Learning to Lose

Learning to Lose?Our Education System Isn't Ready for a World of Competition
By Norman R. AugustineTuesday, December 6, 2005; A29
In the five decades since I began working in the aerospace industry, I have never seen American business and academic leaders as concerned about this nation's future prosperity as they are today.
On the surface, these concerns may seem unwarranted. Two million jobs were created in the United States in the past year. Citizens of other nations continue to invest their savings in this country at a remarkable rate. Our nation still has the strongest scientific and technological enterprise -- and the best research universities -- in the world.
But deeper trends in this country and abroad are signs of a gathering storm. After the Cold War, nearly 3 billion potential new capitalists entered the job market. A substantial portion of our workforce now finds itself in direct competition for jobs with highly motivated and often well-educated people from around the world. Workers in virtually every economic sector now face competitors who live just a mouse click away in Ireland, Finland, India, China, Australia and dozens of other nations.
Soon the only jobs that will not be open to worldwide competition are those that require near physical contact between the parties to a transaction. Visitors to an office not far from the White House are greeted by a receptionist on a flat-screen display that controls access to the building and arranges contacts; she is in Pakistan. U.S. companies each morning receive software that was written in India overnight in time to be tested in the United States and returned to India for further refinement that same evening. Drawings for American architectural firms are produced in Brazil. Call-center employees in India are being taught to speak with a Midwestern accent.
This movement of U.S. jobs to other countries has few natural limits. Manufacturing jobs were the first to go, but jobs developing software and conducting various design activities soon followed. Administrative and support jobs are starting to move overseas, and even "high-end" jobs such as professional services, research and management are threatened.
Other nations will continue to have the advantage of lower wages, so the United States must compete on the basis of its strengths. Throughout the 20th century, one of these strengths was our knowledge-based resources -- particularly science and technology. But the scientific and technological foundations of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are building their innovative capacity.
This nation's trade balance in high-technology goods swung from a positive flow of $33 billion in 1990 to a negative flow of $24 billion in 2003. Two years from now, for the first time ever, the most capable high-energy particle accelerator in the world will be outside the United States. Low-wage employers in this country, such as McDonald's and Wal-Mart, create many more jobs than do high-wage employers. In 2001 U.S. industry spent more on tort litigation and related costs than on research and development.
Today, high-technology firms have to be on the leading edge of scientific and technological progress to survive. Intel Corp. Chairman Craig Barrett has said that 90 percent of the products his company delivers on the final day of each year did not exist on the first day of the same year. To succeed in that kind of marketplace, U.S. firms need employees who are flexible, knowledgeable, and scientifically and mathematically literate.
But the U.S. educational system is failing in precisely those areas that underpin our competitiveness: science, engineering and mathematics. In a recent international test involving mathematical understanding, U.S. students finished 27th among the participating nations. In China and Japan, 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively, of undergraduates receive their degrees in science and engineering, compared with 32 percent in the United States.
I've recently had an opportunity to review these trends as chairman of a 20-member committee created by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. Congress asked the committee to examine the threats to America's future prosperity. The panel was a diverse group that included university presidents, Nobel laureates, heads of companies and former government officials. We agreed unanimously that the United States faces a serious and intensifying economic challenge from abroad -- and that we appear to be on a losing path.
Our committee emphasized that the United States needs to focus on fundamentals. We recommended the recruitment of 10,000 new science and math teachers each year through the awarding of competitive scholarships. The skills of a quarter-million current teachers should be improved through enhanced training and education. We recommended establishing 25,000 competitive science, mathematics, engineering and technology undergraduate scholarships and 5,000 graduate fellowships.
To boost scientific and technological innovation, we recommended that the U.S. government increase research funding by 10 percent annually over the next several years, with primary attention devoted to the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics and information sciences. We urged the federal government to create an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which would support out-of-the-box, transformative research aimed at ending our crippling dependence on foreign sources of energy. We asked the government to provide permanent tax incentives for U.S.-based innovation.
The United States wants other nations to do well economically. Broadly based prosperity can make the world more stable and safer for all. What worries business leaders is that the United States could easily fall behind as the rest of the world prospers.
The writer is the retired chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corp.

25 Questions About the Murder of New Orleans

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051017/davis

25 Questions About the Murder of New Orleans

by MIKE DAVIS & ANTHONY FONTENAT

[posted online on September 30, 2005]

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect--the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or Congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans side and not on the Metairie side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward--the most deadly hit-and-run accident in US history?

3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods?

4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city?

5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an "Incident of National Significance" until August 31--thus preventing the full deployment of urgently needed federal resources?

6. Why wasn't the nearby USS Bataan immediately sent to the aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants, helicopters, food supplies and 1,200 sailors eager to join the rescue effort.

7. Similarly, why wasn't the Baltimore-based hospital ship USS Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5?

8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making public his "severe weather execution order" that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame to state and local governments?

9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority--eventually flooded where they were parked--not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor and car-less residents?

10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council, which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves"--white business leaders led by Reiss--reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

12. Everyone knows about a famous train called "the City of New Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not?

13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital were left to suffer and die?

14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water, portable toilets, cots and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a deliberate decision--as many believe--to force poorer residents to leave the city?

15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn't officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.)

16. City Hall's emergency command center had to be abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of diesel fuel. Likewise, many critical-care patients died from heat or equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital generators located in basements that would obviously flood?

17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?

18. Why weren't evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews?

19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police, who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River Bridge--an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?

20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater?

21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television.

22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?

23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

24. As politicians talk about "disaster czars" and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed "new urbanism" in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city's ordinary citizens in their own future?

25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?

Display Commandments, but not Koran verses

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3944/is_200311/ai_n9307693/print

Display Commandments, but not Koran verses, Americans tell pollsters

A majority of Americans believe government should be able to display the Ten Commandments but would not extend that right to displays involving passages from the Koran, a new poll indicates.

The survey, taken by CNN and Gallup in conjunction with USA Today, found that 70 percent of Americans back displays of the Ten Commandments at government buildings and public schools. However, only 33 percent approved of displays featuring a verse from the Koran in those same settings. Sixty-four percent opposed them.

A separate question asked respondents how they feel about displays that include many different religious symbols. Only 10 percent said they believe government should be able to display exclusively Christian symbols, while 58 percent said other religious symbols should be included. (Twenty-nine percent said government should display no religious symbols.)

Those polled did not accept the argument that displays of religious symbols at the seat of government send a message of religious exclusion. Only 25 percent of those polled said displaying the Ten Commandments could send the message that Christians and Jews will get special treatment; 73 percent said the display would not send that message.

A majority did agree that government endorsement of religion can harm religious minorities, however. Fifty-four percent agreed with the statement that when government promotes religion it "can harm the rights of people who do not belong to that religion." Forty percent disagreed.

The survey also asked a few questions about faith-based initiatives. Most respondents - 64 percent - said they approve of using tax funds to pay for community services run by Christian groups. But 56 percent said they would not support funding of community groups with an Islamic affiliation.

The poll was based on a survey of 1,003 adults nationwide taken Sept. 19-21. It has a margin of error of plus or minus three points.

Copyright Americans United for Separation of Church and State Nov 2003

Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

Display Commandments, but not Koran verses

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3944/is_200311/ai_n9307693/print

Display Commandments, but not Koran verses, Americans tell pollsters
A majority of Americans believe government should be able to display the Ten Commandments but would not extend that right to displays involving passages from the Koran, a new poll indicates.
The survey, taken by CNN and Gallup in conjunction with USA Today, found that 70 percent of Americans back displays of the Ten Commandments at government buildings and public schools. However, only 33 percent approved of displays featuring a verse from the Koran in those same settings. Sixty-four percent opposed them.
A separate question asked respondents how they feel about displays that include many different religious symbols. Only 10 percent said they believe government should be able to display exclusively Christian symbols, while 58 percent said other religious symbols should be included. (Twenty-nine percent said government should display no religious symbols.)
Those polled did not accept the argument that displays of religious symbols at the seat of government send a message of religious exclusion. Only 25 percent of those polled said displaying the Ten Commandments could send the message that Christians and Jews will get special treatment; 73 percent said the display would not send that message.
A majority did agree that government endorsement of religion can harm religious minorities, however. Fifty-four percent agreed with the statement that when government promotes religion it "can harm the rights of people who do not belong to that religion." Forty percent disagreed.
The survey also asked a few questions about faith-based initiatives. Most respondents - 64 percent - said they approve of using tax funds to pay for community services run by Christian groups. But 56 percent said they would not support funding of community groups with an Islamic affiliation.
The poll was based on a survey of 1,003 adults nationwide taken Sept. 19-21. It has a margin of error of plus or minus three points.
Copyright Americans United for Separation of Church and State Nov 2003Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

Protesters draw link between Katrina and Iraq war

Protesters draw link between Katrina and Iraq war
19 Sep 2005 23:08:45 GMT
Source: Reuters
(adds police breaking up rally in paragraphs 4, 5)

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N1943789.htm

NEW YORK, Sept 19 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's faltering performance after Hurricane Katrina, like his decision to invade Iraq, show his priorities are at odds with actions needed to keep Americans safe, anti-war protesters said on Monday.

"One of the bogus reasons that George Bush gives for this invasion (and) occupation of Iraq is to make America safer -- and Katrina exposed that clearly he has made America more vulnerable through his policies in Iraq," anti-war activist and bereaved mother Cindy Sheehan told a morning news conference.

U.S. troops fighting an unexpectedly stubborn insurgency in Iraq should come home to help face domestic challenges like the unprecedented humanitarian relief and recovery effort on the Gulf Coast, said the activists, who will stage a march on Washington this weekend.

When Sheehan later spoke in Manhattan's Union Square to a group of about 200 anti-war protesters, New York police broke up the rally and arrested a man over a dispute about whether their permit allowed amplified sound.

Morrigan Phillips, spokeswoman for the Bring Them Home Now Tour, which has been stopping in towns across America on its way to the march in Washington, said the arrest was the first since the group began its campaign earlier this summer.

Leaders of the coalition organizing the Sept. 24-26 protest in Washington include Sheehan, who gained international fame by camping out for weeks outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

The anti-war group United for Peace and Justice, spearheading the march on Washington, said National Guard troops and materiel deployed in Iraq were needed to respond to the tragedy in and around New Orleans.

Sheehan is the star attraction for the three-day protest, which will include nonviolent acts of civil disobedience at the White House and an interfaith religious service, organizers said.

After her soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq, Sheehan demanded to meet with Bush while he vacationed in Texas so he could explain why U.S. troops were not being withdrawn from Iraq.

Bush, who had met briefly with Sheehan on a previous occasion, has declined to meet with her again.

"We were alarmed to hear the first company to get a contract in the rebuilding of New Orleans was Halliburton, another nonbid contract," said Leslie Cagan of United for Peace and Justice, which bills itself as the largest anti-war coalition in the United States.

The largest U.S. contractor in Iraq, Halliburton Co.'s <HAL.N> subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root has been given a $29.8 million contract to rebuild Navy bases along the Katrina-battered Gulf Coast.

Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton, whose subsidiary secured no-bid contracts in Iraq after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein.

Why the millennium goals won’t work?

Q:
Why the millennium goals won’t work?
Ans:

Because those who designed them do not want them to work well. These are the rich executives of UN and WorldBank. If those goals are fulfilled and the poor became rich, then they will loose their luxurious jobs. They will loose around-the-world missions. They will loose 5-start hotel stay.

So, the solution is to make big bubbles on the subject, and hold meetings and conferences in most luxury places and claim love for the poor and shed crocodile tears for the poor.

THE DEVELOPMENT SET

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet-
I'm off to join the Development Set;
My bags area packed, and I've had all my shots,
I have traveller's cheques and pills for the trots.

The Development Set is bright and noble,
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes,
Out thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton hotels in scattered nations,
We damn multinational corporations;
Injustice seems so easy to protest,
In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks
And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.
Whether Asian floods or African drought,
We face each issue with an open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution
Raises difficulties for every solution-
Thus guaranteeing continued good eating
By showing the need for another meeting.

The Language of the Development Set,
Stretches the English alphabet;
We use swell words like 'epigenetic',
'Micro', 'Macro', and 'logarithmetic'.

Development Set homes are extremely chic,
Full of carving, curios and draped with batik.
Eye-level photographs subtly assure
That your host is at home with the rich and poor.

Enough of these verses- on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just pray to God the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you.



Why the millennium goals won't work
By Bunker Roy International Herald Tribune WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2005
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/09/13/opinion/edbunker.php


TILONIA, India In 1978, when Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank, and McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, spend a night at the Barefoot College here in Tilonia, McNamara asked a man whose family lived on much less than a dollar a day what he looked forward to in life. He smiled and said very quietly, "Two square meals a day."
 
I remember the stunned silence even today and think back to that meeting when I read the United Nations' report on its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2005. For all the high-powered officials who put it together and for all the 25 UN agencies and international donor groups it depends on, it reflects a naïve and gullible attitude about poverty.
 
The virtual reality in which its authors live, full of action plans, road maps and fact sheets, is frightening. They should listen to someone who has lived and worked for the last 34 years with the rural poor: Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger (MDG No. 1) does not need indicators and databases. Only intellectual activists who have no idea how to reach the very poor need that.
 
So long as governments in the South are powerless to break the hold of corrupt private contractors and larcenous village-level politicians, the poor will never be free from want or free from fear, whatever the UN report envisions. The possible solution? Get every government in the South to work toward a Right to Information Act like India's. Ensure transparency and accountability, with rural communities putting pressure on government from below to disclose how money has been spent. Ask Transparency International. They will help.
 
If we want to achieve universal primary education (MDG No. 2), Unesco's approach has not worked. With 60 percent of the poorest rural children not going to school in the morning because they have to help with domestic chores, far from a solution, the development report offers only a demonstration of an inability to think out of the box. But there's a common-sense people's solution - have school at night.
 
Few government teachers sleep in the villages. So train literate but unemployed rural youth as part-time "barefoot" teachers by the thousands, all over the world, to run the night schools.
 
Are the development report's authors aware that the tremendous work that community-based groups are doing in primary education is not reflected in the official statistics either of Unesco or of governments? This is because their work is still not valued or recognized and never will be, because they are a threat to village officials who represent government and who do not believe in changing the status quo.
 
There are many innovative ways of empowering women (MDG No. 3) used by community-based groups the world over. In my experience, to the disbelief of urban paper-qualified experts, semiliterate rural women have become solar and water engineers and have begun repairing hand pumps, building rainwater tanks in schools, solar-electrifying villages and feeding data into computers without any technical help from outside.
 
Speaking of rainwater, it falls on the roofs of schools everywhere. It should be collected, by the billions of gallons, for drinking and flushing toilets. Expensive centralized technology solutions with hand pumps or piping systems must be phased out. This simple solution to meet a basic minimum need will advance not only MDG No. 7, which specifically calls for greater access to safe drinking water, but almost every other MDG as well, either directly or indirectly.
 
We do not need the World Health Organization in the villages: It's so simple and inexpensive to upgrade the skills of traditional midwives, improve their confidence and build on their knowledge. Where these small community-managed steps have been taken to involve the traditional medicinal systems, child mortality has fallen sharply, maternal health has improved and waterborne diseases have been tackled more effectively (MDG Nos. 4 through 6).
 
If the primary focus is really ending poverty, the partnerships we need to strengthen are of a sort other than trade (MDG No. 8): partnerships between poor communities so that they learn from one another and share traditional, practical knowledge and skills. Importing expensive, unworkable ideas, equipment and consultants from the North simply destroys the capacity of communities to help themselves.
 
Any goal that is driven from the top by international donors and governments not accountable to the communities and without financial transparency is doomed to fail. That model encourages colossal falsification of figures, the excessive hiring of private consultants and contractors, conflicts of interest and a massive patronage system.
 
When poor communities think at the human level, all their goals are interconnected. But under the present top-down model, with the absence of a global grass-roots movement with the communities as equal partners, the goals have been broken up compartmentally into project mode, to suit donors and governments.
 
That's the ultimate recipe for disaster, and that's why the MDGs will be achieved only on paper.
 
(Bunker Roy is the founder of the Barefoot College and chairman of the Global Rain Water Harvesting Collective. A complete list of the Millennium Development Goals and the related UN report can be found at www.un.org/millenniumgoals.)

CHARITIES ARE FOR SUCKERS

This man did the internal audit correct!!
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ucru/20050914/cm_ucru/charitiesareforsuckers

CHARITIES ARE FOR SUCKERS
By Ted RallTue Sep 13, 8:06 PM ET
Leave Katrina Relief Efforts to Government
NEW YORK--Hurricane Katrina has prompted Americans to donate more than $700 million to charity, reports the Chronicle of Philanthropy. So many suckers, so little foresight.
Government has been shirking its basic responsibilities since the '80s, when Ronald Reagan sold us his belief that the sick, poor and unlucky should no longer count on "big government" to help them, but should rather live and die at the whim of contributors to private charities. The Katrina disaster, whose total damage estimate has risen from $100 to $125 billion, marks the culmination of Reagan's privatization of despair.
The American Red Cross leads the post-Katrina sweepstakes, quickly closing in on the $534 million it took in just after 9/11. But Red Cross spokeswoman Sheila Graham told the AP it needs another half billion "to provide emergency relief over the coming weeks for thousands of evacuees who have scattered among 675 of its shelters in 23 states."
Shelley Borysiewicz of Catholic Charities USA, which has raised $7 million thus far, also continues to solicit donations: "We don't want people to lose sight of the fact that this is going to take years of recovery, and we're going to be there to help the people who fall through the cracks."
What "cracks"? Why should New Orleans' dispossessed have to live in private shelters? We live in the United States, not Mali. There's only one reason flood victims aren't getting help from the government: because the government refuses to help them. The Red Cross and its cohorts are letting lazy, incompetent and corrupt politicians off the hook, and so are their donors.
It's ridiculous, but people evidently need to be reminded that the United States is not only the world's wealthiest nation but the wealthiest society that has existed anywhere, ever. The U.S. government can easily pick up the tab for people inconvenienced by bad weather--if helping them is a priority. That goes double for Katrina, a disaster caused by the government's conscious decision to eliminate the $50 million pittance needed to improve New Orleans' levees.
For our leaders the optional war against Iraq is such a priority, which the Congressional Budget Office expects to cost $600 billion by 2010. That's four or five Katrinas right there. (That's also where the levee money went.) Because rich people are always a political priority, their taxes have been slashed by $4 trillion over a decade--the equivalent of 32 Katrinas. So worried are our public servants about the tax burden placed on the rich that they're looking out for rich dead people. This is why they've gutted the estate tax that, at a cost of $75 billion annually, will run half a Katrina a year. Trickle-down economists beginning with Milton Friedman shout "starve the beast," but while the social programs are put on a diet, the mean and powerful pig out more than ever.
Disaster relief is too important to be left to private fundraisers, with their self-sustaining fundraising expenses, administrative overhead (nine percent for the Red Cross) and their parochial, often religious, agendas. It's also way too expensive. In the final analysis, after the floodwaters have receded and the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans have been razed under eminent domain, major charities will be lucky if they've managed to raise one percent of the total cost of Katrina. Congress, recognizing the reality that only the federal government possesses the means to deal with the calamity, has already allocated $58 billion--over 70 times the amount raised by charities--to flood relief along the Gulf of Mexico. As Bush says, that's only a "down payment."
Cutting a check to the Red Cross isn't just a vote for irresponsible government. It's a drop in the bucket compared to what you'll end up paying for Katrina in increased taxes.
Granted, in terms of popularity of likelihood of success, trying to make a case against giving money to charities compares to lobbying against puppies. The impulse to donate, after all, is rooted in our best human traits. As we watched New Orleanians die of thirst, disease and anarchic violence in the face of Bush Administration disinterest and local government incompetence, millions of us did the only thing we thought we could to do to help: cut a check or click a PayPal button. Tragically, that generosity feeds into the mindset of the sinister ideologues who argue that government shouldn't help people--the very mindset that caused the levee break that turned Katrina into a holocaust and led to official unresponsiveness. And it is already setting the stage for the next avoidable disaster.
It's time to "starve the beast": private charities used by the government to justify the abdication of its duties to its citizens.

Satan Says: Mardi Gras Must Continue

This tells that Satan inspires it’s fellows and push them for sin and before that covers the sin with blanket of virtue…

Those people never think that Mardi Gras has any contribution to the calamity New Orleans are suffering…

Mardi Gras is a festival that promotes paganism, sex, crime…it fetches the city a billion bucks and a Katrina….

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/national/nationalspecial/17mardigras.html?hp

September 17, 2005
Vowing to Maintain an Annual Rite After the Storm
By MICHAEL LUO
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 16 - The giant Agamemnon survived. So did the Kevin Costner head from last year's parade. Wolfman just lost a little papier-mâché. But SpongeBob needs some major work.
In a sprawling patchwork of warehouses across the Mississippi River from downtown, a different kind of recovery from Hurricane Katrina is under way. One worker was busy the other day mending the Styrofoam teeth of an oversize alligator, while another repainted a large catfish - all part of a headlong rush to get back on track for the annual rite that is the psychic center of this city and could signal its rebirth next year: Mardi Gras.
"It's certainly some millions of dollars in damage that we have sustained," said Barry Kern, president of Kern Studios, the family-run company that produces most of the elaborate floats for Carnival, the several-weeks-long celebration that culminates in Mardi Gras, which falls on Feb. 28 next year. "But it's nothing that's going to stop us. We're ready to roll."
Still, it is unclear whether New Orleans will have the money, the crowds or the heart for a full-blown Mardi Gras, especially the parades that are the season's signature. And as the city struggles to regain its footing, that question promises to take center stage.
"Maybe it has to be primitive, but it still has to happen," said Oliver Thomas, president of the City Council. "It would be an international shame if it didn't."
The celebration's contribution to the city's economy has been estimated at more than $1 billion, according to study conducted in 2000 for the Mayor's Mardi Gras Advisory Committee. Mardi Gras is the lifeblood of a cottage industry of bead manufacturers, costume designers and other artisans, as well as hotels, restaurants and taxis that profit from the tourists and residents who jam the streets.
"It's equal in size to three Super Bowls," Mr. Kern said. "If we don't have it, it would be devastating."
In the storm's wake, the importance of Mardi Gras extends well beyond dollars, many people said.
"Psychologically, I think it would be significant for New Orleans to have some kind of Mardi Gras celebration next year, celebrating that it's back," said Sarah Kracke, senior vice president of Greater New Orleans Inc., an economic development group. "All these things would be extremely valuable to the city and our psyche."
Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the first Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, said Arthur Hardy, who publishes an annual guide to the festivities. In all those years, there have been only a handful of times when revelers did not parade through the streets in the days before Ash Wednesday: during the Civil War, a period of local unrest in 1875, World Wars I and II and the Korean War.
"Basically, it's been wars that have stopped Mardi Gras," Mr. Hardy said, "not anything like a little rainstorm."
Much of how Mardi Gras will look next year is dependent on the more than 50 organizations, called krewes, that put on the raucous parades that stretch over 10 days. Some have histories that stretch back decades, and mythological names like Orpheus, Endymion and Bacchus. Rex, one of the oldest krewes, dating from 1872, suffered some of the worst storm damage, as waters flooded its warehouse, across the Mississippi River from Kern Studios.
A major question is whether the smaller krewes will have enough money, and members back in the city, to stage their parades, said Mr. Hardy, who suggested that corporate sponsors might step in to help.
Regardless, Kern Studios is plunging ahead with preparations at its warehouses here in the Algiers neighborhood.
The work begins an entire year before Mardi Gras, said Blaine Kern Sr., who founded the company and is widely known here as Mr. Mardi Gras. As a result, many floats for next year's festivities had already been completed before the storm. "We're set back, of course, but we were ahead of our schedule," Mr. Kern said.
Some doors blew off the Kern warehouses, but damage to the floats and props inside was minimal. Signature floats like Orpheus's Leviathan, a giant dragon that blinks with an elaborate fiber-optic system, and Endymion's 240-foot-long riverboat were unharmed.
The worst damage was the collapsed roofs of two warehouses. But even there, amid the debris, a fragile flamingo on one float remained standing atop spindly legs, ready to go on.