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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (37041)	9/5/2005 4:24:39 PM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 362351

But don't call him. He'll run your phone bill up large. A Failure of Leadership by Bob Herbert "Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead" Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world. The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see. Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble. The president didn't seem to notice. Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces. Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem to notice. Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television, and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping. Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days the president of the United States didn't seem to notice. He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible. After days of withering criticism from white and black Americans, from conservatives as well as liberals, from Republicans and Democrats, the president finally felt compelled to act, however feebly. (The chorus of criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this administration.) Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration. And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities. Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble. Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends

To: Suma who wrote (37041)	9/5/2005 4:26:53 PM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 362351

The Media Discover the Poor by James H. Wittebols It’s too bad it takes a disaster like Hurricane Katrina to draw the media’s attention to the disenfranchised and economically marginal in this “land of plenty” but that seems to be an obvious conclusion from this week’s coverage of the tragic situation in New Orleans. After years of drift by both TV news and newspapers toward serving advertisers who seek consumers with money rather than citizens who want to be nourished with information, this turn of events would be celebrated if it weren’t for the tragedy it took to generate it. Even then it was a mixed bag. CNN’s curmudgeonly Jack Cafferty, repeatedly asked the question whether aid would be so slow in coming if the victims were the white, upper middle class instead of the largely poor, African American faces of victims that were flashed on the nation’s television screens this week. Other reporters started referring to the victims as refugees—quickly consigning the victims to third world status—a kind of “other” status that suggests they are less than “normal” Americans. But largely, the reporting corps which has made it to New Orleans, many of whom had reported disasters abroad, have expressed their own personal shock at what was happening within the borders of the richest country in the world. While right wing radio commentators were busy victim blaming (who, in their pathetic world view, undoubtedly were wondering why families on welfare weren’t just packing up their Cadillacs and getting out of the city), reporters on the ground saw the dehumanized way in which people were being forced to cope and actually were able to generate some empathy for their plight. The right wing talk crowd was merely aping the attitude expressed repeatedly by George Bush’s FEMA director, Michael Brown, who in one interview on MSNBC said several times “those who chose not to evacuate” before finally amending it to could not evacuate. This was countered by some reporters astute and knowledgeable enough to report that over a third of New Orleans residents do not own cars. Other officials, notably the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, started talking tough about “shoot to kill” orders for those caught looting when it was obvious that most looting was a matter of survival—food and water—and that only a few were trying to procure luxury items Again, some reporters commented that shoot to kill orders sounded more than a little harsh for a population obviously experiencing severe psychological and physical trauma. This discovery (or perhaps in the legacy of the great documentaries like “Harvest of Shame,” re-discovery) of the poor by the nation’s news media is a welcome development after years in which things like welfare reform and health care were treated largely as a budget issues rather than issues of human dignity. In many ways, the media are merely following the cues of political leaders on both sides of the aisle who are usually preoccupied with playing to the issues of campaign contributors. A politics driven by campaign contributions given by a tiny minority of affluent people will not be focusing on issues which affect the vast majority struggling to make ends meet. Perhaps this tragedy will mark a turn in values and priorities for the nation’s news reporters. Perhaps many of these well paid denizens of journalism now recognize there are two very separate Americas—the incredibly affluent which jets about the country and world like it is at their disposal and the growing sector of America which is experiencing a long, slow downward mobility as manufacturing and service work wages decline to sweatshop levels. Perhaps the kind of reporting which can unite the country will replace the kind of reporting which has exacerbated its divisions. Perhaps. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. commondreams.org