← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot

Moral Poverty Cost Blacks in New Orleans

Thread ID: 20499 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2005-10-03

Wayback Archive

weisbrot [OP]

2005-10-03 17:14 | User Profile

[url]http://www.michaellwilliams.com/archive/display.php?id=421[/url]

Moral poverty cost blacks in New Orleans By Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Guest Commentary » September 30, 2005

Say a hurricane is about to destroy the city you live in. Two questions:

What would you do? What would you do if you were black? Sadly, the two questions don’t have the same answer.

To the first: Most of us would take our families out of that city quickly to protect them from danger. Then, able-bodied men would return to help others in need, as wives and others cared for children, elderly, infirm and the like.

For better or worse, Hurricane Katrina has told us the answer to the second question. If you’re black and a hurricane is about to destroy your city, then you’ll probably wait for the government to save you.

This was not always the case. Prior to 40 years ago, such a pathetic performance by the black community in a time of crisis would have been inconceivable. The first response would have come from black men. They would take care of their families, bring them to safety, and then help the rest of the community. Then local government would come in.

No longer. When 75 percent of New Orleans residents had left the city, it was primarily immoral, welfare-pampered blacks that stayed behind and waited for the government to bail them out. This, as we know, did not turn out good results.

Enter Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. Jackson and Farrakhan laid blame on “racist” President Bush. Farrakhan actually proposed the idea that the government blew up a levee so as to kill blacks and save whites. The two demanded massive governmental spending to rebuild New Orleans, above and beyond the federal government’s proposed $60 billion. Not only that, these two were positioning themselves as the gatekeepers to supervise the dispersion of funds. Perfect: Two of the most dishonest elite blacks in America, “overseeing” billions of dollars. I wonder where that money will end up.

Of course, if these two were really serious about laying blame on government, they should blame the local one. Responsibility to perform – legally and practically – fell first on the mayor of New Orleans. We are now all familiar with Mayor Ray Nagin – the black Democrat who likes to yell at President Bush for failing to do Nagin’s job. The facts, unfortunately, do not support Nagin’s wailing. As the Washington Times puts it, “recent reports show [Nagin] failed to follow through on his own city’s emergency-response plan, which acknowledged that thousands of the city’s poorest residents would have no way to evacuate the city.”

One wonders how there was “no way” for these people to evacuate the city. We have photographic evidence telling us otherwise. You’ve probably seen it by now – the photo showing 200 parked school buses, unused and underwater. How much planning does it require to put people on a bus and leave town, Mayor Nagin?

Instead of doing the obvious, Mayor Nagin (with no positive contribution from Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the other major leader vested with responsibility to address the hurricane disaster) loaded remaining New Orleans residents into the Superdome and the city’s convention center. We know how that plan turned out.

About five years ago, in a debate before the National Association of Black Journalists, I stated that if whites were to just leave the United States and let blacks run the country, they would turn America into a ghetto within 10 years. The audience, shall we say, disagreed with me strongly. Now I have to disagree with me. I gave blacks too much credit. It took a mere three days for blacks to turn the Superdome and the convention center into ghettos, rampant with theft, rape and murder.

President Bush is not to blame for the rampant immorality of blacks. Had New Orleans’ black community taken action, most would have been out of harm’s way. But most were too lazy, immoral and trifling to do anything productive for themselves.

All Americans must tell blacks this truth. It was blacks’ moral poverty – not their material poverty – that cost them dearly in New Orleans. Farrakhan, Jackson, and other race hustlers are to be repudiated – they will only perpetuate this problem by stirring up hatred and applauding moral corruption. New Orleans, to the extent it is to be rebuilt, should be remade into a dependency-free, morally strong city where corruption is opposed and success is applauded. Blacks are obligated to help themselves and not depend on the government to care for them. We are all obligated to tell them so.

The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is founder and president of BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, and author of “Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America.”

BlueBonnet

2005-10-04 04:44 | User Profile

**[size=1]The cool thing is that this is now prime real estate and the blacks won't be able to afford it.[/size] **

** **

**[url="http://www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/09/speculators_circle_new_orleans_for_real_estate_deals/"][size=2]Boston Globe[/size][/url] **

** **

Speculators circle New Orleans for real estate deals

By Kimberly Blanton, Globe Staff | September 9, 2005

Real estate speculators are searching for easy profits in the Big Easy.

Days after Hurricane Katrina struck, investors began posting inquiries about properties for sale on the website craigslist.org. Under ''New Orleans," dozens of ads were posted seeking properties to buy in Louisiana, including in the city's French Quarter and nearby Garden District. Some ads offered property for sale.

A ''triplex 4 sale" in an upcoming neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter has ''little to no hurricane flood damage," according to an ad posted by Alexis De Bram, an interpreter who said he was laid off by his employer and can't afford his mortgage, since some tenants have disappeared.

''French Quarter/Garden District properties wanted," wrote Jason Malroy, a District of Columbia-area computer engineer and real estate investor, on the same site.

Malroy is searching for bargains in the fabled city neighborhood now surrounded by a toxic soup. He owns about 20 houses in Northern Virginia, many purchased from homeowners who no longer wish to live in flood-prone areas. He said he can afford to spend up to $1 million for four properties in New Orleans's Garden District, a neighborhood of mansions developed in the 1800s. He said he is doing so out of twin desires to encourage redevelopment of one of the country's treasures and to own a vacation home.

''Now's a good time to buy property," Malroy said.

Floods, hurricanes, and other disasters often attract what realtors call property ''vultures." But interest after Hurricane Katrina also is propelled by the nation's speculative real estate frenzy. In a market fueled by record-low mortgage interest rates, prospective buyers are sweeping into New Orleans in search of risky deals that may provide big profits when, or if, the city is rebuilt.

''We really don't have any comparable experience of something like this in the US, at least not in the last 100 years," said Henry Pollakowski, director of the Housing Affordability Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tom Byrne, chief marketing officer for San Francisco-based LoopNet Inc., an online forum for independent real estate investors and sellers of commercial properties, said that while investors ''have come in droves" to New Orleans, ''we have not seen any noticeable increase in listings" of properties for sale.

LoopNet has measured a 45 percent rise in investor inquiries for properties in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama since Katrina, which drove hundreds of thousands of people from homes that now may be destroyed, be flooded, or lack utilities. Byrne said interest in residential properties is highest: Inquiries for hotels and housing rose 72 percent; multifamily properties such as apartment buildings are up 54 percent.

Investors may view rental properties as good bets. ''I bet in those three states, the occupancy rates will be close to 100 percent in every single apartment building and hotel for a long time -- if they're in a dry area," Byrne said.

Real estate specialists said speculators purchased so-called ''distressed properties" when prices plunged for apartments in downtown Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or for oceanfront property slammed by Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992.

Ryan Dougherty, a resident of Charleston, S.C., who advertised for historic New Orleans properties on craigslist.org, said that after Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989, historic buildings were refurbished with insurance and government money.

''It's a running joke Hugo was the best thing that happened to South Carolina because of all the government money that helped rebuild Charleston," Dougherty said.

New Orleans investors will be ''pretty big investors who can write a check," said Dave Barry, a Boston-area investor who buys houses entering foreclosure. He predicted huge numbers of foreclosures in Louisiana, a process starting Sept. 1, when many probably missed mortgage payments. ''This is a process that's going to play out over the next few weeks."

MIT's Pollakowski was concerned about the New Orleans residents who may sell unwisely.

''You just can't help but thinking and worrying about people getting excessively afraid and selling at excessively low prices," he said.

           Kimberly Blanton can be reached at [email]blanton@globe.com[/email].            [img]http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/dingbat_story_end_icon.gif[/img]

[img]http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/spacer.gif[/img]
© [url="http://www.boston.com/help/bostoncom_info/copyright"]Copyright[/url]   2005 The New York Times Company

[img]http://nytbglobe.112.2o7.net/b/ss/nytbglobe/1/G.5-PD-S/s14456746729258?%5BAQB%5D&ndh=1&t=3/9/2005%2023%3A42%3A52%201%20300&pageName=News%20%7C%20Weather%20%7C%20Speculators%20circle%20New%20Orleans%20for%20real%20estate%20deals&ch=News&events=event2&c1=News%20%7C%20Weather&c5=News%20%7C%20Weather%20%7C%20Speculators%20circle%20New%20Orleans%20for%20real%20estate%20deals%20%7C%20PF&c6=Article%20Page%20%7C%20Globe%20Story&pid=News%20%7C%20Weather%20%7C%20Speculators%20circle%20New%20Orleans%20for%20real%20estate%20deals&pidt=1&oid=http%3A//www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/09/speculators_circle_new_orleans_for_real_estat&ot=A&g=http%3A//www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/09/speculators_circle_new_orleans_for_real_estate_deals%3Fmode%3DPF&r=http%3A//www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/09/speculators_circle_new_orleans_for_real_estate_deals/&s=1152x864&c=32&j=1.3&v=Y&k=Y&bw=1141&bh=632&p=Mozilla%20Default%20Plug-in%3BShockwave%20Flash%3BMetaStream%203%20Plugin%3BJava%20Plug-in%3BAdobe%20Acrobat%3BQuickTime%20Plug-in%206.5.1%3BMicrosoft%AE%20DRM%3BWindows%20Media%20Player%20Plug-in%20Dynamic%20Link%20Library%3B&%5BAQE%5D[/img]

[img]http://te.boston.com/tte/blank.gif?0.9399406077865099&snippet_version=1.3a&referrer=http%3A//www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/09/speculators_circle_new_orleans_for_real_estate_deals/&page=http%3A//www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/09/speculators_circle_new_orleans_for_real_estate_deals%3Fmode%3DPF&timezone=300&clist_TID=27punq411k4229&var_t_section=News%20%7C%20Weather%20%7C%20Speculators%20circle%20New%20Orleans%20for%20real%20estate%20deals&var_site=boston.com[/img]

JoseyWales

2005-10-04 08:32 | User Profile

nature made the negro, not welfare or white oppression.

Faust

2005-10-05 03:10 | User Profile

BlueBonnet,

You are right, New Orleans may well be a better city for this mess. But the bad news is all those Afros are going to move somewhere else.

[QUOTE=BlueBonnet][size=1]The cool thing is that this is now prime real estate and the blacks won't be able to afford it.[/size] [/QUOTE]

BlueBonnet

2005-10-05 03:26 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Faust]BlueBonnet,

You are right, New Orleans may well be a better city for this mess. But the bad news is all those Afros are going to move somewhere else.[/QUOTE] Yeah, they are here in Dallas and Houston.:shocking: And they confused our hospitality and aid with an invitation to stay, forever!

Happy Hacker

2005-10-05 03:32 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Faust]BlueBonnet,

You are right, New Orleans may well be a better city for this mess. But the bad news is all those Afros are going to move somewhere else.[/QUOTE]

That, and the huge federal spending, are the two things that depress me about this black-made mess.

Okiereddust

2005-10-05 04:27 | User Profile

[QUOTE=weisbrot][url]http://www.michaellwilliams.com/archive/display.php?id=421[/url]

Moral poverty cost blacks in New Orleans.................

All Americans must tell blacks this truth. It was blacks’ moral poverty – not their material poverty – that cost them dearly in New Orleans. [/QUOTE]Weissy, you jive ass honkey! You think that acting like a prissy old lady in Sunday best is gonna get you a cold one? I refute you thus. [CENTER] [IMG]http://sayanythingblog.com/images/beerlooter.jpg[/IMG]

[/CENTER] :afro::afro:

(Well OK, so it probably wasn't cold, unless he went back and got a pail full of ice.)

Keith Rex

2005-10-05 05:42 | User Profile

Because white people detest poverty it does not follow that other races share their prejudice. Nor are all whites against poverty The Left argues for equal distribution of wealth. If this happened we would all be poor and there would be no capital for industry and the human race would collapse into the stone age - which is what the Left wants - living in harmony with Nature. Keith

weisbrot

2005-10-06 02:29 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Okiereddust]Weissy, you jive ass honkey! You think that acting like a prissy old lady in Sunday best is gonna get you a cold one? I refute you thus. [CENTER] [IMG]http://sayanythingblog.com/images/beerlooter.jpg[/IMG]

[/CENTER] :afro::afro:

(Well OK, so it probably wasn't cold, unless he went back and got a pail full of ice.)[/QUOTE]

Any creature who walks erect and who has opposable thumbs must face moral dilemmas and the inevitable choices they present.

In the case of this creature, he chose to ignore the floating bag of soggy choco-molate cookies in favor of saving the imperiled garbage can full of delectably skunky Heinies.

I say this creature exhibits the moral clarity hailed by neoconservatives throughout the land, or at least those in small enclaves of Brooklyn and D.C. Hail moral clarity! Hail, creature!

van helsing

2005-10-16 04:24 | User Profile

hell, the 2 pic versions i have, with comments, are just too big to attach...

well, it was the number one choice of looters!

Angeleyes

2005-10-28 02:03 | User Profile

High water does not excuse unlawful behavior.

That said, while the following article doesn't address the various allegations of demolition by explosives, probably due to their considering the premise laughable, it does point to a 40 year policy of "hope a big one doesn't hit."

Washington Post October 24, 2005 Pg. 1

[B][SIZE=5][SIZE=3]Investigators Link Levee Failures To Design Flaws[/SIZE] [/SIZE][/B][I][B][SIZE=4]Three Teams of Engineers Find Weakened Soil, Navigation Canal Contributed to La. Collapses [/SIZE][/B][/I][I]By Joby Warrick and Michael Grunwald, Washington Post Staff Writers[/I]

NEW ORLEANS -- Within a space of 15 hours on Aug. 29, three massive, concrete floodwalls in separate parts of the city suddenly fractured and burst under the weight of surging waters from Hurricane Katrina. The breaches unleashed a wall of water that swept entire buildings from their foundations and transformed what might have been a routine hurricane into the costliest storm in U.S. history.

Today, exactly eight weeks after the storm, all three breaches are looking less like acts of God and more like failures of engineering that could have been anticipated and very likely prevented.

Investigators in recent days have assembled evidence implicating design flaws in the failures of two floodwalls near Lake Pontchartrain that collapsed when weakened soils beneath them became saturated and began to slide. They also have confirmed that a little-used navigation canal helped amplify and intensify Katrina's initial surge, contributing to a third floodwall collapse on the east side of town. The walls and navigation canal were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for defending the city against hurricane-related flooding. The preliminary findings -- based on physical evidence, Corps documents and hydrodynamic models run through a Louisiana State University supercomputer -- are the work of three teams of engineers and forensic experts conducting separate probes. The investigations are shedding light not only on the cause of the failures but also the scale of the rebuilding effort: The discovery of major flaws in the design of the city's levees and floodwalls could add billions of dollars to the cost of New Orleans' recovery.

Investigators already have rejected the initial explanation offered by Corps officials in the hurricane's aftermath that massive storm surges had overtopped and overwhelmed floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals on the north side of town. The new findings for the first time point to a human role in all three of the major floodwall failures that left about 100,000 homes underwater and caused most of Louisiana's approximately 1,000 hurricane deaths.

Experts now believe that Katrina was no stronger than a Category 3 storm when it roared into New Orleans, and Congress had directed the Corps to protect the city from just such a hurricane.

"This was not the Big One -- not even close," said Hassan Mashriqui, a storm surge expert at LSU's Hurricane Center. He said that Katrina would have caused some modest flooding and wind damage regardless, but that human errors turned "a problem into a catastrophe." The National Science Foundation, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the state of Louisiana are all conducting investigations of the three major floodwall breaches and dozens of smaller ones. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced last week that the National Academies of science and engineering will lead a separate probe. The Corps has offered data and other assistance to the independent inquiries, but the agency has declined to speculate on the causes of the tragedy. John Paul Woodley Jr., the assistant Army secretary overseeing the Corps, said it is still too early to cast blame for the drowning of New Orleans. But he said the Corps intends to learn from the Katrina investigations, and use the lessons to build stronger protections for the city.

"I'm not afraid of finding out the truth," Woodley said. The independent investigations have pointed to two failures in the infrastructure maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers that were critical factors in the destruction Katrina wrought in New Orleans.

In 1965, the Corps completed the 76-mile-long, 36-foot-deep Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a larger dirt-moving project than the Panama Canal. The outlet -- known locally as MRGO, or "Mr. Go" -- created a navigation shortcut to the Port of New Orleans, although a little-used one that averages fewer than one ship a day. But the outlet also amounted to a funnel that would accelerate and enlarge any storm surges headed for the city's levees.

Three months before Katrina, Mashriqui told a room full of emergency managers that the outlet was a "critical and fundamental flaw" in the Corps' hurricane defenses, a "Trojan Horse" that could amplify storm surges 20 to 40 percent.

With the help of a supercomputer, Mashriqui has now concluded that the effect was even worse than he predicted. The analysis shows that the outlet's "funnel" intensified the initial surge by 20 percent, raising the wall of water about three feet. But it also increased the velocity of the surge, which Mashriqui believes contributed to the scouring that undermined the levees and floodwalls along the outlet and Industrial Canal. He found that Katrina's surge moved through nearby Lake Borgne at less than 3 feet per second. But the rate was about 6 feet per second at the mouth of the funnel, and as much as 8 feet per second in the funnel.

Mashriqui also found that in the areas where the outlet had wiped out marshes and other wetlands, levees and floodwalls were much more likely to fail. In areas where the natural buffers remained, the manmade defenses held, even when they were overtopped. "Without MRGO, the flooding would have been much less," he said. "The levees might have overtopped, but they wouldn't have been washed away."

Corps officials declined comment on the results of the modeling. But Corps spokesman Jason Fanselau said the agency's own data still point to a massive surge that exceeded the height of the Industrial Canal floodwall by more than a few feet.

"Katrina flat-out overwhelmed the system," he said. "There was a huge wall of surge that obliterated entire sections of the floodwall."

In the case of the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, the independent investigators believe the floodwalls themselves were the problem. The reason was the naturally soft soil made up of river silts and swampy peat that has been the bane of builders here for two centuries. Investigators now believe the walls collapsed when the soils beneath them became saturated and began to shift under the weight of relatively modest surges from the lake. And newly released documents show that the Corps was aware years ago that a particularly unstable layer of soil lay beneath both floodwalls.

"These levees did not overtop, yet they failed anyway," said Peter Nicholson, an engineering professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and leader of the ASCE investigating team. "It's important that we find out now exactly what went wrong, because the Corps is already starting to rebuild."

Documents given to investigators by former Corps contractors have shed some light on what government engineers knew about the weak soils and how this knowledge affected their decisions.

In the 1980s, the Corps began constructing concrete floodwalls on top of older earthen levees to give the city's northern neighborhoods better protection from storm surges from Lake Pontchartrain. Soil tests in the 1980s detected trouble 20 feet below the surface: a thick layer of spongy, organic soil called peat. Soft and highly compressible when dry, peat becomes even weaker when saturated with water.

A 1988 document reveals that Corps officials took careful measurements of the peat layer and tested the soil in a laboratory to calculate its relative strength, according to Robert Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the NSF investigating team. Based on those calculations, the Corps designed a concrete-and-steel floodwall anchored to the earth by steel pilings driven to a depth of 20 feet.

"The depth of the pilings becomes important," said Bea, because the "tips of the sheet piles may not have penetrated the peat." Meanwhile, because the canal was dredged to an even greater depth, water was able to penetrate the peat layer from the inside, investigators said.

"There was a gap where water could get through," said Ivor Van Heerden, the deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center and the leader of the Louisiana forensic investigation. "Water was able to get around or through those pilings to the other side and start weakening the structure."

Reports of problems with the soft underlayer began to surface even before the floodwalls were finished. In 1994, the now-defunct Pittman Construction Co., a New Orleans firm involved in levee construction, claimed in court documents that floodwall sections were failing to line up properly because of unstable soils. An administrative law judge dismissed the complaint on technical grounds in 1998, without specifically addressing the allegations about weak soils.

Katrina's storm surge put the floodwalls to the ultimate test. Hours after the storm hit, water poured into the canals from Lake Pontchartrain and added enormous strain to the walls and levees. According to a scenario developed by Bea and other investigators, the already-saturated peat was the path of least resistance, allowing the water to burst through the wall from underneath. At the 17th Street Canal, truck-size chunks of the old earthen levee were heaved 35 feet on a carpet of sliding soil.

Corps officials are not yet convinced. "It is important not to jump to conclusions," said John Grieshaber, chief of the engineering division in the Corps' New Orleans district office. "It's hard to look at the aftereffects and say with a high level of certainty, 'This is what happened.' "

The Corps' actions since the storm, however, suggest that at least some officials are worried about weaknesses in the floodwalls' design. A proposal for rebuilding the floodwalls has set far tougher standards than existed 15 years ago. And the steel pilings, which formerly reached a depth of 20 feet, must now be driven through the peat layer to 40 feet, twice as deep as before.

If design flaws are confirmed, the task of preparing the 200-mile levee system for the next hurricane may be far more complex -- and more expensive -- than first believed, said Gordon Boutwell, president of Soil Testing Engineers Inc. and a member of the ASCE investigative team.

"Nothing beats a full-scale field test, and this was a full-scale field test," Boutwell said. "Some structures did the job they were supposed to, but some were total failures -- and those you can't just leave alone. And you can't expect to just stack them higher and walk away."

[I]Designer David Murray contributed to this report.[/I]

Okiereddust

2005-10-28 02:31 | User Profile

Dem Army core failed to protect us.

[I]:cry: :afro: [/I]

Uh hmm.

What I want to know is about all those "levee" boards in New Orleans. You'd think if the causes were so easy to discover, the locals might have been able to do more. Instead of probably spending all the levee boards money on Heinekens (if not cocaine)

This is all a croc anyway. Everyone is in on the "blame the feds" routine. No one talks about the locals involvement. You think if there had been a dike failure in Holland, two months later people would still be running around like this, with not the slightest idea of what made the dikes fail or how to fix them?

Angeleyes

2005-10-29 15:31 | User Profile

Yes, you have to wonder at the lack of wit the local government had, and the lack of priorities its Senators and Congressmen embodied, for them to ignore a fundamental design flaw that civil engineers had put in front of them.

AE

[quote=Okiereddust]Dem Army core failed to protect us.

[I]:cry: :afro: [/I]

Uh hmm.

What I want to know is about all those "levee" boards in New Orleans. You'd think if the causes were so easy to discover, the locals might have been able to do more. Instead of probably spending all the levee boards money on Heinekens (if not cocaine)

This is all a croc anyway. Everyone is in on the "blame the feds" routine. No one talks about the locals involvement. You think if there had been a dike failure in Holland, two months later people would still be running around like this, with not the slightest idea of what made the dikes fail or how to fix them?

Gregz

2005-10-29 17:10 | User Profile

[I]"Yes, you have to wonder at the lack of wit the local government had, and the lack of priorities its Senators and Congressmen embodied, for them to ignore a fundamental design flaw that civil engineers had put in front of them."- Angeleyes[/I]

The local Black elite where probably to high from their weekly kick back to even notice. Blacks officials are lousy administrators, who just love em public service jobs where they can put them feet up (go on a permanent go slow), steal public money and create non jobs or find housing for other worthless blacks. :bag:

Greg

"'He is a prodigy,' he said at last. 'He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,' he began to declaim suddenly, 'for the guidance of the cause entrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.'" - Heart of Darkness : Joseph Conrad