No reply from FEMA

[harmony]

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10789636/from/RS.5/

a week or more passed and fema didnt help oklahoma and i wonder if they screwed up in new orleans too- i think they did

[patty]

YA KNOW HARMONY I HAVE TO AGREE...FEMA HAS SKREWED UP ALL OVER THE PLACE..NOT JUST OKLAHOMA AND NOLA....

[shirl]

harmony said:

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10789636/from/RS.5/

a week or more passed and fema didnt help oklahoma and i wonder if they screwed up in new orleans too- i think they did

FEMA, screw up? You bet your bottom dollar they screw up at every turn. During Katrina, it was FEMA who turned away trucks from WalMart bringing food and water to the evacuees at the Marrero shelter in Jefferson Parrish. It was FEMA, who put up their own communications towers in New Orleans and disabled the land lines and cell phone lines making communications impossible from outside the area. It's FEMA who said, "if you relocate out of New Orleans, we'll pay your rent for one year. " Now the cut off date for that rent assistance may be as soon as March 1st.

Could FEMA let down Oklahoma? Well, in my circle, "FEMA" stands for their attitude: F*** EM All.

[cynthia]

shirl said:

Well, in my circle, "FEMA" stands for their attitude: F*** EM All.

F***EM All is a term usually regularly by our esteemed "President", and quoted by White House staffers, too. Sort of a personal motto.

[Gerald]

Remember the Pres. say
``Your doin a heck of a job Brownie`` then 2 days later he was fired or quit. Take your pick. I saw Tom Browkal
( the last news anchor of nbc news.. and I know I miss spelled his name) say on the Charlie Rose show...
``Micheal Brown was not qualified to be a manager at Wal-Mart.``...... this has been the trend of the calaber of people in the Bush Adm. the last 6 yrs. in every instance has been a Disaster. If the flood in New Orleans had been handled differently....WELL.. YOU KNOW...However the good die young. I have had to learn to deal with that.

[cynthia]

Gerald said:

WELL.. YOU KNOW...However the good die young. I have had to learn to deal with that.

I suspect that both good and bad die young, it's just that the bad go with far less sense of tragedy and mourning.

[shirl]

cynthia said:

shirl said:

Well, in my circle, "FEMA" stands for their attitude: F*** EM All.

F***EM All is a term usually regularly by our esteemed "President", and quoted by White House staffers, too. Sort of a personal motto.

Cynthia:
F***EM All is a term "I" regularly use in regards to our "President" and his current administration LOL

[Maureen Cusa]

Ya know, I had an argument with one of my clients who works for FEMA and she strongly dissagreed with me, of course. And I told her about Barry and she said we worked around the clock and she didn't want to hear from me. I was fuming, how could they pat themselves. She said to me she didn't want to hear another word about the bad stuff about them. But I told her I'm sorry,many people lost lives sencelessly. What happened out there, was horrible and you people didn't work hard enough. O f course I haven't seen her since and nor do I wish to. She knew how I felt. Love Maureen

[cynthia]

I suspect it wasn't lack of effort on the part of FEMA employees, but rather the organisation from the top down was badly run. Policy rather than effort was at fault, in fact, poor planning and organisation creates MORE work for the workers as they fire-fight and chase their tails.

[Suzanne]

I'm sure the FEMA employees worked their butts off and were as disappointed and frustrated as we are and I think the organization itself was a mess starting at the top. Remember NOLA is also at fault. They had no plans either or ineffective ones. If the levees were maintained as they should have been Barry would be in LA now (hopefully).

Things could have and should have been so different....... :-(

[shirl]

Maintaining the levees wasn't even viable since Bush aka the Chimp in the White House, cut 72 million dollars from the state of Louisianna's federal emergency funds in 2004. Some FEMA people were good and others were outright criminals in what they did down there.

I'm sorry to hear that someone had the audicity to tell someone grieveing, "i don't want to hear about the bad things"...they need to; so that autrocity never occurs again anywhere else on their watch.

How dumb was some of planning of FEMA? Remember when I said they turned the food and water trucks away from the shelt in Marrerro? FEMA thought they'd be John Wayne and bring 50 cases of cranberry juice concentrate to the shelter....guess what? No water to make it with.

[harmony]

infowars site with radio talked about it

if true its scary

www.infowars.net/Pages/Sept05/050905New_World_Orleans.htm

click listen live at top left

not sure if i beleive it all

[Gerald]

Fema is at fault for alot of what happened in NOLA.
However it was GWB who put Micheal Brown in charge.
It was GWB who did not give the money in recent Yrs.
to update the leeves. These are complex issues and GWB cannot grasp them. He is a very simple minded man, like giving people nicknames. I don`t think when he leaves office that he will ever be asked his opinion
about anything. He will be leaving the USA in a disaster from the way he found it. I really can`t believe anyone would want the job of Pres. after the way he has messed up the world. Remember the Billy Gilman song,
there is a lyric `` WE NEED HELP DOWN HERE ON EARTH`` this has never been truer since the Bushes got into Washington.

[harmony]

i like billy gilman but never heard the song

[tiedyegal]

Harmony,
Thanks for the link to the article, and it does a really good job of outlining a lot of what happened down there, and what went wrong, and why, and why all of us should be worried about the future implications about how this disaster was handled. Exactly right with the posts on here about what happened to FEMA with being put under Homeland Security, and with the funding, and putting "Brownie" in charge of it.

The bigger story here, and it's lost on most people because the press simply does not report on it is what the GOP has done to our government. They detest the idea that government should help anyone with anything. They consider all government programs "welfare", and that includes things like Social Security, Medicaid, disaster relief, job works packages, and anything that heaven forbid gives either the poor, or the working people of this country a leg up, and heaven forbid the rich or corporations of this country have to pay their fare share in taxes. George Will last week on ABC had the audacity to call the pension plans paid by Ford "a welfare state". If that comment does not speak volumes as to what these snobs think of anyone who actually has to work for a living I don't know what does. They hate the poor, and the only good poor person to these people is a dead one, and if you actually work for a company and give them 30 years of your life and would like your pension to be paid, well, you're a welfare recipient and shame on you.

They intentionally dismantled FEMA under Bush because they despise it. They've also put corporate hacks in charge of every single segment of government that they possibly could. Need a guy to watch over safety for coal miners, put a corporate coal guy in charge who will give industry a pass and loosen regulations. Need someone to look out for OSHA laws, put the son of the guy who helped get you elected on the SCOTUS and give him a job to oversee that department when he's done nothing but fight as a lawyer to strip away at protections for workers. Need someone to be in charge of the EPA, put the wife of someone who works for one of the biggest polluters on one of the biggest Superfund cleanup sites, and make sure the company never pays for the site to be cleaned up, and it gets dumped on the working class and tax payers.

FEMA is just another case of a systemic problem with the Bush administration. They put corporate hacks in charge of departments that have the opposite agenda of the departments that they're running, and do everything they can to wreck those very departments. It's been going on since he came into office, and only once New Orleans drowned has anyone even given it a glitch of notice. That's a d**ned shame, and one that speaks volumes for how lame our press is in this country. Read Molly Ivins book called Bushwhacked if you want to get a real idea of just what this man has done, and how what happened in New Orleans should have really been no surprise to anyone who's followed what this man has done since he's come into office. It's part of a huge pattern, and who knows what the next thing to blow up will be with who's left behind, and the public will again act shocked, and the news will again not do its job.

[harmony]

fema is dismantled?i think its there-they just spend time on wrong projects or mismanage money

they gave out 2000 a piece to people but many that didnt deserve the money got money

i saw senator murtha on 60 minutes maybe he will get elected..hes sick of the war
bush bombing those people in pakistan on friday or other day was stupid

i guess states should handle their own afairs moreso ,,i also think it was stupid of nagin not to use his buses to evacuate

a city below sea level needs a d**e or a quick escape plan or both

i wish i lived in denmark or sweden maybe

[tiedyegal]

Of course FEMA had mismanaged the money given out when they're being de-funded, and there are people who will cheat the system, and the system is broken when there aren't enough there to manage it, or oversee it to make sure the cheats don't get away with it. It's also a huge problem when you've got people who used to run it like Brownie's former boss, who turned lobbyist, and decided to go into the business of helping people get contracts down there and show them how to game the system. Then there are the little cheats, like you brought up, who will always take advantage of something if they can.

I don't think Murtha is up for re-election this year and he sure as hell won't be running for anything besides his House seat, and he's not running for President, and that has nothing to do with why he's speaking out. He's spent countless hours visiting at these military hospitals, and he was a war hawk, and he sees us messing up, and is sick of it, and has been brave enough to put up with the smears to stick his neck out to come out against how the war has been handled, and feels we need to get the hell out of there in the next six months, and in a way that won't get our troops killed and still have us there on the side lines in case things go to hell. BushCo is in the process of trying to Swift Boat the guy right now, and I don't think they'll get away with it with this one. They tried to call out the Gannon Gay News Network to discredit him, and I think it won't work when they have to get some bitter guy who lost to him in an election in a landslide to come out and smear him, and that's all they've got.

The CIA messed up very badly in Pakistan, and we're going to have hell to pay for it. So glad to see we're spreading democracy in that part of the world, and making them love us.

The Nagin issue with the busses is a moot point, since they didn't have anyone to drive them. I thought Homeland Security was supposed to be so worried about how they'd handle an attack on any city in this country that all that money dumped in there would help protect us. Since they wasted the money on ridiculous stuff, and could not handle what happened in New Orleans that they had warning on, I think we've been sold a bill of goods, and it's bigger than a city's resources or their ability to handle something like what happened down there, so it's not a local problem. It's a national problem, and it's one they've wasted our tax dollars on for local pork in po-dunk counties that had little threat of a terrorist ever hitting them, but they had their people scared to death, and they wasted our money on that big time.

[shirl]

harmony said:

they gave out 2000 a piece to people but many that didnt deserve the money got money

Not every evacuee got the FEMA checks and those who did are being told now they have to repay the money. I still have friends who are displaced in shelters and other places who can't get dime one to help them get out nor will the insurance companies pay up on the damages because homes were "damaged by flood waters and you have hurricane insurance"...figure that cluster f*** out.

Cab drivers were gouging people to get to the shelters, some charging 100 dollars a person to go over the bridge. Some bus drivers were charging 85 dollars to get out of New Orleans. Traffic was bottlenecked on the highways and people had to turn around and figure out another direction. The bridge was closed off to people trying to cross it on foot.

New Orleans was an investors dream...if gets flooded and destroyed, only the rich can come back and build and prosper....but there's a special place for them and Bush in the afterworld, too.

[harmony]

you say noone was there to drive the buses? well id say they should have had volunteers

i live in a town where large %%people voulteer for all sorts of stuff,picking up trash on the bike trail the park, tutoring,cleaning up disabled apratments anything you can think of

id think at least half of the drivers would have been there in new orleans to help and to get out themselves

not a very prepared city

and i guess bush and clinton both cut back funds for diike
60 minutes said murtha is anti war but hilery and kerrey arent saying much about war

i hope people organize for a third party maybe

i like the libertarians sort of because theyd say let locals handle their own affairs and tax less but i like welfare programs for the poor otherwise id vote for liberatirians

ron paul is an ex lib turned repub and hes ok maybe

[Gerald]

I know what happened in NOLA is different than 911.
But is it not Ironic that $2000 dollars is ok for poor people and The workers in the World Trade center rec.
millions for each family. It reminds me of a Drew Carey
show I saw once where Mrs. Louder offered Mimi like
640.00 to drop a law suit and she acceped. Then she asked Mrs. Louder why she quoted the figure 640. Mrs.
Louders reply was `` We have spent millions of dollars on research that says 640.00 sounds like alot of money to poor people. Now the people of New Orleans and other Gulf coast area have to try to put their lives back
together with 2000. That equates to one months rent and utitlies hook ups and payment for 30 days.
Also Oprha Winfrey said about the World trade center familys rec. million of dollars ..... how do they get that kind of money. It is not like the won the Lottery. And I feel she is right.