Sidney Blumenthal: millions of Americans ... scavenge for food and shelter

[Benbow]

Katrina comes home to roost
Sidney Blumenthal
Friday September 2, 2005
The Guardian

A year ago the US army corps of engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken.

<snip>

By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers' request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration's additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate debated adding funds for fixing levees, but it was too late.

<snip>

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly has contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands around New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush promised a "no net loss" wetland policy, which had been launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed the approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The army corps of engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a study that concluded in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary - much less a category four or five - hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's council on environmental quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable", and boasted: "Everybody loves what we're doing."

<snip>

On the day the levee burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech comparing the Iraq war to the second world war and himself to Franklin D Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own Streetcar Named Desire.

I realise that most of what is in this article is not news to DUers but it will be a revelation to many "movers and shakers" on this side of the Atlantic.

The BBC is saying that it is difficult to grasp how things have deteriorated in the Katrina-affected areas.

[Erika]

1. Bush's legacy is in the toilet

Katrina was the straw.

[Poiuyt]

2. I just heard Blumenthal on BBC radio

He was saying that it's the first time in modern history that a major US city was obliterated and that Bush was responsible.

Here's a link to the above article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561356,00.html

[Kurt Remarque]

3. worse yet, he did it while diverting resources....

to a country which he ruined himself (i.e. iraq) displaying much more concern about his success in the unjustified war than for trapped and dying people in the united states