast was, in some ways, comparable to a strike by a tactical nuclear weapon. The toxic wake to be left by receding floodwaters will create a public health catastrophe larger than most conceivable bio- or chemical weapons attacks. Added to this is the breakdown of civic order in New Orleans and elsewhere in the region. Grave as the crisis would be even in the best of times, the absence of First Responders deployed to Iraq threatens to turn it into an unprecedented calamity.
Opportunities abound to set precedents for militarizing domestic emergency responses, federal interventions in the energy market, perhaps even the re-introduction of conscription in the guise of a national service program to deal with disaster relief (as well as military contingencies). The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and the radiating economic consequences of the disaster, will offer further opportunities to expand the central government’s powers in novel and dangerous ways.
New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States. New Orleans is not optional for the United States commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist.
Katrina's Wrath, America's Shame
What is the explanation for FEMA not allowing Red Cross trucks full of supplies to deliver them? Is Martial Law in our future? Why are we turning down donations from around the world?
Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans, in his deserved anger, said he would give “No more press conferences until he sees trucks for as far as the eye can see”. He questions out loud why the help hasn’t arrived, why they’ve waited so long – and he’s not alone.
Apocalyptic Warning to All Citizens of United States, the World Cries ‘You Are Not Alone’, They Cannot Hear
Russian Intelligence reports are stating this morning that the grave situation developing in the American City of New Orleans can only be described as a ‘Decent Into Hell’, as to this hour over 50,000 human beings of this once great American City remain trapped by rising flood waters with no means for their Government to evacuate all of them.
With no resources available for food, water, shelter, or evacuation, the masses of these peoples have become one of the largest unruly mobs in modern history, and with no police or military forces able to contain them they are presently running rampant throughout what remains of this city in what these reports describe as ‘frantic acts for survival’.
Being kept from these American people also by their Military Rulers have been the uncounted offers of assistance from Nations all around the world...
Only through such unprecedented cataclysms such as they are currently experiencing are they able to break through the lies and distortions of their Military Leaders and Propaganda Media Organs to see, even glimpse, the wholesale lies they are told in order to keep them in a pacified state.
But sadly, and as the events of September 11, 2001 clearly show, the mass of these Americans are willing to believe any and all lies they are told, no matter how absurd, as long as they can be left with the illusion that their lives today will continue into their tomorrows. How sad it is for them to see their world in these terms, but it remains a fact that this is indeed the only way they can cope with a world disintegrating around them.
