Why Bush Wasn't Concerned About the People of New Orleans

[debbie]

Like everyone I've been wondering why the Bush administration ignored/abandoned New Orleans in the early days of the hurricane devastation. I received a link today to a National Geographic article published in October 2004 and it answered my question.

What's a little collateral damage amongst friends?

http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/


The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana's vanishing marsh.

[Exmortis]

There's one thing I don't understand... The article you linked suggest why there wasn't much done in terms of preparation for a predictable disaster... However...

why the Bush administration ignored/abandoned New Orleans in the early days of the hurricane devastation

I don't get the connection to the statement above...

[debbie]

There's one thing I don't understand... The article you linked suggest why there wasn't much done in terms of preparation for a predictable disaster... However...

why the Bush administration ignored/abandoned New Orleans in the early days of the hurricane devastation

I don't get the connection to the statement above...What about "in the early days of the hurricane devastation" don't you get?

[Exmortis]

Ok... Well, how does being friendly with oil companies links to the slow response? That's what I'm asking.

But I just read an interesting quote from Barbara Bush: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them"

Wow... That's harsh..

[Quintin]

Ok... Well, how does being friendly with oil companies links to the slow response? That's what I'm asking.

But I just read an interesting quote from Barbara Bush: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them"

Wow... That's harsh..
i think that's politician speak for " they have won the lottery"

[debbie]

Ok... Well, how does being friendly with oil companies links to the slow response? That's what I'm asking.I have no idea. I didn't say anything about being friendly with oil companies. Can you not see the paragraph I quoted from National Georgraphic with the bolded text?


But I just read an interesting quote from Barbara Bush: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them"

Wow... That's harsh..Another harsh moment was the comment from Bush Sr. that people better not criticise George Ws participation to his mother regarding New Orleans unless their wearing a flak jacket.

I'd like to see Barbara go toe-to-toe with a mother who lost her child and her home.

[Exmortis]

I have no idea. I didn't say anything about being friendly with oil companies. Can you not see the paragraph I quoted from National Georgraphic with the bolded text?

Yes, I did. But how can you answer "I have no idea" when in your post you said the article made you understand why Bush ignored/abandoned New-Orleans in the early days of the devastation. You said it made you understand... So I ask what is the link between being friendly to oil companies (isn't that what the article says?) and the slow rescue response? You seem to understand that link, but I don't...

[debbie]

Yes, I did. But how can you answer "I have no idea" when in your post you said the article made you understand why Bush ignored/abandoned New-Orleans in the early days of the devastation. You said it made you understand... So I ask what is the link between being friendly to oil companies (isn't that what the article says?) and the slow rescue response? You seem to understand that link, but I don't...I checked the article and the word "friendly" doesn't appear. I don't know where you are getting this "friendly to oil companies" thing. Is there a point you are trying to make here? If so please just get to it.

[Exmortis]

Or whatever the article is saying. I must admit, I quickly glanced over it and I mainly went along with the part you quoted.

So, what is the link between the article and the delay in rescue response? You said you understood the link. So I'm asking, what is the link? There's no point I'm trying to make, I just want to know. Why the hostility?

[debbie]

Or whatever the article is saying. ahh I see.


I must admit, I quickly glanced over it and I mainly went along with the part you quoted.No I don't think you did.


So, what is the link between the article and the delay in rescue response? You said you understood the link. So I'm asking, what is the link? There's no point I'm trying to make, I just want to know.
No it's obvious now that you're either trolling or thread crapping.



Why the hostility?When?

You must be thinking of the other two threads you were picking fights in.
You're in quite the paranoid snit today aren't you?

[Nave]

i dont see the connection between ur quote and a the delay in emergency help either...... so because the oil pipes were supposed to be protected by dissapearing marshes bush stayed away?

[Lesster]

I hope this isn't "off-topic", I don't think it is. I feel I am taking a risk here, I am a little gun-shy in this forum due to some "history".

As I watched (on TV) the tragic disaster in and around Louisianna I wondered why the government wasn't doing more to send aide, quickly.

I received this article via email from a friend - it explains much, it reads as if someone was reading my thoughts - things I wondered, but didn't know. I don't know how biased the author's point-of-view is, I feel that much of the article is correct, although it does take a pretty "hard-nosed" stance on the people. I hope to have some feedback on this ...... what do you think of the opinions expressed in this article?



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

by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist

September 2, 2005



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.

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 "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as 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.

[debbie]

i dont see the connection between ur quote and a the delay in emergency help either...... so because the oil pipes were supposed to be protected by dissapearing marshes bush stayed away?When I read that part of the article it resonated and helped me understand Bush's blatant disregard for the situation. The oil was protected and safe - what else was there for him to worry about? For me this info was one missing piece of the puzzle.

I'm still quite perplexed by the differences in how Bush handled 9/11 vs. New Orleans. I've been listening to how Americans were waiting for the "bull-horn moment" Bush displayed with 9/11..... but it never came.

[debbie]

I hope this isn't "off-topic", I don't think it is. I feel I am taking a risk here, I am a little gun-shy in this forum due to some "history".It is off topic. I'm not aware of your "history" - but you shouldn't feel guy-shy to post your own thread if you're looking to discuss the welfare state of the U.S. and the philosophies of Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged and so do I. :rrg: ;)

[Nave]

ahhhhh i c
but honestly it doesnt seem that the oil wasnt as safe as predicted, as our wallets can see. even if the pipes are protected the heart of the system is very vunerable. no pumps or drills no oil. And i think 9/11 was more national, it affect everyone in the states thats why he played up the bullhorn this time its only a portion, has he even taken a trip down there?

[lpj63]

My husband and I were in Louisiana in June and as we made our way to the most Southerly point of Louisiana we were both appalled at the poverty of the people of the State.We saw family after family living in squalor,one family of 8 or so all crammed in the better half of a mobile home that had split in half and had no windows or siding.When we stopped to take photos of a sign marking the "Most Southerly Point" we were joined by gentleman who hoped we enjoyed our stay in Louisiana but warned us not to travel down the road he had just exited and take photos near the refinery because we would be arrested.It occured to us then as we sped away that this wasafter all a country that is spending billions on a war and as long as the oil and gas is secure,who gives a **** about the people.........for after all,they were all once just slaves.BUt God Bless America because they are free.........or are they? :rrg:

[debbie]

ahhhhh i c
but honestly it doesnt seem that the oil wasnt as safe as predicted, as our wallets can see. even if the pipes are protected the heart of the system is very vunerable. no pumps or drills no oil. And i think 9/11 was more national, it affect everyone in the states thats why he played up the bullhorn this time its only a portion, has he even taken a trip down there?Haliburton is on the scene - it won't take them long to get things going. ;) They are a part of the Bush posse. CNN is reporting they are half way there and it will only takes weeks and not months to restore the supply.

We all suffer from price gouging but governments are reluctant to investigate. Some Governors in the States were discussing temporarily reducing the gas tax - might be something Mr. Martin should be thinking about.

[dakotaeagle]

Satellite images from March 9, 2004, and Aug. 31, 2005, show how New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina. (Darker areas in the "after" photo indicate standing water.)


http://sympatico-msn-ca.com.com/2300-1028_3-5845671-1.html?tag=ca_home

[Mr. Apollo]

I hope this isn't "off-topic", I don't think it is. I feel I am taking a risk here, I am a little gun-shy in this forum due to some "history".

As I watched (on TV) the tragic disaster in and around Louisianna I wondered why the government wasn't doing more to send aide, quickly.

I received this article via email from a friend - it explains much, it reads as if someone was reading my thoughts - things I wondered, but didn't know. I don't know how biased the author's point-of-view is, I feel that much of the article is correct, although it does take a pretty "hard-nosed" stance on the people. I hope to have some feedback on this ...... what do you think of the opinions expressed in this article?
Wow, that's a lot harsher then the usual far right libertarian "blame the poor" article. It would probably be more at home on freerepublic.com. So basically the behaviour of the looters should have been expected since they are "looting our tax dollars" OK. :rolleyes: The prisioners were not "just released" but were watched by guards. There were taken to different locations while being under guard the whole time.

So, to sum up the article, poor people are basically subhuman savages that don't belong in our society. That article was disgusting. It's an outrage for the sake of outrage. It creates a problem and then refuses to address it.

[Walter]

What about "in the early days of the hurricane devastation" don't you get?

Following your logic then that explains why you didn't see any major union leaders or celebrities show up in the in the early days of the hurricane devastation.....their pension funds and portfolios more than likely contain stocks in "oil companies." But putting that to one side it appears that everything is now under control because I read that Oprah, Dr. Phil, Sean Penn, et al are now on site.

[Walter]

ahh I see.

No I don't think you did.


No it's obvious now that you're either trolling or thread crapping.

I don't believe that is the case....all he asked was for you to provide the logic/truth behind your comment. But if he is trolling/thread crapping he has done it beautifully; look at all the traffic he caused you to generate.

When?

You must be thinking of the other two threads you were picking fights in.
You're in quite the paranoid snit today aren't you?
..

[Exmortis]

The oil was protected and safe - what else was there for him to worry about?

There's one flaw in the logic. What's the point of protected pipelines when you have damaged platforms that aren't pumping? Or damaged refineries that are no longer refining? Oil in pipelines isn't safe when you have reservoirs leaking. Did we see Bush running for those in the first few days of the devastation? Or am I trolling again?

[I LIKE EGGS]

You must be thinking of the other two threads you were picking fights in. You're in quite the paranoid snit today aren't you?:hys:

[debbie]

My husband and I were in Louisiana in June and as we made our way to the most Southerly point of Louisiana we were both appalled at the poverty of the people of the State.We saw family after family living in squalor,one family of 8 or so all crammed in the better half of a mobile home that had split in half and had no windows or siding.When we stopped to take photos of a sign marking the "Most Southerly Point" we were joined by gentleman who hoped we enjoyed our stay in Louisiana but warned us not to travel down the road he had just exited and take photos near the refinery because we would be arrested.It occured to us then as we sped away that this wasafter all a country that is spending billions on a war and as long as the oil and gas is secure,who gives a **** about the people.........for after all,they were all once just slaves.BUt God Bless America because they are free.........or are they? :rrg:Thanks for sharing your experience lpj63.

I think it's interesting that people who live in the area would be arrested in going near the refinery. That they were all once just slaves gets to the heart of the overwhelming indifference that has been exposed.

[debbie]

There's one flaw in the logic. What's the point of protected pipelines when you have damaged platforms that aren't pumping? Or damaged refineries that are no longer refining? Oil in pipelines isn't safe when you have reservoirs leaking. Did we see Bush running for those in the first few days of the devastation? Or am I trolling again?Considering that as of yesterday more than half of the shut down refineries are now operating shows that a more efficient disaster relief/contingency plan was in place for the oil and gas than for the American people.

It's common knowledge that Bush was on vacation, riding his bike, going to birthday parties, playing guitar and going to a Padres game during those first few days. There was obviously very little for him to be concerned about. The refineries would recover and be up and running in no time. All is well. Surely you are aware of this unless you are being deliberately obtuse.