Re: 'When The Levees Broke"

JimK wrote:
Did anybody watch this Spike Lee documentary on HBO last night? I
think part 2 is tonight. Like most people, I had seen a lot of the
news reports at the time Katrina hit New Orleans, but this film paints
a much broader and more detailed picture of the devastation to
property and, more importantly, to people's lives. After watching it,
I can give the city and state governments a bit of a pass, despite
their mistakes, because they clearly didn't have the resources to deal
with a disaster of this magnitude. But there's no excuse for the
remarkable indifference and incompetence of Bush, Chertoff, Brown, et
al. Bush used to talk about how he wanted to run the federal
government more like a business. If it was a business, they'd all be
out of jobs right now.

Though it's not really important who you give a pass to, let's not forget
that this was a natural disaster. There have been and will be plenty of
natural disasters that people will blame the devestation on individuals.
Sure, the levees coulda been fixed years ago. Sure, it wasn't a high
government priority because it's a mostly minority area. Consider the
consequences of global warming. They know about that too but it will be once
again "too late". Consider the consequences of building cities like San
Francisco on major earthquake faults. Consider the whole oil dependence
thing. The fact is, there is little that can be done about national
disasters except clean 'em up. It's human nature.

How many crooks made and are making millions on the Katrina aftermath? World
Trade Center? Hurricanes in Florida? For most connected politicians &
companies, disasters often equal profit for the buddies. Hasn't changed for
millions of years. 'taint gonna change now.

-
-I'm Gumby Dammit!


.

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