"OUR COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET"
http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/08/news/economy/katrina_wages.reut/
Our President is using the disaster as means to essentially enlarge the income gap between the poor and rich that lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. This is despicable and sad, and my disgust for this man has grown so much in the last few weeks. I urge all of you to closely examine how the federal government has handled this disaster and to examine the things they've done in the past that have affected disaster. If Mr. Bush hadn't hired Michael Brown (keep in mind that Michael Brown was an old college crony of Bush who's former job was training Arabian Horses, and had no prior experience in public service.) to become the Chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and if there weren't considerable funding cuts to FEMA in the President's first term, then the people of New Orleans would have been so much more prepared and safe.
My mother grew up in Mississippi, and after talking with her relatives and friends, she said that the day after the Hurricane, the Salvation Army was there, set up, and ready to aid in making sure people were healthy and safe, yet it took days for anybody affiliated with FEMA to reach the disaster. In fact, Michael Brown and other heads of FEMA learned that the levies broke in New Orleans by reading the front page of their morning newspapers the day after it happened. Shouldn't leaders of a federal Disaster Agency have people in the area reporting this back to them? He knows he's screwed up badly, you can see it in his quotes. "Now is not the time to be blaming," Brown said. "Now is the time to recognize that whether they chose to evacuate or chose not to evacuate, we have to help them." Also, he said he had to be careful to send relief and rescue teams down to the disaster. "Otherwise, we would have faced an even higher death toll," he said.
Here are some of Michael Brown's remarks about the hurricane and following disaster from press conferences and news programs. Please keep in mind that this is the Chief of Federal Disaster Relief in the United States:
"The federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today (Thursday). ... And I - my heart goes out to every - even if they chose not to evacuate, my heart still goes out to them, because they now find themselves in this catastrophic disaster. Now is not the time to be blaming."
"I think the other thing that really caught me by surprise was the fact that there were so many people, and I'm not laying blame, but either chose not to evacuate or could not evacuate. And as we began to do the evacuations from the Superdome, all of a sudden, literally thousands of other people started showing up in other places, and we were not prepared for that. We were, we were surprised by that."
"We pre-positioned all the manpower and equipment that we could prior to the storm making landfall. And I think once the storm made landfall, it was still at a Category 5, and the devastation became so widespread that it moved further inland and geographically wider than we expected. And so now we're having to work our way inward from a lot further out than we anticipated."
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Mr. Brown by Ted Koppel on ABC's "Nightline":
Brown: "The people in the convention center are being fed; the people on the bridges are being provided with water. ..."
Koppel: "With all due respect, sir, the people, the people in the convention center are not being fed. Our reporters. ..."
Brown: "I misspoke. The people in the, the people in the Superdome. I'm sorry, you're absolutely correct. We're getting the supplies to the convention center now. But the people in the Superdome have been being fed, that supply chain has been working, and that has been moving along and those evacuations have been continuous."
And Finally, some of Mr. Brown's remarks on CNN:
"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans."
"Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans - virtually a city that has been destroyed - that things are going relatively well."
"I've had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot or, you know, they're banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I've had no reports of that."
Michael Brown does not know what he is doing, what is going on in the South, or how to handle his job and the agency he is in charge of. Luckily, he has been relieved from the position as head of the relief for the hurricane, but all of the blame shouldn't rest on him - it should rest on the President for making appointments to federal positions not on qualifications, but on political patronage. NYU public service professor Paul Light put it this way: "(Brown) has become a symbol of what's wrong with FEMA, and ultimately he has to go. ... The real problem here is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the appointments process. It's the people who decided to put him in place and put all those politicals in place."
Most of you live in Phoenix and thankfully will not have to experience a natural disaster of this magnitude, so we really have to do all we can to help. If you haven't already donated money to a credible relief organization like the Red Cross, please do so. You can make a donation here:
http://www.redcross.org/
Please keep the unfortunate in your thoughts.