Kanye West ...

Scott Leffler · Guru

Kanye West ...

Mindcrime · Guru

People hate to hear the truth, especially when it's an ugly one. The media has been trying to capitalize on this angle of the story for days. Nobody was concerned with race until the media brought it up, who were desperate as always to find controversy in anything.

My problem is his timing was horrible. That was obviously not the time nor the place to make a statement like that. No one else was using the opportunity to soapbox, and it didn't make me want to donate, rants like that make people want to revolt. I felt bad for Mike Myers who could only stand there, shifting his weight, staring into the camera.

jspeer · Guru

Leave it to NBC and the rest of the Dems to make a bad matter worse. Why would you allow a guy who has already been proven to have negative outburst on TV be a representitive for relief efferts...unless you wanted him to be an ass on TV. The country needs to stick together for the good of the victims. Yes, the relief efferts were slow. I won't deny that but who is at fault? I say our Gov't as a whole has let us all down. I'm just tired of finger pointing instead of constructive solutions. I think a country is like a sports team... the ones that stick together as a team are the ones that come out on top.

shughes · Senior Member

By putting race out in front they are going to turn people away who might have given a donation. It would have been better to focus on the poverty, most people don’t realize how many people in this country are poor. The bottom line should be these people need help.

MBrophy · Veteran Member

Kayne West has sold a lot of records and won quite a few accolades in the music world; I think that NBC was betting that his obvious popularity would produce more in donations. It's unfortunate that this guy would subvert the very cause and people he was claiming to support! A Relief Benefit is not the right venue for this type of commentary but I think it's unwise to bury our heads in the sand and ignore the fact that a lot of people are culpable for making this natural disaster worse than it had to be. We're not a sports team; this is a nation that elects leaders to make the big decisions and I think it's fair to have some expectations of these people. I think it's also fair to examine what we could have done differently, particularly in this situation since the last 2 hurricane seasons have proven that this could very well happen again and soon!

kspeer · Senior Member

I don't care what color these people are. Any white people who were stealing TV's are scum too. Any black people who tried to band together and help each other are heroes too. But that's not how people like Kanye West ever want us to see things. Some black people are eternally the victims of the evil white plot, including the laws of physics that tell you hanging out in a neighborhood below a levee during a flood is a bad idea. But I guess you're saying that innocent simple minded black people could never understand it without the Great White Father coming and telling them that water runs downhill. Do you see what Kanye is saying about his own people?

By the way, this isn't the first time Kanye has done something like this. During an interview at Live AID, he explained that AIDS was invented by the US govt to destroy black people. Yup.
This guy should be permanently blacklisted (no pun intended) from any sort of televised charity.

-- Edited by kspeer at 22:29, 2005-09-04

-- Edited by kspeer at 23:01, 2005-09-04

MBrophy · Veteran Member

Kspeer, I didn't know he had a history of those kinds of antics. I guess bad publicity is good publicity for people like that. What an idiot for playing the race card though.

Anyway, I didn't know where to post this but it kind of seems relevant here; I found this article at the Chicago Tribune that explained how this could happen in the US (I've provided the text and a link below); I mean, maybe I'm naive but so many of the tv images look like this happened in a Third World country. I've been reading as much as I can find since I now live in a hurricane-prone state...I have hurricane insurance but I sure don't want to come home to that someday!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-050831corps-story,1,2364215.story?page=2&cset=true&ctrack=1&coll=chi-news-hed

By Andrew Martin and and Andrew Zajac
Washington bureau
Published August 31, 2005, 10:24 PM CDT

WASHINGTON -- Despite continuous warnings that a catastrophic hurricane could hit New Orleans, the Bush administration and Congress in recent years have repeatedly cut funding for hurricane preparation and flood control.

The cuts have delayed construction of levees around the city and stymied an ambitious project to improve drainage in New Orleans' neighborhoods.

For instance, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for this fiscal year to pay for hurricane protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush administration countered with $3.9 million, and Congress eventually provided $5.7 million, according to figures provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Because of the budget cuts, which were caused in part by the rising costs of the war in Iraq, the corps delayed seven contracts that included enlarging the levees, according to corps documents.

Much of the devastation in New Orleans was caused by breaches in the levees, which sent water from Lake Pontchartrain pouring into the city. Since much of the city is below sea level, the levee walls acted like the walls of a bowl that filled until as much as 80 percent of the city was under water.

Similarly, the Army Corps requested $78 million for this fiscal year for projects that would improve draining and prevent flooding in New Orleans. The Bush administration's budget provided $30 million for the projects, and Congress ultimately approved $36.5 million, according to Landrieu's office.

"I'm not saying it wouldn't still be flooded, but I do feel that if it had been totally funded, there would be less flooding than you have," said Michael Parker, a former Republican Mississippi congressman who headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from October 2001 until March 2002, when he was ousted after publicly criticizing a Bush administration proposal to cut the corps' budget.

A corps plan to shore up the levees began in 1965 and was supposed to be finished in 10 years but remains incomplete. "They've never put enough money in to complete it," Parker said. He complained that the corps' budget has been regularly targeted by the White House because public works projects are perceived as pork and aren't considered "sexy."

"Go talk to the people who are suffering in New Orleans," Parker said. "Ask them, `Do they think it's pork?' "

Joseph Suhayda, an emeritus engineering professor at Louisiana State University who has worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, said the corps simply didn't have enough money to build the levees as high as the designs called for.

"The fact that they weren't that high was a result of lack of funding," he said, noting that part of the levee at the 17th Street Canal--where one of the breaches occurred--was 4 feet lower than the rest. "I think they could have significantly reduced the impact if they had those projects funded. If you need to spend $20 million and you spend $4 or $5 million, something's got to give."

Officials for the Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment on the reasons for the budget cutbacks.

Fred Caver, who retired in June as the corps' deputy director of civil works, said there is always competition for funding and "you're never going to get everything you want."

But he said a reluctance to invest in unglamorous public works projects and especially heavy demands on the budget, from the war in Iraq and entitlement programs, have added to the difficulty in securing funding for corps projects.

Scott Milburn, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, declined to comment about the specific allegations regarding funding for hurricane-related projects in Louisiana. However, he said, "The president signed into law a $100 million increase for the corps for the current fiscal year compared to the previous year's level."

Historically, New Orleans has built bigger and more ambitious levees every time the city floods, Suhayda said.

"They would live with the conditions that they had until there was an event," he said. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 prompted a major upgrade to the levees around New Orleans, he said. The levees were upgraded again to handle a Category 3 storm after Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in 1965.

In the years since then, local officials have warned that a catastrophic storm was inevitable and sought more funding to improve the area's hurricane preparedness to handle larger storms. In July 2004, for instance, federal, state and local officials staged a simulation in which a "Hurricane Pam" slammed into New Orleans with 120 m.p.h. winds and created havoc that was eerily similar to that of Hurricane Katrina, including widespread building damage and death.

"Since 1995, we've been replaying these scenarios out in various degrees. As we got together to do these, the people in the parishes would say, `Make them as bad as possible so we can get some attention,' " said Suhayda, who participated in the Hurricane Pam exercises.

"Unfortunately, our way for dealing with these disasters is after the fact," he said.

J. David Rogers, chairman of the geological engineering department at the University of Missouri-Rolla, said politicians have refused to spend money to improve the levees to handle a Category 5 storm because of the low probability of such a storm occurring.

"The politicians were convinced that they had their 100-year event with [Hurricane] Camille," he said, referring to the Category 5 storm in 1969 that obliterated a large swath of the Gulf Coast. "The fact that we had a big event 20 years ago, or we dodged one last year, doesn't mean it's not going to happen tomorrow."

While corps officials were trying to determine the cause of the levee breaches, they said they believed it was caused by water lapping over the top of the levees, which eroded the back side and eventually caused them to give way.

There are at least three major breaches of 200 to 300 feet long, corps officials said. Once the corps plugs the leaks, with huge bags of sand and gravel dropped by helicopters, it will begin repairing and replacing pumps in the city to remove the water.

Estimates of how long it will take to pump out the water varied from several weeks to several months, depending on which corps official was asked.

The Corps of Engineers has been working on two flood-control projects in New Orleans and is awaiting approval of a third, according to Caver, the former corps officials.

The Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Protection Project, begun in 1965, originally was to include a movable barrier on the eastern edge of the lake to block a tidal surge during a hurricane. Planners opted for a cheaper, less desirable alternative of building up levees to keep the lake from spilling into the city, Caver said.

A second project, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control

Project, aims to improve water drainage within New Orleans. It required hundreds of millions of dollars but has been funded around $50 million a year, Caver said.

A third project, the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Project, remains in a planning stage. It aims to counter the effects of erosion on the state's coastline for a better buffer against storm surges. A huge swath of Louisiana coastline has disappeared, in part because of manmade dikes, canals and levees.

Date: Mon Sep 5 5:30 PM, 2005

This Army Corps of Engineers article is CRAP! They're as responsible as ANYONE. What's the government's first job? To PROTECT IT's CITIZENS!! They failed. The Corps knew since 1965 that this was going to happen. This entire mess is the responsibility of your federal government. Hire another horse trainer and see what further results you get.

Erin Beggorah

Date: Mon Sep 5 8:48 PM, 2005

Anonymous wrote:

This entire mess is the responsibility of your federal government.

Thanks for pointing out the crux of the argument in the article; the federal govt never allocated sufficient funds to solve the problem as the article suggests in just about every paragraph. Did you actually read the article? What were they supposed to do when their plans don't have the funding: "'The fact that they [the levees] weren't that high was a result of lack of funding,' he said, noting that part of the levee at the 17th Street Canal--where one of the breaches occurred--was 4 feet lower than the rest. 'I think they could have significantly reduced the impact if they had those projects funded. If you need to spend $20 million and you spend $4 or $5 million, something's got to give.'"
As usual, money talks and the lobbyists w/ the big money behind them are going to get funding on these domestic projects. Look, we all know that this can't be blamed entirely on the president but we should also be aware of the fact that these budget decisions that half the time we don't even know about can have drastic impacts on our lives.

Also, it's troubling that someone can, w/ one swooping comment, dismiss researched info. as "crap" and then offer up no research/information on which to predicate their own argument.

MBrophy · Veteran Member

Previous post was me, I forgot to log in.