prisonplanet.com

by Cornel West
It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.
What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: ‘You are on your own’. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action – the survival of the fittest. People said: ‘It looks like something out of the Third World.’ Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.
observor.guardian.co.uk

Source: HalTurnerShow.com

New Orleans, LA — Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall !

One diver, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw the burn marks and knew immediately what caused them. When he surfaced and showed the evidence to his superior, the on-site Coordinator for FEMA stepped-in and said “You are not here to conduct an investigation as to why this rupture occurred, but only to determine how best to close it.” The FEMA coordinator then threw the evidence back into the water and said “You will tell no one about this.”

At that point, the diver went back down to do more inspection of the levee. On the second dive, he secreted a small chunk of the debris inside his wet suit and later arranged for it to be sent to trusted military friends at a The U.S. Army Forensic Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Georgia for testing.

According to well placed sources, a military forensic specialist determined the burn marks on the cement chunks did, in fact, come from high explosives. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity said “We found traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111. This would indicate at least two separate types of explosive devices.”
cytations.blogspot.com

by Judith Moriarty
Take Boss – Hog, Police Chief, Arthur Lawson; of the City of Gretna that is across the bridge from New Orleans and remained dry. When citizens tried to escape to some semblance of normalcy, this bozo had the audacious gall (not surprising down there) to close the bridge to foot traffic. Two paramedics, the Bradshaw couple, visiting New Orleans, joined a group of people who had been turned out by the hotels they were staying at. When they tried to reach the Superdome they were turned back by National Guards.

Ms. Bradshaw stated that she asked, “What’s our alternative?” The guards told her that was their problem and that no, they did not have extra water to give them. As they made their way to the bridge in order to leave the city, armed Gretna (bedroom community to New Orleans) police formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Ms. Bradshaw stated on MSNBC Sept 10-05, that they began firing their weapons over their heads. When they asked police why they couldn’t cross the bridge, they said that the West Bank wasn’t going to become New Orleans. The Bradshaw’s said that there was no doubt in their minds, that because there were few whites in their group, with the majority being Black, that’s why they were refused help. When the Bradshaw’s then set up a camp for the some 90 people, the police came and took their food and water. This Hog – Boss Police Chief, Lawson, said on MSNBC, that Grenta, had no food or places for people to stay; that they were keeping people from crossing for their own protection! If you visit the website of Gretna; you’ll note that there are numerous schools, churches, and hotels. The police were allowing cars to pass. This is probably very alien to those who’ve never lived in the South or in a large city. When I lived in CT, there were these bedroom communities outside the large city where I lived. There were no Blacks, unless they were the maids or groundskeepers. When a veteran I knew, went back to visit the exclusive town, where he grew up, he told me a police cruiser followed him every bit of the way. Back from war and bedraggled and ill, there was no longer the pretense of flags – ribbons – or supporting the troops.

New Orleans will come back, but it will be absent the multitudes of poor folks and Black residents. They’ll have themselves a Mardi Gras theme town, complete with hotels and corporate businesses and we’ll be picking up the tab. It’ll be Disney World Times Square. We’ll be made to pick up the tab for decades of ineptness and incompetence; from the derelict levee system, to the barrier islands and marshes – all destroyed from years of oil and gas drilling, and 8000 miles of canals, dug through wetlands, by the Army Corps of Engineers. This disaster was made and created by man and allowed to happen – much like the Everglades, that we’re now being billed billions to restore. Hey, but Representative Baker of Baton Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Yep – good old God, decided to flood ONLY the poor sections of New Orleans, and protect the French Quarter – and exclusive/business parts of town. It’s just like these hypocritical – self -righteous prigs, to shrug and tell the folks, “Obviously you were the sinners in town – the ner’ do wells, and God kicked you all to the curb. Got problems go to Him about it.”

The Wall Street Journal reports, Sept 8 -05, that “The mostly African – American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there are scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white (isn’t God good – JM) and more affluent areas streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators.”
Full: rense.com

Mercenaries guard homes of the rich in New Orleans
Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city’s millionaires from looters.
The heavily armed men, employed by private military companies including Blackwater and ISI, are part of the militarisation of a city which had a reputation for being one of the most relaxed and easy-going in America.

After scenes of looting and lawlessness in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state and federal law enforcement officers, as well as 70,000 national guard troops and active-duty soldiers now based in the region.

Blackwater, one of the fastest-growing private security firms in the world, which achieved global prominence last year when four of its men were killed and their bodies mutilated in the Iraqi city of Falluja, has set up camp in the back garden of a vast mansion in the wealthy Uptown district of the city.

…”relaxed and easy-going…”? For who?

After weeks of intense Katrina coverage from the main press, LA TIMES guru and former CNN host Michael Kinsley divulges that CNN was coaching guests to artificially enhance emotions!

Kinsley writes:

“The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to ‘get angry.'”
drudgereport.com

Report from the Houston Astrodome

10:23: Joel just got removed. Almost arrested. Fox News is down on the floor. I’m in dome, hiding in seats. They’re allowing some media on the floor, not others.

10:31 Just met members of the Polish press, they are being stopped from entering floor. Says this is like the former USSR.

10:57 Raw transcript of comments by NOLA evacuee : “The 17th street levee was bombed by the Army Corps of Engineers to save the more valuable real estate in the city… to keep the French Quarter protected, the ninth ward was sacrificed… people are afraid to speak out… everyone who was near there heard the bombings… they bombed seven times. That’s why they didn’t fix the levees… 20 feet of water. Gators. People dying in water. They let the parishes go, not the city center. Tourist trap was saved over human life. A six year old girl was raped in here.. 9 year old boy killed. A man in the shower beaten. No hot food. No help for elderly.”
bellaciao.org

So they killed people in order to save deserted white neighborhoods.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Four people were shot and killed in partisan violence in the Mountain View community east of Jamaica’s capital, where fires and gunfights raged, police said on Thursday.

The violence began on Tuesday during a nationwide protest against rising prices, which was organized by the opposition Jamaica Labour Party and led to a virtual shutdown of commerce on the island.

A 71-year-old man was shot dead by a group of men during a dispute over an impromptu roadblock and police were trying to quell an ongoing dispute as his friends sought revenge.

Three other men were shot and killed during the disturbances in the Mountain View neighborhood that links the capital of Kingston with Norman Manley International Airport.

Police said four houses were set afire and burned to the ground and bombs were thrown into other homes.

Supporters of the ruling People’s National Party and the opposition party assigned themselves to sections of the community and have prevented each other from entering the other’s neighborhoods.

Scores of frightened residents fled the area and traffic to and from the airport was diverted onto lengthy detours.

The killings pushed Jamaica’s murder tally to 1,157, the highest ever recorded for the year to date. The nation of 2.7 million people had 1,469 murders last year and police said the annual toll could top 1,500 for the first time in Jamaica’s history.
nytimes.com

I have never heard the US Republicans referred to as the ‘ruling party’. Of course unruly and inscrutable ‘natives’ like the ones portrayed in this article need some sort of ruling party, right? This article is also a good example of bias by ommission. They begin by speaking of politically motivated killings and and up talking about the murder rate. It’s hard to get it from this article, but yesterday in Jamaica there was a general strike that shut the country down. For the Times, the big story was ‘partisan violence.’

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week that it didn’t want the news media taking photographs of the dead in New Orleans. A FEMA spokeswoman talked unconvincingly about the dignity of the dead. But the bizarre demand, a creepy echo of the ban on news media coverage of the coffins returning from Iraq, is simply the latest spasm of a gutted federal agency.

It’s not really all that surprising that the officials who run FEMA are stressing that all-important emergency response function: the public relations campaign. As it turns out, that’s all they really have experience at doing.
nytimes.com

WASHINGTON (AP) – The human brain may still be evolving. So suggests new research that tracked changes in two genes thought to help regulate brain growth, changes that appeared well after the rise of modern humans 200,000 years ago.

That the defining feature of humans – our large brains – continued to evolve as recently as 5,800 years ago, and may be doing so today, promises to surprise the average person, if not biologists.

“We, including scientists, have considered ourselves as sort of the pinnacle of evolution,” noted lead researcher Bruce Lahn, a University of Chicago geneticist whose studies appear in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“There’s a sense we as humans have kind of peaked,” agreed Greg Wray, director of Duke University’s Center for Evolutionary Genomics. “A different way to look at is it’s almost impossible for evolution not to happen.”
apnews.myway.com

This is good news: now we need a mutation, quick.

ATLANTA – Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: “What are we doing here?”

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters – his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week – a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Federal officials are unapologetic.

“I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country,” said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

The firefighters – or at least the fire chiefs who assigned them to come to Atlanta – knew what the assignment would be, Hudak said.

“The initial call to action very specifically says we’re looking for two-person fire teams to do community relations,” she said. “So if there is a breakdown [in communication], it was likely in their own departments.”

One fire chief from Texas agreed that the call was clear to work as community-relations officers. But he wonders why the 1,400 firefighters FEMA attracted to Atlanta aren’t being put to better use. He also questioned why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – of which FEMA is a part – has not responded better to the disaster.

The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for “austere conditions.” Many of them
came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.

“They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter. “We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.”

The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.
mosnews.com