Bush wil besparen...

[Pieterjan]

Bush wil besparen na orkanen

WASHINGTON - De Amerikaanse president George W. Bush heeft tot besparingen in de overheidsuitgaven opgeroepen om de heropbouw na de beide vernietigende orkanen Katrina en Rita te financieren.
Behalve de uitgaven voor de staatsveiligheid zullen alle sectoren en alle 115 regeringsprogramma’s onder de loep worden genomen, zei Bush vandaag in Washington. Tegelijkertijd moeten de getroffen staten begrijpen, dat er ook voor de overheid grenzen bestaan bij de financiering. De motor voor de wederopbouw wordt het particuliere bedrijfsleven.

De kosten voor het herstel van de openbare infrastructuur zoals wegen, bruggen, gebouwen, haven en dammen worden op minstens 200 miljard dollar (168 miljard euro) geraamd.

[Pieterjan]

Whatever you do, don't mention the war???
;)

[Pieterjan]

Helft stadspersoneel New Orleans ontslagen


In New Orleans heeft de burgemeester aangekondigd dat hij drieduizend stadsambtenaren zal ontslaan. Het gaat om ongeveer de helft van het personeel. De stad heeft na de orkanen Katrina en Rita te weinig geld om hen nog uit te betalen.

De afvloeiingen gebeuren in de loop van de maand. Burgemeester Ray Nagin eerde ook de toewijding en het professionalisme van het personeel, dat door de ramp zwaar op de proef werd gesteld.
,,We hebben tevergeefs naar een oplossing gezocht, maar we zijn gewoonweg niet in staat om het nodige budget te vinden om het aantal werknemers van de stad op het huidige niveau te houden'', zei Nagin.

Maar de problemen situeren zich niet alleen in New Orleans. Bestuurders in de hele staat Louisiana, waarvan New Orleans deel uitmaakt, lieten onlangs weten dat ze veel minder belasting ontvangen. De economische bedrijvigheid is immers fors afgenomen. Ook klaagden de functionarissen dat het federale agentschap voor rampenbestrijding (FEMA) te traag over de brug komt met hulpgelden.

Oud-president Bill Clinton riep deze week nog de regering-Bush op om deskundigen op het gebied van de hulpverlening snel van Washington over te brengen naar de staten die door de orkanen zijn getroffen. Clinton zei dat de FEMA wordt overstelpt met hulpvragen van de honderdduizenden gedupeerden.

Clinton staat samen met George Bush senior aan het hoofd van het Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund dat zich richt op hulpverlening voor de lange termijn aan de mensen die door Katrina zijn getroffen.

[Barst]

Wanted a leader for America

By Noam Chomsky


10/05/05 "ICH" -- -- AS THE survivors of Hurricane Katrina try to piece their lives back together, it is all the clearer that a long-gathering storm of misguided policies and priorities preceded the tragedy.


Government failures at home and the war in Iraq found a confluence in Katrina’s wake that graphically illustrates the need for fundamental social change, lest we suffer worse disasters in the future.

In a pre-9/11 report, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had listed a major hurricane in New Orleans as one of the three most likely catastrophes to strike the United States. The others: a terrorist attack in New York and an earthquake in San Francisco.

New Orleans had become an urgent priority at FEMA since January, when the agency’s now-departed director Michael Brown returned from touring the tsunami devastation in Asia.

"New Orleans was the No. 1 disaster we were talking about," Eric L. Tolbert, a former FEMA official, told The New York Times. "We were obsessed with New Orleans because of the risk."

A year before Katrina hit, FEMA conducted a successful simulated-hurricane drill for New Orleans, but FEMA’s elaborate plans were not implemented.

The war played a role in the failure. National Guard troops that had been sent to Iraq "took a lot of needed equipment with them, including dozens of high-water vehicles, Humvees, refuelling tankers and generators that would be needed in the event a major natural disaster hit the state," The Wall Street Journal reported. "A senior Army official said the service was reluctant to commit the 4th brigade of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Polk, because the unit, which numbers several thousand soldiers, is in the midst of preparing for an Afghanistan deployment."

Bureaucratic manoeuvring also trumped the risk of natural disaster. Former FEMA officials told The Chicago Tribune that the agency’s capabilities were "effectively marginalised" under President George W. Bush when the agency was folded into the Homeland Security Department, with fewer resources and extra layers of bureaucracy, a "brain drain" as demoralised employees left and a completely unqualified Bush political crony put in charge.

Once a "tier-one federal agency," FEMA now isn’t "even in the back seat," Eric Holdeman, director of emergency management in King County, Washington, told The Financial Times. "They are in the trunk of the Department of Homeland Security car."

Bush funding cuts in 2004 compelled the Army Corps of Engineers to reduce flood-control work sharply, including badly needed strengthening of the levees that protected New Orleans. Bush’s 2005 budget called for another serious reduction — a speciality of Bush-administration timing, much like the proposed sharp cut in security for public transportation right before the London bombings in July 2005.

A disregard for the environment was another factor in this perfect storm. Wetlands help reduce the power of hurricanes and storm surges, but Sandra Postel, a water-policy expert, wrote in The Christian Science Monitor that wetlands were "largely missing when Katrina struck," in part because "the Bush administration in 2003 effectively gutted the ‘no net loss’ of wetlands policy initiated during the administration of the elder Bush."

The human toll of Katrina is incalculable, especially among the region’s poorest citizens, but a relevant number is the 28-per cent poverty rate in New Orleans — more than twice the national rate. During the Bush administration the US poverty rate has grown, and welfare’s limited safety net has been weakened further.

The effects were so striking that even the right-wing media were appalled by the scale of the class-based and race-based devastation. While the media were showing vivid scenes of human misery, the back pages reported that Republican leaders wasted no time in "using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies," The Wall Street Journal reported.

Those agenda-promoting measures include suspending rules that require payment of prevailing wages by federal contractors and providing displaced schoolchildren with vouchers — another underhanded blow at the public-school system. They included lifting environmental restrictions, "waiving the estate tax for deaths in the storm-affected states" — a great boon for the population fleeing New Orleans slums — and in general making it clear once again that cynicism knows few bounds.

Lost in the flood is a concern for the needs of cities and for human services. The larger agenda of enhancing global domination and domestic concentrations of wealth and power takes precedence.

The images of suffering in Iraq, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, could hardly depict the consequences more dramatically.

Noam Chomsky, the author, most recently, of Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (Metropolitan Books, 2005), is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ICH, 05-10-2005