Entry tags:
Pissed off.
Katrina did a huge amount of damage.
In real terms (property damage, economic damage, infrastructural damage, and; probably, loss of life) it makes That Tuesday pale by comparison.
It doesn't have the gut-shot shock value, but it's a bigger catastrophe.
It also shows some of the rot in the way we run things.
The rich, they are all right. The Middle Class, they have real problems, and they may end up poor.
The poor, they're screwed.
They were screwed before Katrina came ashore.
Recall the people who were/are in the Superdome... they had to wait for hours to get in. Why? Ostensibly to be searched for weapons (which I can understand) but there was more to it than that Lew Rockwell reports,
"During coverage by Geraldo Rivera Sunday night, FOX NEWS' video cameras zoomed inside the foyer deck of the Superdome and viewers could see a national guard person going through a powder compact from of a woman's purse that was way too small to hold a liquor bottle or a gun. It was obvious that they were looking for drugs in warrantless searches. They instructed all the refugees far back in the seemingly endless lines to have their prescription-pill bottles out when approaching the security checkpoint and also a photo ID to prove that they belonged with the prescription.
There were THOUSANDS of poor, mostly black citizens of the lower Louisiana area, many of them little children and sickly elderly, being forced to stand for hours while the government violated their civil rights with forced searches that were patently unconstitutional, unjust and unreasonable under the dire circumstances. "Don't want to be searched? That's okay...now turn around, go outside and die!" Big choice."
And he's right. Do you think that would fly if the scene were rich folks from Georgetown heading into the the National's Stadium? Me neither.
And now, the people who are heading for the AstroDome, they won't be allowed in, unless they can prove they were in the Superdome. WTF?
Steve Gilliard's got a long post on The Price of Poverty
Some excerpts:When Andy Sullivan knocks Kos for saying this is worse than 9/11, he's wrong and Kos is right, because I lived through 9/11 without so much as a lost glass of water. This is a lot closer to an attack than any natural disaster we've seen. An entire city has turned into a movie set, and I mean Escape from New York. The people fleeing New Orelans are refugees, soemthing we haven't seen since the Civil War. The Astrodome is a temporary solution, and refugee camps will have to be built. There are sharks and alligators swimming in the streets, nobody will be going home for a long time.
There is still an inability to realize the scale of this. They are talking about trucking in supplies. Why not do what they did in Afghanistan and just drop food and water from C-130's? They need to act like this is a humanitarian crisis, and not just a national disaster.
The decision making here is flawed. While the Louisiana NG sits in Mosul, the mayor has to drag cops from search and rescue to looter patrol. Why? Because armed gangs are playing Baghdad, 2003. One guy shot his AK at a police station.
Why does it matter that the NG is in Iraq? Because the infantry which would be stopping looters is in Iraq. It's one thing to get water and shoes, another to rob anything which came along. Which is what some people are doing.
Of course, as the middle class runs out of class, they will start stealing and going nuts because they are just that desperate.
And the surprise: Atlanta has $5 gas. Hmmm, there's no risk of a riot there, is there.
What bothers me is the pace. When you have starving people in other countries, the AF can drop supplies to the needy. In the US, people have to wait for trucks which may not come for days. People are going to die at this pace.
How poor is NOLA?
Read, then ask yourself if you're suprised at how people are reacting.
...
http://www.realestatejournal.com/cityprofiles/neworleans_la.html
Business
Unemployment rate -- June 2003(for New Orleans): 6.6%
Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (for New Orleans): 6.1%
Unemployment rate -- June 2003 (Louisiana): 7.6%
Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (Louisiana): 7.0%
Civilians employed: 562,100
Civilians unemployed: 32,000
Projected job growth, by state: 4.6%
Projected income growth, by state (projected per-capita income change: 1988 through 2020):
39.8% (for Louisiana)
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2003-10-07/news_scut.html
Once again, the government is telling you what most people know by walking down their street -- people are hurting, financially.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent in 2002. Four out of 10 of those poor people live in the South, the poorest part of the nation. In Louisiana, the poverty rate is a third higher than the United States as a whole. Over the past three years, 17.9 percent -- nearly one in five people -- have been poor in this state. That's basically a tie for highest poverty rate in the nation with Arkansas, where the poverty rate officially stands at 18 percent.
http://bizneworleans.com/70+M56d76a2d7b6.html
The underserved
As the 40-year-old DeSalvo sees it, New Orleans represents a gold mine for her research. For one thing, more than a quarter of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. Low-income patients, she says, are more likely than others to suffer from more than one chronic condition, such as obesity, heart disease or diabetes. In addition, more than two-thirds of the local populace is black, constituting what DeSalvo says is an understudied minority group.
And what are we seeing in reaction to the calamaty the citizens there are facing?
A mix. Lots of people are pitching in to help. Some of them from compassion, and some from compassion and anger.![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
annafddd said I just made a donation to the American Red Cross and I'm posting about it here for purely selfish and vile reasons. I'm pissing mad at people who are whining about stopping foreign aid and who ask belligerently where is the rest of the world now that the USA needs it?
Well, here's my 25 $, fuck it.
Though I think the richest country on Earth should take care of its own and could very well afford to do it if it weren't pissing money out in foreign parts that never asked for aid in the shape of military intervention in the first place, those poor bastards in the Gulf Coast shouldn't suffer for the fact that a) their government doesn't give a damn about them and b) I'm mad at it for this.
I don't blame her. I'm angry too, and a little ashamed, because she's right, we have enough money that we ought to be able to prevent, both the poverty,and the inadequate response we are going to see.
Some people, Jonah Goldberg for example, are just mad. They are frothing that the folks there are suffering, and that other people care. "Several readers complain that it's in fact true that the hurricane will disproportionately affect poor people. I don't really dispute that in the sense most mean it. Yes, the poor will have special hardships. Obviously so. But what I objected to, and still object to, is the reflexive playing of the class card. Is it really true that some middle class retirees who heeded the advice of the government to leave town, only to watch their homes be looted after a lifetime of hardwork for a better life are suffering less than a poor person who lost his rented apartment? What's the metric for measuring this sort of suffering? What about the small businessman who worked his entire life to build something he's proud of? What about the families who lost loved ones, but had the poor taste to make more money than the poverty line?
Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of a calamity is an important value? We're all in it together, I guess, except for the poor who are extra-special.
So there you have it, the poor, it's too bad for them, but hey, he's in it with them (the same way his chickenhawk-ass is fighting the good fight for the freedom of Iraq and the destruction of terrorism, safe behind his keyboard).
Jesus said we should always have the poor with us. There are those who see this as absolution, since Jesus said there would always be poor, we don't really have to go all out to help them. They conveniently forget what else he said, to the young man who was obedient to all the commandments, "Then sell all you have and give it to the poor."
I don't think we need to go so far as to make everyone give up all they have (though I don't think that levelling the field some would be a bad idea, if not because it's right and fitting, then because the example of 1798 is horrid, and can be repeated), but we can do a lot to make it better.
I close with this.
Matt: 25 41-46
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
In real terms (property damage, economic damage, infrastructural damage, and; probably, loss of life) it makes That Tuesday pale by comparison.
It doesn't have the gut-shot shock value, but it's a bigger catastrophe.
It also shows some of the rot in the way we run things.
The rich, they are all right. The Middle Class, they have real problems, and they may end up poor.
The poor, they're screwed.
They were screwed before Katrina came ashore.
Recall the people who were/are in the Superdome... they had to wait for hours to get in. Why? Ostensibly to be searched for weapons (which I can understand) but there was more to it than that Lew Rockwell reports,
"During coverage by Geraldo Rivera Sunday night, FOX NEWS' video cameras zoomed inside the foyer deck of the Superdome and viewers could see a national guard person going through a powder compact from of a woman's purse that was way too small to hold a liquor bottle or a gun. It was obvious that they were looking for drugs in warrantless searches. They instructed all the refugees far back in the seemingly endless lines to have their prescription-pill bottles out when approaching the security checkpoint and also a photo ID to prove that they belonged with the prescription.
There were THOUSANDS of poor, mostly black citizens of the lower Louisiana area, many of them little children and sickly elderly, being forced to stand for hours while the government violated their civil rights with forced searches that were patently unconstitutional, unjust and unreasonable under the dire circumstances. "Don't want to be searched? That's okay...now turn around, go outside and die!" Big choice."
And he's right. Do you think that would fly if the scene were rich folks from Georgetown heading into the the National's Stadium? Me neither.
And now, the people who are heading for the AstroDome, they won't be allowed in, unless they can prove they were in the Superdome. WTF?
Steve Gilliard's got a long post on The Price of Poverty
Some excerpts:When Andy Sullivan knocks Kos for saying this is worse than 9/11, he's wrong and Kos is right, because I lived through 9/11 without so much as a lost glass of water. This is a lot closer to an attack than any natural disaster we've seen. An entire city has turned into a movie set, and I mean Escape from New York. The people fleeing New Orelans are refugees, soemthing we haven't seen since the Civil War. The Astrodome is a temporary solution, and refugee camps will have to be built. There are sharks and alligators swimming in the streets, nobody will be going home for a long time.
There is still an inability to realize the scale of this. They are talking about trucking in supplies. Why not do what they did in Afghanistan and just drop food and water from C-130's? They need to act like this is a humanitarian crisis, and not just a national disaster.
The decision making here is flawed. While the Louisiana NG sits in Mosul, the mayor has to drag cops from search and rescue to looter patrol. Why? Because armed gangs are playing Baghdad, 2003. One guy shot his AK at a police station.
Why does it matter that the NG is in Iraq? Because the infantry which would be stopping looters is in Iraq. It's one thing to get water and shoes, another to rob anything which came along. Which is what some people are doing.
Of course, as the middle class runs out of class, they will start stealing and going nuts because they are just that desperate.
And the surprise: Atlanta has $5 gas. Hmmm, there's no risk of a riot there, is there.
What bothers me is the pace. When you have starving people in other countries, the AF can drop supplies to the needy. In the US, people have to wait for trucks which may not come for days. People are going to die at this pace.
How poor is NOLA?
Read, then ask yourself if you're suprised at how people are reacting.
...
http://www.realestatejournal.com/cityprofiles/neworleans_la.html
Business
Unemployment rate -- June 2003(for New Orleans): 6.6%
Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (for New Orleans): 6.1%
Unemployment rate -- June 2003 (Louisiana): 7.6%
Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (Louisiana): 7.0%
Civilians employed: 562,100
Civilians unemployed: 32,000
Projected job growth, by state: 4.6%
Projected income growth, by state (projected per-capita income change: 1988 through 2020):
39.8% (for Louisiana)
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2003-10-07/news_scut.html
Once again, the government is telling you what most people know by walking down their street -- people are hurting, financially.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent in 2002. Four out of 10 of those poor people live in the South, the poorest part of the nation. In Louisiana, the poverty rate is a third higher than the United States as a whole. Over the past three years, 17.9 percent -- nearly one in five people -- have been poor in this state. That's basically a tie for highest poverty rate in the nation with Arkansas, where the poverty rate officially stands at 18 percent.
http://bizneworleans.com/70+M56d76a2d7b6.html
The underserved
As the 40-year-old DeSalvo sees it, New Orleans represents a gold mine for her research. For one thing, more than a quarter of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. Low-income patients, she says, are more likely than others to suffer from more than one chronic condition, such as obesity, heart disease or diabetes. In addition, more than two-thirds of the local populace is black, constituting what DeSalvo says is an understudied minority group.
And what are we seeing in reaction to the calamaty the citizens there are facing?
A mix. Lots of people are pitching in to help. Some of them from compassion, and some from compassion and anger.
annafddd said I just made a donation to the American Red Cross and I'm posting about it here for purely selfish and vile reasons. I'm pissing mad at people who are whining about stopping foreign aid and who ask belligerently where is the rest of the world now that the USA needs it?Well, here's my 25 $, fuck it.
Though I think the richest country on Earth should take care of its own and could very well afford to do it if it weren't pissing money out in foreign parts that never asked for aid in the shape of military intervention in the first place, those poor bastards in the Gulf Coast shouldn't suffer for the fact that a) their government doesn't give a damn about them and b) I'm mad at it for this.
I don't blame her. I'm angry too, and a little ashamed, because she's right, we have enough money that we ought to be able to prevent, both the poverty,and the inadequate response we are going to see.
Some people, Jonah Goldberg for example, are just mad. They are frothing that the folks there are suffering, and that other people care. "Several readers complain that it's in fact true that the hurricane will disproportionately affect poor people. I don't really dispute that in the sense most mean it. Yes, the poor will have special hardships. Obviously so. But what I objected to, and still object to, is the reflexive playing of the class card. Is it really true that some middle class retirees who heeded the advice of the government to leave town, only to watch their homes be looted after a lifetime of hardwork for a better life are suffering less than a poor person who lost his rented apartment? What's the metric for measuring this sort of suffering? What about the small businessman who worked his entire life to build something he's proud of? What about the families who lost loved ones, but had the poor taste to make more money than the poverty line?
Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of a calamity is an important value? We're all in it together, I guess, except for the poor who are extra-special.
So there you have it, the poor, it's too bad for them, but hey, he's in it with them (the same way his chickenhawk-ass is fighting the good fight for the freedom of Iraq and the destruction of terrorism, safe behind his keyboard).
Jesus said we should always have the poor with us. There are those who see this as absolution, since Jesus said there would always be poor, we don't really have to go all out to help them. They conveniently forget what else he said, to the young man who was obedient to all the commandments, "Then sell all you have and give it to the poor."
I don't think we need to go so far as to make everyone give up all they have (though I don't think that levelling the field some would be a bad idea, if not because it's right and fitting, then because the example of 1798 is horrid, and can be repeated), but we can do a lot to make it better.
I close with this.
Matt: 25 41-46
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
finger pointing
Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult to summon much righteous indignation against looters in New Orleans while people are still stranded and dying all over the city. This is a catastrophe of monumental proportions and the theft of personal property pales by comparison to the human tragedy. When heads eventually start rolling, I hope prosecutors spend more time worrying about official malfeasance by those who should have done more to prepare for this than they do scouring video tape trying to identify some guy who steals a microwave he can't plug in, or ten shirts that were gonna soon be floating in sewage whether he took them or not.
There are a bunch of people doing mea culpas now
unpreparednesscriminal negligence of the government becomes clear, about how smug they felt looking down on the East Asians after the tsunami, thinking that well, those poor people starving in tents, isn't it nice we live in a country that you'll never see anything like that - um, uh oh. Or, oh, wow, I guess we really do have rampant social inequality in this country, and maybe it does have something to do with racism which really still exists.It blows my mind that it would take this to wake them up to it, because these are precisely not Joe and Judy Smoe who just watch TV all day and don't know who the mayor of their hometown his but do know all the football stars. These are the "liberal elite" and informed/active sorts, who still to this hour believed that we as Americans were magically protected from the failings of humanity.
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Helping the victims
Re: Helping the victims
Jesus asked (demanded?) we give until we had nothing left.
But he also praised the widow's mite. Give the shoes. Those people are going to be in a bad way for a long time. Some will never really recover.
But if you can't spare money, and can't spare time (I have time, and if they call for it they pay me, the bags are packed), then do what you can.
Preach at others to help, and let them know you sent your hand me downs.
TK
Re: Helping the victims
no subject
no subject
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I've had similar thoughts over the past two days. In my own experience with being poor in my past, I always remember just how desperate people can be to live day by day. A family member actually suggested to me that we fake a will in order to get money ($5,000) into our hands when George died. I was incredulous that anyone would think that. But this family member lives in poverty and I do not. They weren't thinking straight in their desperation.
Is it so fucking bad to give up some of your millions of dollars to help the poor, Rich Person X? Is it? God, this pisses me off.
no subject
Back when we used to have a progressive tax structure, and a narrower gap between rich and poor, and strong; widespread, unions (under Eisenhower) we saw huge growth.
These days... the gap is only getting bigger, the middle classes are carrying the load and unions are hurting, both in numbers and effect (because the laws are now structured in ways which let the bosses break them).
It's dark times we live in.
TK
lurker brought to the surface
I'm still wondering how, if they KNEW this was going to be as bad as it was, which they did, they did not prepare themselves for this contingency. How they allowed the levies of New Orleans to become so decrepit. How they could not prepare to evacuate, to rescue, to feed, to give fresh water. How they could let people remain and not send someone through to help them evacuate before the hurricane struck. How? How can those in charge, the local, state, and national government officials, have not prepared for this and still call themselves human beings? I hear of the numbers of National Guardsmen being sent in and think, It's not enough. They're not sending in enough. There is no order there. People need shelter and food and water and order. They're getting none of this, and abuse besides. I almost can't blame them for shooting at the helicopters. I have no idea what it's like to be in their place. I hope I'd respond better. I fear for what's happening to those who aren't the type to shoot at helicopters.
What's it going to be like when the next terrorist attack occurs and we're shown to be equally ill-prepared? What will happen then?
I'm horrified and terrified. And there's nothing I can do, as I'm one of the unemployed who can't find a job. Why those who can don't do something is beyond me. Why those who could have done something didn't is...incomprehensible.
Re: lurker brought to the surface
But, as you say, outside the immediate area, it was horrible, but removed. And the immediate area was smaller than those who live outside New York believe.
TK
Re: lurker brought to the surface
Still, what happened then is not on the level of what happened to the Gulf Coast. Other buildings still stood in the City, and, most importantly, though we weren't expecting an attack, we still had local government officials who stood up and behaved as leaders should, for the most part. We still had law and order. And both poor and rich were equally affected: the trader lost his life along with the dishwasher. The tragedy of New Orleans is how the worst-affected are the poorest, those who can least afford to lose everything, those who cannot escape without help.
I wondered for a while if the efforts made by our government, federal, regional, and local, haven't made things worse since September 11th, not better. Then I wondered if it was partially a regional problem. Then I realized the two events are so completely different, you can't really compare them. So, I just feel lost, and wonder why no one did anything to help those who needed help before Katrina hit. I want New Orleans back, dammit, as much as I want the Towers back.
no subject