I tuned in to the Thursday, opening night football game between the Vikings (my team) and the Saint.) There was an hour long preview show, which I had on but with the sound down, but I did have the sound up at one point and, of course, they were talking about Hurricane Katrina. Brad Pitt was on screen briefly saying how angry he'd gotten when he'd heard that 1,500 people had died, ya da ya da. [And, it may or may not have been mentioned, but Spike Lee has done a new doc about Katrina.]
All I know about Katrina is that the city is still not rebuilt, and there are still thousands of people who refuse to move out of their FEMA trailers.
The thing is, why are they still there? There's no jobs in New Orleans, the city is still rebuilding - hesitantly because why rebuild a city that might flood again. Why not move (sometime in the previous 5 or 6 years, before the economy tanked, obviously) somewhere where you could get a job?
But no - those FEMA trailers were rent free, so they had no incentive to move.
I do wonder if anybody did learn anything from Katrina, though. The amount of fraud and waste that went into the payments to the "disposssessed" - scam artists moved in and made millions - and its a heckuva lot more expensive to find and prosecute them now than it would have been to be careful and not get scammed in the first place.
There was the incompetence of the local govenrment - all those school buses that could have taken people out of harms way, so no one would have had to go to the Superdome for 7 horrible days, and all those people who stayed because they couldn't afford to leave (or didn't want to leave).
And now we've got a whole sub-city of people living off the government teat, who will never get off.
And every year when the New Orleans Saints appear on TV, we have to hear about Katrina all over again.
It will be interesting to see if Rush comments about this tomorrow.
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