This is not what democracy looks like
I'm still catching up after my hospital hiatus so I've been blogging about the recovery efforts this morning at the DetNews. Now I find today's WaPo reporting another reason for the delay in recovering the dead was due to bickering over who was going to pay the private contractor, FEMA or the state of Louisiana.
In the meantime, some of the 68,000 troops and 21 ships will be leaving the area in weeks rather than months. I assume this number doesn't include the thousands of FEMA workers, private groups who have pitched in and out-of-state law enforcement and emergency personnel who have also volunteered in the area. With all these people, it took almost ten days to rescue about 8000 residents in NOLA, many reported removed at gunpoint, and to keep control of what couldn't be more than a couple of hundred looters that might have remained in the city?
They couldn't spare a unit to recover the bodies as they went along, instead of just marking the buildings? The inefficiency is breathtaking and it all centers around awarding fat contracts to private companies favored by the administration. Is this America or Baghdad? How sick is it to turn human tragedy into another feeding frenzy at the pork barrel trough?
As for the living survivors of NOLA, (via Grumpy Old Man who has his own take on the preznit), Andrew W. Griffin brings us news I hadn't seen on the plight of the displaced. Blogging from Louisiana, he has more tales of evacuees being locked into virtual concentration camps while being denied free movement and has other posts at his Spelunking Through the Chaos that note 1000 evacuees have been sent to an army base in Puerto Rico and the Mexican Army is operating on American soil with the full consent of our government, confiscating legally owned weapons from US citizens.
Will we have to wait until the tanks are rolling down every street in America before the kool-ade drinkers snap out of their stupor and realize they're supporting a wanna-be dictator and his budding police state? It simply boggles the mind.
In the meantime, some of the 68,000 troops and 21 ships will be leaving the area in weeks rather than months. I assume this number doesn't include the thousands of FEMA workers, private groups who have pitched in and out-of-state law enforcement and emergency personnel who have also volunteered in the area. With all these people, it took almost ten days to rescue about 8000 residents in NOLA, many reported removed at gunpoint, and to keep control of what couldn't be more than a couple of hundred looters that might have remained in the city?
They couldn't spare a unit to recover the bodies as they went along, instead of just marking the buildings? The inefficiency is breathtaking and it all centers around awarding fat contracts to private companies favored by the administration. Is this America or Baghdad? How sick is it to turn human tragedy into another feeding frenzy at the pork barrel trough?
As for the living survivors of NOLA, (via Grumpy Old Man who has his own take on the preznit), Andrew W. Griffin brings us news I hadn't seen on the plight of the displaced. Blogging from Louisiana, he has more tales of evacuees being locked into virtual concentration camps while being denied free movement and has other posts at his Spelunking Through the Chaos that note 1000 evacuees have been sent to an army base in Puerto Rico and the Mexican Army is operating on American soil with the full consent of our government, confiscating legally owned weapons from US citizens.
Will we have to wait until the tanks are rolling down every street in America before the kool-ade drinkers snap out of their stupor and realize they're supporting a wanna-be dictator and his budding police state? It simply boggles the mind.
posted by Libby Spencer at 12:58 PM
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