The Raven' s Blog Quotes Archive, Hurricane Katrina

Quotes Archive: Hurricane Katrina

"The Republicans can't seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather."
Karl Rove, on the impending arrival of Hurricane Gustav on the Gulf Coast coincidental with the GOP convention. Wrong Karl, it's the Gulf Coast that can't catch a break, not Republicans. The departure of you and your party from government is one of the breaks they hope to catch.

"No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."
A Katrina evacuee from New Orleans, responding to a statement that state and federal politicians must be blind to privatize the city at terrible cost to the poor and displaced, effectively kicking them out of their city.

"Some of us in the city think it's a bigger crime to keep thousands of families out of their apartments than to sell drugs. But law enforcement doesn't see it that way."
Loyola Law School professor Bill Quigley, on how New Orleans residents aren't being allowed back into habitable housing.

"It seems that the Katrina federal legacy is one of minimizing exposure for the next event and ensuring future focus is centered on state and local preparedness."
Albert Ashwood, president of a national association of state emergency managers, on how Homeland Security is making emergency plans without state input, and in secret, and apparently with an eye to covering liability. At least the secrecy means the hurricanes can't know our plans.

"More than 75 percent of the housing damage from the storm was in Louisiana, but Mississippi has received 70 percent of the funds through FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program. Of the $388 million available, FEMA gave a Mississippi program offering upgraded trailers more than $275 million. Meanwhile, the agency awarded Louisiana's "Katrina Cottage" program, which features more permanent modular homes for storm victims, a mere $75 million."
Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis reporting on how the GOP has disproportionately allocated money to the state with a GOP governor instead of the one most in much more need.

"It could have been any of us -- New Orleans was like a police state. There was hysteria. He was arrested in his own house for looting."
ACLU attorney Katie Schwartzmann, speaking about James Terry Jr., a New Orleans resident who was arrested for looting on his own porch and held in bad conditions for seven months without charge, trial, or access to lawyers.

"The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves."
Chris Hedges, writing about Blackwater mercenaries, and the ominous presence of a paramilitary force with no accountability and a religious motivation.

"I cannot name another circumstance when so many public servants have worked so hard to provide such dehumanizing and shoddy service to citizens who were entitled to basic help and deserved fundamental respect."
Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, on the bizarre and harsh way FEMA has treated many Katrina victims.

"Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
...
Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost."
Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky who were stranded in New Orleans during the hurricane, on how officials threatened, harassed, and robbed them instead of helping. This is about 25 minutes into the podcast. The article Mike Malloy is reading is on Counterpunch.

"Working through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA gave each of four companies contracts worth up to $500 million to clear hurricane debris. This spring government inspectors reported that the companies — AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., Ceres Environmental Services Inc. of Brooklyn Park, Minn. and ECC Operating Services Inc. of Burlingame, Calif. — charged the government as much as four to six times what they paid their subcontractors who actually did the work."
AP National Writer Matt Crenson on how so little reconstruction of New Orleans has happened for so much money. Want to bet those contractors are big GOP contributors?

protest at Bush fundraiser in Ohio February 2006

"We know that what is happening in New Orleans is just a more concentrated, more graphic version of what is going on all over our country. Every city in our country has some serious similarities to New Orleans. Every city has some abandoned neighborhoods. Every city in our country has abandoned some public education, public housing, public healthcare, and criminal justice. Those who do not support public education, healthcare, and housing will continue to turn all of our country into the Lower Ninth Ward unless we stop them. Why do we allow this?"
Bill Quigley, human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, on the utter lack of rebuilding in almost a year, and what has been rebuilt has benefitted the affluent.

"WWL-TV introduced us to Korean War veteran Paul Morris, 74, and his wife Yvonne, 66. They have been sleeping in their 2 door sedan since January. They have been waiting that long for FEMA contractors to unlock the 240 square foot trailer in their yard and connect the power so they can sleep inside it in front of their devastated home."
Loyola Professor Bill Quigley on the consequences of corrupt government in terms not so abstract as lobbying rules.

"White Houses past and present always seemed to be about money -- penny-wise and pound-foolish. They kept telling us to prove our projects were justified. Do they think we've proved it now? Excuse me if I sound strident, but what's the cost benefit of this disaster?"
Sidney Coffee, the top restoration aide to the governor of Louisiana, on the difficulty of getting money for hurricane protection.

"Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?''
US House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, asked of some boys evacuated from New Orleans and living in a Houston stadium.

"As soon as they realized that the beating of the suspects was being captured on film, one officer tried to rip the camera off his shoulder. His press tag was ripped off. Eventually, they got one camera and started messing with the camera trying to get the pictures out. Fearful that they were going to ruin his camera, he showed them how to get the images out. His second camera was ripped from his shoulder at that time, and when he asked whether he could get his images back, he was threatened with having his neck broken, had guns pointed at him."
Tim Harper, reporter for the Toronto Star, describing an incident in the press censorship going on in New Orleans.

"Instead, he came too late to the disaster and caused even supporters to cringe with every ill-chosen word. He lost not only the politician's fantasy photo op, but he let slip the rarest of opportunities --- that of saving human life and the nation's pride. By his performance in this time of extreme stress, Bush may have revealed a truer self than we were meant to see."
Kathleen Parker showing that even conservatives are coming to see what liberals have seen at least since "The Pet Goat".

"The plane is parked at the airport here, and we are awaiting instructions on where to send the medicines and food items."
Unidentified official of the Indian External Affairs Ministry revealing that Bush is dithering instead of accepting foriegn aid to hurricane victims while people are dying for lack of what's in that plane.

"The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting."
David Brooks, conservative columnist, on how the country's morale is in the crapper like the 70's, and Katrina may bring political storms.

"The Bush administration has had all kinds of folks in New Orleans and in Louisiana begging for funding for this--the cost of the Big Dig--to restore the Barrier islands, to fix the wetlands because without that, New Orleans is an endangered city forever."
Mike Tidwell, author of "Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast," on the preventive measures necessary to stop the flooding of New Orleans.

"His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night."
Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish President, describing the death of a colleague's mother who was too frail to evacuate and the worthlessness of Bush administration promises. Video here.

"I didn't have gas in the car and I don't have the money. It's not like I'm trying to play tough. I just don't have the means to leave."
Tom Pendley of Biloxi, MS, explaining why he "defied", as the right is putting it, the evacuation order as Katrina was coming.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guantánamo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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