Katrina has been a mess on many different levels.
CNN (in the United States at least) has been reporting it nonstop as if there’s no other news in the world, adhering to the true CNN reporting fashion (and American mass media in general). Every single report after another has been about the aftermath and other related news of Katrina and very little of anything else (on BOTH of CNN’s channels). MSNBC and Fox News are not any better.
It’s f*cked up to see how New Orleans is literally under water, which could have been prevented had not been Bush Administration’s budget cut on flood prevention plans for the city. And like Mark said, the gas prices are now in ridiculous levels. Worst yet, some businesses are totally taking advantage of the situation with price gouging practices (six-dollar-a-gallon gas, $200-motel rooms… etc). Jack asses.
Images of people looting, dying (or just plain dead) and being homeless are disturbing (and the mass media is not shy of showing them repeatedly). To think that this level of lawlessness and the disorganization of the rescue efforts can happen in the United States is hard to stomach. The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, was on the WWL Radio expressing his frustrations, probably the only politician who’s not afraid to question the slowness of rescue deployment to New Orleans. More and more people are beginning to wonder why rescue has been slow in coming. My humble conspiracy theory tells me that a Republican White House most likely doesn’t really give a rat’s ass to a city where majority of the population is African American.
Coming back to the gas prices, Bloomberg has reported:
Heating oil for September delivery climbed 7.64 cents, or 4.2 percent, to $1.913 a gallon. Futures surged to $2.0137, the highest in 27 years of trading on the exchange. Heating oil is 67 percent higher than a year ago.
The profit margin for turning a barrel of crude oil into heating oil and gasoline is $14.79, based on futures prices in New York. That is up 24 percent from Aug. 26 and more than double a year ago.
Hello? Higher profit margins during the time of disaster and war? By any stretch of imagination in the definition of the word “gouging”, the practice by the oil companies and refineries should easily fit within it.
UPDATE: As I was putting Bryan to bed and about to go to sleep (at 4AM!), I caught a section of a CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien grilling a FEMA official as to why people in New Orleans are dying of hunger and lack of medication several days into the disaster when victims of the Southeast Asian Tsunami received air drops of food within two days of the disaster. Kudos to Soledad for asking tough questions.
My favorite quote from that interview:
Do you look at the situation at New Orleans now and say to yourself, “I am proud of what is being done”? Or do you say to yourself, “There’s a lot of room for improvement here”?
That guy is never speaking to the press ever again.
