the guy by the door …

The preparation for Hurricane Katrina or lack there of raises questions. The most poignant remarks I’ve seen were posted by Ned Sublette the creator of  cowboy rumba music. Posted [with a little help from Steve Rosenfeld] on the blog of the Laura Flanders Show,
Ned asks not just why so many were left in harm’s way, but who are
they? [The original post is on the second page of comments.]
———

     camp casey is an important story, but not
when new orleans — among other things, still one
of       
     america’s most important port cities — is
about to be very possibly destroyed.  i think it’s so
far   
     beyond people’s imagination what’s about to happen that we can’t process it.  the storm is well
     above the category 5 threshold.

     and here’s the scandal:

     the poorest one-fifth or so of the city is still there in harm’s way!

     guess what color the poorest one-fifth of new orleans is.  it’s as if you had advance notice that
     mohammed atta’s crew was coming to the world trade center and evacuated all but the poor
     from it.

     everyone has known about this.  about 134,000 people in new orleans — a city which is 67%
     black — didn’t have a car.  you’re supposed to have a car.  fox news estimated that there were
     100,000 people remaining in the city, though perhaps they pulled the number out of their butt.

     it seems unlikely that the superdome won’t hold even under hours and hours
     of 175 mph winds.  but if it doesn’t?  chronicle of a genocide foretold.

     oil rig workers are being rescued from the offshore derricks, as they should be.  but why couldn’t
     air force cargo planes have evacuated *every single person*?  oh wait, only countries with very
     powerful militaries can do that. only countries that know how to get things done do things like that.

     i saw this warning on a forum and thought it was a hoax.  then i thought it
    was a hack.  it’s neither.  it’s real.

—-

Ned completes his post with an official NWS prujection of what
categories of buildins will most certainly be destroyed. Quite scary.
Thankfully, the storm has weakend slightly and turned a bit to the
east. The storm has made landfall and is expected to hit New Orleans at
about 11:00 AM.  The first three casualties were elderly people
who died evacuating their nursing home in advance of the storm. So
far the Superdome has held up, but there are holes in the roof and main power is out. Backup generators
provide no air-conditioning – only dim emergency lighting.

Oh, and crude oil hit $70/barrel.