Tag Archives: Levees

Gulf oil spill is SO Obama’s Katrina

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Which parallel is not analogous? Off New Orleans, massive devastation to environment and human health, predictable failure of flawed technology, inadequate official response which broadens tragedy. Leaving BP to shoulder cleanup is like tasking arsonists to extinguish their fire. BP is responsible, but needn’t be put in charge. Put every government resource into addressing this calamity, make oil industry write the checks. By any standards of a failed rescue, Obama’s watch is proving as laggard as Bush’s.

We can all express our awe at the scale of the spill, but who can believe the professionals couldn’t foresee it? The media ramped its estimates incrementally, but department first responders were theorizing 100,000 barrels a day right from the start.

I’m amused that conservative critics use “Katrina” in the pejorative, where they didn’t hold it against Bush. Katrina has come to mean colossal fail, but what did it mean for Bush? It wasn’t his Waterloo, it didn’t even stub his toe. Those who pretend Katrina was Dubya’s downfall are the same pundits who describe Iraq as a blunder. Lies. To tar President Obama with a tragedy of like magnitude of a predecessor is to remind the electorate how bad Bush was.

I’m pleased by the comparison because it pollutes your perception that voting matters. The choice of lesser of two evils means relative degrees of industrial strength toxicity.

Why aren’t Obama hopefuls confident enough to let their leader take this “Katrina” on? Let him own it and beat Bush’s legacy of indifferent passivity.

Are you provoked because “Katrina” presumes a callous failure, as yet in your opinion unmerited by Team Obama? I’d rather say it means disaster in the sense of a test which proved this nation’s horribly misplaced priorities. Has Obama’s administration brought better preparedness in the face of unforeseen peril coming in with the tide? In such a manner alone this oil spill will rival Katrina. If you are measuring only loss of human lives, look to the health impact which the crude infusion will bring.

Now if you’re asking if the oil spill is a “Katrina” land grab of coastal real estate, and excuse to gentrify New Orleans and remake gambling regulations to suit the casinos, perhaps not. But count the same relief contractors to make themselves spillionaires. Once again the residents will bear the burden of the labor and disruption, ultimately to lose their livelihoods and homes. This time instead of praising “Brownie” the president will praise BP for doing their best, as the media will assure us it was. The spill’s magnitude could never have been predicted, they’ll say, a mitigation of the damage beyond anyone’s capability.

Was “Katrina” a repudiation of our reliance on old levees? Not really. Will this Katrina mean a rekindled moratorium against new offshore drilling capers? I doubt it. Americans inland will probably write off the oceans. No longer pristine, what with mercury, hypoxia and now oil, why not Drill Baby Drill with what is there left to lose aplomb?

Colorado’s collapsing Medical Care

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kildare promo stillThe Denver Post ran an article this Sunday that paints a pretty sad picture of what’s going on in Health Care as the Obama Regime stands by. Health services in distress- Newly jobless seek aid in “astronomical” numbers
 
Health services being shut down even as demand goes up, as the economy is just not getting the job down for what people actually need! Meanwhile, Big Business run local, state, and federal government sits idly by watching the on rush of disaster without responding to it in any meaningful manner. This is Hurricane Katrina unfolding once again, but on a national scale and a scale of national corruption that dwarfs the mess that Bush made out of Southern Louisiana and Southern Mississippi. The levees have burst wide open, because the money was spent elsewhere rather than in reinforcement of these vital services. Where’s the CHANGE?

The Whites win this one against the great Orange Juice Simpson

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RiccioThe media is so muted this time around. Racism in America is so volatile that a concrete channel for it must always be built by the ruling class and the damns only opened up to the common (religious) folk under the most controlled circumstances. Arab racism is now allowed to flow at a heavy rate along with anti-Latino/ anti-immigrant worker racism, but anti-Black racism can only be opened to a trickle at this time. So how to handle the OJ Simpson verdict to keep the levees intact?

The Verdict ‘In’ is for ‘The Revenge of Injured Whites’ where 2 wrongs can certainly seemingly be used to make a seeming Right. What the Criminal Injustice System had working for it this time is that Orange Juice Simpleton continued to carry on in a vain, self centered manner, all to snatch justice away from injustice (or is it the other way around?), never mind all that money spent by the Football Guy the first time around. The criminal got beat by the con it seems! The Black criminal and the White Con, with the Smiling Police Officers, the prim and serious Judge Nancy Nice presiding.

Oh Well, Oj. The prison system really is not that much worse than the typical American nursing home, and you’ll get used to it in the short run. I know that at 62 you wanted to wait a few more years before going to the Shady Manor , but many of the people you’ll meet will even seem already quite familiar to you. You’ll be a star to them! So have fun! It’s all such poetic injustice! We’ll miss you…

Will the levees fail once again with Hurricane Dolly?

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Social drinkers In the US it’s all money all the time for war and big business bailouts, but what about the bailouts the little people have to do when American levee systems fail from lack of proper maintenance? Hurricane Dolly is due to come ashore in the next few days and the lower Rio Grande Valley may well go under water just like what happened in New Orleans and the upper Mississippi region. Dolly Bears Down on Texas, Mexico

How many strikes like this are Americans prepared to let go by? This is not nature alone responsible here because it is not nature that maintains protective levees but your government that does.

Though it is the US military that will be mobilized if failure of these levees occurs, this time it is not the US Corps of Engineers directly in charge of maintaining the levee system, but an agency called The International Boundary and Water Commission with another Bush appointee in charge there. Good luck, People, you will need it.

New Orleans

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Police attack crowd with mace and tasers where people were trying to express opposition to tearing down perfectly serviceable Public Housing units in New Orleans. The US government wants Black people not to return to New Orleans for the same racist reasons that they didn’t bother reinforcing the levees in the first place before Katrina hit.

It was then a Black dominated city and the White Dixiecrat political establishment of Louisiana hated having to govern over such a concentration of poor income Blacks. It was an Apartheid city where Blacks had too much sway over the politics of the area in the White Political Establishment’s eyes, so the federal government, too, just didn’t think it important enough to do the job of holding back the flood waters that might occur, and eventually did.

So now they are trying to keep poorer Blacks dispersed by Katrina from being able to return to their former neighborhoods. Nothing has changed. The federal, state, and local governments are engaged in a giant racial relocation program that keeps former Black residents from being able to survive return to their city. White policy here? Divide, keep them away, and conquer. The same policy of divide and conquer used in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Science of Fools

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I’m sure you missed it, since most of us have long since given up on reading the idiotic editorials of The Gazette, our Far Right Wing local daily paper. But there it was this Tuesday morning as they attacked the notion of giving our country’s children government guaranteed health care. Oh horror of horrors they said, ‘This will keep people from buying health insurance for the tiny tots!’

This all from a paper that has no problem with giving trillions of government funds to the military industrial complex. They call their ideology ‘Libertarian’, too! But what about the science of these fools, the Science of Libertarian Fools?

Well lets see…..? Just at the moment that scientists see an explosion of infectious disease epidemics as being likely in the near future (in fact they see it as already underway), these fools of The Gazette ignore scientific opinion. They don’t give a shit that the Medical System of the US if more full of holes than Swiss Cheese.

They pooh pooh the idea that there is such a thing as Global Warming, too. Or that there is any planetary ecological crisis currently underway! They practice the Science of Fools, Pretend Libertarianism, so they oppose strengthing medical coverage at the time it is most needed! That’s how they support ‘national security’. They ignore common scientific sense.

Speaking of ignoring science. The Gazette Gang of Editorial Clowns wrote their editorial against providing federal medical coverage for America’s children almost exactly 2 years after Katrina. That was when political clowns such as The Gazette always supports had completely ignored scientific advice calling to strengthen the levees of New Orlean, scientific advice that had been given for decades.

Ignoring that scientific advice led to the Great New Orleans Flood, which no doubt the ignorant a-holes at The Gazette consider to be God’s will. It wasn’t, but New Orleans got washed into the gutter because of dumb dicks like the Gazeete editorial writers that always support what they call “Free Enterprise,’ while condeming and ignoring realy important scientific opinion. Goodbye, New Orleans.

Boy that paper sucks! Every time The Gazette writes editorial comments on ecology, medicine, or anything at all dealing with science, they just are on Cloud Nine. They are lost dealing with Political Science, too. In fact, they are as corrupted as you can get.

The ‘free market’ doesn’t like science at all. It just gets in the way of maxing out making profits for the well-to-do. Our children deserve more, and they deserve guaranteed federal mandated medical coverage. This is the science that will stop the spread of disease. Big Business hates it. They prefer the Science of Fools instead.

PS- See where these unoriginal editorialists of The Gazette got their unoriginal opinion from. A Socialist Plot

New Orleans- the city George lost

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New Orleans will go down as the American city that Dubya lost, and that will be his place in history, along with having blown the Middle East apart. Now that New Orleans slipped by the hurricane season, this Southern city has virtually disappeared from public view once again, as the press kept quiet during the elections. Too troubling for Americans to know that over $100 billion dollars later, the levee system there in Louisiana is still in shambles. On the scale of American corporate corruption, FEMA (a branch of the hilariously named Department of Homeland Security) ranks #3 top dog, right behind #1 Pentagon and #2, the US healthcare system. Here is what the New Orleans daily has to say about the partially constructed new levees.

War on the home front against us

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Are Americans at war with the Neocons? Have the Neocons declared was upon us, on our way of life, our civility, our humanitarian compassion, on social services, on health care, on a social safety net, on anybody who isn’t ungodly rich? Sure!
 
Katrina didn’t cause the death and destruction in New Orleans. The levees did.
 
The federal government did this. The gutting of resources for infrastructure, for preparedness. The graft at the top left nothing for those in need. And now they’re looking to the middle class for the money and effort to pick up after this national disaster.