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Today, four years ago.

September 11, 2001

September 10th, 2005 Posted by admin | General | no comments

The Ugly Americans

It’s often said that disaster and tragedy can bring out the best in people: strangers helping strangers by donating labor, materials, money, time, or even their lives. After 9/11, story after story along the lines of “and then this total stranger came and helped me” was played out over and over again.

Not this time. The stories of mayhem, violence, and just plain stupidity are what the nation has been subjected to more times than I care to count this week. Among the highlights:

• Are We There Yet?: while the government relief efforts took days to reach New Orleans, news agencies and just plain regular folks managed to get in and out of the city, and report on the happenings there.
   
• Biased Journalism: white people carrying stuff out of stores and down the street “found” what they needed. Black people doing the same thing were “looters”.
   
• To Have and Have Not: Wolf Blitzer unconsciously said it for the rest of us: “they’re so poor, and so black.” Yep. The folks who had the least resources for picking up and leaving home were the ones most affected by Hurricane Katrina. In Louisiana, and New Orleans, those have-nots are black. Some days I looked at photos of the survivors piled up in the SuperDome, and realized that without the captions, it was impossible to prove the photos were not taken in Nigeria.
   
• Homeland Insecurity: one thing Hurricane Katrina made stupifyingly obvious: America is not even close to being prepared to protect its people from disaster.
   
• Homeland Insecurity, redux: a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina is a natural job for the National Guard….who were all out of the country, in Iraq. They were recalled and given orders to go to NOLA, and be prepared to shoot their fellow Americans.
   
• Homeland Insecurity, one more time: National Geographic’s April issue focused on the erosion of Louisiana’s wetlands. Most of the erosion is the results of dams, levees, and other water-redirections to promote natural gas production. The article focussed on the fact that the state was in incredible danger of flooding, as the coastline’s natural defenses were wearing away. Another tasty tidbit was the role of government policy in all this.
   
• The Unkindness of Strangers: the Mayor of New Orleans has already said that they estimate the death toll to be 10,000 or more. It’s impossible to tell how many of these victims are people who successfully survived the Hurricane and the flooding, only to get raped, robbed, and murdered by fellow survivors in the New Orleans Superdome.
   
• The Unkindness of Other Strangers: Let’s not forget that a lot of the mayhem that went down in the Superdome happened because although it was listed as an emergency shelter, it contained no supplies, and the promised buses sent to evacuate people didn’t arrive for days.
   
  
• The Unkindness of Real Strangers: PayPal turned into one of the unsung villains of this whole mess, routinely freezing accounts setup to donate funds to relief agencies. In one case, it took a tearful phone call to PayPal to explain that doctors and medical materials were already loaded on trucks, but couldn’t go anywhere. In another, PayPal froze $30,000 in monies donated to the Red Cross, refused to release the funds in any time frame shorter than 3-5 business days, and claimed to be unable to pass the donations on to the Red Cross itself. In the end, the money was refunded to the donors–not one cent got to where it was intended to go.
   
• The Unkindness of Virtual Strangers: No sooner did relief efforts begin than the scamsters joined in, creating fake donation emails and websites designed to funnel money off from real relief efforts. In other words, the accounts PayPal failed to identify successfully while freezing legitimate accounts.
   
• Hit the Road, Jack…If You Can: One industry that managed to provide a prompt response to the whole Hurricane Katrina situation was the energy industry. Gas prices immediately shot up to over $3 a gallon, ostensibly because Louisiana is home to most of the US’s domestic gas production. The problem? Prices went up in California, too–even though California never gets its gas from the Gulf Coast. Now the industry’s under investigation for price gouging.
   

September 5th, 2005 Posted by admin | General | no comments

Lesson for US

By now a lot of folks have commented on the tragedy of New Orleans, and the suffering of people still trapped there, waiting for rescue. We’ve learned a lot of hard lessons from this debacle–lessons W is still taking, in fact–but one of the most obvious has to be this:

America can barely find its ass with both hands–what the hell are we doing trying to run a war in Iraq?

September 2nd, 2005 Posted by admin | General | no comments