Thursday, September 08, 2005
Black and white and wet all over
by Jimmy Breslin
This is a review of the performance of George W. Bush in tight times in this nation. It might explain the single solitary most catastrophic collapse of American government in all of our times. Mark ye well. This was the week when we turned a major American city into Haiti, and racism put its hand out and started to choke a nation, and it may not let go.
With the water coming from the sky and the bottom of the sea, driving with such ferocity that a major American city, New Orleans, followed its face into the water, George W. Bush was at North Island in Coronado, Calif., speaking to a blindingly white audience of 9,000 sailors in uniform.
At the hour, blacks were drowning in New Orleans. Blacks pushed through water that was up to their chests and was thick with the rawest sewage of a major city. Blacks were on rooftops begging to live. Wherever cameras swept, the only thing that was white was a towel being waved by a black woman begging for help, while the tiny black legs of a baby dangled from her shoulder.
Bush was in white Coronado to speak to a military audience on the anniversary of V-J Day.
Get those sailors in their whites clapping.
He barely seemed to understand there was a hurricane for the first three days. He was in Coronado, outside San Diego, and in his speech, he managed to mention New Orleans, by saying that people should not return to their homes until rescue crews could do their work.
Nobody had to be told not to return to their homes because they don't have homes to return to, and no bus fare to go anywhere.
He then told Americans to send donations to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. How marvelous! His administration sends billions and billions of tax money to his personal war in Iraq to shoot up Fallujah for the third or fourth time since he started the war with his lies, and now he wants everybody to go out on the street and give forty dollars to hurricane charity.
Bush's style is to be nowhere if things that carry a bit of fear happen. During Vietnam, he kept all dental appointments.
For the World Trade Center attack, he first froze in a classroom in Florida. Then he flew off in his plane for long hours.
Three days later, he got to New York where a flunkie placed a retired firefighter, Bob Beckwith from Long Island, alongside him atop a truck. Then Bush called out a football dressing room speech over a bullhorn.
This week, he spoke in Coronado with the carrier Ronald Reagan parked in the background. This was his sixth visit to San Diego as president.
In May 2003 Bush landed on the carrier Abraham Lincoln in the waters off San Diego. He wore a green flight suit, with a helmet under his arm. Why shouldn't he look like this? He was an American warrior. He changed into a business suit and spoke in front of a banner proclaiming, "Mission Accomplished."
There have been nearly 1,800 bodies in boxes returned from Iraq since then.
Friday, showing up on the fifth day of a national tragedy, Bush made a little humorous aside about the times he was in New Orleans celebrating too much. Beautiful! If he tried to walk fifty yards he could have tripped over somebody's dead black grandmother under a blanket.
How do you like it? How do you like having a president who at a time like this reminisces about getting drunk in New Orleans? White boy with Daddy's money roaring at Mardi Gras in a town black for the rest of the year.
If whites were in trouble in New Orleans, trust that his government would have been there early and the aid massive.
This racism, which is at the bottom of everything in America, makes it only natural for Bush and his people to talk about turning to Rudolph Giuliani to save New Orleans as he supposedly saved New York after the World Trade Center attack.
In New York, Giuliani did nothing but go on television. That's all he did and all he ever can do. Beautiful! There are television cameras in New Orleans. And just as Bush, Giuliani doesn't want many blacks near him. If more than two blacks entered City Hall, he called for snipers. Giuliani doesn't even have a show black like Condoleezza Rice, who bought shoes in Ferragamo in Manhattan this week.
Bush got found out this week and he needs his own rescue. Assure Giuliani that he could run for president if he does the job. As New York found, he can do nothing good about anything. That doesn't matter. Without somebody in front, Bush stands there, uncovered, without an American flag draped around him, as the most incompetent president we've ever had.
US Republicans say hurricane won't stop budget cuts
WASHINGTON, Sept 7 (Reuters) - Republicans in Congress on Wednesday rejected calls by Democrats to suspend work on tax cuts, that would mainly benefit the rich, and spending reductions on social programs because of the huge costs of hurricane relief.
"Now is not the time to cut services for our most vulnerable, cut taxes for our most fortunate and add $35 billion to the deficit," the Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives said in a letter to their Republican counterparts.
Congressional committees face a Sept. 16 deadline to come up with $35 billion in spending reductions over five years to programs including the Medicaid health-care program for the poor, student loans, food stamps and pension insurance.
The committees are also scheduled to approve $70 billion in tax cuts this month. The cuts could be extensions of reductions on capital gains and dividends, which affect mainly the incomes of the wealthy.
The Democrats said that budget plan "would likely cut programs that many victims of Hurricane Katrina will be relying on" and asked that it be suspended "indefinitely."
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire, said "nothing could be further from the truth" and insisted that the spending reductions being considered could have an impact on Gulf Coast aid efforts.
For example, he said that slowing growth in Medicaid by one percent over five years would improve its efficiency by giving governors more flexibility in administering the health care.
"Dramatically more people will be covered" if the budget changes are made, Gregg said.
Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, countered: "You don't just stick with the same old plan when something of this consequence occurs."
House Republicans said hurricane disaster relief legislation would slow the spending and tax cut legislation by only about two weeks.
Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist
By Alan Dershowitz
My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history.
So here’s the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won’t hear on Fox News or from politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Rehnquist bragged about being first in his class at Stanford Law School. Today Stanford is a great law school with a diverse student body, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it discriminated against Jews and other minorities, both in the admission of students and in the selection of faculty. Justice Stephen Breyer recalled an earlier period of Stanford’s history: “When my father was at Stanford, he could not join any of the social organizations because he was Jewish, and those organizations, at that time, did not accept Jews.” Rehnquist not only benefited in his class ranking from this discrimination; he was also part of that bigotry. When he was nominated to be an associate justice in 1971, I learned from several sources who had known him as a student that he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school’s few Jewish students. He also was infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes.
As a law clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson while the court was considering several school desegregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist’s memo, entitled “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases,” defended the separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy “was right and should be reaffirmed.” When questioned about the memos by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986, Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice, stating – under oath – that his memo was meant to reflect the views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation. According to historian Mark Tushnet, Justice Jackson’s longtime legal secretary called Rehnquist’s Senate testimony an attempt to “smear[] the reputation of a great justice.” Rehnquist later admitted to defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks. He did not acknowledge that he committed perjury in front of the Judiciary Committee to get his job.
The young Rehnquist began his legal career as a Republican functionary by obstructing African-American and Hispanic voting at Phoenix polling locations (“Operation Eagle Eye”). As Richard Cohen of The Washington Post wrote, “[H]e helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons -- and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.” In a word, he started out his political career as a Republican thug.
Rehnquist later bought a home in Vermont with a restrictive covenant that barred sale of the property to ''any member of the Hebrew race.”
Rehnquist’s judicial philosophy was result-oriented, activist, and authoritarian. He sometimes moderated his views for prudential or pragmatic reasons, but his vote could almost always be predicted based on who the parties were, not what the legal issues happened to be. He generally opposed the rights of gays, women, blacks, aliens, and religious minorities. He was a friend of corporations, polluters, right wing Republicans, religious fundamentalists, homophobes, and other bigots.
Rehnquist served on the Supreme Court for thirty-three years and as chief justice for nineteen. Yet no opinion comes to mind which will be remembered as brilliant, innovative, or memorable. He will be remembered not for the quality of his opinions but rather for the outcomes decided by his votes, especially Bush v. Gore, in which he accepted an Equal Protection claim that was totally inconsistent with his prior views on that clause. He will also be remembered as a Chief Justice who fought for the independence and authority of the judiciary. This is his only positive contribution to an otherwise regressive career.
Within moments of Rehnquist’s death, Fox News called and asked for my comments, presumably aware that I was a longtime critic of the late Chief Justice. After making several of these points to Alan Colmes (who was supposed to be interviewing me), Sean Hannity intruded, and when he didn’t like my answers, he cut me off and terminated the interview. Only after I was off the air and could not respond did the attack against me begin, which is typical of Hannity’s bullying ambush style. He is afraid to attack when there’s someone there to respond. Since the interview, I’ve received dozens of e-mail hate messages, some of which are overtly anti-Semitic. One writer called me “a jew prick that takes it in the a** from ruth ginzburg [sic].” Another said I am “an ignorant socialist left-wing political hack …. You’re like a little Heinrich Himmler! (even the resemblance is uncanny!).” Yet another informed me that I “personally make us all lament the defeat of the Nazis!” A more restrained viewer found me to be “a disgrace to the Law, to Harvard, and to humanity.”
All this, for refusing to put a deceptive gloss on a man who made his career undermining the rights and liberties of American citizens.
My mother would want me to remain silent, but I think my father would have wanted me to tell the truth. My father was right.
My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history.
So here’s the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won’t hear on Fox News or from politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Rehnquist bragged about being first in his class at Stanford Law School. Today Stanford is a great law school with a diverse student body, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it discriminated against Jews and other minorities, both in the admission of students and in the selection of faculty. Justice Stephen Breyer recalled an earlier period of Stanford’s history: “When my father was at Stanford, he could not join any of the social organizations because he was Jewish, and those organizations, at that time, did not accept Jews.” Rehnquist not only benefited in his class ranking from this discrimination; he was also part of that bigotry. When he was nominated to be an associate justice in 1971, I learned from several sources who had known him as a student that he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school’s few Jewish students. He also was infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes.
As a law clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson while the court was considering several school desegregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist’s memo, entitled “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases,” defended the separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy “was right and should be reaffirmed.” When questioned about the memos by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986, Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice, stating – under oath – that his memo was meant to reflect the views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation. According to historian Mark Tushnet, Justice Jackson’s longtime legal secretary called Rehnquist’s Senate testimony an attempt to “smear[] the reputation of a great justice.” Rehnquist later admitted to defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks. He did not acknowledge that he committed perjury in front of the Judiciary Committee to get his job.
The young Rehnquist began his legal career as a Republican functionary by obstructing African-American and Hispanic voting at Phoenix polling locations (“Operation Eagle Eye”). As Richard Cohen of The Washington Post wrote, “[H]e helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons -- and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.” In a word, he started out his political career as a Republican thug.
Rehnquist later bought a home in Vermont with a restrictive covenant that barred sale of the property to ''any member of the Hebrew race.”
Rehnquist’s judicial philosophy was result-oriented, activist, and authoritarian. He sometimes moderated his views for prudential or pragmatic reasons, but his vote could almost always be predicted based on who the parties were, not what the legal issues happened to be. He generally opposed the rights of gays, women, blacks, aliens, and religious minorities. He was a friend of corporations, polluters, right wing Republicans, religious fundamentalists, homophobes, and other bigots.
Rehnquist served on the Supreme Court for thirty-three years and as chief justice for nineteen. Yet no opinion comes to mind which will be remembered as brilliant, innovative, or memorable. He will be remembered not for the quality of his opinions but rather for the outcomes decided by his votes, especially Bush v. Gore, in which he accepted an Equal Protection claim that was totally inconsistent with his prior views on that clause. He will also be remembered as a Chief Justice who fought for the independence and authority of the judiciary. This is his only positive contribution to an otherwise regressive career.
Within moments of Rehnquist’s death, Fox News called and asked for my comments, presumably aware that I was a longtime critic of the late Chief Justice. After making several of these points to Alan Colmes (who was supposed to be interviewing me), Sean Hannity intruded, and when he didn’t like my answers, he cut me off and terminated the interview. Only after I was off the air and could not respond did the attack against me begin, which is typical of Hannity’s bullying ambush style. He is afraid to attack when there’s someone there to respond. Since the interview, I’ve received dozens of e-mail hate messages, some of which are overtly anti-Semitic. One writer called me “a jew prick that takes it in the a** from ruth ginzburg [sic].” Another said I am “an ignorant socialist left-wing political hack …. You’re like a little Heinrich Himmler! (even the resemblance is uncanny!).” Yet another informed me that I “personally make us all lament the defeat of the Nazis!” A more restrained viewer found me to be “a disgrace to the Law, to Harvard, and to humanity.”
All this, for refusing to put a deceptive gloss on a man who made his career undermining the rights and liberties of American citizens.
My mother would want me to remain silent, but I think my father would have wanted me to tell the truth. My father was right.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Almost as good as Thomas L. Friedman - Miriam V.
Haunted by Hesitation - New York Times
The New York Times
September 7, 2005
Haunted by Hesitation
By
MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the
destruction of New Orleans.
Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to
the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long
last
lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping for a
$2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake
Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was filmed and
where rich lobbyists hunt.
Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make
sure that Halliburton's lucrative contract to rebuild the city is
watertight.
Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described the
shattered parish as "Baghdad under water," the vice president plans to take
his pal
Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying minority rights.
The water that breached the New Orleans levees and left a million people
homeless and jobless has also breached the White House defenses. Reality has
come
flooding in. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been remarkably
successful at blowing off "the reality-based community," as it derisively
calls the
press.
But now, when W., Mr. Cheney, Laura, Rummy, Gen. Richard Myers, Michael
Chertoff and the rest of the gang tell us everything's under control, our
cities
are safe, stay the course - who believes them?
This time we can actually see the bodies.
As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to the
callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000
square
miles of the South.
The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly throwing
away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency warnings. But
the
human toll of those mistakes has not been as viscerally evident because the
White House pulled a curtain over the bodies: the president has avoided the
funerals of soldiers, and the Pentagon has censored the coffins of the dead
coming home and never acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians killed.
But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between Monday
and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary resources to a
disaster
that his own general describes as "biblical," or even send in the 82nd
Airborne, are floating up in front of our eyes.
New Orleans's literary lore and tourist lure was its fascination with the
dead and undead, its lavish annual Halloween party, its famous above-ground
cemeteries,
its love of vampires and voodoo and zombies. But now that the city is
decimated, reeking with unnecessary death and destruction, the restless
spirits of
New Orleans will haunt the White House.
The administration's foreign policy is entirely constructed around American
self-love - the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model
everyone
looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.
But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don't see freedom. They
see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see
glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were
saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see
some
conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.'s
"culture of life."
The president won re-election because he said that the war in Iraq and the
Homeland Security Department would make us safer. Hogwash.
W.'s 2004 convention was staged like "The Magnificent Seven" with the
Republicans' swaggering tough guys - from Rudy Giuliani to Arnold
Schwarzenegger to
John McCain - riding in to save an embattled town.
These were the steely-eyed gunslingers we needed to protect us, they said,
not those sissified girlie-men Democrats. But now it turns out that W. can't
save the town, not even from hurricane damage that everyone has been
predicting for years, much less from unpredictable terrorists.
His campaigns presented the arc of his life story as that of a man who
stumbled around until he was 40, then found himself and developed a
laserlike focus.
But now that the people of New Orleans need an ark, we have to question the
president's arc. He's stumbling in Iraq and he's stumbling on Katrina.
Let's play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in history
from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those
who
lost their families.
E-mail:
liberties@nytimes.com
moveon.org letter to president - Miriam V.
Here's a sample message to send to your friends:
Subject: Tell President Bush to Stop Blaming the Victims!
The President and his administration failed at their most important job:
keeping America safe. The federal effort was too little, too late and the
cost
of their delay will be paid for in human lives. Now, they are seeking
political cover by blaming state and local officials, despite the fact that
they
had begged the administration for help early on. Its really outrageous that
the President would blame the victims at a time like this. Will you help me
tell him he needs to stop blaming the victims and get to work helping them?
http://political.moveon.org/helpvictims
American Family Voices - Miriam V.
AM Feed - September 7, 2005
Hot Topics
List of 2 items
The head of FEMA definitely has an image problem. Internal documents show
that FEMA chief Michael Brown waited until after Hurricane Katrina ended
before
he proposed sending Homeland Security workers into the region, and that part
of the mission was to "convey a positive image" for the response. (As
opposed
to having a goal of, say, "saving lives.") Brown originally proposed sending
1,000 workers into this "near catastrophic event," as he called it - of
course,
that number also proved to be woefully inadequate. President Bush has stated
that he wants to find out what went wrong in the government's response to
the hurricane, but he tellingly rejected calls for an investigation that
would start right away, preferring instead to play the waiting game. Again.
[link]
The Hurricane Katrina disaster has exposed the Bush administration's various
shortcomings in its approach to governing this country - and demonstrated
just
how linked together this series of bad decisions is. For example: The Bush
team has repeatedly injected politics into every last nook and cranny - now
political appointee Michael Brown is failing, as head of FEMA, to adequately
respond to the crisis. Here's another example: President Bush has made no
secret of his top priority of taking care of the wealthy, as his huge tax
cuts for millionaires repeatedly demonstrated - but paying for those
decisions
had disastrous consequences, as the levee system went perennially
underfunded. And now, a third example has come to light: Remember the
corporate-sponsored
bankruptcy bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by
President Bush? That piece of legislation will make it more difficult for
victims
of the hurricane to file for bankruptcy and begin to get their lives back on
track. The new law, heavily pushed by credit card companies, is set to take
effect next month as bankruptcy filings are expected to rise. Here's the
kicker: When the bankruptcy bill was up for debate, an exemption for natural
disaster
victims was proposed, but the Republican-controlled House shot it down.
[link]
list end
Who Says That?
"You have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk
as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at
tougher
penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are
consequences to not leaving." - Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) during a weekend
TV
interview
Morning Snark
List of 1 items
Isn't anyone else curious to hear what Sen. Santorum thinks those "tougher
penalties" should be? Maybe after these people get their homes back, return
to
their jobs, bury their loved ones and regain access to uncontaminated food
and drinking water - maybe after all that happens they could pay a fine or
something.
list end
tax cuts
Dear Friend,
Tell the President, the Majority Leader and Speaker of the House, that you
demand that the leaders of the Republican Party act immediately to take the
idea
of tax cuts for the wealthy off the table.
http://www.johnkerry.com/petition/taxcuts.php
President Bush, Majority Leader Frist and Speaker Hastert,
It is totally unbelievable to me that, at this time of pain and suffering
for so many people in our nation, Republican leaders have yet to forego
their
plans to lavish more tax cuts on the wealthy and well-connected.
Such tax cuts at this time would be a total betrayal of American values -
and a slap in the face of people in the Gulf Coast who have lost and
suffered
through so much and have so far to go on the road to recovery.
I demand that the leaders of the Republican Party act immediately to take
the idea of tax cuts for the wealthy off the table. And I won't stop working
until
you do.
Our message to those who would even contemplate bestowing more tax cuts on
the wealthy at this time is clear and unambiguous: Don't you dare!
Signed,
Dean takes aim, hits bullseye
Howard Dean:
"Based on today's reports, it seems clear that President Bush's visit today is just another callous political move crafted by Karl Rove. It's just appalling to see how quickly President Bush and Karl Rove have mobilized a political strategy in their own defense, but simply failed to mobilize a swift response to either keep the people in the Gulf Coast region safe in the first place or aid the victims in the aftermath of the storm.
"Thousands of people have lost their lives. Our nation faces difficult times as we address the painful aftermath of Katrina, yet President Bush is worried about shifting blame and passing the buck? Shouldn't he be worried about restoring stability, plans to evacuate survivors, and ensuring that our communities have the resources they need to help the victims of this tragedy rebuild their lives? Now is a time for leadership not partisanship. This is one failure we will not allow Rove and the GOP attack machine to spin away with their usual barrage of photo-ops, misinformation, smear campaigns and press conferences."
"Based on today's reports, it seems clear that President Bush's visit today is just another callous political move crafted by Karl Rove. It's just appalling to see how quickly President Bush and Karl Rove have mobilized a political strategy in their own defense, but simply failed to mobilize a swift response to either keep the people in the Gulf Coast region safe in the first place or aid the victims in the aftermath of the storm.
"Thousands of people have lost their lives. Our nation faces difficult times as we address the painful aftermath of Katrina, yet President Bush is worried about shifting blame and passing the buck? Shouldn't he be worried about restoring stability, plans to evacuate survivors, and ensuring that our communities have the resources they need to help the victims of this tragedy rebuild their lives? Now is a time for leadership not partisanship. This is one failure we will not allow Rove and the GOP attack machine to spin away with their usual barrage of photo-ops, misinformation, smear campaigns and press conferences."
Dipping His Toe Into Disaster
Slow, awkward and at times tone-deaf, Bush mishandled the storm's first days. Now he has his own recovery problem
By MATTHEW COOPER
It isn't easy picking George Bush's worst moment last week. Was it his first go at addressing the crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring? Was it when he said that he didn't "think anybody expected" the New Orleans levees to give way, though that very possibility had been forecast for years? Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Ala., a full four days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Michael D. Brown, whose disaster credentials seemed to consist of once being the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association? "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," said the President. Or was it that odd moment when he promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's house--a gesture that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New Orleans. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire house," cracked Bush, "there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Bush seemed so regularly out of it last week, it made you wonder if he was stuck in the same White House bubble of isolation that confined his dad. Too often, W. looked annoyed. Or he smiled when he should have been serious. Or he swaggered when simple action would have been the right move.
And he was so slow. Everyone knew on Sunday morning that Katrina was a killer. Yet when the levees broke after the storm, the White House slouched toward action. And this from a leader who made his bones with 9/11. In a crisis he can act paradoxically, appearing--almost simultaneously--strong and weak, decisive and vacillating, Churchill and Chamberlain. This week he was more Chamberlain.
There was no breaking off from his commemoration in Coronado, Calif., of the 60th anniversary of victory over Japan, but there were videoconference calls and the like. The White House is "very, very slow sometimes," says a former Administration official. Besides, members of the A team were on vacation: chief of staff Andy Card was in Maine; Dick Cheney was in Wyoming; even Condoleezza Rice was out of town, shoe-shopping in Manhattan. Many of Bush's best p.r. minds, including media adviser Mark McKinnon, were in Greece at the wedding of White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. Had they been around, perhaps Bush would not have been accompanied only by his dog Barney when he returned from vacation in Crawford.
Part of what dogged Bush was long-standing traits. He showed his usual reluctance to ask for sacrifice from Americans, and that added to the sense that he just didn't get it. While Southern Governors facing fuel shortages in the coming days have called on drivers to scale back use of their cars, Bush did so only as an afterthought. "We ought to conserve more," he finally said on Thursday, making it seem like a vague option. The same day, Bush all but spurned offers of help from allies because of the way it would look. "I'm sure he saw it as a sign of American weakness to be taking aid from other countries," says the former Administration official. A Bush aide countered that his boss "wasn't rejecting offers; he wasn't focused on it."
Bush did begin to admit that the response was "unacceptable." But even when it came to enacting the role of Consoler in Chief, he sometimes sounded more like a quartermaster, running through long lists of things the government was sending to the Gulf Coast, rather than empathizing with people. That may be why the White House wheeled out his pitch-perfect wife Laura on Friday, to lend some genuine compassion to the moment.
Of course, Bush has a history of floundering at the start of a crisis and then finding his voice. Handling Sept. 11 is now considered his finest hour, even though he stumbled dramatically at first. But last week offered no New York bullhorn moment. He can't threaten to get Katrina "dead or alive." The victims didn't need a photo-op gesture of reassurance so much as water, food and escape, plus help for the long haul. And for an Administration that has staked its reputation on fighting the war on terrorism, no one can be very encouraged by the first crisis test-drive of the Department of Homeland Security. What's more, while Americans might have rallied around Bush as he faced a foreign threat, this time the enemy is his own bureaucracy, the one that left American refugees to fend for themselves far longer than anybody thinks is acceptable.
As he drove to meet the President, Bobby Jindal, the Republican Congressman from metro New Orleans, complained about aspects of the federal response: "The bureaucracy needs to do more than one thing at a time. It's appropriate to save people with helicopters, but it can't be done to the exclusion of everything else." Jindal, who served in the President's Administration, would like Bush to ask Colin Powell to come back to run the relief operation. Others urge Bush to rope in New York City's savior Rudy Giuliani. Given the President's own performance, passing the buck wouldn't be the worst thing.
By MATTHEW COOPER
It isn't easy picking George Bush's worst moment last week. Was it his first go at addressing the crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring? Was it when he said that he didn't "think anybody expected" the New Orleans levees to give way, though that very possibility had been forecast for years? Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Ala., a full four days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Michael D. Brown, whose disaster credentials seemed to consist of once being the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association? "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," said the President. Or was it that odd moment when he promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's house--a gesture that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New Orleans. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire house," cracked Bush, "there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Bush seemed so regularly out of it last week, it made you wonder if he was stuck in the same White House bubble of isolation that confined his dad. Too often, W. looked annoyed. Or he smiled when he should have been serious. Or he swaggered when simple action would have been the right move.
And he was so slow. Everyone knew on Sunday morning that Katrina was a killer. Yet when the levees broke after the storm, the White House slouched toward action. And this from a leader who made his bones with 9/11. In a crisis he can act paradoxically, appearing--almost simultaneously--strong and weak, decisive and vacillating, Churchill and Chamberlain. This week he was more Chamberlain.
There was no breaking off from his commemoration in Coronado, Calif., of the 60th anniversary of victory over Japan, but there were videoconference calls and the like. The White House is "very, very slow sometimes," says a former Administration official. Besides, members of the A team were on vacation: chief of staff Andy Card was in Maine; Dick Cheney was in Wyoming; even Condoleezza Rice was out of town, shoe-shopping in Manhattan. Many of Bush's best p.r. minds, including media adviser Mark McKinnon, were in Greece at the wedding of White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. Had they been around, perhaps Bush would not have been accompanied only by his dog Barney when he returned from vacation in Crawford.
Part of what dogged Bush was long-standing traits. He showed his usual reluctance to ask for sacrifice from Americans, and that added to the sense that he just didn't get it. While Southern Governors facing fuel shortages in the coming days have called on drivers to scale back use of their cars, Bush did so only as an afterthought. "We ought to conserve more," he finally said on Thursday, making it seem like a vague option. The same day, Bush all but spurned offers of help from allies because of the way it would look. "I'm sure he saw it as a sign of American weakness to be taking aid from other countries," says the former Administration official. A Bush aide countered that his boss "wasn't rejecting offers; he wasn't focused on it."
Bush did begin to admit that the response was "unacceptable." But even when it came to enacting the role of Consoler in Chief, he sometimes sounded more like a quartermaster, running through long lists of things the government was sending to the Gulf Coast, rather than empathizing with people. That may be why the White House wheeled out his pitch-perfect wife Laura on Friday, to lend some genuine compassion to the moment.
Of course, Bush has a history of floundering at the start of a crisis and then finding his voice. Handling Sept. 11 is now considered his finest hour, even though he stumbled dramatically at first. But last week offered no New York bullhorn moment. He can't threaten to get Katrina "dead or alive." The victims didn't need a photo-op gesture of reassurance so much as water, food and escape, plus help for the long haul. And for an Administration that has staked its reputation on fighting the war on terrorism, no one can be very encouraged by the first crisis test-drive of the Department of Homeland Security. What's more, while Americans might have rallied around Bush as he faced a foreign threat, this time the enemy is his own bureaucracy, the one that left American refugees to fend for themselves far longer than anybody thinks is acceptable.
As he drove to meet the President, Bobby Jindal, the Republican Congressman from metro New Orleans, complained about aspects of the federal response: "The bureaucracy needs to do more than one thing at a time. It's appropriate to save people with helicopters, but it can't be done to the exclusion of everything else." Jindal, who served in the President's Administration, would like Bush to ask Colin Powell to come back to run the relief operation. Others urge Bush to rope in New York City's savior Rudy Giuliani. Given the President's own performance, passing the buck wouldn't be the worst thing.
Rove's machine revs up
by kos
Facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in campaign mode.
This campaign is to salvage Bush's reputation.
Like previous Rove operations, it calls for multiple appearances by the president in controlled environments in which he can appear leader-like. It calls for extensive use of Air Force One and a massive deployment of spinners.
It doesn't necessarily include any change in policy. It certainly doesn't include any admission of error.
It utilizes the classic Rovian tactic of attacking critics rather than defending against their criticism -- and of throwing up chaff to muddle the issue and throw the press off the scent.
It calls for public expressions of outrage over the politicization of the issue and of those who would play the "blame game." While at the same time, it is utterly political in nature and heavily reliant on shifting the blame elsewhere.
Facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in campaign mode.
This campaign is to salvage Bush's reputation.
Like previous Rove operations, it calls for multiple appearances by the president in controlled environments in which he can appear leader-like. It calls for extensive use of Air Force One and a massive deployment of spinners.
It doesn't necessarily include any change in policy. It certainly doesn't include any admission of error.
It utilizes the classic Rovian tactic of attacking critics rather than defending against their criticism -- and of throwing up chaff to muddle the issue and throw the press off the scent.
It calls for public expressions of outrage over the politicization of the issue and of those who would play the "blame game." While at the same time, it is utterly political in nature and heavily reliant on shifting the blame elsewhere.
The Real Rehnquist
A Call To Action
AlterNet
By David Corn, TheNation.com
Posted on September 7, 2005, Printed on September 7, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/25103/
I confess: I have a hard time saying "William Rehnquist, rest in peace."
Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist, who died on Saturday night, spent much of his adult life trying to restrict the rights of American citizens and to empower further the already-powerful.
He rose to prominence as a right-wing attorney who decried the Earl Warren court for being a hotbed of judicial activism (left-wing judicial activism, as he saw it). He then became, as a Supreme Court justice, a judicial activist of the right-wing sort, overturning laws made by Congress (that protected women against domestic violence, banned guns near school property, and prohibited discrimination against disabled workers) and steering the justices into Florida's vote-counting mess in 2000 (an act that only coincidentally--right?--led to George W. Bush's presidency).
In that case--Bush v. Gore--Rehnquist, for some reason or another, put aside his much heralded belief in state sovereignty, which led him, on other occasions, to grouse about limits on the abilities of states to execute criminals. When it came to states frying prisoners, he advocated a hands-off approach. In vote-counting, he was all for intervention.
But let's be clear: in recent years there has been no other Supreme Court justice who had a personal history so loaded with racism--or, to be kinder than is warranted, tremendous insensitivity to racial discrimination--as did William Rehnquist.
As a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson in the early 1950s--when the Court was considering the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case--Rehnquist wrote a memo defending the infamous 1896 decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the separate-but-equal doctrine. Rehnquist noted, "That decision was right and should be reaffirmed." In other words, he favored continuing discrimination and racial segregation.
During his 1971 confirmation hearings, after he was nominated to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court, he said that memo merely reflected Jackson's view not his own. But few historians have bought that shaky explanation.
It's not hard to conclude that Rehnquist was on the wrong side of history and then lied about it--especially given actions he took later. In 1964, Rehnquist testified against a proposed ordinance in Phoenix that would ban racial discrimination in public housing. As The Washington Post notes in stories on his death, Rehnquist wrote at the time, "It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual liberty for a purpose such as this."
In other words, people are not truly free if they are not free to discriminate. In his 1971 hearings, Rehnquist repudiated that stance. But did he really mean it?
Twelve years later, he was the only justice to say that Bob Jones University--that hotbed of racial discrimination and religious bigotry--had a legal right to keep African-Americans off its campus.
"He Lived for The Law"--that's how AOL headlined the story on Rehnquist's death. But it's not that Rehnquist had a blind spot on race. He was an active proponent of discrimination. Yet this fellow--without truly making amends--became chief justice of the highest court of the land. Only in America.
As Rehnquist's impact on America is considered, it ought not be forgotten--particularly at a time when we see how the poor of New Orleans have been neglected--that Rehnquist was at times all too willing to forget about the rights of those less fortunate than he.
David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and author of "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception." He writes a blog at davidcorn.com.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/25103/
AlterNet
By David Corn, TheNation.com
Posted on September 7, 2005, Printed on September 7, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/25103/
I confess: I have a hard time saying "William Rehnquist, rest in peace."
Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist, who died on Saturday night, spent much of his adult life trying to restrict the rights of American citizens and to empower further the already-powerful.
He rose to prominence as a right-wing attorney who decried the Earl Warren court for being a hotbed of judicial activism (left-wing judicial activism, as he saw it). He then became, as a Supreme Court justice, a judicial activist of the right-wing sort, overturning laws made by Congress (that protected women against domestic violence, banned guns near school property, and prohibited discrimination against disabled workers) and steering the justices into Florida's vote-counting mess in 2000 (an act that only coincidentally--right?--led to George W. Bush's presidency).
In that case--Bush v. Gore--Rehnquist, for some reason or another, put aside his much heralded belief in state sovereignty, which led him, on other occasions, to grouse about limits on the abilities of states to execute criminals. When it came to states frying prisoners, he advocated a hands-off approach. In vote-counting, he was all for intervention.
But let's be clear: in recent years there has been no other Supreme Court justice who had a personal history so loaded with racism--or, to be kinder than is warranted, tremendous insensitivity to racial discrimination--as did William Rehnquist.
As a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson in the early 1950s--when the Court was considering the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case--Rehnquist wrote a memo defending the infamous 1896 decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the separate-but-equal doctrine. Rehnquist noted, "That decision was right and should be reaffirmed." In other words, he favored continuing discrimination and racial segregation.
During his 1971 confirmation hearings, after he was nominated to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court, he said that memo merely reflected Jackson's view not his own. But few historians have bought that shaky explanation.
It's not hard to conclude that Rehnquist was on the wrong side of history and then lied about it--especially given actions he took later. In 1964, Rehnquist testified against a proposed ordinance in Phoenix that would ban racial discrimination in public housing. As The Washington Post notes in stories on his death, Rehnquist wrote at the time, "It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual liberty for a purpose such as this."
In other words, people are not truly free if they are not free to discriminate. In his 1971 hearings, Rehnquist repudiated that stance. But did he really mean it?
Twelve years later, he was the only justice to say that Bob Jones University--that hotbed of racial discrimination and religious bigotry--had a legal right to keep African-Americans off its campus.
"He Lived for The Law"--that's how AOL headlined the story on Rehnquist's death. But it's not that Rehnquist had a blind spot on race. He was an active proponent of discrimination. Yet this fellow--without truly making amends--became chief justice of the highest court of the land. Only in America.
As Rehnquist's impact on America is considered, it ought not be forgotten--particularly at a time when we see how the poor of New Orleans have been neglected--that Rehnquist was at times all too willing to forget about the rights of those less fortunate than he.
David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and author of "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception." He writes a blog at davidcorn.com.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/25103/
Another Republican Gift To The Nation
latimes.com
advertisement
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bankrupt7sep07,0,824755.story?coll=la-home-nation
KATRINA'S AFTERMATH
New Bankruptcy Law Could Exact a Toll on Storm Victims
Unless changes are made, some say the overhaul due to take effect soon could make it tougher for Gulf Coast residents to recover.
By Peter G. Gosselin
Times Staff Writer
September 7, 2005
WASHINGTON — After virtually every major hurricane of the last 25 years, bankruptcy filings have grown significantly faster than usual as victims sought to shake off old debts in order to rebuild their economically ruined lives.
But unless changes are made to an overhaul of the nation's bankruptcy law due to kick in next month, many of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and the resulting floods will have a substantially harder time winning court relief from loans they incurred for homes and businesses that are now gone, according to a variety of judges, lawyers and policy experts.
"Just because your house or car is somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't mean that your auto loan or mortgage went with it," said Brady C. Williamson, who was appointed by President Clinton to head a national bankruptcy commission in the mid-1990s.
UCLA professor Kenneth N. Klee said, "The new law is going to make it much more difficult for people to put their lives back together." Klee is a former Republican congressional staffer who was a chief author of the previous major bankruptcy-law change in the late 1970s.
House and Senate Democrats are expected to propose, perhaps as early as today, delaying the effective date for the new measure and easing some of its most stringent requirements. When it passed the bankruptcy overhaul last spring, the Republican-controlled House rejected an exemption for victims of natural disasters.
The link between bankruptcies and disasters has long been assumed, but the extent of the tie is only now becoming clear in findings by Robert M. Lawless, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Lawless examined the 18 hurricanes and tropical storms since 1980 that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said caused $1 billion or more in damage in the United States. He studied the pattern of bankruptcy filings in the states where the storms made landfall and compared that with patterns in surrounding states and the rest of the country. He looked at the effects in the first, second and third year after the event.
His key finding: that bankruptcy filings, which have been rising nationally for 25 years, climbed in landfall states at more than 1 1/2 times the pace of unaffected states and remained stuck at that rate even three years after the disasters.
"Armchair economic analysis suggests that natural disasters are actually good for local economies because they spur reconstruction," Lawless said. "What these numbers show is the extent of the financial distress underneath whatever overall economic improvement there may be."
Bankruptcy overhaul supporters asserted Tuesday that the law would not impose undue hardship on victims of the Gulf Coast catastrophe. "There's nothing in here that is going to make it more difficult for people to get complete bankruptcy relief," said Jeff Tassey, the Washington lobbyist who headed a group of credit card companies, banks and others at the vanguard of the eight-year fight for the measure.
Tassey said the law included language that would allow bankruptcy judges to take into account "special circumstances" such as the recent hurricane and flood. "There is plenty of flexibility to cope with situations like this," he said.
But critics of the new law say many filers will not be able to qualify for leniency because of paperwork rules, among other reasons. The law says the debtor "shall be required to itemize each additional expense or adjustment to income and to provide … documentation … and a detailed explanation" under oath.
"There's no way many people are going to be able to provide all this paperwork; it's underwater," said Keith Lundin, a federal bankruptcy judge for the eastern district of Tennessee and a longtime opponent of the overhaul.
At root, the first principles of the new measure, which hold that Americans should accept greater responsibility for their spending and not readily use bankruptcy to escape debts, appear to be at odds with conditions that now exist in Louisiana, Mississippi and part of Alabama.
"The law is premised on the notion that we're all authors of our own economic fates," said Klee, the former Republican congressional staffer. But as the hurricane and flood demonstrate, "there are periodic catastrophic incidents that can strike any of us at any time and any place and deliver economic ruin."
Much of the debate over the law focused on the so-called means test, which will make it much harder for financially distressed Americans who earn more than the median income in their states to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, in which filers can forfeit most of their assets in return for cancellation of most debts and a "fresh start." The only alternative for those who do not qualify is to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, in which they get to keep most of their property but must continue paying on a portion of their debts for up to five years.
The median income for a family of four in Louisiana last year was $51,402, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The median income in Mississippi was $49,893.
Tassey, the lobbyist, said the means test would have little effect on the largely poor and black victims who stayed or were left behind to bear the brunt of the hurricane's wrath and have figured prominently in coverage of the disaster. That is because most presumably made less than the median income and so would qualify for Chapter 7.
But Tassey also said that, absent a court ruling of special circumstances, the law could have a substantial effect on those making the median or above, not least because the measure's income gauge is not what debtors make now but what they made over the last six months.
John Rao, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, said, "There are going to be a lot of people who were making good livings before the hurricane who have lost their jobs and their employers and have very little prospect of getting back to work in the foreseeable future."
The law also will impose much stricter limits on businesses, especially small businesses, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, under which they could continue operating while coming up with a plan to partially repay creditors.
Under current law, businesses with court permission can continue operating — sometimes for several years — before settling on a repayment plan. But under the new law, big businesses would have only 18 months.
Small businesses, such as the many dry cleaners, variety stores and restaurants drowned by the flood, would have just 10.
Though thousands of financially distressed families and businesses elsewhere are rushing to file before the Oct. 17 effective date, those in the flood-ravaged Gulf Coast have lost their chance, with the bankruptcy courts shuttered, their lawyers unavailable and their records destroyed.
That means that unless Congress intervenes, many victims of the Gulf Coast storm will have to file under the new law.
"With no jobs or cars or houses, all these people have is debt. The only way they can get out from under it is if they can file for Chapter 7," said Williamson, the former bankruptcy commission head. "It will be a travesty if someone who could file for Chapter 7 today won't be able to simply because they missed the deadline."
*
More misery
After previous hurricanes, there were sharp increases in bankruptcy filings in the affected states, compared with unaffected ones. Here are estimates of the percentage increases for all hurricanes since 1980 causing more than $1 billion in damage:
Time after hurricane
1 year
Landfall states: 11.6%
Other affected states: 12.0%
Unaffected states: 7.0%
*
2 years
Landfall states: 29.9%
Other affected states: 22.5%
Unaffected states: 18.1%
*
3 years
Landfall states: 46.2%
Other affected states: 33.7%
Unaffected states: 28.1%
Source: Robert M. Lawless, University of Nevada, Las Vegas School
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times | Privacy
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bankrupt7sep07,0,824755.story?coll=la-home-nation
KATRINA'S AFTERMATH
New Bankruptcy Law Could Exact a Toll on Storm Victims
Unless changes are made, some say the overhaul due to take effect soon could make it tougher for Gulf Coast residents to recover.
By Peter G. Gosselin
Times Staff Writer
September 7, 2005
WASHINGTON — After virtually every major hurricane of the last 25 years, bankruptcy filings have grown significantly faster than usual as victims sought to shake off old debts in order to rebuild their economically ruined lives.
But unless changes are made to an overhaul of the nation's bankruptcy law due to kick in next month, many of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and the resulting floods will have a substantially harder time winning court relief from loans they incurred for homes and businesses that are now gone, according to a variety of judges, lawyers and policy experts.
"Just because your house or car is somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't mean that your auto loan or mortgage went with it," said Brady C. Williamson, who was appointed by President Clinton to head a national bankruptcy commission in the mid-1990s.
UCLA professor Kenneth N. Klee said, "The new law is going to make it much more difficult for people to put their lives back together." Klee is a former Republican congressional staffer who was a chief author of the previous major bankruptcy-law change in the late 1970s.
House and Senate Democrats are expected to propose, perhaps as early as today, delaying the effective date for the new measure and easing some of its most stringent requirements. When it passed the bankruptcy overhaul last spring, the Republican-controlled House rejected an exemption for victims of natural disasters.
The link between bankruptcies and disasters has long been assumed, but the extent of the tie is only now becoming clear in findings by Robert M. Lawless, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Lawless examined the 18 hurricanes and tropical storms since 1980 that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said caused $1 billion or more in damage in the United States. He studied the pattern of bankruptcy filings in the states where the storms made landfall and compared that with patterns in surrounding states and the rest of the country. He looked at the effects in the first, second and third year after the event.
His key finding: that bankruptcy filings, which have been rising nationally for 25 years, climbed in landfall states at more than 1 1/2 times the pace of unaffected states and remained stuck at that rate even three years after the disasters.
"Armchair economic analysis suggests that natural disasters are actually good for local economies because they spur reconstruction," Lawless said. "What these numbers show is the extent of the financial distress underneath whatever overall economic improvement there may be."
Bankruptcy overhaul supporters asserted Tuesday that the law would not impose undue hardship on victims of the Gulf Coast catastrophe. "There's nothing in here that is going to make it more difficult for people to get complete bankruptcy relief," said Jeff Tassey, the Washington lobbyist who headed a group of credit card companies, banks and others at the vanguard of the eight-year fight for the measure.
Tassey said the law included language that would allow bankruptcy judges to take into account "special circumstances" such as the recent hurricane and flood. "There is plenty of flexibility to cope with situations like this," he said.
But critics of the new law say many filers will not be able to qualify for leniency because of paperwork rules, among other reasons. The law says the debtor "shall be required to itemize each additional expense or adjustment to income and to provide … documentation … and a detailed explanation" under oath.
"There's no way many people are going to be able to provide all this paperwork; it's underwater," said Keith Lundin, a federal bankruptcy judge for the eastern district of Tennessee and a longtime opponent of the overhaul.
At root, the first principles of the new measure, which hold that Americans should accept greater responsibility for their spending and not readily use bankruptcy to escape debts, appear to be at odds with conditions that now exist in Louisiana, Mississippi and part of Alabama.
"The law is premised on the notion that we're all authors of our own economic fates," said Klee, the former Republican congressional staffer. But as the hurricane and flood demonstrate, "there are periodic catastrophic incidents that can strike any of us at any time and any place and deliver economic ruin."
Much of the debate over the law focused on the so-called means test, which will make it much harder for financially distressed Americans who earn more than the median income in their states to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, in which filers can forfeit most of their assets in return for cancellation of most debts and a "fresh start." The only alternative for those who do not qualify is to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, in which they get to keep most of their property but must continue paying on a portion of their debts for up to five years.
The median income for a family of four in Louisiana last year was $51,402, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The median income in Mississippi was $49,893.
Tassey, the lobbyist, said the means test would have little effect on the largely poor and black victims who stayed or were left behind to bear the brunt of the hurricane's wrath and have figured prominently in coverage of the disaster. That is because most presumably made less than the median income and so would qualify for Chapter 7.
But Tassey also said that, absent a court ruling of special circumstances, the law could have a substantial effect on those making the median or above, not least because the measure's income gauge is not what debtors make now but what they made over the last six months.
John Rao, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, said, "There are going to be a lot of people who were making good livings before the hurricane who have lost their jobs and their employers and have very little prospect of getting back to work in the foreseeable future."
The law also will impose much stricter limits on businesses, especially small businesses, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, under which they could continue operating while coming up with a plan to partially repay creditors.
Under current law, businesses with court permission can continue operating — sometimes for several years — before settling on a repayment plan. But under the new law, big businesses would have only 18 months.
Small businesses, such as the many dry cleaners, variety stores and restaurants drowned by the flood, would have just 10.
Though thousands of financially distressed families and businesses elsewhere are rushing to file before the Oct. 17 effective date, those in the flood-ravaged Gulf Coast have lost their chance, with the bankruptcy courts shuttered, their lawyers unavailable and their records destroyed.
That means that unless Congress intervenes, many victims of the Gulf Coast storm will have to file under the new law.
"With no jobs or cars or houses, all these people have is debt. The only way they can get out from under it is if they can file for Chapter 7," said Williamson, the former bankruptcy commission head. "It will be a travesty if someone who could file for Chapter 7 today won't be able to simply because they missed the deadline."
*
More misery
After previous hurricanes, there were sharp increases in bankruptcy filings in the affected states, compared with unaffected ones. Here are estimates of the percentage increases for all hurricanes since 1980 causing more than $1 billion in damage:
Time after hurricane
1 year
Landfall states: 11.6%
Other affected states: 12.0%
Unaffected states: 7.0%
*
2 years
Landfall states: 29.9%
Other affected states: 22.5%
Unaffected states: 18.1%
*
3 years
Landfall states: 46.2%
Other affected states: 33.7%
Unaffected states: 28.1%
Source: Robert M. Lawless, University of Nevada, Las Vegas School
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times | Privacy
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Rotten Fruit of the 'Reagan Revolution'
by Robert Scheer
WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.
Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.
Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub flooded New Orleans "Lake George."
None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life. Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government policies that aid only poor brown and black people — even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared.
For decades we have seen social services that benefit everyone — education, community policing, public health, environmental protections and infrastructure repair, emergency services — in steady, steep decline in the face of tax cuts and rising military spending. But it is a false savings; it will certainly cost exponentially more to save New Orleans than it would have to protect it in the first place.
And, although the wealthy can soften the blow of this national decline by sending their kids to private school, building walls around their communities and checking into distant hotels in the face of approaching calamities, others, like the 150,000 people living below the poverty line in the Katrina damage area — one-third of whom are elderly — are left exposed.
Watching on television the stark vulnerability of a permanent underclass of African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos is terrifying. It should be remembered, however, that even when hurricanes are not threatening their lives and sanity, they live in rotting housing complexes, attend embarrassingly ill-equipped public schools and, lacking adequate police protection, are frequently terrorized by unemployed, uneducated young men.
In fact, rather than an anomaly, the public suffering of these desperate Americans is a symbol for a nation that is becoming progressively poorer under the leadership of the party of Big Business. As Katrina was making its devastating landfall, the U.S. Census Bureau released new figures that show that since 1999, the income of the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7% in inflation-adjusted dollars. Last year alone, 1.1 million were added to the 36 million already on the poverty rolls.
For those who have trouble with statistics, here's the shorthand: The rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting, in the ripe populist language of Louisiana's legendary Long, the shaft.
These are people who have long since been abandoned to their fate. Despite the deep religiosity of the Gulf States and the United States in general, it is the gods of greed that seem to rule. Case in point: The crucial New Orleans marshland that absorbs excess water during storms has been greatly denuded by rampant commercial development allowed by a deregulation-crazy culture that favors a quick buck over long-term community benefits.
Given all this, it is no surprise that leaders, from the White House on down, haven't done right by the people of New Orleans and the rest of the region, before and after what insurance companies insultingly call an "act of God."
Fact is, most of them, and especially our president, just don't care about the people who can't afford to attend political fundraisers or pay for high-priced lobbyists. No, these folks are supposed to be cruising on the rising tide of a booming, unregulated economy that "floats all boats."
They were left floating all right.
Bush Visit Grounded Relief Helicopters
From the AP (via Coldfury and Digby):
In St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, just south of New Orleans, victims of the hurricane are still waiting for food and water and for buses to escape the floodwaters, [ Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La.] said. And for the entire time Bush was in the state, the congressman said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies.
Confirmed by the Times-Picayune.
You have got to be f--king kidding me. Dear sweet Jesus, you have got to be kidding me.
In St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, just south of New Orleans, victims of the hurricane are still waiting for food and water and for buses to escape the floodwaters, [ Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La.] said. And for the entire time Bush was in the state, the congressman said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies.
Confirmed by the Times-Picayune.
You have got to be f--king kidding me. Dear sweet Jesus, you have got to be kidding me.
Why, Oh Why?
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Write
Questions. So many questions.
Why, throughout most of last week, was the most eloquent ambassador, and the only recognizable white face in New Orleans, the great and noted statesman . . . Harry Connick Jr.? The jazz musician appeared on NBC's "Today" show several times, roaming the streets of his home town, ruminating on its history, delivering food to the displaced and bemoaning the hideous lack of response to Hurricane Katrina.
Why did Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA head Michael Brown appear on television repeatedly patting themselves on the back for the federal government's effort, when it was so clear to the rest of the world that people were suffering and dying in the streets? "People are getting the help they need," Brown said Friday on the "Today" show, even though the newsreel suggested otherwise.
What in the world was President Bush talking about when he praised Brown at a news conference in Mobile, Ala., saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"?
Speaking of Brownie, how did a guy with no notable experience in disaster relief get that job, anyway?
Mr. President, why did you think it was so important to deliver a political speech comparing Iraq to WWII the day after the hurricane?
Anybody seen Dick Cheney?
Why was Condoleezza Rice, the administration's highest ranking black official, grinning and guffawing at the Broadway show "Spamalot" and shopping for expensive shoes at Salvatore Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue days after the hurricane ravaged the Gulf Coast and left tens of thousands of poor black folks hungry, desperate and dying?
Dear Federal Officials, what kind of message do you think your response to the hurricane must have sent the terrorists, sitting at home watching CNN?
Local and state officials, you can't escape scrutiny: Why didn't you do a better job preparing for the process of evacuating people, given that this sort of disaster has been predicted for decades, and at least one previous study has shown that as many as a third of the residents of New Orleans would be reluctant to evacuate? Did you do everything in your power to prepare the police department, state law enforcements and other emergency services for this disastrous event?
Wait a minute . . . Democrats, you can't get away scot-free. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did issue some tough sounding press releases, and Pelosi held a press conference on Friday. But neither exactly played a high profile role earlier in the week. Is that what you call leadership?
Back to Connick for a minute . . . why is it that he had no trouble getting in and out of New Orleans, but the feds couldn't figure out a way to deliver water to people five days after the hurricane?
[Here's what the New Orleans Times-Picayune had to say on that subject in a blistering editorial on Sunday:
"Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.
"Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.
"Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning."]
Why did it take a president who embraces black kids in campaign photo ops as often as possible five days to get to the scene and embrace some of the mostly black suffering masses in New Orleans?
Why do some in the media seem more intent on focusing on the looting of a criminal few than on the more pervasive acts of human kindness of a people enduring the monumental stress of hunger, thirst, separation from family members, loss of homes, and fatigue in the blistering 90 degree heat of Louisiana and Mississippi?
Why have some of the president's supporters attempted to shift blame onto those who did not, or were not able to, evacuate before the storm?
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, why did you suggest that the city looked like "a place that could be bulldozed"? And why were you at a campaign fundraiser for a colleague when the House was voting on a $10.5 billion relief effort bill?
Mr. President, will you ever hold anyone accountable for performance deficiencies? Will you even bother to demand answers?
Would the federal response have taken so long if some similarly devastating disaster had struck, say, McLean, Va., or Scarsdale, N.Y.?
Would a president who proclaims himself to be a conservative sign a $286 billion highway bill packed with some 6,000 pork-barrel projects, many of them frivolous, while cutting a request from the Army Corps of Engineers to bolster hurricane protection in New Orleans from $105 million to $40 million? Wouldn't a president who calls himself a conservative, demand that taxpayer money be spent on priorities and try to do something to reform a budgeting system that rewards politicians for acting like pigs at a trough?
Final question:
Bush, the CEO president?
washingtonpost.com Staff Write
Questions. So many questions.
Why, throughout most of last week, was the most eloquent ambassador, and the only recognizable white face in New Orleans, the great and noted statesman . . . Harry Connick Jr.? The jazz musician appeared on NBC's "Today" show several times, roaming the streets of his home town, ruminating on its history, delivering food to the displaced and bemoaning the hideous lack of response to Hurricane Katrina.
Why did Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA head Michael Brown appear on television repeatedly patting themselves on the back for the federal government's effort, when it was so clear to the rest of the world that people were suffering and dying in the streets? "People are getting the help they need," Brown said Friday on the "Today" show, even though the newsreel suggested otherwise.
What in the world was President Bush talking about when he praised Brown at a news conference in Mobile, Ala., saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"?
Speaking of Brownie, how did a guy with no notable experience in disaster relief get that job, anyway?
Mr. President, why did you think it was so important to deliver a political speech comparing Iraq to WWII the day after the hurricane?
Anybody seen Dick Cheney?
Why was Condoleezza Rice, the administration's highest ranking black official, grinning and guffawing at the Broadway show "Spamalot" and shopping for expensive shoes at Salvatore Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue days after the hurricane ravaged the Gulf Coast and left tens of thousands of poor black folks hungry, desperate and dying?
Dear Federal Officials, what kind of message do you think your response to the hurricane must have sent the terrorists, sitting at home watching CNN?
Local and state officials, you can't escape scrutiny: Why didn't you do a better job preparing for the process of evacuating people, given that this sort of disaster has been predicted for decades, and at least one previous study has shown that as many as a third of the residents of New Orleans would be reluctant to evacuate? Did you do everything in your power to prepare the police department, state law enforcements and other emergency services for this disastrous event?
Wait a minute . . . Democrats, you can't get away scot-free. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did issue some tough sounding press releases, and Pelosi held a press conference on Friday. But neither exactly played a high profile role earlier in the week. Is that what you call leadership?
Back to Connick for a minute . . . why is it that he had no trouble getting in and out of New Orleans, but the feds couldn't figure out a way to deliver water to people five days after the hurricane?
[Here's what the New Orleans Times-Picayune had to say on that subject in a blistering editorial on Sunday:
"Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.
"Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.
"Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning."]
Why did it take a president who embraces black kids in campaign photo ops as often as possible five days to get to the scene and embrace some of the mostly black suffering masses in New Orleans?
Why do some in the media seem more intent on focusing on the looting of a criminal few than on the more pervasive acts of human kindness of a people enduring the monumental stress of hunger, thirst, separation from family members, loss of homes, and fatigue in the blistering 90 degree heat of Louisiana and Mississippi?
Why have some of the president's supporters attempted to shift blame onto those who did not, or were not able to, evacuate before the storm?
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, why did you suggest that the city looked like "a place that could be bulldozed"? And why were you at a campaign fundraiser for a colleague when the House was voting on a $10.5 billion relief effort bill?
Mr. President, will you ever hold anyone accountable for performance deficiencies? Will you even bother to demand answers?
Would the federal response have taken so long if some similarly devastating disaster had struck, say, McLean, Va., or Scarsdale, N.Y.?
Would a president who proclaims himself to be a conservative sign a $286 billion highway bill packed with some 6,000 pork-barrel projects, many of them frivolous, while cutting a request from the Army Corps of Engineers to bolster hurricane protection in New Orleans from $105 million to $40 million? Wouldn't a president who calls himself a conservative, demand that taxpayer money be spent on priorities and try to do something to reform a budgeting system that rewards politicians for acting like pigs at a trough?
Final question:
Bush, the CEO president?
American Family Voices - Miriam V
AM Feed - September 6, 2005
Hot Topics
List of 2 items
President Bush made another trip to the flood-ravaged Gulf Coast region, but
at this point he appears far more interested in repairing his image than
anything
else. The Bush administration's handling of this crisis - from the president
's initial decision to remain on vacation, to FEMA's delayed response - has
been roundly criticized, but President Bush has adopted his familiar
approach of ignoring problems at hand. He has publicly backed FEMA head
Michael Brown,
who made a statement that appeared to blame storm victims for not leaving
and who admitted that his agency had no idea victims were housed in the New
Orleans
convention center even after it had been reported on the news. Bush also has
adopted the stance that the flooding was little more than a random,
unpredictable
freak occurrence even though officials had been briefed 32 hours in advance
that the levees could be topped (not to mention the fact that officials had
been pleading with the administration for more money long before the
disaster, to no avail). Right now the most important job at hand is saving
the lives
of those still trapped. In the long run, we must look to ensure that
something like this does not happen again. Both of these tasks will be
severely impeded
if the administration does not alter its approach.
[link]
President Bush wasted little time in announcing the nomination of John
Roberts for chief justice of the US Supreme Court, just two days after the
passing
of William Rehnquist. Bush initially picked Roberts as an associate justice
to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's position, but the arch-conservative had not
been
confirmed for that position. If confirmed, Roberts - who clerked for
Rehnquist - would be the youngest chief justice since 1801.
[link]
list end
Who Says That? (Part 1)
"Unfortunately, that's [the high death toll in New Orleans] going to be
attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings." - FEMA
chief
Michael Brown
Who Says That? (Part 2)
"What I'm hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so
overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here,
you know,
were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them." -
Former First Lady Barbara Bush, speaking about the displaced hurricane
victims
in Houston
Monday, September 05, 2005
More on the ssame awful subject - Miriam V.
Killed by Contempt - New York Times
The New York Times
September 5, 2005
Killed by Contempt
By
PAUL KRUGMAN
Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of
federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook,
but federal
officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference,
but were never mobilized.
Here's one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S.
Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the
ability
to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the
Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.
Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial
window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after
Katrina
was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a "strange paralysis" set in
among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while
thousands
died.
What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After
9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it
needed
action - and he didn't deliver.
But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of
Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological
hostility
to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years
the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government
is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that
when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?
Does anyone remember the fight over federalizing airport security? Even
after 9/11, the administration and conservative members of Congress tried to
keep
airport security in the hands of private companies. They were more worried
about adding federal employees than about closing a deadly hole in national
security.
Of course, the attempt to keep airport security private wasn't just about
philosophy; it was also an attempt to protect private interests. But that's
not
really a contradiction. Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs
into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your
friends.
After all, if you don't believe government can do any good, why not?
Which brings us to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In my last
column, I asked whether the Bush administration had destroyed FEMA's
effectiveness.
Now we know the answer.
Several recent news analyses on FEMA's sorry state have attributed the
agency's decline to its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security,
whose prime
concern is terrorism, not natural disasters. But that supposed change in
focus misses a crucial part of the story.
For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took
office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to
disaster
to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political
confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA's
preparedness
programs.
You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to
emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as
important
in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural
disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows
that we
are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years
ago.
But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown
as Mr. Allbaugh's successor.
Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr.
Allbaugh's college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA;
The Boston
Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse
shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director.
The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration
felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale.
That contempt, as I've said, reflects a general hostility to the role of
government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast
have
now reaped the consequences of that hostility.
The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about
good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren't
caused
by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective
government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we
listen?
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
The Beautiful Mind Strikes Again
Barbara Bush - the woman whom no less an authority than Dick Nixon said "knows how to hate," the woman who didn't want to trouble her "beautiful mind" with thoughts of "body bags and deaths" - has now offered us yet another gem. After visting refugees staying at the Houston Astrodome, she had this to say:
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (she chuckled slightly)--this is working very well for them."
What a cold, callous, wretched ghoul of a person. I just don't even know what else to say.
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (she chuckled slightly)--this is working very well for them."
What a cold, callous, wretched ghoul of a person. I just don't even know what else to say.
Fw: [Norton AntiSpam] connie mancini-haack sends you An Open Letter to The President Petition
 |
| An Open Letter to The President |
To: The White HouseSeptember 2, 2005
An Open Letter to The President.
Dear Mr. President:
I as an American, would like to ask you some questions. I believe that I deserve answers from you, as does the rest of the America.
In the wake of this horrific tragedy in New Orleans, I am just so saddened by the lack of immediate help that these people have received. People who that by their situation could not leave New Orleans or the surrounding areas due to the high level of poverty that they suffer from.
I am an American, I have freedoms, I am protected and looked after by my government. I have always felt that way until now. I am fortunate that I do not live in the ravished areas of the Gulf Coast, however, I am now scared to death that if there were a natural disaster here in Los Angeles, where I live, what will happen to me and those around me. I live in what has been called the most powerful country in the world. Why then can we not help our own citizens when they are in trouble?. These people in New Orleans have spent four days without any food and more important water, why is that I ask you? Why were these people made to suffer even one more second than they had to? They already lost everything, every single thing they had ever worked for, then they are made to wait in conditions that are not fit for humans. It seems as though more concerns were placed on looters, looters�of course there are looters, these people had no signs of light, once again no food or wat! er for four days. Let me ask you Mr. President, would you steal food, water or medication for yourself or your family if you were in the same situation?
How is it that we can spend billions and billions of dollars to tear down and rebuild other countries when the citizens of our own country cannot even make a fair living? How is it that we can fund missions into space that cost billions of dollars as well when we do not help the poverty stricken people in our own country? How is it that we can run off and offer aid to other poverty stricken countries when our own citizens are dying of hunger and disease daily? You ask us as Americans to donate money to aid in relief efforts, but why is it that we have to pay $3+ for a tank of gas just to get back and forth to work to make money to survive. Is this the choice that we as citizens make when we choose to vote for you? Is this what you promised us? Please Mr. President can you make this clear to me just so I can understand why it is so many people did choose to vote for you.
Mr. President, what took those supplies and relief workers so long to get to our fellow citizens of The United States of America? Can you tell me that Mr. President, please.
Sincerely
Tina Madden
A Citizen of the United States of America
Sincerely,
The An Open Letter to The President Petition to The White House was created by and written by Tina Madden (tmtinytm@msn.com). This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.
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Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 1:18 AM
Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] connie mancini-haack sends you An Open Letter to
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An Open Letter to The President Petition
An Open Letter to The President
View Current Signatures - Sign the Petition
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
To: The White House
September 2, 2005
An Open Letter to The President.
Dear Mr. President:
I as an American, would like to ask you some questions. I believe that I
deserve answers from you, as does the rest of the America.
In the wake of this horrific tragedy in New Orleans, I am just so saddened
by the lack of immediate help that these people have received. People who
that by their situation could not leave New Orleans or the surrounding areas
due to the high level of poverty that they suffer from.
I am an American, I have freedoms, I am protected and looked after by my
government. I have always felt that way until now. I am fortunate that I do
not live in the ravished areas of the Gulf Coast, however, I am now scared
to death that if there were a natural disaster here in Los Angeles, where I
live, what will happen to me and those around me. I live in what has been
called the most powerful country in the world. Why then can we not help our
own citizens when they are in trouble?. These people in New Orleans have
spent four days without any food and more important water, why is that I ask
you? Why were these people made to suffer even one more second than they had
to? They already lost everything, every single thing they had ever worked
for, then they are made to wait in conditions that are not fit for humans.
It seems as though more concerns were placed on looters, looters.of course
there are looters, these people had no signs of light, once again no food or
wat! er for four days. Let me ask you Mr. President, would you steal food,
water or medication for yourself or your family if you were in the same
situation?
How is it that we can spend billions and billions of dollars to tear down
and rebuild other countries when the citizens of our own country cannot even
make a fair living? How is it that we can fund missions into space that cost
billions of dollars as well when we do not help the poverty stricken people
in our own country? How is it that we can run off and offer aid to other
poverty stricken countries when our own citizens are dying of hunger and
disease daily? You ask us as Americans to donate money to aid in relief
efforts, but why is it that we have to pay $3+ for a tank of gas just to get
back and forth to work to make money to survive. Is this the choice that we
as citizens make when we choose to vote for you? Is this what you promised
us? Please Mr. President can you make this clear to me just so I can
understand why it is so many people did choose to vote for you.
Mr. President, what took those supplies and relief workers so long to get
to our fellow citizens of The United States of America? Can you tell me that
Mr. President, please.
Sincerely
Tina Madden
A Citizen of the United States of America
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
View Current Signatures
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
The An Open Letter to The President Petition to The White House was
created by and written by Tina Madden (tmtinytm@msn.com). This petition is
hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no
endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our
sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.
Send this to a friend
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Pumping Us Dry
by James Ridgeway
The very first thing George W. Bush did in response to Hurricane Katrina was to offer a helping hand—not to the people stranded on rooftops in New Orleans, but to his friends in the oil industry. These were the same people who gave him $52 million in his last campaign. The president released millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve so the oil companies would have enough fuel to make gas and keep the country going. But the companies don't need this oil. They're already swimming in it.
Pouring more oil into the marketplace didn't reduce gasoline prices, which kept on going up, hitting $4 a gallon in some places.
While crude oil production doubtless was curtailed by the storm, the companies face a surplus, not a shortage, of crude oil. So why dump more on the market?
“Despite growing inventories, U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) increased by nearly 5 million barrels over the past 3 weeks,” wrote the federal Energy Information Administration. Continuing in the clipped industry jargon, the agency added, “While this may not appear to be a substantial build, it comes at a time when crude oil inventories typically decline, as refiners use more crude to make gasoline needed for current demand and heating oil as they stock up for the winter.”
Thus, any crude oil inventory increase during the month of August, much less one of five million barrels over a three-week period, might lead one to expect prices to drop. Yet the price for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil has risen by $5 per barrel! If prices don't fall under these conditions, what will make them fall?
All over the world this summer, oilmen raced to dump surplus into the U.S. market, where the rigged prices made them a killing. Oil traders in China, the second biggest world market next to the U.S., were shoving oil into the high-priced U.S. market to make more money. (The U.S. consumes 25 percent of the world market; China 7 percent.)
Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Ed Wallace wrote last week that “there's actually weakening demand in Asia over the past two months, so oil is being diverted to the U.S., where it'll bring higher profits.” He quoted Reuters as noting that “Chinese oil trader Unipec resold at least 3 million barrels of August-arriving crude due to reduced refinery demand and was offering more, traders said last week.” Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for Valero in San Antonio, was quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying, “There is no reason for crude oil to be at $65 a barrel other than hype in the market.”
To be sure, some oil companies face shortages because of the storm, but the release of oil from the strategic reserve may not help them much. “The Capline, a major crude oil pipeline that feeds many Midwest refineries with crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico, is currently shut down due to lack of electricity at many of its pumping stations,” the EIA reported Wednesday. “As a result, one refinery in the Midwest has already reported that it has reduced its production due to a loss in crude oil supply. With the recent Government decision that crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) will be made available to those affected by the hurricane, there may be some relief for refiners that have reduced their production due to loss of crude supply,” the government service dryly continues. “However, they will need to find a way to get the crude oil from the SPR to their refineries.”
What is going on here? The story goes like this: Refineries are increasing their stocks of crude, yet not increasing production of gasoline. This may help explain the high prices. It is an odd situation, since usually, in the summer, refineries are operating full tilt to lay in supplies of gasoline and home heating oil.
The slowing of gasoline production might be due to some unrecognized problems within the refineries. But the industry says it's because of market conditions, with officials noting that while today's crude prices are over $70, in 1999 crude oil was selling at around $12 a barrel. “Refineries lost a lot of money. In fact they lost money for most of the 1990s,” Jeff Morris, president of Alon USA, owner of the Big Spring Refinery, told The Wall Street Journal last week. “People chose not to spend on refineries. So what's affecting us now is that we're behind the investment curve and it will take us five to 10 years to catch up.”
If the companies can't increase their refined products, they could end up turning not to the petroleum reserve but to the European Union. While the U.S. keeps a supply of crude oil in its strategic reserve, the Europeans maintain a stock of gasoline as well as crude. There has been speculation that in a really tight situation, the EU might be called on to export some of that supply to the U.S.
Meanwhile, the high gas prices are adding to the profits of the big companies. Says the watchdog group Public Citizen: “Since George Bush became president in 2001, the top five oil companies [selling gas] in the United States have recorded profits of $254 billion: ExxonMobil: $89 billion, Shell: $60.7 billion, BP: $53 billion, ChevronTexaco: $31 billion, ConocoPhillips: $20 billion.” The group adds: “As Americans shell out more dollars at the pump, the profit margin by U.S. oil refiners has shot up 79% from 1999 (the year Exxon and Mobil merged) to 2004.”
Bush refuses to increase the energy efficiency standards for motor vehicles, which use 70 percent of total oil production, and he recently signed the energy bill that hands out billions in new subsidies to the industry. Even he seems to recognize what a shuck this is: In April, with prices moving ever higher and the Congress debating the energy bill, Bush said, “With $55 oil, we don't need incentives to oil and gas companies.”
But this summer, Congress, with the president's enthusiastic support, adopted a series of new subsidies for the oil and gas industry. “Officially, the energy bill's giveaways are supposed to cost $14.6 billion over the next 10 years, offset in part by $3.1 billion in higher gasoline taxes on consumers,” says Robert S. McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. “But that doesn't include the bill's $70 billion in authorized but unfunded subsidies, for which cash will have to be appropriated later.”
Now they get another handout in the form of the strategic oil reserve. This is a complicated setup whereby rather than paying the federal government (i.e., the general public) for the right to drill oil on public lands, the industry puts some of this oil into the reserve. When times get bad, it then extracts some of the 750 million barrels stored in salt domes under the Texas and Louisiana coasts-with the promise to return it later on. It can therefore get cost-free oil, turn it into gasoline and sell it at high prices, hoping to buy back crude oil later on at lower prices and return it to the reserve.
In addition, the petroleum reserve will buy oil to fill its reservoirs on the market to jack up crude prices. So the industry makes a killing both ways. The public is left shelling out $4 a gallon at the pump.
..
The very first thing George W. Bush did in response to Hurricane Katrina was to offer a helping hand—not to the people stranded on rooftops in New Orleans, but to his friends in the oil industry. These were the same people who gave him $52 million in his last campaign. The president released millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve so the oil companies would have enough fuel to make gas and keep the country going. But the companies don't need this oil. They're already swimming in it.
Pouring more oil into the marketplace didn't reduce gasoline prices, which kept on going up, hitting $4 a gallon in some places.
While crude oil production doubtless was curtailed by the storm, the companies face a surplus, not a shortage, of crude oil. So why dump more on the market?
“Despite growing inventories, U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) increased by nearly 5 million barrels over the past 3 weeks,” wrote the federal Energy Information Administration. Continuing in the clipped industry jargon, the agency added, “While this may not appear to be a substantial build, it comes at a time when crude oil inventories typically decline, as refiners use more crude to make gasoline needed for current demand and heating oil as they stock up for the winter.”
Thus, any crude oil inventory increase during the month of August, much less one of five million barrels over a three-week period, might lead one to expect prices to drop. Yet the price for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil has risen by $5 per barrel! If prices don't fall under these conditions, what will make them fall?
All over the world this summer, oilmen raced to dump surplus into the U.S. market, where the rigged prices made them a killing. Oil traders in China, the second biggest world market next to the U.S., were shoving oil into the high-priced U.S. market to make more money. (The U.S. consumes 25 percent of the world market; China 7 percent.)
Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Ed Wallace wrote last week that “there's actually weakening demand in Asia over the past two months, so oil is being diverted to the U.S., where it'll bring higher profits.” He quoted Reuters as noting that “Chinese oil trader Unipec resold at least 3 million barrels of August-arriving crude due to reduced refinery demand and was offering more, traders said last week.” Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for Valero in San Antonio, was quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying, “There is no reason for crude oil to be at $65 a barrel other than hype in the market.”
To be sure, some oil companies face shortages because of the storm, but the release of oil from the strategic reserve may not help them much. “The Capline, a major crude oil pipeline that feeds many Midwest refineries with crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico, is currently shut down due to lack of electricity at many of its pumping stations,” the EIA reported Wednesday. “As a result, one refinery in the Midwest has already reported that it has reduced its production due to a loss in crude oil supply. With the recent Government decision that crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) will be made available to those affected by the hurricane, there may be some relief for refiners that have reduced their production due to loss of crude supply,” the government service dryly continues. “However, they will need to find a way to get the crude oil from the SPR to their refineries.”
What is going on here? The story goes like this: Refineries are increasing their stocks of crude, yet not increasing production of gasoline. This may help explain the high prices. It is an odd situation, since usually, in the summer, refineries are operating full tilt to lay in supplies of gasoline and home heating oil.
The slowing of gasoline production might be due to some unrecognized problems within the refineries. But the industry says it's because of market conditions, with officials noting that while today's crude prices are over $70, in 1999 crude oil was selling at around $12 a barrel. “Refineries lost a lot of money. In fact they lost money for most of the 1990s,” Jeff Morris, president of Alon USA, owner of the Big Spring Refinery, told The Wall Street Journal last week. “People chose not to spend on refineries. So what's affecting us now is that we're behind the investment curve and it will take us five to 10 years to catch up.”
If the companies can't increase their refined products, they could end up turning not to the petroleum reserve but to the European Union. While the U.S. keeps a supply of crude oil in its strategic reserve, the Europeans maintain a stock of gasoline as well as crude. There has been speculation that in a really tight situation, the EU might be called on to export some of that supply to the U.S.
Meanwhile, the high gas prices are adding to the profits of the big companies. Says the watchdog group Public Citizen: “Since George Bush became president in 2001, the top five oil companies [selling gas] in the United States have recorded profits of $254 billion: ExxonMobil: $89 billion, Shell: $60.7 billion, BP: $53 billion, ChevronTexaco: $31 billion, ConocoPhillips: $20 billion.” The group adds: “As Americans shell out more dollars at the pump, the profit margin by U.S. oil refiners has shot up 79% from 1999 (the year Exxon and Mobil merged) to 2004.”
Bush refuses to increase the energy efficiency standards for motor vehicles, which use 70 percent of total oil production, and he recently signed the energy bill that hands out billions in new subsidies to the industry. Even he seems to recognize what a shuck this is: In April, with prices moving ever higher and the Congress debating the energy bill, Bush said, “With $55 oil, we don't need incentives to oil and gas companies.”
But this summer, Congress, with the president's enthusiastic support, adopted a series of new subsidies for the oil and gas industry. “Officially, the energy bill's giveaways are supposed to cost $14.6 billion over the next 10 years, offset in part by $3.1 billion in higher gasoline taxes on consumers,” says Robert S. McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. “But that doesn't include the bill's $70 billion in authorized but unfunded subsidies, for which cash will have to be appropriated later.”
Now they get another handout in the form of the strategic oil reserve. This is a complicated setup whereby rather than paying the federal government (i.e., the general public) for the right to drill oil on public lands, the industry puts some of this oil into the reserve. When times get bad, it then extracts some of the 750 million barrels stored in salt domes under the Texas and Louisiana coasts-with the promise to return it later on. It can therefore get cost-free oil, turn it into gasoline and sell it at high prices, hoping to buy back crude oil later on at lower prices and return it to the reserve.
In addition, the petroleum reserve will buy oil to fill its reservoirs on the market to jack up crude prices. So the industry makes a killing both ways. The public is left shelling out $4 a gallon at the pump.
..
Bury the Backlash
by Laura Flanders
Unimaginable, our President called the disaster that hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast this week. And on his back-slapping tour through the least troubled neighborhoods of the region, he said it was as if "the entire coast had been obliterated by the worst kind of weapon."
Sure enough - a deadly weapon hit this nation - this Presidency, and I'm only repeating what I'm hearing when I say Americans can't afford it one more minute.
The disaster in the Gulf Coast was only unimaginable, Mr. President if you don't read the warnings about sinking levees and rising waters. Only unimaginable if you didn't read the requests from the New Orleans flood control people this June, before you recommended to Congress that they slash their budgets by 44 percent. The Gulf Coast disaster was unimaginable like a terror attack on New York City - only if you disregard the CIA reports titled Osama Plans Attacks within the United States.
What's unimaginable is that we'll let this administration continue for one more moment. Katrina hit the Gulf Coast but it's this administration's policies that have wrecked the place.
A whole lot of people died this week that had no need to die: grandmothers in attic crawl-spaces, babies in pools of urine at the stadium, old men in lawn chairs in the street. A whole lot of people died this week who should be living and breathing.
One thing that should also have died this week is American apathy about government like this.
Seventy - eight years ago, it was another flood in New Orleans that sounded an alarm-bell. The Mississippi river rose over New Orleans and another Republican President made a photo-op stop, promised to rebuild, and then didn't. Out of that disaster came a plan. Huey Long laid it out when he was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928: progressive income taxes, real money for education, public works an end to imperial wars and the untrammeled power of Wall Street. Government should be for the we the people, not a cookie jar for private profiteers. The US military should defend the US, not bankrupt it the nation in the service of imperial chicken hawks.
Did I mention that Exxon’s last quarter profits stand at $7.6 billion – before gas prices rose to $3.50 a gallon. Did you hear who received the Navy’s contract to build their ships in New Orleans? Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown and Root.
Huey Long was shot dead before he could run for the White House (and I thank Greg Palast for reminding us of this history.) But prodded awake by Long and his supporters, Democrats cobbled together what they called a New Deal inherent in which was the idea that the mission of government is to help those who can not help themselves.
For half a century since, conservatives have been lashing back, serving up shrink-the-government snake oil, hogwash about how you can help the people by slashing safety nets. And they've set us at each other's throats.
Talking about “combat operations” underway in the streets of New Orleans, Army Times called Americans there “insurgents.” At least one commander in the ravaged city had to tell his men not to aim their rifles at the flood victims "You're not in Iraq."
But it’s a century of scapegoat and slash that has made New Orleans a war-zone. What we’re seeing across the Gulf Coast is a society that has sunk.
Amid the bodies that should not be dead in the putrid New Orleans water, I can only hope the conservatives backlash is buried there in that toxic pit.
Just as Mayor Ray Nagin, who let rip last week about his people’s abandonment on WWL radio, is now a mayor without a city. We Americans are a people without a government.
We are not Refugees vs. Americans, National Guard vs. Insurgents. We are one people in search of a government. A government that would serve us, not the reverse; a government that prioritizes us.
As my favorite t-shirt of the moment reads: “Make levees not war.”
Give us poverty relief not tax relief for the rich. Impose a windfall profit tax to pay for the gulf’s recovery – don’t ask private givers to pay not only for what government’s failed to do – like plan for disaster – as well as what this government’s done – like create a disaster in Iraq. Let the looting of Mother Nature and the people’s treasure stop. We’ve got a society to rebuild. Let’s rebuild it different.
When the spin becomes a lie
Karl Rove has dispatched George W. Bush back to Louisiana and Mississippi this morning, presumably with marching orders to show the sort of respect and compassion he failed to muster his first time around last week. Meanwhile, all the president's men -- and the president himself -- are trying to shift the blame for the Katrina response from the White House to state and local officials.
As usual, however, the White House spin game is a little less than honest. The Washington Post reported on Sunday morning that a "senior Bush official" had complained that, as of Saturday, the governor of Louisiana -- who just happens to be a Democrat -- had not yet declared a state of emergency. Kathleen Blanco, meet Cindy Sheehan. Or Joseph Wilson. Or Paul O'Neill. Or John McCain.
Only this time, the media is on to the game, at least belatedly. As Scott Rosenberg notes, Gov. Blanco did, in fact, declare a state of emergency. She did it on Aug. 26, when George W. Bush was on vacation. The Post has posted a correction.
As usual, however, the White House spin game is a little less than honest. The Washington Post reported on Sunday morning that a "senior Bush official" had complained that, as of Saturday, the governor of Louisiana -- who just happens to be a Democrat -- had not yet declared a state of emergency. Kathleen Blanco, meet Cindy Sheehan. Or Joseph Wilson. Or Paul O'Neill. Or John McCain.
Only this time, the media is on to the game, at least belatedly. As Scott Rosenberg notes, Gov. Blanco did, in fact, declare a state of emergency. She did it on Aug. 26, when George W. Bush was on vacation. The Post has posted a correction.
Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
A Call To Action
The New York Times
September 4, 2005
By ANNE RICE
La Jolla, Calif.
WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?
Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?
The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.
This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful city.
Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm.
Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.
The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.
Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.
Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.
And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions; including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs.
Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what "modern life" with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.
•
I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?"
Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.
Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another?
Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.
What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.
And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees.
And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question.
I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.
They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.
Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.
Anne Rice is the author of the forthcoming novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
September 4, 2005
By ANNE RICE
La Jolla, Calif.
WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?
Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?
The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.
This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful city.
Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm.
Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.
The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.
Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.
Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.
And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions; including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs.
Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what "modern life" with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.
•
I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?"
Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.
Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another?
Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.
What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.
And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees.
And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question.
I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.
They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.
Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.
Anne Rice is the author of the forthcoming novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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