Children of The Universe

Ya doin' a Great Job, Brownie!

Don't be surprised if someone says that to you the next time you Really mess something up!

But this isn't funny.

"The leadership from top down in our agency is unprepared and out of touch," Bahamonde read. His voice breaking, he continued: "I can't get out of my head the visions of children and babies I saw sitting [in the Superdome], helpless, looking at me and hoping I could make a difference."

Los Angeles Times reporting on Senate Testimony of  Marty Bahamonde, FEMA's only representative in New Orleans from Saturday, Aug. 27, until early Tuesday, Aug. 30,  2005.

25 Questions about the Murder of New Orleans (and it's many dead and displaced)

From TomDispatch.com

"Mike Davis (whose most recent book is Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu) and architect Anthony Fontenot have just returned from New Orleans. They rode out Rita in southern Louisiana and talked with numerous people involved in local Katrina rescue efforts. The city is now, Davis says, a huge crime scene that may never be properly investigated. After Hurricane Ivan turned away from the Big Easy in 2004, Davis wrote a singularly prophetic piece, Poor, Black and Left Behind, about the car-less, unevacuated poor of that city.

Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot

Here are a few examples:

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves" -- white business leaders led by Reiss -- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

12. Everyone knows about a famous train called "the City of New Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not?

13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital were left to suffer and die?

19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River bridge -- an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?"

You can read all the questions at Tomdispatch.com

Where is the Public Health Service?

Where is the Public Health Service?  How can New Orleans be safe enough for people to start going back?  Where is the water service - sewer service?   What chemical hazards and biological hazards still linger - we know that the entire area has not even been searched and inspected yet -  there are still bodies missing and thousands of other hazards that will continue to fester.

Whose interests are being served by "inviting" people to come back to New Orleans?

This is a second public health disaster that will hurt the minorities and poor who go back to New Orleans at this time - the same people who were abandoned before.

No one knows what the long term health hazards and consequences of moving back into New Orleans are at this time.  And, of course, the poor and minority people who get effected by these long term problems will not have the resources to protect themselves or prove that they were harmed.

Is the Government going to fail it's citizens again?

No Protection/Media Lies Video

Joy Wigfall, M.D., M. Div., was trapped in the New Orleans Disaster from it's beginning until the following Saturday, when she and her family were finally released from the Convention Center.

We are presenting QuickTime clips of her impressions and opinions of what happened and how she and her family were treated during the disaster.

It is curious to us that while many officials are being interviewed and seem to be most concerned with shifting any responsibility away from themselves for how these Citizens were treated – we do not see any interviews with people who were trapped about their perceptions of what was going on.

Dr. Wigfall and her family described, during our visit with them on September 10, 11 and 12,  many things that are now coming clear.

We will also post clips of her husband and her daughter.

Play No Protection/Media Lies Clip

Media Fixing

OK, One more post before I go - this was just too much to pass up -

For the first 120 hours after Hurricane Katrina, TV journalists were let off their leashes by their mogul owners...

All of a sudden, broadcasters narrated disturbing images of the poor, the minority, the aged, the sick and the dead, and discussed complex issues like poverty, race, class, infirmity and ecology that never make it on the air...

...once the crisis point had passed, most TV journalists went back to business-as-usual, their choke chains yanked by no-longer-inattentive parent-company bosses who, fearful of fallout from fingering Dubya...decided yet again to sacrifice community need for corporate greed.

If big media look like they’re propping up W’s presidency, they are. Because doing so is good for corporate coffers — in the form of government contracts, billion-dollar tax breaks, regulatory relaxations and security favors.

Not surprising, since he let his network and cable news cheerlead the run-up to the Iraqi war without ever bothering to tell viewers GE had billions in contracts pending. More than half of Iraq’s power grid is GE technology. It was also under Immelt that GE installed a former adviser to W and Condi, who also served as press secretary to former first lady Barbara “Let ’em eat cake” Bush, as NBC Universal’s executive vice president of communications.

NIKKI FINKE writing for LA Weekly - read the whole story here

EyeWitnesses at Convention Center give Statements

By next week we should start putting up the video statements of Joy, James and Lynette about their own experiences at the New Orleans Convention Center and their struggle to survive the New Orleans Flood.  Some of their statements are quite startling - but this is so much better than listening to someone else talking about the experiences of others - I've got other committments over the week end so will start editing when I get back.

Fooling No One

In the Los Angeles Times today -

Finally fooling none of the people

With a terrorist sighting, Bush likely would not have lingered on his Crawford ranch vacation, which he interrupted only for politicking and fundraising opportunities. Nor would Condoleezza Rice have gone shoe shopping while the world witnessed the sorry spectacle of the Gulf Coast in deadly disarray. And surely Donald Rumsfeld, who blithely attended a San Diego Padres game as New Orleans was filling with water, wouldn't have dithered for days before sending in troops to aid desperate Americans.

Even if our high officials bothered to care about the poor, mostly black victims of Katrina enough to change their schedules, the administration would probably have bungled the relief effort anyway, because the Federal Emergency Management Agency is now run by political hacks appointed by Bush who know zilch about disaster relief.

...Brown, who reportedly doctored his unimpressive resume and didn't have a background in emergency management, resigned Monday. He had secured this plum job because he was a college buddy of his predecessor, Joe Allbaugh, who managed Bush's 2000 presidential campaign.

During the Clinton years, FEMA was turned into a model of efficiency, as demonstrated after the Northridge earthquake and the Oklahoma City bombing. How bizarre, then, that in the wake of 9/11, the administration handicapped FEMA by axing its Cabinet-level status, turning it back into what some call a "turkey farm" for patronage jobs and slashing its budget because, as Allbaugh complained, it had become "an oversized entitlement program."

Here's the whole article by Robert Scheer

Joy, James and Lynette in Fort Worth

James, Lynette and Joy
Safe, alive, and ready to move on with life!

Compression Stall

Friday afternoon I left Los Angeles International Airport on the way to Dallas  Fortworth - normally a three hour flight.  This time, about an hour out, boom! boom! boom! boom! - a burst of shuddering blasts that shook and jarred the plane coming from the right side.  The right engine, to be specific.  I was on the left side of the plane and when I looked over I could see the fear in people's faces and bodies.

A crew member came on the intercom, speaking calm things with a fearful voice - this is not usual, but it happens, we are alright, we are doing a few checks on the engine - he said that this was a compression stall - (also called compressor surge)

A few minutes later he reported that the checks showed the engine was performing properly.

About 15 minutes later it started again.  This time the plane banked sharply to the left and the pilot came on to tell us that regulations require that when an incident like this happens twice we are to head for the nearest appropriate airport - in this case, "we are turning back to Phoenix."  He also assured us that the plane could fly on one engine and that the right engine was running at idle speed.

We landed with fire trucks and emergency personnel waiting for us - the aircraft a little shakey but an OK landing.

I remember thinking how ironic it was that I was going to see my Sister and her family after their survival of the New Orleans disaster, who are staying at my Brother's, who is a jet engine mechanic/instructor and I'm wondering if I am going to die in an airplane crash.

So I caught a flight to Denver, then on to Dallas - so late Friday night I finally got there.

I'll have more on their situation soon - and I have video of their statements, so if all goes well, I will have some of that to go up soon.

On assignment for a few days - probably not much posting til early next week.