Thai Response To Tragedy Vs. Us Response

[lovejoy]

Vacation is Over... an open letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore

[email protected]

www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

[udon]

Good one Michael, but I don't think Jnr or his side-kicks would understand one sentence..... Too subtle for them.....

Thanks LoveJoy

[aughie]

Maybe some of the police officers who quit the force had lost their wife and kids. If you haven't heard from your family do you stay on the job or go search the water for them?

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There is enough blame to go all around at all levels. This thing is massive. This is bureaucracy responding and a newly established one too. The Office of Homeland Security is new and its channels and protocols were never before tested in a disaster.

SNAFU (situation normal all fkd up) or FUBAR (fkd up beyond all recognition), they are terms which come about from individual soldiers describing the massive bureacracy in the US Army. The US Army has been in business for 200 years. OHS has been around a few and has never been tested under fire. Bureauracies are not lightening fast and accurate.

[lovejoy]

"When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we

will have

peace." -Jimi Hendrix

[aughie]

60 Minutes, the investigative news program, showed lots of white "refugees" in their news footage. So what is CNN's problem? I guess the news editors at CNN decided to stress the race angle in their news coverage. Why didn't CNN show the vietnamese-americans who chose, as a group, to be the last ones to board the buses?

[Mr. Farang]

An open letter to the President

Editorial blasts federal response

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The Times-Picayune of New Orleans printed this editorial in its Sunday edition, criticizing the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina and calling on every FEMA official to be fired:

An open letter to the President

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we're going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It's accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

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.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job."

That's unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn't be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

[cathyy]

In watching CNN and FOX, I'm stunned by how disorganized the hurricane clean-up is going, how under-manned/womanned the government is, and at the sheer heartlessness of looters.

Even with a few days of notice (something that Thailand didn't have the luxury of), I'm shocked by the following:

1. Hundreds of people died (faulty evacuation plan?  Irresponsible citizens?)

2. They are still looking for more dead

3. The evacuation plan seemed flawed from before the hurricane hit

4. The levee in New Orleans broke - the fact that they built a city with the majority of the city below sea level - and this from the country that put a man on the moon!

5. There is talk of disease issues for some time to come.  Thailand got very bad press from so-called experts like the CDC and WHO stating that the worst was yet to come.  That diseases will likely kill more people than those who died in the water.  On the contrary, within hours, Thai villages had mountains of water and food.  I know, I delivered a lot too.

6. Rescue workers are leaving dead and decomposing bodies safely removed from the debris.  They had plenty of time to get enough rescue workers down there!

7. Some looters are now armed and have shot a cop in the head in New Orleans

8. All of the looters shown on FOX news are non-white (I'm sure they can find some white people to video tape too)

9. People who want to get out now can't get gas because the electricity is out at the gas stations.  Hello, generators, hello.

1. The Hurricane Plan called for the school and city buses to be used to evacuate the thousands of people who were too poor to be able to evacuate themselves. (No car, no money for gas, no money for hotel room?) The mayor never ordered this done. This past July, the city newspaper and mayor stated that the financial circumstances of New Orleans were such that there was NO MONEY to pay for an evacuation of the poor prople and that everyone would be "on their own" in case of an evacuation order. There have also been "false alarms" in the past, and no major hurricane has actually hit the city in decades. People don't know what to expect if they haven't seen it.

2. The death toll is expected to top 10,000. It wasn't the hurricane that killed most of them. It was the levee breaches and the resulting flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. All early efforts were focused on finding survivors, not rounding up bodies. They will be easier to find once the city is drained and a door-to-door search with dogs can be done.

3. I don't know enough to comment on this.

4. Imagine a Bangkok with a huge lake a meter or so above sea level on one side of town and the river on the other. Curiously, the least flooding was in the old French Quarter, the oldest part of town. The original city was built on the highest ground in the area. It's the later building that populated the lower areas. There WAS a plan in place to maintain and strengthen the levees over a 10-year period which began under Clinton. Bush cut the funding, and this year eliminated it entirely from the budget.

5. Tthere are already cases of dysentery from drinking contaminated water, and lethal infections from contact with the flood water through open wounds. When the water is gone the filth will remain, and be just as dangerous. That's why all the remaining citizens in New Orleans will be removed, forcibly if necessary. You can't drop supplies to a village of survivors that you don't know about. There are NO COMMUNICATIONS between the stranded people and the relief efforts other than searching and finding.

6. They are now rounding up bodies. They deliberately chose not to do this before, but to focus all efforts on finding people trapped in attics, on rooftops, and on patches of high ground. Sure they had TIME, but how were more rescue workers supposed to reach New Orleans? Swim? All the roads are flooded, and the airport was closed for the first several days as well.

7. You mean there are CRIMINALS? Who would choose to take advantage of a breakdown in law enforcement?

8. As others have mentioned, New Orleans is a black majority city. Also, Fox has their own political agenda. Showing poor people as thieves makes eliminating social programs less unpopular. I recall they showed black people as "looters" while white people were "looking for food." As my husband said, what were they going to do if they found some food? Wait for a sales clerk to sell it to them? They were looters, too. The vast majority of the looting was survival looting for food and water. There are always criminals.

9. Um, gas is is VERY short supply in the area. Lots of gas used by the peole who did evacuate. The Army has brought in their own tankers of gas. Also, it's not a good idea to restore electricity to an area still under water!

That said, the mayor does deserve a lot of the blame. He didn't order the use of the city resources to evacuate the poor. He refused to cede control of the city to the feds for 7 days. I think he expected the feds to come in and do their thing without any action on his part, but until he cedes control HE has to give the orders. I think that was a misunderstanding on his part, and why no real relief efforts began for the first 4 days. I think the feds then realized he expected them to just come in and do their thing, so they did.

More of the blame goes to the religious right who elected Bush. They decided his views on abortion and gay marriage were more important than his views on overall social justice, the economy, health care, and the war. This is the result; a governent unconcerned about the poor. And now they are shocked? People who vote Republican based on the basic beliefs of the party -fiscal conservatism, small government, states' rights, pro-business- have my respect. People who vote based on one issue and ignore the rest... well...they deserve what they get.