As I’ve written about before (and here) Republicans and White House officials keep lying about the fact that there were no oil spills caused by Hurricane Katrina and Rita in an effort to convince the American public that more off-shore drilling is both a good idea and environmentally safe. Now we have Samuel Bodman, the head of the Department of Energy (DoE), the one man in the United States that should know the facts, lying to our faces that no oil spills or rigs were damaged by Katrina and Rita. It boggles the mind.
Overflowing rivers in Iowa and other Midwest states forced evacuations and disrupted the region’s economy on Friday with fears of worse to come from fragile levees and more rain.
A Cedar Rapids hospital was flooded and evacuated its patients after a levee break on the Cedar River turned the downtown area into a shallow lake. Thousands were forced to leave their homes in the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years [….]
Iowa Gov. Chet Culver said the damage to his state could cost billions of dollars. Scores of bridges spanning nine overflowing rivers have been swept away or weakened.
Olbermann on a nightly basis is trying to keep track of all the Bush scandals so we don’t have to. Last night he highlighted some of the more egregious violations of decency the Bush administration has brought on the public. They include the KBR "gang" rape case, CIA "snuff" tapes, and Hurrican Katrina.
The corps, which constructed the levee system overwhelmed during Hurricane Katrina, received 247 claims and faces nearly 500,000 more for damages and deaths that occurred in the hurricane’s aftermath, USA Today reported Monday.
One personal injury claim seeks $3 quadrillion, about 250 times the U.S. gross domestic product, and another resident in the heavily damaged New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward is seeking $6 trillion.
Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city’s public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.
The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.
First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.
Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city’s public services and spaces, most notably it’s homes, schools and hospitals.
Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.
Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here. And footage from yesterday’s police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.
So there you have it. I don’t have any words to express my anger.
At least 50,000 families are still living in FEMA trailers more than two years after Katrina. As I’ve written about many, if not most of these trailers have high enough levels of formaldehyde to cause people to become ill. Well according to CBS (from emails they obtained through actual reporting) the levels of formaldehyde is such that FEMA has prohibited its employees from even briefly entering them.
This despite the agency claiming "that it is still working on the formaldehyde problem." Well work a little harder would you. Is it any wonder that a party that campaigns on the belief that "government can’t do anything right," when they are actually running said government it doesn’t fucking work.
