News and Views you don't have to lose:
FEMA's hurricane plan for New Orleans didn't get ordered
Sep. 02, 2005 -- Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck.
Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called "a very good exercise." More than a million residents were "evacuated" in the tabletop scenario as 120-mile-an-hour winds and 20 inches of rain caused widespread flooding that supposedly trapped 300,000 people in the city.
FEMA wasn't able to secure buses sooner for the mass evacuation of New Orleans, a step anticipated by the hurricane disaster simulation conducted by federal, state and local emergency officials last year.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said, "There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible," "Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be their approach."
John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said he was bewildered by the slow FEMA response. "I'm a little confused as to why it took so long to get the military presence running convoys into downtown New Orleans," Copenhaver said.
Pleasant Mann, former head of the union for FEMA employees, who has been with the agency since 1988, said a change made by agency higher-ups last year added a bureaucratic layer that likely delayed FEMA's response to Katrina.
Before the change, a FEMA employee on site at a disaster could request that an experienced employee he knew had the right skills be dispatched to help him. But now that requested worker is first made to travel to a location hundreds of miles from the disaster site to be "processed," placed in a pool from which he is dispatched, sometimes to a place different from where he thought he was headed.
Pleasant said he knew of a case where a worker from Washington State was made to first travel to Orlando before he could go to Louisiana, losing at least a day. What's more, that worker was told he might be sent to Alabama, not Louisiana, after all.
source via Eliada Israel
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/politics/12549282.htm
Paramedics: Police Prevent People from Leaving New Orleans
Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, paramedics from California who were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans, detail their own experiences during and after Katrina. Their reports show that official relief efforts were callous, inept, and racist.
A group of 200 New Orleans citizens organized ourselves, they marched the 2-3 miles to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge. It now began to pour down rain.
As they approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before they were close enough to speak, the sheriffs began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of people inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation.
They questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Source: Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, paramedics from California who were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090805A.shtml
Comment: I think the "Gretna sheriffs" are actually members of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office. I think the reference to "West Bank" refers to the city on the other side of the Mississippi River or Jefferson Parish which is actually south of the Superdome.
Jefferson Parish map http://www.jpso.com/jp-map2.htm
March 7, 2002 - Corps of Engineers' Civilian Chief Ousted
Parker Resigns After Openly Questioning Bush's Proposed Spending Cuts
Michael Parker, the recently appointed leader of the Army Corps of Engineers, was abruptly forced to resign yesterday for failing to defend President Bush's proposed budget cuts.
Parker, a former House member from Mississippi who was confirmed as assistant Army secretary for civil works five months ago, was the first major administration official ousted since Bush took office. He had made no secret of his disdain for the Office of Management and Budget's efforts to rein in the Corps, and recently told a sympathetic House committee that he had requested $2 billion more than the OMB proposed in the president's budget. At a Senate hearing, he questioned the administration's decision to fund no new Corps projects, adding that he did not have a "warm and fuzzy feeling" for OMB officials.
http://www.washingtonpostcom/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A51566-2002Mar6¬Found=true
Aug. 31, 2005 -- A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in U.S. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut the Corps of Engineers' request for holding back the waters of New Orleans' Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the Corps to impose a hiring freeze.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/31/disaster_preparation/index_np.html
Promoting the common good is the central role of government
A summary of the Commentary by George Lakoff
September 6, 2005 -- Katrina...(snip) was when the usually invisible people suddenly appeared in all the anguish of their lives -- the impoverished, the old, the infirm, the kids and the
low-wage workers with no cars, TVs, or credit cards. They showed up on
America's doorsteps, entered the living rooms and stayed. Katrina will not go
away soon, and she has the power to change America.
The Bush administration is busy framing it in its own way: bad
things just happen, it's no one's fault; the federal government did the best
it could -- the problem was at the state and local level; we'll rebuild and
everything will be okay; the people being shipped out will have better lives
elsewhere, and jobs in Wal-Mart!
http://www.alternet.org/story/25099
Philanthropic foundations and the CIA
In her book THE CULTURAL COLD WAR, Frances Stoner Saunders recalled how the Ford Foundation collaborated with the CIA in the past--on behalf of the Ultra-Rich families of the U.S. Establishment's power elite.
"The use of philanthropic foundations was the most convenient way to pass large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source. By the mid-1950s, the CIA's intrusion into the foundation field was massive. Although figures are not available for this period, the general counsel of a 1952 Congress committee appointed to investigate US foundations concluded that `An unparalleled amount of power is concentrated increasingly in the hands of an interlocking and self-perpetuating group. Unlike the power of corporate management, it is unchecked by stockholders; unlike the power of government, it is unchecked by the people; unlike the power of the churches, it is unchecked by any firmly established canons of value.' In 1976, a Select Committee appointed to investigate US intelligence activities reported on the CIA's penetration of the foundation field by the mid-1960s: during 1963-6, of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164 foundations, at least 108 involved partial or complete CIA funding. More importantly, CIA funding was involved in nearly half the grants made by these 164 foundations in the field of international activities during the same period.
"`Bona fide' foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie were considered `the best and most plausible kind of funding cover.' A CIA study of 1966 argued that this technique was `particularly effective for democratically run membership organizations, which need to assure their own unwitting members and collaborators, as well as their hostile critics, that they have genuine, respectable, private sources of income.' Certainly, it allowed the CIA to fund`a seemingly limitless range of covert action programs affecting youth groups, labor unions, universities, publishing houses, and other private institutions from the early 1950s."
Shortly after Allen Dulles was to become Director of Central Intelligence, John McCloy became the new president of the Ford Foundation McCloy created an administrative unit within the Ford Foundation specifically to deal with the CIA. Headed by McCloy and two foundation officers, this three-man committee had to be consulted every time the CIA wanted to use the foundation, either as a pass-through, or as cover. With this arrangement in place, the Ford Foundation became officially engaged as one of those organizations the CIA was able to mobilize for political warfare.
After John F. Kennedy's assassination, McCloy was appointed to the Warren Commission.
McGeorge Bundy, became president of the Ford Foundation in 1966 (coming straight from his job as Special Assistant to the President in Charge of National Security.
In her 1982 book ROOTED IN SECRECY: THE CLANDESTINE ELEMENT IN AUSTRALIAN POLITICS by Joan Coxsedge noted that "the Ford Foundation" also "took over the funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom after its CIA cover was blown in 1966."
The percentage of public broadcasting revenue coming from foundations has doubled in the past two decades. And in the world of nonprofit media, a few million a year goes a long way...
http://www.questionsquestions.net/feldman/feldman07.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
Sep. 02, 2005 -- Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck.
Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called "a very good exercise." More than a million residents were "evacuated" in the tabletop scenario as 120-mile-an-hour winds and 20 inches of rain caused widespread flooding that supposedly trapped 300,000 people in the city.
FEMA wasn't able to secure buses sooner for the mass evacuation of New Orleans, a step anticipated by the hurricane disaster simulation conducted by federal, state and local emergency officials last year.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said, "There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible," "Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be their approach."
John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said he was bewildered by the slow FEMA response. "I'm a little confused as to why it took so long to get the military presence running convoys into downtown New Orleans," Copenhaver said.
Pleasant Mann, former head of the union for FEMA employees, who has been with the agency since 1988, said a change made by agency higher-ups last year added a bureaucratic layer that likely delayed FEMA's response to Katrina.
Before the change, a FEMA employee on site at a disaster could request that an experienced employee he knew had the right skills be dispatched to help him. But now that requested worker is first made to travel to a location hundreds of miles from the disaster site to be "processed," placed in a pool from which he is dispatched, sometimes to a place different from where he thought he was headed.
Pleasant said he knew of a case where a worker from Washington State was made to first travel to Orlando before he could go to Louisiana, losing at least a day. What's more, that worker was told he might be sent to Alabama, not Louisiana, after all.
source via Eliada Israel
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/politics/12549282.htm
Paramedics: Police Prevent People from Leaving New Orleans
Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, paramedics from California who were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans, detail their own experiences during and after Katrina. Their reports show that official relief efforts were callous, inept, and racist.
A group of 200 New Orleans citizens organized ourselves, they marched the 2-3 miles to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge. It now began to pour down rain.
As they approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before they were close enough to speak, the sheriffs began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of people inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation.
They questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Source: Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, paramedics from California who were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090805A.shtml
Comment: I think the "Gretna sheriffs" are actually members of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office. I think the reference to "West Bank" refers to the city on the other side of the Mississippi River or Jefferson Parish which is actually south of the Superdome.
Jefferson Parish map http://www.jpso.com/jp-map2.htm
March 7, 2002 - Corps of Engineers' Civilian Chief Ousted
Parker Resigns After Openly Questioning Bush's Proposed Spending Cuts
Michael Parker, the recently appointed leader of the Army Corps of Engineers, was abruptly forced to resign yesterday for failing to defend President Bush's proposed budget cuts.
Parker, a former House member from Mississippi who was confirmed as assistant Army secretary for civil works five months ago, was the first major administration official ousted since Bush took office. He had made no secret of his disdain for the Office of Management and Budget's efforts to rein in the Corps, and recently told a sympathetic House committee that he had requested $2 billion more than the OMB proposed in the president's budget. At a Senate hearing, he questioned the administration's decision to fund no new Corps projects, adding that he did not have a "warm and fuzzy feeling" for OMB officials.
http://www.washingtonpostcom/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A51566-2002Mar6¬Found=true
Aug. 31, 2005 -- A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in U.S. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut the Corps of Engineers' request for holding back the waters of New Orleans' Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the Corps to impose a hiring freeze.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/31/disaster_preparation/index_np.html
Promoting the common good is the central role of government
A summary of the Commentary by George Lakoff
September 6, 2005 -- Katrina...(snip) was when the usually invisible people suddenly appeared in all the anguish of their lives -- the impoverished, the old, the infirm, the kids and the
low-wage workers with no cars, TVs, or credit cards. They showed up on
America's doorsteps, entered the living rooms and stayed. Katrina will not go
away soon, and she has the power to change America.
The Bush administration is busy framing it in its own way: bad
things just happen, it's no one's fault; the federal government did the best
it could -- the problem was at the state and local level; we'll rebuild and
everything will be okay; the people being shipped out will have better lives
elsewhere, and jobs in Wal-Mart!
http://www.alternet.org/story/25099
Philanthropic foundations and the CIA
In her book THE CULTURAL COLD WAR, Frances Stoner Saunders recalled how the Ford Foundation collaborated with the CIA in the past--on behalf of the Ultra-Rich families of the U.S. Establishment's power elite.
"The use of philanthropic foundations was the most convenient way to pass large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source. By the mid-1950s, the CIA's intrusion into the foundation field was massive. Although figures are not available for this period, the general counsel of a 1952 Congress committee appointed to investigate US foundations concluded that `An unparalleled amount of power is concentrated increasingly in the hands of an interlocking and self-perpetuating group. Unlike the power of corporate management, it is unchecked by stockholders; unlike the power of government, it is unchecked by the people; unlike the power of the churches, it is unchecked by any firmly established canons of value.' In 1976, a Select Committee appointed to investigate US intelligence activities reported on the CIA's penetration of the foundation field by the mid-1960s: during 1963-6, of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164 foundations, at least 108 involved partial or complete CIA funding. More importantly, CIA funding was involved in nearly half the grants made by these 164 foundations in the field of international activities during the same period.
"`Bona fide' foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie were considered `the best and most plausible kind of funding cover.' A CIA study of 1966 argued that this technique was `particularly effective for democratically run membership organizations, which need to assure their own unwitting members and collaborators, as well as their hostile critics, that they have genuine, respectable, private sources of income.' Certainly, it allowed the CIA to fund`a seemingly limitless range of covert action programs affecting youth groups, labor unions, universities, publishing houses, and other private institutions from the early 1950s."
Shortly after Allen Dulles was to become Director of Central Intelligence, John McCloy became the new president of the Ford Foundation McCloy created an administrative unit within the Ford Foundation specifically to deal with the CIA. Headed by McCloy and two foundation officers, this three-man committee had to be consulted every time the CIA wanted to use the foundation, either as a pass-through, or as cover. With this arrangement in place, the Ford Foundation became officially engaged as one of those organizations the CIA was able to mobilize for political warfare.
After John F. Kennedy's assassination, McCloy was appointed to the Warren Commission.
McGeorge Bundy, became president of the Ford Foundation in 1966 (coming straight from his job as Special Assistant to the President in Charge of National Security.
In her 1982 book ROOTED IN SECRECY: THE CLANDESTINE ELEMENT IN AUSTRALIAN POLITICS by Joan Coxsedge noted that "the Ford Foundation" also "took over the funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom after its CIA cover was blown in 1966."
The percentage of public broadcasting revenue coming from foundations has doubled in the past two decades. And in the world of nonprofit media, a few million a year goes a long way...
http://www.questionsquestions.net/feldman/feldman07.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
posted by T. Scott Brineman | 10:33 AM
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