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earthnann
Child of the ancient schools
Posts: 108
(9/5/05 8:09 am)
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You Bet Your Life
www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/...life.shtml
YOU BET YOUR LIFE
By Michael C. Ruppert
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
September 2, 2005 0600 PST (FTW) -- Following these remarks is a brilliant piece of reporting by the American Progress Action Fund. It makes a clear case for what we are all now suspecting and seeing: the Bush administration is horribly mismanaging relief efforts along the Gulf Coast. Several things are now becoming clear. It is unlikely that New Orleans will ever be significantly rebuilt. When we talk about collapse as a result of Peak Oil, New Orleans is an exemplary – if horrifying – glimpse of what it will look like for all of us. In the case of New Orleans, however, it’s happening about two or three times as fast as we will see it when Peak Oil becomes an unavoidable, ugly, global reality. How long? Months. If we’re lucky, a year. As of August 2005 it’s not just a race to make sure that a particular region is not eaten by warfare and economic collapse. Mother Nature is obviously very hungry too. What region will be the next to go? What sacrifices can be offered before the inevitable comes knocking at our own personal door? Who can be pushed ahead of us into the mouth of the hungry beast in the hopes it will become sated?
How low can human beings sink? Keep watching the news. It’s not the first time civilizations have collapsed. This has all happened many times before. This behavior is not new. What is new — but is now dying — is our enshrined belief that there were to be no consequences of our reckless consumption and destruction of the ecosystem. What is now dying a horrible death is America’s grotesque global arrogance, brutality and cupidity.
What is not being discussed rationally by the mainstream media is Katrina’s impact on energy production. They don’t dare. By my calculations and those of oil energy expert Jan Lundberg, the United States has just lost between 20% and 25% of its energy supply. My projection is that it’s not coming back — at least not most of it.
As a result of Katrina, Saudi Arabia has finally admitted that it cannot increase production. Many of us knew they’ve been lying for at least two years. The Energy Information Administration has just admitted that global demand has been outstripping supply for several months before Katrina. Nice time to start telling the truth. Nature is finally calling everybody’s bluff. The liars, deniers and mentally ill will be exposed soon enough and they will pay their own price. Daniel Yergin will finally get his comeuppance. FTW’s race is to reach as many people as possible who want to prepare and are willing to prepare for this in local community settings.
You save whom you can.
Gulf energy production has four main components: drilling and production, pipeline delivery to shore, refinery capacity, and then delivery to the rest of the nation. We have heard precious little about the damage to Louisiana’s Port Fourchon which is the largest point at which energy passes from sea to land in the region. It is heavily damaged and mostly inoperable for now, despite optimistic financial reports, intended to calm the markets, stating that “damage is minimal.” I am quite sure that I speak for the maybe 250,000 New Orleans residents who couldn’t or wouldn’t get out when I say, “Screw the markets!”
Production, if and when it starts trickling again, will most likely shift to Port Murphy or to Lake Charles. Sounds easy in the abstract, but the corporate headquarters at which to make and implement those decisions were mostly located in New Orleans. Shifting energy flows will never replace what was lost because those two facilities already face the daunting task of restoring their own output. They can’t handle the additional burden of compensation for what has been lost. As one astute and great researcher put it, “How will the oil companies even find their workers or tell them where to report for work?” Where will the workers live? Where will they buy groceries? How will they get to and from work if the gasoline they’re supposed to produce isn’t there? The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) is also much more seriously damaged than press accounts disclose. It’s here that supertankers from overseas (used to) offload. They have no place else to do it. They’re too big. I have seen video of LOOP damage which doesn’t look anything like the minimal damage that’s been reported. OK, so when the port is fixed what about the damaged pipelines running to shore? How many boat anchors have been dragged over them? In how many places are they ruptured, crushed or broken?
As many as twenty offshore rigs have now been confirmed as adrift, capsized, listing or sunk. Each rig may have as many as eight wells. Where’s the money coming from to replace them? How long will that take?
Bottom line: my assessment is that New Orleans is never going to be rebuilt and that US domestic oil production will never again reach pre-Katrina levels. The infrastructure is gone, the people are gone, and the US economy will be on life support very, very quickly. If people are griping at $5.00 gasoline what will they do when it’s $8.00? $10.00? Start shooting (the wrong people)? How difficult is it to rebuild in that kind of social climate? And if US oil production does not soon exceed pre-Katrina levels then the US economy is doomed anyway. It’s a catch-up game now. I think it’s quite likely that the Bush administration is responding so ineptly in part because it is in a complete crisis mode realizing that the entire United States is on the brink of collapse and there’s very little they can do about it. The Bush administration doesn’t know how to build things up, only blow them up. They aren’t worrying about New Orleans because they’re frantically triaging the rest of the nation and deciding what can be saved elsewhere.
What lingers for all of us is the inexplicably bovine behavior of the Bush administration. And how in the name of a loving God could Louisiana’s Attorney General Charles Foti say on national television that he will prosecute those who loot for survival with the same vigor as those who have looted for profit and greed? Even New Orleans police are smarter and better than this. They’re letting people go who have taken food, water, shoes that fit their feet and clothing that fits their bodies. Those who understand the situation condemn Mr. Foti’s callous and unreasoned position in the strongest possible terms.
And may God have mercy on the Democratic Party if it approaches the 2008 campaign with a platform saying that oil will flow, the prices will fall, and unbridled consumption will return if only we elect Hillary.
I was on ABC network satellite radio yesterday and after the show I repeated an observation that has been clear to me for some time. “Demand destruction” has become a priority not only to mitigate Peak Oil but also to mitigate global warming. The United States, with 5% of the world’s people, consumes (wastes) 25% of the world’s energy. How do you destroy demand? You collapse the economy. Homeless, unemployed “refugees” (what a cold, depersonalizing term) don’t buy gas, take trips, fly on airplanes or buy consumer goods (made with energy and requiring energy to operate). They don’t use air conditioning because they can’t afford it. They are the embodiment of Henry Kissinger’s infamous term “useless eaters,” a phrase from the Nazi vocabulary. If energy demand destruction, as acknowledged by the Bilderbergers and the CFR, is a priority, then the only – I repeat only – beast that must be tamed is the United States.
What happens when we run out of the poor and “minority” people whom our country has historically regarded as expendable – and the beast is still not satisfied?
The people in New Orleans and Mississippi are being sacrificed just as surely as the World Trade Center, Pentagon and airline victims were sacrificed on 9/11.
The most chilling thing I have heard is that hurricane Katrina fell on the thirteenth anniversary of Hurricane Andrew which devastated Florida in 1992. Hurricanes are named alphabetically. Andrew was the first tropical storm of 1992. Katrina was the eleventh of 2005 and the hurricane season is just beginning. There are more storms forming now. Some of them will most likely become very large hurricanes because water temperatures are so high in our dying oceans.
Go ahead. Tell me we’ve all been wrong about Peak Oil, about climate collapse, and the metastatic corruption of our government and economic system. Now it’s an easy bet and one that we will not have to wait long to settle. I’ll take your wager.
As New Orleans is showing us, and as Groucho Marx once said, “You bet your life!”
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
AMERICAN PROGRESS
Questions of Preparedness
Hurricane Katrina will likely be the worst natural disaster in our nation's history. If indeed thousands have perished, as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin predicted yesterday, it will also be the deadliest natural disaster in the United States in at least a century, since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. And as one Louisiana paper put it, "No one can say they didn't see it coming. " There have been "decades of repeated warnings about a breach of levees or failure of drainage systems that protect New Orleans from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain." It's "inappropriate to 'blame' anyone for a natural disaster," the Washington Post rightly observes. "But given how frequently the impact of this one was predicted, and given the scale of the economic and human catastrophe that has resulted, it is certainly fair to ask questions about disaster preparations ." Below, a few of those questions:
WHERE WERE THE PLANS FOR EMERGENCY DISASTER RELIEF?: The response to Hurricane Katrina "is exposing serious failures by government leaders and crisis planners before Katrina's arrival and flawed execution by relief agencies as the disaster unfolded," the Wall Street Journal reports this morning. Communication failures have been widespread, local officials "found they lacked critical equipment and materials to use in repairs if levees breached," and even "basic emergency management" has been lacking. For instance, former FEMA chief James Lee Witt told reporters yesterday that "in the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby." Now federal officials say a hospital ship won't leave its port in Baltimore until tomorrow, and isn't expected to arrive for seven days. "These things need to be planned and prepared for; it just doesn't look like it was," Witt said. Other reporters offered a chilling, first-hand perspective: "[A] striking feature of the situation there was the scant presence of civil authority. We did see police controlling some intersections but we saw no military authority and no Red Cross or other health authority. It did not appear that any disaster center had been established by the authorities to communicate with the public. There appeared to be very little, if any, response yet to the enormous challenge of housing, feeding and supporting a devastated population."
WHY WAS GULF COAST DISASTER PREPARATION SUCH A LOW PRIORITY?
The planning failures were not limited to the short-term emergency response. As Louisiana Rep. Bobby Jindal (R), one of three members of Congress whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, said yesterday: "If we had been investing resources in restoring our coast, it wouldn't have prevented the storm but the barrier islands would have absorbed some of the tidal surge." Unfortunately, the resources were not invested -- either in coastal restoration or the levees -- despite years of pleas. On June 8, 2004, the emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, complained about a lack of funding for the levees, a long stretch of which had sunk by four feet: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." The money never came through, and last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "essentially stopped major work " on the levee system that has now been breached. "It was the first such stoppage in 37 years." Additionally, federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana was "chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005 ," Knight-Ridder reports, even as "federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year." The cuts were strenuously opposed by Louisiana representatives, who "urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House ."
WHY WERE FEMA'S PREPAREDNESS MISSIONS DISMANTLED?: "The advent of the Bush administration in January 2001 signaled the beginning of the end for FEMA," one expert writes. In particular, the White House targeted the agency's "mitigation" programs -- "the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters" -- which emergency specialists consider "a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs." Shortly after coming into office, "key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, [were] slashed and tossed aside ." FEMA's Project Impact, "a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration," was canceled outright by the Bush administration on February 28, 2001 -- ironically, the very same day of the 6.8 magnitude Nisqually earthquake in Washington state, which provided one of the "best examples of the impact the program had" in protecting people. Indeed, FEMA employees were officially "directed not to become involved in disaster preparedness functions, since a new directorate (yet to be established) will have that mission."
WHY WERE INEXPERIENCED POLITICAL APPOINTEES PICKED TO HEAD FEMA?: Since taking office, President Bush "has appointed, in succession, his 2000 campaign manager and an Oklahoma lawyer whose only emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA was as an assistant city manager." According to one emergency expert, these officials "showed little interest in its work or in the missions pursued by the departed [former FEMA chief James Lee Witt]," who led emergency management in Arkansas and "reoriented FEMA from civil defense preparations to a focus on natural disaster preparedness and disaster mitigation." Indeed, Washington Monthly editor Daniel Franklin yesterday noted, "The difficulties of coordination seem to indicate we've returned to the bad old days where the FEMA administrator position is given away on the basis of political favor, rather than hard experience."
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Sugar Mtn Honeybee
Waiting for a name!!
Posts: 183
(9/13/05 12:53 pm)
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Re: You Bet Your Life
The best articles I've seen so far on Katrina have been at:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
Included in this article is the following section:
Quote:
Previous long term preparations and expectations:
The risk of devastation from a direct hit was well documented. The New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper ran a series on the risk in 2002. "It's only a matter of time before South Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. Billions have been spent to protect us, but we grow more vulnerable every day." New Orleans Times-Picayune June 23 - 27 June 2002 [8] (cited by 'Wall Street Journal Online, by Joe Hagan, 31 August 2005, p. A5). National Geographic ran a feature in October 2004 [9]. Scientific American covered the topic thoroughly in an October 2001 piece titled "Drowning New Orleans" [1![0]](http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/alien.gif) . Walter Williams did a serious short feature on it called "New Orleans: The Natural History", in which an expert said a direct hit by a hurricane could damage the city for six months [11]. CSO magazine ran an interview with the National Weather Service's Gary Woodall in which he listed six steps that citizens and company executives can take to be prepared for hurricanes such as this  .
In another section:
Quote:
Hurricane and flood preparedness in New Orleans has been an issue since the city's early settlement because of the city's location. New Orleans was built on a delta marsh, with many sections of the area below the level of neighboring water bodies.
There were many predictions of hurricane risk in New Orleans before the strike of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005[1]. The city lies under sea level, and its levee system was designed for hurricanes no more intense than category 3. Its natural defenses, the surrounding marshland and the barrier islands are dwindling. There have been various plans to mitigate or prevent such an event from being catastrophic, but none were carried out at the time of Katrina and the city had to rely on evacuation in case of a category 5 storm. No provisions were made to evacuate those who could not evacuate themselves.
Quote:
Criticism of government response to Hurricane Katrina primarily consisted of complaints of mismanagement and lack of leadership in the relief effort in response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, specifically in the delayed response to the flooding of New Orleans.
Within days of Katrina's August 29, 2005, landfall, public debate arose about local, state and federal governments' role in the preparations for and response to the storm. Criticism was prompted largely by televised images of visibly shaken and frustrated political leaders, and of residents who remained in New Orleans without water, food or shelter; and the deaths of several citizens of thirst, exhaustion, and violence days after the storm itself had passed. Others have alleged that race, class, and other factors perhaps even deliberately contributed to preventing help by others while delaying its own response (see Criticisms of FEMA below). The federal government's planning and response, under President Bush's leadership, initially faced the harshest criticism. Subsequently, criticism from politicians, activists, pundits and journalists of all stripes has been directed at the local, state and federal governments.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin harshly criticized Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco for delaying a request for aid after meeting with the President. The President's declaration of a Federal Disaster Area gives the federal government authority to intervene with any specific aids requested by a state governor; however, Governor Blanco asked for "24 hours to make a decision" in her first meeting with the President, even after the city had flooded. In fact, the federal government is not required to wait for state or local response to act. The December 2004 National Response Plan (NRP), the federal Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) most recent plan for coordinated federal response to disasters, confirms the Red Cross' status as a "primary agency" that will, under the oversight of FEMA and DHS, coordinate "federal mass care resources" to affected areas. Moreover, in a "catastrophic event," such as what befell New Orleans, the NRP directs FEMA to act on its own authority to quickly provide assistance and conduct emergency operations, bypassing state and local authorities if necessary [1].
The Mayor himself has also felt criticism for failing to implement his evacuation plan and for ordering residents to a shelter of last resort without any provisions for food, water, security, or sanitary conditions.
President Bush has faced criticism from across the political spectrum, for his personal performance before and after the disaster, over possible effects his policies of the previous four years may have had on emergency preparedness, and as the leader of an administration seen by many to have failed in this situation.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has raised other, more general public policy issues about emergency management, environmental policy, poverty, and unemployment. The discussion of both the immediate response and of the broader public policy issues may affect elections and legislation enacted at various levels of government.
Quote:
Criticisms of evacuation
Many critics have noted that while the local government gave a mandatory evacuation order on August 28, before the storm hit, they did not make provisions to evacuate the large numbers of citizens unable to evacuate themselves: evacuation was mainly left up to individuals to find their own way out of the city. Officials also did not take into account the fact that New Orleans has one of the highest poverty rates in the United States, at about 38%. These factors prevented many people from being able to evacuate on their own. Consequentially most of those stranded in the city are the poor, the elderly, and the sick.[3][4]
Karen Tumulty of Time magazine stated, "New Orleans allowed development for decades that actually weakened the barrier islands and encouraged erosion. It clearly did not have an adequate evacuation plan, even though the city was fully aware that over 100,000 people there don't have cars."
Authorities have refused to allow consular officials of Australia access to the affected areas, citing dangerous conditions.[5] Evacuation of tourists has been facilitated by foreign journalists. Canadian [6] and Japanese consular officials have, however, been able to visit.
[edit]
Provisions for the poor, elderly and those without automobiles
The mandatory evacuation called on August 28 made no provisions to evacuate homeless or low-income and carless households, as well as large numbers of elderly and the infirm. Officials knew that many residents of New Orleans lack cars. A 2000 census revealed that 27% of New Orleans households, amounting to approximately 120,000 people, were without privately owned transportation.
Aerial view of flooded New Orleans school buses.An image released by the Associated Press and heavily circulated on the Internet several days after the storm showed 205 New Orleans school buses in their flooded lots. Additionally, the city had access to over 300 buses attached to the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority. Why these resources were not immediately pressed into service during the mandatory evacuation of the city to get the poor, sick, and unwilling out of the city is not known.
Speculation ranges from claims of incompetence of city and state officials, to deliberate foot-dragging by FEMA as a result of its being folded into the Department of Homeland Security, to the inability to find qualified bus drivers working under increasingly hazardous conditions, to the fact that these buses were flooded and thus useless for any evacuation, to the fact that as schoolbuses they completely lacked facilities for the handicapped, the injured, or the aged.
It has been stated in evacuation order that, beginning at noon on August 28 and running for several hours, all city buses were redeployed to shuttle local residents to "refuges of last resort" designated in advance, including the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. The same article stated that FEMA prepositioned millions of MREs, millions of litres of water and truckloads of ice. While in light of the failure to get adequate supplies to the refuges it might have been better to move people completely out of the city, fewer could have been moved and they would have been exposed to unpredictable hazards from the hurricane.
One news account cited a lack of drivers as a reason why the buses were not utilized to remove those left behind; whether this was reasonable under the circumstances remains to be seen.
On the night of August 31st, the governor (Kathleen Babineaux Blanco) was begging FEMA and other federal authorities for transport without success.[7] The next day mayor Nagin complained that federal authorities wanted to use public school buses while he wanted Greyhound buses.[8] The same day, Governor Blanco issued an executive order where "she has in consultation with school superintendents, utilized public school buses for transportation of Hurricane Katrina evacuees."[9] On September 3 she ordered school superintendents to supply bus inventories.[1
Epistemologically, narratives at this point are bifurcated under disturbingly racial lines. 77% of white Americans blame New Orleans for its plight whereas only about one-quarter of black Americans do so. While the facts will be in dispute for years, we know now that New Orleans has an indication of deep racial division.
[edit]
Criticisms of emergency response
President Bush observes damage from Hurricane Katrina over New Orleans, August 31.Criticism of local and national government response is widespread in the media, as reports continued to show hunger, deaths and lack of aid.[11] More than two and a half days after the hurricane struck, police, health care and other emergency workers voiced concerns in the media about the absence of National Guard troops in the city for search and rescue missions and to control looting. Media reports have also criticized the fact that National Guard units are short staffed in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama because they are currently on a tour of duty in Iraq, including 3,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard's 256th Brigade.[12] The failure to immediately evacuate or re-supply New Orleans area hospitals and the lack of a visible FEMA presence in the city and surrounding area has raised concerns in the press.
Governors and other officials in several states have expressed surprise that they did not get formal requests for their National Guard troops until days after the hurricane struck. "We could have had people on the road Tuesday," said the commander of the Michigan Guard. Louisiana's Governor had accepted an offer of National Guard reinforcements from New Mexico on August 28, but this was not approved by the federal government until September 1, and the number of National Guard from other states in New Orleans when the hurricane hit was only 723.[13]
Jurisdiction issues
Whenever federal troops are deployed, there is reference to the Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. §1385, which prevents ordinary use of the federal military force, including National Guard troops on active federal duty, in support of local and federal law enforcement or in quelling riots or civil disorder. The National Guard remain under the control of the governor during ordinary times. The president can waive the requirement and assume control of the military in an emergency. However, in practice the President will not assume control of a state's National Guard or move federal troops into a state on a law and order mission until requested by the state's Governor. In addition, the Stafford Act states that the president cannot declare that a disaster exists in a state unless requested to do so by the state's governor, who must furnish information on the disaster and the steps the state has taken to resist or recover from it as part of the request.
Some Bush administration supporters contend that Louisiana Gov. Blanco did not request military assistance for several days after the hurricane hit.[14] However, Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, the head of the Department of Defense's Joint Task Force Katrina, indicated in a briefing on September 1 that the governors of Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states requested that the Pentagon establish local defense coordinating offices on Friday, August 26, and that the Army began operating in those states that day and the following weekend in preparation for the hurricane.[15] In addition, Gov. Blanco formally requested that the president declare a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 27, in a letter complying with the terms of the Stafford Act.[16]
[edit]
Presidential role
Senator John McCain enjoys a birthday cake with President George W. Bush on August 29, 2005.[edit]
Appearance
The image of President Bush playing a guitar presented to him by country singer Mark Wills in the early days of this devastation was called "Exhibit A for many liberal bloggers" in the opinion piece called American Caesar: Nero Fiddled while Rome burned because "He may find the comparison hard to shake. True, while Bush enjoyed his vacation and strummed his new guitar, a great city was being devastated by water rather than fire. And unlike the Emperor Nero, who was accused by the historian Suetonius of having deliberately started the fire that destroyed much of Rome in AD 64, no one is accusing President Bush of planning Hurricane Katrina. But the Bush administration deserves substantial blame for the scale of the catastrophe in New Orleans." Los Angeles Times
[edit]
Competing priorities
On Tuesday afternoon, August 30, President Bush attended a V-J Day commemoration ceremony at Coronado, California [17]. Starting the night before (Monday) [18], floodwaters overwhelmed levees protecting the city of New Orleans [19], greatly exacerbating the damage. The President rushed to the aid of Washington, D.C. and New York City following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which has invited comparisons in regards to his travel schedule following the levee collapses in New Orleans. News of flooding of the city was widely available by Tuesday morning [2 , with one account [21] reporting "At 9 a.m. CDT a levee breach was reported at Tennessee Street by CCTV operators of a local bank." and "At 11 a.m. the National Weather Service reported that a levee broke on the Industrial Canal, a 5.5-mile waterway that connects the Mississippi River to the Intracoastal Waterway, near the St. Bernard-Orleans parish line (Tennessee St.) and 3 to 10 feet of flooding was possible." These times are for Monday, August 29.
[edit]
Criticisms of approach
The New York Times described a 1 September speech by President Bush as "casual to the point of carelessness".[22] Bush was also criticised for not breaking off his vacation until Wednesday afternoon, more than a day after the Monday hurricane.[23] Others have noted that on August 28, the president telephoned Gov. Blanco before Katrina struck and urged a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans [24]; however, by that time the governor was already en route to a press conference to order a mandatory evacuation. [25]
Bush subsequently visited the Gulf Coast on Friday and was briefed on Hurricane Katrina. The president expressed enthusiasm in the pending reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, noting particularly, "...that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house — he's lost his entire house — there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
A report on Germany's ZDF television implied that some relief efforts were being staged to benefit the President's public image.[26]
I think there's a lot of finger-pointing in all directions, but the bottom line is this: Every agency involved COULD HAVE done better than they did. Also, New Orleans COULD HAVE done differently than mismanage the wetlands that would have absorbed some of the flood waters, but they didn't. Lots of warnings were issued BEFORE the fact, but went unheeded.
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