by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Monday, I, for one, breathed a sigh of relief since it appeared the Katrina had missed the direct hit on New Orleans. I felt for the folks in Mississippi and Alabama who were getting tromped on by the Category 4 hurricane, but was relieved that the bigger target had been missed...until Tuesday. What has happened on our Gulf Coast these past six days is an indictment of our government, our political leaders of all stripes and our society as a whole.

• It took one day for aid to begin to reach the tsunami victims bordering the Indian Ocean. It took four days for any organized relief efforts to reach our Gulf Coast.
• The levees protecting New Orleans and its environs are built on a river delta, and that means they are built on silt which is, by definition, soft and impermanent. Said levees are constantly sinking into this silt (the levees, therefore, need constant maintenance/rebuilding.) Over the past few years, the federal funds made available for this purpose have been shrinking. In the most recent budget, the Army Corps of Engineers received something around 20% of what they said was needed.
• 28% of the population of New Orleans has income below the Federal poverty level benchmark. This means that these people do not have the personal resources needed to establish an emergency fund or to stockpile emergency supplies. When the order to evacuate the city came, this 28% was, for the most part, unable to comply.
• Of this 28% of the population, 85% are Black.
• Only 46% of the "poor" population have a car, and that means something with 4 wheels and an engine that will turn over: It does not mean a reliable vehicle capable of traveling one hundred miles or more in heavy traffic.
• While everybody in New Orleans has suffered losses, this quartile of the population endured disproportionate physical suffering.
• President Bush has flat out lied to the American people in a number of instances.
• He stated in front of the television cameras that the U.S. had adequate resources to deal with both this disaster and the war in Iraq. However, both his budget requests and the obvious disorganization in the government when it actually had a disaster to deal with prove this is a lie.
• Again, in front of TV cameras, he stated that this was an unforeseen event when, in actuality, there have been numerous published works on this subject which predicted pretty much this exact event. This was, in fact, a predicted event where the only unknown was the "when". We learned that final part on Tuesday last.
• The city and state governments were just as culpable as the Feds in both the lack of planning for getting the population out of harm's way and the lack of planning for the response to such an event.

The next big question mark facing the entire nation is how bad will the shockwaves rippling (ripping) through our society/economy be? The dramatic rise in the cost of petroleum based energy is going to adversely effect almost every sector of the economy. The loss of at least 1,000,000 jobs along the immediate track of the hurricane will also have a national impact. I am not overly optimistic about our immediate future; the "recession" word comes to mind, and even that may eventually prove to be too mild.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005