Looters of N.O.

Re: open letter to President Bush

A new low, even for this prolific applicant.
I think people say crap like this in hopes that in a few months, they can bitch on the other side of the coin and say he was heartless because he didn't go.

What aspect of Bush's response was so wrong, and what improvement would you make, specifically?

On the topic of Bush, a friend was discussing Katrina and the disaster with me today, and brought up that she had found out that in 2001, Bush had been warned about the possibilities of disaster in New Orleans should the levees ever break. Apparently, in 2003, he cut the flood-funding to New Orleans by 40%.

Now, I took into consideration my friend's avid hatred for Bush and the fact that I'm not so sure if I would have considered a levee system one of my country's top spending priorities either. But does anyone have any information on this story, if it's true or just a rumor through the political grape vine?

I'm very suspicious of this one, and surprisingly understanding if it is indeed true.

Bush is not the first president to be given that information. NO's been around a long time--and the other presidents didn't have the financial strain of a post-911 US to deal with.

So, it is true--but it was also true of the last several presidents--and he bears no more blame than they do.

I thought it was cool that you didn't blindly jump on the Bush Bashing bandwagon, before getting other opinions. I'm sure a few more will be along shortly.

Perhaps, Sanctuary, you'd be interested in something more than someone's unsupported partisan assertion. These are two posts which i put in another thread last night:

siddown and hold on to something real tight, lash...

in this particular case, i don't have any real grevious complaint about bush.



maybe he should have cut the photo-op in coronado and headed home, but on the other hand, probably not a great idea to fly through tornado weather.




aw jeezzz... would one of you guys pick lash up off the floor while i go for a cold compress ???

An NPR news report has just stated that FEMA is spending one half billion dollars a day on disaster relief on the Gulf coast, and that spokespeople of the Congress state that the members will very shortly appropriate more funds for the purpose.

In the local news segment, they report that the price of game programs at the football game at the Ohio State University on Saturday will be raised by one dollar, and that the printers of the program have agreed to join with the University in providing matching funds, one dollar per program, so that two dollars can be sent for disaster relief for each program sold. The "Horseshoe" at OSU can hold up to 55,000 spectators, so a not inconsiderable sum could be raised, if everyone is perpared for the effort.

Money is the least of the worries I have right now. We simply need more bodies down there to do search and rescue (or recover ).

Bella--

Money buys bleach and gas, maps of the area, batteries for walkie-talkies and body bags. Money buys clean clothes and groceries for the rescued as well as breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rescue crews.

DTOM--

Grateful for any non-Blame Bushies right now! We can get back to that tomorrow.

I understand that but if we can't get to them, they can't be resuced and that food, clean clothes and water is useless.

I rummaged around my boxes of books and finally found a book published in 1997, Rising Tide (The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America), by John M. Barry. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

If you think this Aug. 2005 flood was "the worst" disaster, think again, I just don't see how anything could have been worse than this "forgotten" flood of most of the south when the levees let loose.

On the book's flap:

In 1927 the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as 30 feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people - in a nation of 120 million - were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands. The Red Cross fed nearly 700,000 refugees for months.

Rising Tide is the story of this forgotten event, the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known. But it is not simply a tale of disaster. The flood transformed part of the nation and had a major cultural and political impact on the rest. Rising Tide is an American epic about science, race, honor, politics, and society.

Rising Tide begins in the 19th century, when the first serious attempts to control the river began. The story focuses on engineers James Eads and Andrew Humphreys, who hated each other. Out of the collision of their personalities and their theories came a compromise river policy that would lead to the disaster of the 1927 flood yet would also allow the cultivation of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and create wealth and aristocracy, as well as a whole culture.

One family, the Percys, dominated the Delta, eventually even defeating the power Ku Klux Klan. The father, LeRoy Percy, was a senator and confidant of presidents. The son, William Alexander Percy, was a poet and a war hero. But father and son collided during the flood over the handling of tens of thousands of black refugees. Their personal conflict soon became engangled with presidential politics and with a rapid acceleration in the Great Migration of blacks northward.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, the men who ran the city and state, some of the wealthiest men in the south, used all their influence to compel the government to dynamite the levee, guaranteeing the safety of New Orleans but flooding out thousands of their rural neighbors. The city promptly reneged on promises of reparations. This created the climate that, a few months after the flood, helped elect Huey Long governor.

Finally, Herbert Hoover was named head of the massive rescue and rehabilitation effort. For months his name dominated front pages, and he exploited the publicity to win the Republican presidential nomination and the White House. At the same time, his manipulation of black leaders broke the historic link between blacks and the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, and marked the beginning of their shift to the Democrats. In the end, the flood had indeed changed the face of America, leading to the most comprehensive legislation the government had ever enacted, touching the entire Mississippi valley from Pennsylvania to Montana. In its aftermath was laid the foundation for the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
__________
Fascinating book (500 pages) but it also describes pre-1927 New Orleans and all those men's clubs that were more important that even the folks' jobs, and the women, none of them, ever knew what was going on.

The story of this great flood also includes how the blacks along the Delta who built the levees were fairly well respected until they were forced to work ever longer and longer hours on those levees once the rains came (for months) and wrecked them. Then, it was out-came-the-whips and all manner of abuse, blame, and hatred.

Since the recent flood I've heard one man mention the 1927 flood, on Bill O'Riley's show but O'Riley didn't even hear it. This person was a member of the Army Corps of Engineers. Interesting, because prior to the time of the 1927 flood when Jim Thompson (owner of 2 newspapers in New Orleans) pushed Presidents Harding and Coolidge, the War Department, and the Congress to require the river commission to build a spillway the head of the Army Engineers charged that New Orleans' interests wanted a spillway only to save money. Raising the city's port infrastructure - docks, railroads, grain elevators, cotton warehouses, wharves - had been built to the old Mississippi River Commission standarad and raising it all to the new commission standard would cost millions of dollars, and the federal government would pay none of it.

sunlover
sunlover, thanks for the reminder about the Mississippi Flood disaster.
A similar, but preventable disaster was the Johnstown Flood.
http://www.johnstownpa.com/History/hist19.html

What history teaches us, and will teach us again with the hurrican Katrina, is that such disasters could have been prevented if, if, if. Political corruption and refusal to spend money where needed is usually the culprit. Once again, today, all of the above is the result.

BBB

There will always be "if"s, BBB. If the world were perfect, then we'd all be bored out of our skulls.

Set, interesting quotes. I will reply to them when I have more time.

Lash, believe me, I despise Bush. But I am also not going to rag on him for everything in the world, especially when I know that in the back of my mind, had I been in the position, I probably wouldn't have considered it an importance in a country facing poverty, war, etc.

Agree and also
I'm wondering how are all these people going to take care of themselves?
and all the oher support people

bm

and thank you all for the wide spread of information and takes <nods>

I think, all things being equal and I was being bussed from the Superdome to the Astrodome, and the bus stopped at various reststops, I'd be taking a hike.

but whereto? they aint got nothing, probably no money either...

I kinda doubht if that is a new situation in their lives.

The law in Louisiana allows for looting food and other things needed for survival.
BUT,looting jewelry,electronics,guns,shoes and anything else is theft!!

Personally,I think that the looters should be shot,tagged as a looter,and left.
If they dont respect others property rights or the law,then they must be eliminated as a drain on society,no matter what race or sex they are.