A majority of Americans believe three things about New Orleans that simply aren’t true…
The Big Three “Katrina” myths:
1. Katrina destroyed the city
2. New Orleanians are responsible for what happened to them because they recklessly built their homes in dangerous areas
3. New Orleans is a bad place for a city and shouldn’t be rebuilt
These carefully crafted lies – and that’s exactly what they are – were manufactured by the Bush White House to cover over a simple matter of fact:
New Orleans was not destroyed by Katrina.
It was destroyed by the failure of the levee system, the construction and mangagement of which is the responsibility of the federal government through the agency of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The federal government is morally, financially and probably legally responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage and incalculable human suffering, much of which continues to this day.
The Bush White House was in such terror of this basic fact getting out to the public that it actively withheld life and death information about the levee collapses from state and local officials for several critical hours.
It’s simple: Properly constructed and maintained levees would not have collapsed. No collapsed levees. No disaster.
As for New Orleans being a bad place for a city, it’s actually perfectly located for its main industries: shipping and oil and gas extraction.
By the standards of the Bush adminstration spin masters, places like Tokyo and Los Angeles, not to mention Seattle and San Francisco (earthquakes); Miami, Tampa, and the south shore of Long Island (hurricanes): and Amsterdam and most of Holland (below sea level) should be evacuated immediately.
And that’s not counting all the communities that live in the shadow of nuclear power plants. For example, should there ever be a Three Mile-island level accident near Indian Point on the Hudson River, the twenty million people who live within a fifty mile radius of the plant will be physically unable to evacuate to a safe distance.
Let’s face it. Living on earth is risky…so you prepare and you invest in safety measures.
What would it have cost to build the levees correctly and restore south Louisianas wetlands? The equivalent of what the Bush administration spends in Iraq each month: $30 billion dollars.
If you have friends who continue to mindlessly spout the Bush adminstration line, here’s a helpful video you can point them to to straighten them out:
More information about the kind of help New Orleans and southern Lousiana need from the nation can he found here:
Duke Ellington