|
A few items
that made it through the weekend news dominated by Harriet and Tom, and the
cycle of violence as civil war takes hold in Iraq. Color
highlights, italics, indents, mine. KwC Exaggerations of Mayhem May Have Slowed Aid: Unsubstantiated reports of violence were confirmed by some officials,
spread by news media. Some local, state and federal officials
have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors
repeated uncritically in the news media after Hurricane Katrina helped slow the
response to the disaster. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR2005100401525.html So
does this mean that combat-trained National Guardsmen and active duty troops
were ‘standing down’, waiting for violence to subside? Will they blame FEMA-hired
trucks of ice rejected at roadblocks and sent back to the Midwest and Northeast
on rumors of violence, too? Is
this a way of blaming the victims? I’m not blaming First Responders who waited
on orders to act.
These
were folks not directly impacted by storm damage who received checks
nonetheless. Another case of lack
of bureaucratic oversight but on a much smaller scale than Katrina, exposing
the potential for corruption and fraud vis a vis no bid contracts and cronyism
by Katrina carpetbaggers - and they recently demoted/fired the auditor who
exposed fraud in Pentagon no-bid contracts. Got the picture?
Federal officials are struggling to launch an alternative interim
housing program that would give families whose homes are destroyed or
uninhabitable a lump
sum of $2,358 in rental assistance, or $786 a month for three months, with the possibility of a 15-month
extension. So far,
330,000 families have signed up for the housing assistance. But if evacuees have to use
those stipends to pay for hotel rooms when FEMA stops covering such lodging,
the funds will not last long. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/01/AR2005100101437.html One church proposal calls
for FEMA to allocate 5 mobile homes/RVs to each church interested, let them be
fully responsible for 5 families for 1 year and at the end of the year, give
ownership to the church as compensation. I’m betting that proposal gets more
examination in the Rove White House-run reconstruction program than expediting
the pre-existing Section 8 housing program to move Katrina’s homeless into
vacant rentals across the nation – because the neocons don’t want housing
assistance to work institutionally. What will become of
the newly homeless? Not just the welfare recipients who may indeed make better futures
elsewhere, but the middle class business and homeowners who can’t afford to
rebuild, but still have business loans and mortgages, and the new bankruptcy
law looms Oct. 15? Are we looking at a Grapes of Wrath winter 2005? Hurricanes destroyed 109 drilling platforms, gov’t says. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed
109 oil platforms and five drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, but only a
small portion of production will be lost for good, the Rita
did the most damage, destroying 63 platforms and one drilling rig and seriously
damaged 30 platforms and 10 drilling rigs. Katrina
destroyed 46 platforms and four drilling rigs and also caused extensive damage
to another 20 platforms and nine drilling rigs.. Altogether, there were bout
2,900 platforms in the path of the hurricanes. There are no official dollar value estimates for the damage
nor what it will cost to repair the lost/damaged facilities. Sec. of the
Interior Gale Norton said that a total of 342 platforms remain evacuated,
roughly 40 percent of the manned sites in the Gulf. As a result, 90 percent of crude production and 72 percent
of natural gas output is paralysed. Norton also stressed that only one of the
damaged platforms was built after federal construction standards were tightened
in 1988. The ones that were destroyed were nearing the end of their lives. "As a result, only a very small
percentage of production is expected to be permanently lost," she said. "Despite such intense winds and
powerful waves offshore, we experienced no loss of life or significant spills
from any offshore well on the outer continental shelf." http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051004/pl_afp/usstormweatherenergy Hurricanes used to promote new construction of refineries. Sec. of Energy Samuel Bodman said about
three million barrels a day of refining capacity remain shut down owing to the
hurricanes' impact along a string of states, notably around Congress
plans to move quickly this week on legislation aimed at providing incentives
such as special government-backed insurance for refinery expansion or
construction, along with provisions that are aimed at more energy production,
especially natural gas. Other bills would ease some air-pollution requirements
on refineries, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil
drilling and allow states to override bans on natural-gas drilling in coastal
waters. Energy companies
have long complained that the lack of new refineries has been a drag on the
nation's energy-supply network. Some
consumer groups have accused oil companies of deliberately restricting refining
capacity to keep gasoline prices high. In addition to a lack of new
construction, refining capacity has been affected by other factors. Years of heavy financial losses and a wave
of mergers have wiped out many refineries, leaving the industry with only 148
fuel-making plants today, down from a peak of 324 refineries in 1981.
In the past decade, the industry has largely offset the lost production
from refinery closures by expanding existing plants. At the same time, refiners
have spent money in recent years to comply with more stringent environmental
regulations. They have
not increased production enough to keep up with the swelling demand for
gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002522966_katbush27.html In other words, don’t
blame the environmentalists for tight production capacity. Blame those who want
profit first before energy security. Lobbyists seek hurricane connections: On Capitol Hill,
industry lobbyists and state and local officials are using this fall's storms
to give their causes momentum--even if their constituents were not directly
affected or their priorities are only tenuously connected. Congress and the president have
enacted $62.3 billion in emergency spending for relief efforts on the Gulf
Coast (PL 109-61, PL 109-62). A package of hurricane-related tax breaks (PL
109-73) will cost an estimated $6.1 billion. Lawmakers expect the White House
to request more spending, perhaps in the next month, and a longer-term tax
package is somewhere down the road. The initial rounds
of emergency funding for victims of Hurricane Katrina rolled through Congress
with a minimum of legislative jockeying and interest group pressures. But the
next installment is likely to be more complicated, especially in the Senate,
where leaders often have trouble fending off additional spending that has
bipartisan support. http://www.governing.com/news/10cqlob.htm Maybe
Tom DeLay will open his own K Street shop or relocate to Louisiana and seek to
redistrict that state, too, in the name of the GOP, the Religious Right, and
the Holy No Tax Trinity….see, I’m being sarcastic to segue into this next item.
With a low-wage
economy and consistently poor educational performance, Louisiana was losing
population even before the hurricanes. The state had a net loss of more than
75,000 people from 1995 to 2000, according to census figures. But the physical
and psychological damage inflicted by the hurricanes could push tens of
thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of people out of the state for
good, state officials say, comparable only to the Dust Bowl during the Great
Depression and possibly the 1927 floods.
About 1.5 million people were initially evacuated from the
damaged regions, roughly 1 million have applied for hurricane-related federal aid, 30,000 are
in out-of-state shelters, 46,400 are in in-state shelters and 932 people
have perished in the storms. Officials are unsure how many people are staying in hotels
or with family and friends. If evacuees from
the Ninth Ward in New Orleans - a reliable bloc of 30,000 black voters that is traditionally easy
to mobilize - choose suburban or rural areas over their urban roots in coming
years, it could be a political blow to Democrats, said Roy Fletcher, a
political consultant from Shreveport who helped elect former Gov. Mike Foster,
a Republican. "It would give
a whole lot of a stronger foothold to Republicans in the Legislature and
statewide," Mr. Fletcher said. "Louisiana has always been a swing state, a purple state that's both blue and red. You take the
Ninth Ward out of that equation and you get a real shot of Republicans winning
statewide office." Barry
Erwin, president of a Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonpartisan nonprofit
group that monitors the activities of state government, said such a change
could forever alter the political landscape. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/national/nationalspecial/04census.html The other unknown
will be what becomes of those voters in the states where they relocate? Will
they “tip the balance” in local and small-state elections, that also ripple
over into the national campaigns? |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
