Just released a brand new song: Democracy.
This song comes with its own page to help explain the lyrics.
It's about what has become our sorry excuse for a democracy, and thinking about it for five minutes, in the context of the world at large.
I recorded the guitar and vocals for this on my mac laptop, using Audio Recorder. (I did mix it in protools, but I didn't do anything special that would have required protools.)
Hope you like it. I've made all the source files available for remix, and it's all under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
I decided to allow commercial use of the work. Let's see how far it can get!
Did the White House make a conscious decision to do nothing about getting Katrina rescue efforts to the people of New Orleans?
If not, how could Bush have been relieved on Tuesday morning when he mistakenly thought that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet?"
This article is from Friday, February 10, 2006.
Now we can't give the reorganization of the Department of Home Security all the credit for single handedly screwing up the rescue system that Clinton had taken 8 years to build. The Shrub gets some credit for cutting a lot of FEMA funding too, straight across the board.
So in many areas, it didn't matter who was in charge, there was no money for the program anyway. (Here's factcheck.org and washington monthly for some more good information on that.)
White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By Eric Lipton for The New York Times.
via
t r u t h o u t
Washington - In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought - also a number of fires."
Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed...
"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.
The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?hp&ex=1139634000&en=914abcf6c2b5fc5a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
also from truthout: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021006K.shtml
White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By Eric Lipton
The New York Times
Friday 10 February 2006
Washington - In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought - also a number of fires."
Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.
The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.
"The real story is with this new structure," he said. "Why weren't more things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to do what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?"
Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had notified Mr. Brown that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the Homeland Security Department did with that information, or when the White House was told.
Missteps at All Levels
It has been known since the earliest days of the storm that all levels of government - from the White House to the Department of Homeland Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall - were unprepared, uncommunicative and phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination of the latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the key players involved in the important turning points: what they said, what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be written up in the committees' investigative reports.
Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were these:
Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.
Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.
The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no plans in place to do any of this."
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.
The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.
Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.
"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."
One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.
Eyewitness to Devastation
As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in October, there was no mistaking what had happened: large sections of the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of the scene with a small camera.
"The situation is only going to get worse," he said he warned Mr. Brown, then the FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour.
"Thank you," he said Mr. Brown replied. "I am now going to call the White House."
Citing restrictions placed on him by his lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that call. White House aides have urged administration officials not to discuss any conversations with the president or his top advisors and declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush's senior advisors.
But investigators have found the e-mail message referring to Mr. Bahamonde's helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary of Mr. Bahamonde's observations that was issued at 10:30 p.m. and an 11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of homeland security. Each message describes in detail the extensive flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee collapse.
Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff stated in the days after the storm that the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the catastrophe that some had feared.
"The hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning the levee broke and the water started to flood into New Orleans," Mr. Chertoff said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sept. 4, the weekend after the hurricane hit.
Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were referring to official confirmation that the levee had broken, which they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday about whether a breach had occurred and noted that they were not alone in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe.
Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours," he said.
But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Mr. Brown's authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to the disaster may have been slowed as a result.
"Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Ms. Collins said in an interview.
Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday, he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on helicopter tours of the damage.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, said the government confusion reminded him of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Information was in different places, in that case prior to the attack," Mr. Lieberman said, "and it wasn't reaching the key decision makers in a coordinated way for them to take action."
Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr. Chertoff had been "intensely involved in monitoring the storm" he had not actually been told about the report of the levee breach until Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta.
"No one is satisfied with the response in the early days," Mr. Knocke said.
But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr. Chertoff was disengaged.
"He was not informed of it," Mr. Knocke said. "It is certainly a breakdown. And through an after-action process, that is something we will address."
The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars.
Focus on Highway Plan
Mr. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal government.
In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost in hospitals and nursing homes.
One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department official told investigators.
Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a water rescue effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his small team spent much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who themselves were trapped by rising water.
The investigators also determined that the federal Department of Transportation was not asked until Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees sat there for perhaps two more days longer than necessary.
Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the Department of Defense. It was not until the middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice.
"In hindsight I should have done it right then," Mr. Brown told the House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.
Go to Original
Former FEMA Director to Testify about Katrina
By Spencer S. Hsu
The Washington Post
Friday 10 February 2006
Denied executive privilege, Brown plans to discuss communications with Bush.
Michael D. Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was rebuffed in his request for a claim of executive privilege and plans to testify to a Senate panel today about his calls and e-mails to President Bush and top White House aides in the Hurricane Katrina crisis, Brown's lawyer said yesterday.
White House Counsel Harriet Miers declined to offer Brown a legal defense for declining to testify or respond to a Feb. 6 letter advising that without such protection Brown "intends to answer all questions fully, completely and accurately," said Brown's lawyer, Andrew W. Lester.
Lester wrote that Brown will testify if asked about communications with Bush, Vice President Cheney, Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin, domestic policy adviser Claude A. Allen and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.
As the federal official in charge of the disaster before he resigned, Brown is "between a rock and a hard place," his lawyer said. "On the one hand he desires to answer fully any and all questions the Committee may have," Lester wrote. "On the other hand the President's statements indicate concern that the President be able to 'get unvarnished advice from [his] advisors.'"
House and Senate investigative committees have battled the White House over its refusal to make available top aides and their correspondence from the response to the storm. Instead, the White House has provided 15,000 pages of records and briefings by a deputy White House homeland security adviser.
Bush spokesman Trent Duffy declined to comment on Brown's letter. But Duffy noted a Jan. 26 news conference in which Bush, while declining to cite Brown by name, defended "people who give me advice" from being forced to disclose such conversations, citing a "chilling effect on future advisers."
In testimony to a House committee in September, Brown did not discuss such conversations on the advice of counsel, although he estimated that he communicated with the White House "30 times" during the weekend before Katrina made landfall on Monday, Aug. 29. That included "several" calls to Bush to help speed evacuations by Louisiana and New Orleans leaders.
Yesterday, Lester said that Brown "is planning to testify by answering all questions."
Brown could shed light on the White House's lack of awareness of events on the day of Katrina's landfall. Documents released by the Senate show that although the Homeland Security Operations Center reported at 6 p.m. Aug. 29 that no New Orleans levees had been breached, authorities received no fewer than 16 reports to the contrary before then.
Beginning at 8:30 a.m. Aug. 29, levee breaks were reported by sources including New Orleans and Louisiana homeland security officials, the Transportation Security Administration, the National Weather Service, FEMA officials, White House Homeland Security Council and Homeland Security Department "spot reports," the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, and the American Red Cross.
And now, from the "shoot me now, this isn't really happening" department, we have ex-FEMA dork Michael Brown being paid an extra consulting fee to explain how he fucked up the evacuation.
Hey I got an idea, how 'bout we get him to tell us that before we fire him. Sheesh!
Brown serving as consultant to FEMA
By Ed Henry for CNN.
A congressional panel on Tuesday is expected to
scrutinize the decision to keep ousted Federal Emergency Management
Agency chief Michael Brown on the federal payroll.Brown told congressional investigators Monday that he is being paid as a consultant to help FEMA assess what went wrong in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, according to a senior official familiar with the
meeting...Brown's comments were made to investigators for Rep. Tom Davis,
R-Virginia. Davis leads a House select committee probing the federal,
state and local response to Katrina, and Brown is scheduled to appear
before the panel Tuesday in a highly anticipated appearance...A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA's parent
agency, said last week that Brown would be paid for about a month for
"transitional purposes." The spokesman, Russ Knocke, said he did not
know how much Brown was being paid.Brown's 2004 salary was $145,600, according to the Plum Book, a
congressional reference guide to executive branch salaries.
Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/27/brown.fema/index.html
Brown serving as consultant to FEMA
Ousted chief says he should have pushed for federal troops
From Ed Henry CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A congressional panel on Tuesday is expected to
scrutinize the decision to keep ousted Federal Emergency Management
Agency chief Michael Brown on the federal payroll.
Brown told congressional investigators Monday that he is being paid as a
consultant to help FEMA assess what went wrong in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, according to a senior official familiar with the
meeting.
Brown also said he wished he had pushed more forcefully -- and earlier
-- for federal troops to be brought in to restore order in New Orleans,
the official told CNN.
Brown's comments were made to investigators for Rep. Tom Davis,
R-Virginia. Davis leads a House select committee probing the federal,
state and local response to Katrina, and Brown is scheduled to appear
before the panel Tuesday in a highly anticipated appearance.
Congressional aides told CNN that given all of the questions already
raised about Brown's qualifications for the FEMA job, the decision to
keep him on the payroll for about a month will be examined at Tuesday's
hearing.
Brown resigned September 12 after two weeks of intense criticism of
FEMA's response to Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 when it struck
near the Louisiana-Mississippi state line August 29.
The storm devastated Mississippi beach towns and left most of New
Orleans flooded when the city's protective levees failed at several
points.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA's parent
agency, said last week that Brown would be paid for about a month for
"transitional purposes." The spokesman, Russ Knocke, said he did not
know how much Brown was being paid.
Brown's 2004 salary was $145,600, according to the Plum Book, a
congressional reference guide to executive branch salaries.
Like much of this country's current events, the New Orleans Catastrophe is playing out like a bad TV movie.
Halliburton, Kellog and Root etc. are actually going to benefit from this disaster. They win. Everybody else loses. The end.
Kan Do Karl
These organizations are set up for faster, local service for those that need it in the gulf region. You can send money, apply your hotel points for housing, or send actual goods (see list of what's needed and addresses below).
1.
Grassroots / Low-income / People of Color-led Hurricane Katrina Relief
http://www.sparkplugfoundation.org/katrinarelief.html
2.
List of organizations based in the Black community, compiled by hip-hop artist Kevin Powell
http://www.wbai.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=6735&Itemid=0
3.
List of relief organizations compiled by AlterNet (alternative media site)
http://alternet.org/story/24938/
4.
Offers of Housing to the Uprooted: MoveOn.org
http://www.hurricanehousing.org/
5.
Operation USA
"They can provide medical supplies and cash grants to smaller local clinics who are not Red Cross affiliates."
http://www.opusa.org
6.
Jazz Foundation of America
Helping jazz musicians in New Orleans
http://www.jazzfoundation.org/new_orleans.php
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP IMMEDIATELY
1. Cut and past the information in this e-blast about
a. Items needed by survivors of the New Orleans catastrophe
b. Monetary donations
c. Where you can ship non-perishable times
d. Alternative media outlets
e. A few things you can do to help immediately
and share this information as a ONE SHEET, with folks near and far, via email or as a hand out at your event, religious institution and with your civic organization.
2. Voice your opinion to local and national media and to elected officials, via letter, email, op-ed article or phone call regarding the coverage of the New Orleans catastrophe.
a. ACTION: Improve Racial Justice Coverage of Katrina
Posted by Lisa at 02:16 PM
This isn't new. It's from around September 8, 2005, but it still seemed relevant when I read it this morning, so I bring it to you...
Katrina: account from an EPA rep
via BoingBoing and
Steve's No Direction Home Page
A Boing Boing reader who owns an environmental cleanup services company -- and asks to remain anonymous here -- says,Thanks for publishing my plea to get involved the other day. Unfortunately nothing has come of that. No one is proceeding at this point. However, plenty of opportunities to help refugees in Atlanta are now available, so that's where my time has gone.
My company cleans up waste industrial gas cylinders and specialty chemicals. As such we are in contact with the EPA regularly and often work for the government. As you might imagine, there is expected to be a large number of cylinders recovered from Katrina, and many will probably be in bad shape, or even unknowns, which can present hazard. Today a consultant who works with us and the EPA came back from the Gulf region. Here are some of the things that he had to report:
* He said that the 30 elderly who died in the nursing home were simply forgotten. They were supposed to be rescued but someone dropped the ball and they died.
* There are now 130,000 people working in the Gulf region, including 60,000 National Guard. Conditions for these workers, especially the contractors, are extremely hard. Many are sleeping in their cars and have to supply their own food and water. There is as yet no infrastructure in place to support this group. 80% of these people have terrible diarrhea and some have been hospitalized.
* Under Homeland Security, FEMA is supposed to be in charge, but they have been marginalized due to their obvious screw ups. The National Guard is now in charge in the region and they have no experience in these matters. This is aggravating a bad situation.
* The plan going forward for New Orleans is to demolish all the houses and burn them. There is nowhere to bury the waste in the region so they will incinerate it all. Before that can go on, they will have to search every house for chemical hazards.
* They have found large numbers of seals in and around the houses in NOLA and no one is clear where they came from. An aquarium?
* They are shooting hundreds of dogs a day to protect search and rescue workers. The Humane Society shelters in the region have over 4000 animals.
* The entire Gulfport region is blocked by National Guard and only authorized contractors can get in. An RV campground has grown up outside the roadblock of 80 or more contractors hoping to get a piece of the action. These people have signs outside saying, "Mold Expert," "Asbestos Contractor," etc. They are having cookouts at their RVs just to try to get people to come and talk to them.
* Cell phone towers are on their way from Germany to get the communication infrastructure back in place. The EPA ordered 40 satellite phones to get their people in contact. Those phones have arrived, but no one ordered SIM cards and these phones are currently useless.
* This contractor has been organizing reverse osmosis (RO) water purification units from all over the country since last Tuesday. He has over 100 units of various sizes available to move into the region, but no one will give the go ahead. No one will sign their name to a piece of paper for fear recriminations later. He says that over 80 million pint bottles of water have been purchased at $0.75 each. The RO units can produce a gallon of water from contaminated water for $0.01 and they can produce thousands of gallons a day. Two are staged near the zone and these alone can produce 250,000 gallons per day. The Army has RO units, but every functional one, and every operator trained to use them, is in Iraq or Afghanistan.
* The Navy ship Bataan, which has been widely reported to be available for producing water, can only do desalination, but cannot handle contaminated water.
* All of the Army's good gear, including vehicles and generators are overseas. Humvees and other vehicles in the Gulf region are breaking down frequently.
Certainly I cannot attest to the absolute reliability of all this information, but it is from a reliable source who has been involved with EPA response to hazardous situations for 20 years.
He confirms what everyone else has already said: the clusterfuck down there is beyond all imagining.
And you can bet he wasn't treated well by either one. While he's looking through what's left of his house, a couple goons with M-16s handcuff him for a while to let him know who's boss. Meanwhile, E-bay removes his photos of the wreckage from his website.
Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina, Detained, Cuffed by Cheney's M-16-carrying Goons
By Jackson Thoreau for OpEdNews.
Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in
alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since
he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Sept. 8,
that's the least we can do.Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes
can be considered harsh by some ? personally what I've heard is very
much on target - but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast
cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor.When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane
Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life.
That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents
the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in
U.S. history..."I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr.
Cheney's infamous words back at him," Marble wrote. "At that moment, I noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their
faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back
to my former house."His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marble's house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble's home, two military police waving M-16's showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit Marble's description who had cursed at Cheney.
"I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so
they put me in handcuffs and 'detained' me for about 20 minutes or so," Marble wrote. "My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go."
Here is the full text of the story in case the link goes bad:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jackson__050909_physician_who_told_o.htm
Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina,
Detained, Cuffed by Cheney's M-16-carrying Goons
by Jackson Thoreau
Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in
alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since
he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Sept. 8,
that's the least we can do.
Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes
can be considered harsh by some ? personally what I've heard is very
much on target - but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast
cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor.
When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane
Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life.
That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents
the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in
U.S. history.
As Marble explains, he was driving to his destroyed house Sept. 8 in
Gulfport, Ms., when military police refused to allow him to cross a
barricade that was about 200 feet from his home. They forced him to
drive an extra 20 minutes and spend even more on gasoline.
"Thanks to Dubya Gump and Mr. Cheney, gas is really expensive and
extremely hard to get anywhere Katrina has destroyed," Marble wrote.
"So needless to say, I was extremely aggravated that they wouldn't let
me pass."
Suddenly a long line of dark cars pulled up, and they honked at Marble
to back up to let them through the barricade that supposedly no one
could drive through. That only made Marble madder so he did what most
of us would do ? or at least consider doing.
"I waved a middle finger at the caravan," Marble wrote.
After driving the extra 20 minutes and filming video of destruction
along the way, he made it to his home. Marble overheard a neighbor say
that Cheney was down the street talking to people. That's when he got
the idea to go meet Dr. Evil himself.
"I am no fan of Mr. Cheney because of several reasons," Marble wrote.
"For those who don't know, Mr. Cheney is infamous for telling Senator
[Pat] Leahy 'go fu** yourself' on the Senate floor. Also, I am not
happy about the fact that thousands have died due to the slow action of
FEMA, not to even mention the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong
time, i.e. Iraq."
So Marble, who was wearing an old Mr. T "I Pity Da Fool" t-shirt since
he was sifting through the wreckage, asked a couple of police officers
if he and a friend could walk down to Cheney. They told him Cheney was
"looking forwardî to talking to ìthe locals.î
"So we grabbed my Canon digital rebel and my Sony videocamera and
started walking down the street," Marble wrote. "And then right in
front of the destroyed tennis court I used to play on, Dick Cheney was
giving a pep rally, talking to the press. The Secret Service guys
patted us down and waved the wands over us, and then let us pass."
As he stood about 10 feet away from Cheney and his friend and some
camera operators from CNN and other media filmed the scene, Marble
suddenly yelled, "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go fuck yourself, you
asshole!"
Hey, at least Marble was polite. After all, he referred to Cheney as
ìMr. Cheney.î
"I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr.
Cheney's infamous words back at him," Marble wrote. "At that moment, I
noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their
faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back
to my former house."
His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marbleís
house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble's home, two
military police waving M-16's showed up and said they were looking for
someone who fit Marble's description who had cursed at Cheney.
"I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so
they put me in handcuffs and 'detained' me for about 20 minutes or so,"
Marble wrote. "My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so
tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after
getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I
was free to go."
So letís get this straight: A physician with a newborn baby loses most
everything he owns in the hurricane, does what most of us WANT to do and
ìechoesî Cheneyís words he spoke on the Senate floor last year, walks
away harmlessly, mission accomplished, and then once the media cameras
leave, he is treated like a foreign terrorist as Cheneyís goons waving
M-16s handcuff him in front of his destroyed home? Had it not been for
the media cameras filming the initial scene, I doubt Cheneyís goons
would have just let Marble go after 20 minutes.
America, land of the free?
Marble and his family have been in the media spotlight before, including
his wife, Lisa, and baby, Sofia Grace, who was born shortly after the
storm, on CNN. Marble has also been interviewed in art magazines and the
Biloxi Sun Herald about his concert fund-raisers and musical success ó
one of his bands, dR. O, has had at least 20 No. 1 songs on the MP3.com
charts.
"The truth is even with all our losses, we are still luckier than many
people down here because at least we didn't die," Marble wrote. "But I
thought I could try to raise some awareness to the bad policies of the
Dubya Gump administration and also possibly raise some money to replace
the many things we lost, and so I decided I would auction the videotape
my friend shot of the event. I will also grant an interview to the
winner if so desired."
So go to eBay here and place a bid for this important video to help
Marble raise some needed funds. I have done so and was at least at one
time the high bidder.
Marble also has an Internet site with photographs of some damage in his
town at www.HurricaneKatrinaSucked.com. A photo of him is here, and you
can also email Marble at clone9@yahoo.com.
Dr. Ben Marble, you rock. May we all return the favor.
UPDATE: Late Friday, Sept. 9, and again on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11, eBay,
which is owned by strong Bush-Cheney supporters, took down Marble's
site.
Marble said it was because he didnít bleep out the first ìfuî of ìfuck,î
which he said in an email to me was ìpretty silly.î I think itís a
bunch of BS - I did some searches on eBay of profanity they allow that
is not even partially bleeped out and found more than 1,250 items on
there with the word "bitch,î more than 400 items on there with the word
"bastard,î more than 60 ìgo to hellî phrases and even two ìgoddamned son
of a bitchî items. Yet, they say they won't even allow "f***.î Thatís
fu****. If you want to complain to an eBay bigwig, email meg@ebay.com.
The bidding on Marbleís second auction was over $1,900 at one time. He
is also considering auctioning off some of his paintings.
More at http://www.opednews.com
In the NY Times:
Osama and Katrina
Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the
argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S.
infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without
putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the
guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy
much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07friedman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fThomas%20L%20Friedman
Op-Ed Columnist
Osama and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 7, 2005
On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli
TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up
to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered:
"Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they
know how to pull the trigger."
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the
right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as
a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from
9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used
that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a
radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells,
the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before
9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11
distorted our politics and society.
Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be
the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put
the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right
guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with
Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at
home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so
much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much
better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing
it as a policy.
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of
energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word
"conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already
denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national
policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for
price gouging?
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the
government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that
we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and
fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the
government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly
selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want
to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I
can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't
have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person
about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New
Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax
dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy
drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had
to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one
underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just
spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day,
but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that
someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his
watch.
Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the
argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with
India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S.
infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without
putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the
guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a
gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy
much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy
day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy;
its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40
million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when
that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal
with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush
team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he
has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and
relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but
helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as
usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a
city and a presidency.
Continuing in his great tradition of being the only one to have the cahunas to say in plain english what needs to be said, Keith Olbermann had a few important words to say about the New Orleans situation -- and Bush's utter failure in dealing with it.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely
by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe.
These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country
to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and
defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even
keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure
collapse in New Orleans even though the government had heard all the
"chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers
and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern...
a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror
government. It promised protection or at least amelioration against
all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological
weapon called standing water.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8514671/#050905a
September 5, 2005 | 8:58 p.m. ET
The "city" of Louisiana (Keith Olbermann)
SECAUCUS Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all,
starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city
that is largely underwater..."
Well there's your problem right there.
If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a
crisis, this was it.
The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their
insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that mightíve saved
New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was
on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away
from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus,
to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of
these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in
terms of relief they couldíve brought last Monday and Tuesday like the
President, whose statements have looked like they're being transmitted
to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.
But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever
be symbolized by one gaffe by the head of what is ironically called "The
Department of Homeland Security": "Louisiana is a city."
Politician after politician Republican and Democrat alike has
paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in
their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how
devastated they were congenitally incapable of telling the difference
between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted
editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the
stranded even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to
telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural...and
government-made.
But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in
Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not
the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week
or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial
silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas,
nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord
knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee
improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of
trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely
by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe.
These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country
to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and
defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even
keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure
collapse in New Orleans even though the government had heard all the
"chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers
and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern...
a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror
government. It promised protection or at least amelioration against
all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological
weapon called standing water.
Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the
response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which
"we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the
administration, although we still don't know where some of them are.
Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time
last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?
I don't know which 'WE' Mr. Bush meant.
For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been as we were
taught in Social Studies it should always be whether or not I voted
for this President he is still my President. I suspect anybody who
had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I
suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how
they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his
government our government "New Orleans."
For him, it is a shame in all senses of the word. A few changes of
pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st
Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not
satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind
phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered
Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of
government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety
is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object
for which governments come into existence."
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage
itself it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is
in the White House.
As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region
are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot
longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the
last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug
up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and
toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's
credibility.
Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.
This is from the September 4, 2005 program.
MP3 - Part One
MP3 - Part Two
MP3 - Parts One and Two
Video Part One
Video Part Two
Video Parts One and Two
Here's Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana on Meet the Press from yesterday morning, September 4, 2005.
Here's an article about it in the Kansas City Star.
Video (Crooks and Liars)
My archive of this video
Tim Russert: First Mr. President Broussard. Let me start with you. You just heard the Director of Homeland Security's explanation of what has happened this last week. What is your reaction?Aaron Broussard: "The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonment of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history."
Here are some clips from CNN that ran this afternoon (September 4, 2005).
(Hopefully I'll get some more up tonight, but now I want to get 60 min and meet the press up first, now that these are up.)
1. The Mayor of New Orleans blaming the Bush Administration for not providing proper assistance.
(video, MP3)
2. A rescuer explaining how he doesn't even really consider what he's doing "a real rescue," because he's "just moving people languishing on their roofs to languishing on the expressway."
(video, MP3)
3. A general overview of the situation down there. (But note that today's 60 Minutes program** challenges the allegation that the levees broke, giving the alternative explanation that it was two or more of the city's 2 feet thick floodwalls that actually gave way.
(video, MP3)
(**This 60 minutes includes in interview with Al Naomi, who manages Flood Control for the Army Core of Engineers.)
(video, MP3)
Okay I fished around and found an update from Veterans for Peace explaining how they have been helping the Red Cross in Covington, LA.
There is also a petition you can sign to endorse that vacant military bases be used to house hurricane victims.
Here's the url to give money to the Red Cross
Damn. How'd dat happen?
Oh well, too late now. But I'm back for real this time (a likely story).
I'm at home working on some of my graduate projects, when I couldn't help but turn on CNN to check in on whatever the hell is going on in New Orleans.
The result of which is a series of video clips that I'm about to put up here, that I would love it if you helped me follow up on, as my time is limited today and tomorrow, but, you know, timing's a bitch :-)
I'm trying to determine what is actually going on over there so I can determine how I can best help out. I read an article questioning the effectiveness of giving money to the Red Cross (like a "they're not going to actually be there helping out, so don't give them money" story) -- that also contributed to my apprehension about just throwing money at the problem (my first response).
