Hurrican Katrina - The Apathy of Bush Administration

What a nightmarish scenes Katrina has left behind?!!

And what an inefficient way it has been handled, to prevent the loss of life or dignity!

Whatever relief operations have been done so far are just an eyewash - the damage has already been done: to the lives of these victims, and to the confidence of american people in little bush's governance. When most of the soldiers and equipment are in Iraq on a useless mission, what else can he do than sit back and make some stupid statements like "the results are not acceptable", (as if it is not his responsibility to make things happen) or "we're going to help the people that need help" (when? it is too late already). May be that is what African-americans mean to him.


Here are some reactions:

"I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.


Transcript of radio interview with New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin

A Can't-Do Government - by Paul Krugman


"If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you've already seen the damage they've done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God's name were you thinking?"..."I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people." - Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem.

"Most cities have a hidden or not always talked about poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them. This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now. They were the ones less able to hop in a car and less able to drive off." - Spencer R. Crew, president and CEO of the national Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati.

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?"..."If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions." - Mark Naison, professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University, Bronx.

"Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino." - Martín Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts