It is sadly ironic that having grown up and lived in the north east my entire life that I have never experienced a need for the national guard in my lifetime. A few months ago, I even heard some rumblings from state governors around the country that they were not prepared for local situations that would require deployment of their guard, because they were already deployed in Iraq. I have to be honest I paid it little or no attention at the time, because I figured it did not really effect me. Having watched the utter destruction by Hurricane Katrina of New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast this week on TV has made me rethink my naïveté.
According to the Army National Guard website the mission of the individual state National Guard is as follows: (http://www.arng.army.mil/about_us/aiding_america.asp)
“The Army National Guard exists in all 50 states, three territories and the District of Columbia. The state, territory or district leadership is the Commanders in Chief for each Guard. Their Adjutants General are answerable to them for the training and readiness of the units. At the state level, the governors reserve the ability, under the Constitution of the United States, to call up members of the National Guard in time of domestic emergencies or need.”
I don’t have confirmation of these numbers, but I heard the Louisiana National Guard, has 11, 000 soldiers on active duty, 8,000 of those are currently deployed in Iraq. Now my math shows that leaves about 3,000 men and woman left on the ground in the state of Louisiana to help assist with this natural disaster, which is the true mission of the National Guard as defined above. The mission statement says nothing about defending democracy and fighting a debatable war of terrorism half-way around the globe. However, our glorious draft dodging President has seen it fit to send these soldiers overseas and they are not around to do what they signed up for protecting the state. So the fundamental question is, why are they not in Louisiana doing their job?
As a strict Jeffersonian Libertarian, who believes that states have very specific constitutional rights and thus can refuse requests from the federal government when the request violates the constitutional rights of the state, I have an issue with the whole deployment since these soldiers of the Louisiana National Guard have dedicated themselves to the defense and protection of the their state, their homeland, and this is a clear violation of the second amendment, but as I said, that is another issue.
I am not saying that with a larger force the Louisiana National Guard, would have had a better chance to help prevent the chaos and anarchy that has erupted in the big easy, but I guess we will never know. It makes me question our reasons for being in Iraq in the first place, but again that is obviously another issue as well.
I am heart broken and sad seeing what is happening in the Gulf Coast and specifically in New Orleans, and knowing that the Big Easy may never be the same again. I have always had a fondness in my heart for New Orleans. It was a place where you could go to and know you were going to have fun. I think it was the only place I never wanted to live, simply because I liked visiting there. If I lived there, I would need to get a job, and it would be regular and normal. It would lose its allure and charm. It was always alright to go there and drink until you could no longer stand, to party like you had never partied before. I once drove there for Mardi-Gras, leaving LaGuardia Airport in a February blizzard, driving 21 hours straight through the night, getting out of the mini-van and feeling suprisingly not tired but rather that it was time to drink and have some fun. I could sleep later, but now that we were there, it was time to party. No other town I have been to has ever made me feel that way, and now it is potentially gone forever, flooded under 20 feet of water.
Worse yet, I feel for the people living in the Gulf Coast, whose homes were destroyed, whose business were lost and whose lives will probably never be the same. Some commentator on CNN said this has the potential to be this century’s dust bowl, a period in the 1930’s when farms in the southwest simply dried up and blew away. These people just got up and left Oklahoma and Texas leaving their dried and withered homes and farms with no money, no jobs and no where to go. The potential impact of this Hurricane is very similar with up to 100,000 homeless people, wandering the south for months, with no where to go, looking for work, hoping to find something or someplace to start over.
It is interesting to hear why people stayed in their homes; “We have been through hurricanes before”; “It never got this bad”, “We made it through Camille in 1969 and we are still here”. I guess this was worse. Now anarchy and chaos reigns with armed bandits looting and dead bodies floating everywhere in New Orleans and the Saints will be like the old 1899 Cleveland Spiders, probably never playing a home game this year. It will also be interesting to read the sociological studies done in the future to determine how society broke down and deteriorated in just a few days there. Overall it is Very Sad!
Wouldn’t it be interested in President Bush were forced to serve his last month in the Alabama National Guard now and really have to physically clean up this mess? Again, I think that is another issue.
If you want to help go to the American Red Cross website (http://www.redcross.org/) and make a donation. I assume that every charity and non-profit will be sending out emails, throwing up a tithing plates, sending around a charity basket and generally collecting donations to help the victims of this terrible disaster. If we learned anything from the Tsunami in Southeast Asia last December, is too many hands in the pot, spoils the broth. So many international agencies collected money it was impossible to tell how much was collected or where it was going. Let’s avoid that situation this time, and donate directly to the Red Cross, where they can and know how to put the donations to good use and will do so immediately.
My prayers go out to the victims of this disaster, and to all of the citizens of the United States that are now going to have to pay upwards of $3 and $4 for a gallon of gasoline, while I almost guarantee that big oil companies will show huge profits over the next year. Just a guess.
Buy shares in Sunoco, BP, Standard Oil (Exxon/Mobil) and Texaco now, as I am sure there stocks will rise and this next year will be very good for them.
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2 comments:
So many bloggs so little time. Great blogg.
I'm sure some people will say this is not a time to discuss politics... that we're in the midst of a national disaster, and that relief is of paramount importance. "How dare someone," they'll say "politicize this tragedy."
It's true that relief and rescue must be the number one goals, but it is our civic responsibility to shout loudly, and shout now, our dissatisfaction with the policies and actions that are making this disaster -- an unavoidable natural catastrophe -- much, much, much worse than it should be.
With a cadre of hyperbolic, bull-dogish conservative commentators protecting him, and with his handlers' strategy of never personally exposing the President to citizens who disagree with his policies, Mr. Bush has not been held accountable for his policies. His administration has been able to operate, unchecked, in an arrogant, short-sighed, myopic manner. Katrina must be a wake up call. This carte blanche afforded the President must end.
The article below, while written by a partisan, is factually accurate. It's also fairly mild in its assessment of what went wrong and what's going wrong.
The Bush administration needs to be held fully accountable for its role in the avoidable scope of this disaster.
Len
===
Katrina comes home to roost
President Bush is to blame for the scale of the disaster as a result of his administration's policies and actions
Sidney Blumenthal
Friday September 2, 2005
Guardian
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, the storm has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter, and hundreds reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.
A year ago the US 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, the Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Operated by the corps of engineers, levees and pumping stations were strengthened and renovated. In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers' request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration's additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate debated adding funds for fixing levees, but it was too late.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem - whose presses are underwater and can now only put out an online edition - has reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly has contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands around New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush promised a "no net loss" wetland policy, which had been launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed the approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The army corps of engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a study that concluded in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary - much less a category four or five - hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's council on environmental quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable", and boasted: "Everybody loves what we're doing."
"My administration's climate change policy will be science-based," President Bush declared. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the UN, reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy", and excised the climate change assessment from its annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive Report on the Environment, stating: "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment", the White House simply removed the line and all such conclusions. At the G8 meeting in Gleneagles this year, Bush stymied any common action on global warming. But scientists have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, producing more severe hurricanes.
In February 2004, 60 scientists warned in a statement, Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the US the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease..." Bush ignored the statement.
In the two weeks preceding the storm, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced it was postponing sale of the morning-after pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board.
The UN special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda as a result of pushing its evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence". The chief of the board of justice statistics in the justice department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops. He refused to concede and was forced to quit. When the army's chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7bn no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton, she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings.
On the day the levee burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech comparing the Iraq war to the second world war and himself to Franklin D Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own Streetcar Named Desire.
· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is author of The Clinton Wars
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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