Guest guest Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 17 Sep 2005 19:38:26 -0000 Health Supreme Update: Katrina: Why America Must Act sepp ((((((((( Health Supreme Update: Katrina: Why America Must Act ))))))))) September 17, 2005 ------ Much has been written about the storm and the ensuing disaster. Mishandling an emergency is bad by any standard ... cause for a deep reorganization of who did not follow what are by now standard procedures, internationally refined and perfectly clear to the 'responders'. But obviously, these procedures have not been followed and are not even now being followed in New Orleans. What to do? Jon Rappoport of www.nomorefakenews.com catches the essence of the situation and, in a chilling conclusion, wakes us up to the price of ... inaction. Talking about action, Michael Moore the filmmaker did the right thing. He closed office and went to organize a citizens' relief effort. They are finding that there is little or no help coming from those that should be organizing relief. Here is Michael Moore's message and then the comment of Jon Rappoport: - - - Update 14 September 2005: Michael Moore has organized a relief effort together with others, and here's what he says Michael Moore Wednesday, September 14, 2005. We've Raised a Half-Million Dollars and Sent Over 50 Tons of Food and Water Friends, Last week I closed my New York production office and sent my staff down to New Orleans to set up our own relief effort. I asked all of you to help me by sending food, materials and cash to the emergency relief center we helped set up on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain with the Veterans for Peace. We did this when the government was doing nothing and the Red Cross was still trying to get it together. Every day, every minute was critical. People were dying, poor people, black people, left like so much trash in the street. I wanted to find a way to get aid in there immediately. I hooked up with the Vietnam veterans and Iraqi war vets (Veterans for Peace) who were organizing a guerilla, grass-roots relief effort. They were the same group that had set up Cindy Sheehan's camp in Crawford and now they had moved Camp Casey to Louisiana. I have good news and horrible news to report. First, your response to my appeal letter was overwhelming. Within a few days, a half-million dollars was sent in through my website to fund our relief effort. This money was immediately used to buy generators, food, water, a mobile medical van, tents, satellite phones, etc. Others of you began shipping supplies to our encampment. People in communities all over the country started organizing truck caravans to us in Louisiana. Twenty-two trucks from southern California alone have already arrived. A semi-truck from Chicago delivered ten tons of food. A group of friends in New Jersey got two 24 foot trucks, got their community to load them up with goods, and arrived in Covington tonight. Fifteen iMacs are inbound from California. One man gave us his pick-up truck and another donated truck is en route from Houston. Your response to my appeal has been nothing short of miraculous. And it has saved many, many lives. A number of you decided to just get in your cars and drive to our camp to volunteer to help. We now have had 150 volunteers here doing the work that needs to be done. Last night they unloaded twenty tons of food from a tractor trailer in under two hours. Each day more volunteers arrive. Everyone is sleeping on the ground or in tents. It is a remarkable sight. Thank you, all of you, for responding. I will never forget this outpouring of generosity to those forgotten by our own government. My staff and the vets spend their 18-hour days delivering food and water throughout the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. What they have seen is appalling. I have asked them to post their daily diaries on my website ( http://www.michaelmoore.com ) along with accompanying photos and video so you can learn what is really going on. What the media is showing you is NOT the whole story. It is much, much worse and there is still little being done to bring help to those who need it. Our group has visited many outlying towns and villages in Mississippi and Louisiana, places the Red Cross and FEMA haven't visited in over a week. Often our volunteers are the first relief any of these people have seen. They have no food, water or electricity. People die every day. There are no TV cameras recording this. They have started to report the spin and PR put out by the White House, the happy news that often isn't true ( " Everyone gets 2,000 dollars! " ). The truth is that there are dead bodies everywhere and no one is picking them up. My crew reports that in most areas there is no FEMA presence, and very little Red Cross. It's been over two weeks since the hurricane and there is simply not much being done. At this point, would you call this situation incompetence or a purposeful refusal to get real help down there? That's why we decided not to wait. And we are so grateful to all of you who have joined us. The Veterans for Peace and my staff aren't leaving (and that's why we are hoping those of you who can't get to Covington will make it to the Veterans for Peace co-sponsored anti-war demonstration in DC on September 24: www.unitedforpeace.org.) If you want to help, here's what we need in Covington right now: Cleaning Supplies (glass cleaner, bleach, disinfectant, etc.) Aspirin and other basic over the counter drugs. Bottled Water Canned Goods Hygiene Supplies Baby Supplies - Baby Food Formula, diapers #4, #5, Wipes, Pedialyte Sterile Gloves Batteries - All kinds, from AA to watch and hearing aid batteries. Volunteers with trucks and cars Self contained kitchens with generators, utensils, workers Consider sending supplies in reusable containers. List the contents on the outside of the package so the folks in the warehouse can easily sort the items. Clothes are not needed. If you go, keep in mind that you MUST be self-sufficient. Bring a tent and a sleeping bag. People are driving to Covington from across the country and often have extra room in their cars for you or for an extra box of supplies. For more information, go to the Veterans for Peace message board: www.vfproadtrips.org/katrina/. Send supplies via UPS to: Veterans for Peace Omni Storage 74145 Hwy. 25 Covington LA Thanks again for funding and supporting our relief efforts. It has been a bright spot in this otherwise shameful month. Yours, Michael Moore mike www.michaelmoore.com forwarded by Louise of Zeus Information Service Alternative Views on Health www.zeusinfoservice.com - - - Jon Rappoport: SOME NOTES ON NEW ORLEANS SEPTEMBER 7, 2005. As a number of people have pointed out for years, when you " solve " a tragedy by giving the government more power and money to do better the next time, you are usually whistling in the dark. The entire collaboration between government and big medicine speaks of such madness. Every human behavior and " symptom " is chopped up into a new disease name, and toxic drugs inevitably follow. Whereas, on a level playing field, without government welfare for NIH and other major med institutions, America would be in far better health. Mike Ruppert (From the Wildnerness) has an article about the dangers of feeding more $$ and power into the FEMA machine to handle " the next Katrina. " That way lies: further corruption, less freedom, and no solution. If FEMA is geared to do anything that verges on sanity, it's about forming contingency plans to deal with disasters. We can see how well that's been working in New Orleans. I have a number of eye-witness reports that state looting and crime exist at a far lower level than has been suggested in the press. If so, then of course these press articles serve to explain/justify why rescue efforts have been too little and too late. " We couldn't get in there. People would shoot at us. " I just got back from a trip. I observed that most people are in a semi-dazed shock at the destruction of a major American city. They can't really believe that something like this could happen in this day and age. We're supposed to be, with all our vaunted technology/communication/organization, beyond it. People of every political stripe assume " the government will take care of us. " But the government isn't saving New Orleans. In fact, as everyone now knows, federal funds for the improvement of those now-famous levees were cut. For the last several decades, it's been an open secret that a number of factors have been conspiring to set New Orleans up for exactly what has just happened: the destruction of all-important tree cover to protect the city against a direct hurricane hit; the mangling and shredding of the surrounding wetlands by thousands of miles of dug channels laid in by oil companies; New Orleans' position below sea level; the inability of the levees to deal with massive rains and wind; the strategic bottling up of the Mississippi River. A Katrina has been predicted by scores of people. It appears that there is at least one decent model for averting this horrendous tragedy: Holland. In the 1950s, that nation was flooded in many sectors. Its position vis-a-vis the level of the surrounding seas was a key. So Holland successfully instituted a plan to keep a disaster from reoccurring. The bland and impotent and leaderless position of the White House has driven home the fact that this administration lives its sealed-off life at a different level from what the rest of us would call human. Statements from federal officials have taken a vile tone: " We knew there could be some flooding, but the failure of the levees was a total shock. " Serenely delivered bullshit. I often make pharmaceutical analogies, and here is yet another occasion for doing it. When you stop and add up the overall toxic effects of thousands of medical drugs, you are faced with a choice. You can say the millions of deaths and maimings caused by these drugs is the result of serial blundering by well-intentioned people, or you can go to another place and view, at the very least, a crime of depraved indifference---negligent homicide. You can go beyond that, because who benefits when a population is rendered unable to think or function or react in a normal fashion, as more and more people are poisoned? New Orleans, in all respects, has been sitting there without protection, a perfect target for a storm like Katrina. It's too easy to call this serial blundering. And images of armed troops now moving through the city add up to the idea that help is really all about restoring order, not saving lives. Conditioning the American population to martial law is a goal of the government and those men who, in the shadows, stand behind the known government. All the lunatic hoopla, for example, about the coming " pandemic flu " has the same purpose. Ditto for the so-called war on terrorism. To save democracy, we must destroy it. What better way to drive this point home than to allow a whole city to disappear? George Bush is the perfect puppet for this current " quickening. " In all respects, he is a man who has been foreshortened in perspective by a desperate effort to assert his position as a legitimate member of a royal American family. The approaching end-times, the mission of saving the world from evil forces ranged against the messiah, the sword-wielding crusader against the heathens, the closed-out consciousness that builds walls against admitting mistakes, the sloganeering posing as intelligence...it all feeds into the maw of reducing the kind of freedom in which he, Bush, would sink like a stone. Unrecognized, unappreciated, unsung. And a very large part of the American population, bent on claiming " true values " as its territory, has bought into the premise that those values are quick phrases engraved on blood-soaked pieces of cloth framed behind glass, hanging on walls in living rooms and kitchens. The so-called liberals are no better. They have their own slogans and shallow banners. They, in fact, are the standard bearers for setting up the nation as a virtual hospital, in which every citizen will be treated with kindness by doctors who know that every move we make, every breath we take, is a symptom of a disease that must be alleviated. Both sides of the aisle are fronting for a vicious cartoon, Mickey Mouse bleeding out of both ears. This is what happens when the thread of a real life and its dimensions are lost, when the wellsprings of the soul are replaced by a desert of pure nothing. As one tragedy after another is engineered, we can postpone, under the rubric of emergency, this need for regeneration at the core of what we truly are. We can do that, but the returns will diminish, the price will escalate. JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com - - - See also: War on terror 'causing US deaths' Response to Hurricane Katrina has been affected, Professor Frank said The US government's focus on the war on terror has diverted funds from healthcare, leading to many deaths, a leading health expert claims. FEMA Turned Away Aid, Rescue Crews, Cut Emergency Communication Lines: Witnesses After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go by Gordon Adams  The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office. SHOOT-OUT 17TH STREET CANAL? Between Police & Military Bombing Levee posted by sepp on Thursday September 8 2005 ------ http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2005/09/08/katrina_why_america_must_act.htm -- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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