Katrina Exposes Poverty and Race relations

[Makalakumu]

Actually, upnorthkyosa, I specifically criticized affirmative action, slavery reparations, and 'hate crime' legislation. Not 'Liberal policies' in their totality (which I typically agree with as far as civil liberties, social programs, and healthcare go).

In my opinion, the three aforementioned policies are not only ineffective in regards to their prescribed goals (either invoking minor improvements or reverse improvements), but also foster an attitude of reverse-discrimination (which I consider to be a form of racism).

Have a good 'un. :asian:

Then we are in agreement and I have seen good data to back up criticisms of Affirmative Action. I lobbed my pitch at a few others...

 

[7starmantis]

Hurricane Katrina showed this cluster**** to us all and now people are frantically trying to correct the mistakes with Hurricane Rita. Fine, we'll pull out all of the poor minorities this time. Evacuate them. Then what?

Ok, now your changing threads. Your talking about continued poverty action, we are talking about racism in the issue of hurrican Katrina. Let me say though, dont start talking about something you know nothing about. Almost my entire immediate and extended family are evacuating right now for Rita, its amazing, but that what is happening right now is not FEMA or even federal help at all, its ALL local and state action right now.....hmm, thats a huge difference.

When the local and state government acts in a timely and conscious effort, things turn out differently...colore me confused

7sm

 

[hardheadjarhead]

.

When the local and state government acts in a timely and conscious effort, things turn out differently...colore me confused

7sm

Galveston has a history with hurricanes as well, as I'm sure you're aware. 6,000 people died in Galveston in 1900 during a hurricane.

In addition, I suspect Texas is looking at Louisiana and taking a great little lesson from their experience. They know now that they sure as Hell can't rely on the Feds to do their job. What is it now? "The Department of Homeland Insecurity?"

It'll be interesting to see if blacks attempting to evacuate portions of Texas are turned back by gun toting whites. I thought that was an interesting story coming out of New Orleans.


I have to add this observation on TGace's post...29% of the country's poor are black...yet they constitute 12% of the population. I think poverty rates are something worth looking at...not mere percentages of a population base.

You might want to read Gilens' book, too...rather than just posting a review of it.



Regards,


Steve

 

[Makalakumu]

Ok, now your changing threads. Your talking about continued poverty action, we are talking about racism in the issue of hurrican Katrina. Let me say though, dont start talking about something you know nothing about. Almost my entire immediate and extended family are evacuating right now for Rita, its amazing, but that what is happening right now is not FEMA or even federal help at all, its ALL local and state action right now.....hmm, thats a huge difference.

When the local and state government acts in a timely and conscious effort, things turn out differently...colore me confused

7sm

All arguments aside, good luck in the coming days. I hope everyone in your family makes it to safety.

 

[7starmantis]

Galveston has a history with hurricanes as well, as I'm sure you're aware. 6,000 people died in Galveston in 1900 during a hurricane.

Your kidding right? As much a history as Galveston has, New Orleans has as well. There is only one other year (1915 I believe) that two cat4 hurricans hit the US....guess where....Galveston and New Orleans! I have (they have since passed of course) family that were in the 1900 hurricane (which was a cat4 by the way), so yes I know of it. So history with hurricanes is not an issue here.

In addition, I suspect Texas is looking at Louisiana and taking a great little lesson from their experience. They know now that they sure as Hell can't rely on the Feds to do their job. What is it now? "The Department of Homeland Insecurity?"

I figured that would be a point brought up. I guess we truly can't know how much of this is in response to Katrina, but New Orleans is no stranger to hurricanes. Local government is doing a tremendous job. Plus, your saying that New Orleans local government waited on the feds...a huge mistake any way you cut it....waiting and hurricane aren't great bedfellows.

It'll be interesting to see if blacks attempting to evacuate portions of Texas are turned back by gun toting whites. I thought that was an interesting story coming out of New Orleans.

C'mon, shouldn't we see some type of proof of those reports before we start accepting them as fact?

All arguments aside, good luck in the coming days. I hope everyone in your family makes it to safety.

Thank you. Seriously people, look at this post, this is what MartialTalk is all about. Much respect to you for this, I really appreciate it. Regardless of our arguments or differences you have the heart and compassion to feel this way. That is very respectable. :asian:

7sm

 

[hardheadjarhead]

I figured that would be a point brought up. I guess we truly can't know how much of this is in response to Katrina, but New Orleans is no stranger to hurricanes. Local government is doing a tremendous job. Plus, your saying that New Orleans local government waited on the feds...a huge mistake any way you cut it....waiting and hurricane aren't great bedfellows.

No...I'm not saying the New Orleans government "waited on the feds." I said nothing of the sort. I've hashed the timeline out on this elsewhere. FEMA and DHS didn't meet their responsibilities. They showed gross incompetence.

Michael Brown, head of FEMA learned that there were people at the Superdome the thursday after the storm hit. Thursday. How did he learn of it? From an interview with Brian Williams. Williams told him. Not his staff.

Had he or any other federal official watched the news (they'd been reporting from the Dome since the people went in)...or talked to people within their own command...or talked with people from Louisiana...they'd have known the Convention Center and Dome were staging points for refugees, they would have known their food and water situation, AND they would have known it was in the disaster plan scenario that FEMA was supposed to help draft and implement. Check FEMA's web site for their responsibilities...its pretty clear cut.

The culpability for this starts at the top down...whatever happened to "the buck stops here?" Bush said he's going to "take responsibility" for what happened, yet the administration is perfectly content to let others point the finger of blame at state and local officials. The running joke is that Karl Rove's plan for damage control involves shoring up the damage the adminstration suffered from its ineptitude in dealing with this thing.

In reference to my allegation that blacks were prevented from leaving New Orleans, you wrote:

C'mon, shouldn't we see some type of proof of those reports before we start accepting them as fact?

How much proof do you need? Would the fact that the Gretna city council endorsed the blockade and the people approved of it constitute your fact? Read on:


http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/2762/two-americas-one-bridge


Among the people trapped in the city were Sandra's son and her ex-husband, Otis, 61, a diabetic who has used a wheelchair since his leg was amputated.

Otis had gone without dialysis for five days when their sons, Otis Jr., 35, and Orrin, 34, decided to push his wheelchair down the highway in search of help. They ended up walking miles.

They were near safety that Wednesday after the hurricane -- most of the way across the Crescent City Bridge into Gretna, La. -- when an armed officer told them to turn back because Gretna officials were concerned about looting.

By the time they made it out of New Orleans, hitching a ride on a truck, the younger men's feet were bloody and covered with rashes. Otis Sr. had fallen out of his wheelchair three times while they were walking and had open wounds on his head. He was nearly in a coma.

Residents of Gretna, Louisiana, are pleased with the decision to block the Mississippi River bridge leading out of New Orleans to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.

The Gretna city council passed a resolution Thursday supporting the police chief's decision to block the bridge.



Regards,


Steve

 

[Tgace]

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=2496

The worst political stoking so far not by mouth but by action was that of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. Among several showing of incompetence, she politicized National Guard assistance.

The Democrat governor -- refused to sign over National Guard control to the Republican-led federal government that pursuant to FEMA relief disaster plan would have coordinated and made easier rescue and relief activities in the scene of the calamity and avoided more of those scooped disastrous effects that the media had a field day of reporting.

Instead, the politicking governor became anti-plan and sensing the opening door of political opportunity to embarrass Bush, decided on her own to turn over control of the National Guard assistance to out-of-the-loop former Democrat FEMA chief James Lee Witt who served under President Bill Clinton, to help run the relief effort. The resulting inefficiency of uncoordinated efforts was tossed into the lap of the federal government. As a result, FEMA was verbally abused of either having no synchronized plan of response to the disaster or without mercy, publicly blamed of bungling that was not necessarily of its own making.

 

[hardheadjarhead]

Okay...so let me understand this...

First you blame the locals and state for not doing enough to avoid the disaster as "first responders." You've been claiming ALL along that it wasn't the job of the Feds to do this.

Now, apparently, you're saying the reason the Feds didn't do it...at least in part...is because Blanco wouldn't federalize the Louisiana National Guard. Am I reading that right? Further, by posting this you're suggesting that she placed the lives of her constituents at risk merely to make the President look bad. Sure. That must have been the agenda of Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour. He kept control of his Guard, too...as is the custom in such situations.

The day the hurricane hit she tried to contact the President...she had to leave the message with a low level aid. It was a request for help. That was on August 29.

Ultimately she turned the job over to James Lee Witt on September 3rd--and refused to surrender control of the guard--after it became clear that FEMA and Bush hadn't a clue as to what was going on. She brought Witt in because he knew how to handle the situation--unlike Chertoff, Brown and the President.

Brown was behaving like an idiot, having received no briefs and clearly not having watched the news (see above). Bush, also not watching the news and relying on others to do his reading for him, clearly didn't have a grasp of the situation until his aides gave him a DVD "highlights" tape of the disaster.

So I guess maybe she didn't trust the President at this point...eh? So she turns to James Witt.

James Witt was head of Arkansas' Office of Emergency Services and reorganized that state's emergency management process. Then he headed FEMA.

"Witt's term of office saw approximately 348 Presidential declared disaster areas in more than 6,500 counties and in all 50 states and territories. Witt supervised the response to the most costly flood disaster in the nation's history, the most costly earthquake, and a dozen serious hurricanes."

Since then he's been managing a crisis and emergency management consultation company. Hell, if I was Blanco, I'D HIRE HIM TOO.

Or, I could go with Michael Brown...Bush's boy...who headed up the National Arabian Horse Association prior to being appointed to FEMA. A job, incidentally, that he was fired from. I guess he's just not a horse person.



Now, then, TGace...this for you. WHY is the President assuming responsibility and saying he was unsatisfied with the Federal response if you are correct? Are you contradicting the President? Surely not!


The government failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina, Bush said Thursday night from storm-damaged New Orleans as he laid out plans for one of the largest reconstruction projects ever. The federal government's costs could reach US$200 billion (?164 billion) or beyond.


I bet you're just tickled that Halliburton got a no-bid contract...again...to rebuild new government housing for those folks on the government dole down there. Isn't it nice knowing your hard earned tax dollars are going into Halliburton's pocket...both in Iraq and at home?



Regards,


Steve

 

[Tgace]

http://www.techcentralstation.com/090805I.html

Having been prodded on Saturday into ordering an evacuation by President Bush and the head of the Hurricane Center and then delaying it for seventeen crucial hours until well into Sunday, Mayor Nagin is directly responsible for the AP picture of over 200 unused New Orleans buses marooned in four feet of water that might have evacuated more than 15,000 in one trip alone. Those were the buses that in the Mayor's own plan were to be used to evacuate 100,000 poor the city has long understood had no other means of transportation.

Nagin is also responsible for failing to pre-position generators, food and water, a medical presence and portable toilets for the two sites at the Superdome and Convention Center that he had proclaimed "emergency centers" for tens of thousands of the more than 30% of New Orleanians that lived below the poverty line. And then the Mayor failed to police them.

Those who dream of the perfectibility of human institutions through increasingly, compulsorily collective government will always attack the highest levels of government when it does fail. Republicans and Democrats alike have created huge institutions like the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, and now Homeland Security, built on dreams that can never meet the excessive demands placed upon them.

If we are to learn anything from the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, we will have to review the more practical expectations of the Framers of our Federal system. Local and state government are the primary responders. To keep their powers and responsibility intact the Federal Government is a resource they must administer wisely and decisively. Focusing on the habitual incoherence of Bush Administration communications is beside the point. There is no excuse for ignoring the key failures of local and state government in facing the challenge of Hurricane Katrina. Doing so will only ensure the next disaster.

Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.

 

[Makalakumu]

Sounds like officials in charge of rebuilding New Orleans would like to build a smaller "racially sanitized" version of the big easy. Operation Rebirth is the name that we are giving to a version of "ethnic clensing" it would seem.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9469300/site/newsweek/

Oct. 3, 2005 issue - The Lower Ninth was going under, again. Floodwaters from Hurricane Rita had breached the levee along the Industrial Canal, inundating the poor New Orleans neighborhood that is, or was, home to 40,000 African-Americans. The levee had been patched after it failed in Hurricane Katrina, but not well enough. Cedric Richmond, the president of the Black Caucus in the Louisiana State Legislature, suggested that more than bad luck was at work. "For whatever reason," he told NEWSWEEK, "they didn't put the same effort into fixing the Industrial Canal as they did into the 17th Street Canal." The 17th Street Canal borders a largely white, middle-class area.

Finis Shelnutt, who owns a number of businesses near the French Quarter (including a bar named after his wife, former Bill Clinton paramour Gennifer Flowers), does not hide his feelings about the Lower Ninth. Sitting on his bicycle, draped with Mardi Gras beads, he told NEWSWEEK that he is already talking to Florida investors about building high-rises in the French Quarter that can withstand Category 5 hurricanes. And what about the Lower Ninth? "Give it to us, and we'll turn it into golf courses. I heard that in Gaelic, 'Katrina' means 'to purify'," said Shelnutt.

The city powers have big plans for the restoration of New Orleans, but the Lower Ninth is not in them. Over regular dinners in Baton Rouge restaurants like Gino's, an Italian eatery featuring recently transplanted musicians from the Big Easy, the heads of law firms and tourist businesses and conservation groups have been meeting with big real-estate developers. These men have started to outline a vision of a smaller, more upscale Crescent City.

One of the most ambitious plans, called Operation Rebirth, is aimed at creating a "vital center" of New Orleans. Pres Kabacoff, a well-known local developer, spoke to NEWSWEEK about re-creating New Orleans as "an Afro-Caribbean Paris." In addition to building a movie studio, new museums and a light-rail line, he wants to tear down the poor and almost entirely black Iberville housing project (situated close to the French Quarter) and replace it with low-rise, mixed-income, racially diverse housing. Such plans are "very sensitive politically," he readily acknowledges, but he had an earlier success story replacing run-down tenements with mixed-income housing in the Lower Garden District.

If the US is not going to rebuild the Ninth Ward, then what will we do with the people who lived there? These families have no homes. I could support building a version of the Big Easy that is more racially integrated, but apparently, that is not what locals want. Much of the population of this city will not be moving back.

I wonder where all of the poor black people that fled the city will end up? Perhaps in more "permanant" camps...

This new "sanitized" version of the Crescent City typifies the underlying racism that I've been talking about in this entire thread. I'm particularly taken aback by the comment in bold. "Lauterung das Untermench!" How else is one supposed to take that?

upnorthkyosa

 

[arnisador]

On a somewhat related note:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050930/ap_on_re_us/new_orleans

The police department said Thursday it is investigating a dozen officers in connection with looting during the lawlessness that engulfed the city after Hurricane Katrina.