Left In Lowell

In the last post about Katrina, I pointed out a few things about this president’s leadership failures.

It was worse than I thought. “The difficulties of coordination seem to indicate we’ve returned to the bad old days where the FEMA administrator position is given away on the basis of political favor, rather than hard experience. The whole story of FEMA’s response to Katrina has yet to be written, but it has always troubled me that Bush has appointed, in succession, his 2000 campaign manager and an Oklahoma lawyer whose only emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA was as an assistant city manager.”

Just go read. [Kevin Drum via Atrios]

Oh, and let me add another quote: “This year it was announced that FEMA is to “officially” lose the disaster preparedness function that it has had since its creation. The move is a death blow to an agency that was already on life support. In fact, FEMA employees have been directed not to become involved in disaster preparedness functions, since a new directorate (yet to be established) will have that mission.”

An astute reader sent me a link to an article in the Lowell Sun today, a publication I’ve been neglecting in light of the big national events that have rocked the country. But I can’t ignore the rank stereotyping by City Manager John Cox, the big bully. Unbelievable. First, the article, and some quotes (since the link will soon die):

Goth festival falls silent at ballpark
Promoter cries foul; city manager says permit for event never filed

LOWELL — With five weeks until show time, the city has pulled the plug on the New England Punk, Goth & Metal Festival scheduled for LeLacheur Park on Oct. 1-2.

The 70-band event, which was expected to draw 5,000 people each day, was to be the first concert ever staged at the ballpark, home to the Lowell Spinners minor-league baseball team. The news took Matthew Marchesi by surprise. The 25-year-old Lowell promoter said he has signed contracts with four headliners and sold 1,000 tickets.

“They are afraid of who we are and might be,” said Marchesi, whose company Spaz-tik Ltd., runs events such as Slaughter House Saturdays at Reflections in Chelmsford.

Marchesi said he had a contract with Spinners management for the show and thought he was all set. But on Aug. 15, City Manager John Cox read about the “scheduled” Goth fest in The Sun and immediately contacted Spinners’ officials. Cox said he told the Spinners that proper procedures weren’t being followed and that he was unhappy with the choice of event at the city-owned ballpark.

“First of all, nobody sought the city’s permission about it,” Cox told The Sun.

“Also, it’s not the type of thing we want there. Someone like James Taylor would be more appropriate for the first concert.”

St. Onge told The Sun two weeks ago the Goth concert was a sure thing. The Sun made repeated attempts to contact St. Onge this week, but calls to City Hall and his office were not returned.

Organizers say the festival is being discriminated against because it features Goths, a subculture that favors dark clothing, dark makeup and moody music bordering on the macabre.

“We are perturbed. After the article came out in the newspaper, by Monday they had decided they wanted to get after us,” said Anderson Mar, an alternative-music producer from Malden who runs a company called Dark Sky Productions.

St. Onge is the guy we always deal with in regards to permits for city property (whether that’s bake sales or rallies) so yeah, he’s the person who has the power to issue them.

All right, here’s where I make a private confession to you all: I am a gamer. A role-playing gamer. No, I don’t play D&D, but that’s because D&D isn’t hardcore enough for me. I like my fantasy role playing game to be really good, so my favorite game is Ars Magica. Why am I telling you this?

Because ‘gamers and goths are all often victims of stupid, uninformed stereotyping. Called anti-social, Satan worshippers, or worse.

Goths get the biggest hit, because they wear their “difference” on their sleeves - and on their face, in their hair, etc…in other words, it’s visible. In the 80s, there was a murder trial in the south where circumstantial evidence against two teenage boys consisted of flimsy eyewitness testimony and “they’re Satanists! They do that Wiccan thing!” Their conviction was overturned on appeal.

You know what? I know lots of gamers and goths personally. They are a social bunch - hell, playing a role-playing game is about as social as you can get, short of playing Truth-or-Dare. Interacting in character with other players is the whole point, and you spend the evening laughing, talking, and not drinking (drinking and role-playing don’t mix). Guess what? We’re not evil. I bet if you did the statistics, you’d find the rate of bad sorts among us geeks and freaks would be the same as it is in the general population.

Here’s an action for you: call the City Manager John Cox, (978) 970-4000, and tell him to stop stonewalling the efforts of a legitimate group of people who would like a venue to listen to their music, just because they aren’t your type of people. Hey, if they trash the place, prosecute them after the fact, just like you would any other group using a city venue. But don’t assume they are bad guys just by blackness of their fingernails or the paleness of their skin.

Here’s a great diary bringing together links and quotes from various sources detailing Bush’s administration and their criminal negligence in dealing with the threats to New Orleans, the destruction of which many people have known for years was only a matter of time. Quotes from the diary include:

[In early 2001] the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country. The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.
…
For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won’t be finished for at least another decade.
…
The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Here’s a comparison of the Democratic and Republican online responses to this disaster (I’ve already had emails from Dean, Obama, urging people to donate).

Here’s what Bush did while people died in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf, yesterday. He then went back to his ranch for the night, you know, instead of flying his ass out to the area on the redeye like any other president would have, including his own damn father.

Here are the facts, folks.

40% of Louisiana’s National Guard, the very people trained and equipped for these sorts of disasters, are getting shot at in Iraq instead of saving their loved ones at home. Their equipment is with them.

Bush’s thrice-bedamned tax cuts and his adventure in Iraq are directly to blame for the stoppage of work on the very levees that broke. We don’t know if finishing them would have prevented the loss of New Orleans, but I guess we’ll never know now.

The president took an extra 4 days to figure out that he should maybe come back to work and put his leadership into it. We knew this storm was bad by Saturday night and Sunday.

Bush and his party has refused to fund improvements to the aging Coast Guard fleet, the people who are the front lines in homeland security on our coasts, and some of the first to repond to to this sort of disaster.

There are rumblings that the Federal response has been less than stellar. I guess that’s to be expected, since FEMA and other agencies have been gutted by the budget woes of this president.

I don’t like the idea of being accused of politicizing this tragedy; and I know there will be some who will say I am. But these questions need to be asked. No one else is doing it. I am not the one politicizing anything: this president already did that, when he put politics and his race to be a war preznit over the safety of every man, woman, and child in New Orleans. When he still puts us all in danger with his failed policies.

Do you want to trust your family with his underfunded and politically-lead federal agencies?

Dear. Lord. The water is still rising. The French Quarter will probably not be saved. The parts of NO that have not gone under are threatened. WWL TV has posted a warning issued: ****ALL RESIDENTS ON THE EAST BANK OF ORLEANS AND JEFFERSON REMAINING IN THE METRO AREA ARE BEING TOLD TO EVACUATE AS EFFORTS TO SANDBAG THE LEVEE BREAK HAVE ENDED. THE PUMPS IN THAT AREA ARE EXPECTED TO FAIL SOON AND 9 FEET OF WATER IS EXPECTED IN THE ENTIRE EAST BANK. WITHIN THE NEXT 12-15 HOURS****

No matter how many people expected this, the devastation is too much to comprehend.

Here is a list of places to donate to. If you have any money to spare at all, it is needed. Here is the Red Cross link directly.

Chimpy McSmirk, after reading a short statement (boy, they can’t let him off his leash for a minute, can they?) has decided to cut his vacation short by a few days because of the disaster caused by Katrina. Well, it’s about friggin’ time he took some leadership on this, isn’t it?

Rachel Maddow on Air America Radio (filling in for Al) wondered how much of an argument between Bush and his handlers that took. It was pure snark on her part to be sure, but still, you do wonder…

Too bad so many of our National Guard is in Iraq getting shot at. They, and their specialized equipment, would have done a lot of good here.

If you want to help, the best thing you can do is send money. Sending goods like water and food clogs the system, but the Red Cross can get that stuff for themselves if you send them cash. You can do that here. The site is slow, presumably with good Americans and world citizens trying to donate, so be patient. You can choose to send the donation directly to “Hurricane 2005 Relief.”

New Orleans dodged the worst of Katrina yesterday, getting the weak side of the eye of the hurricane. However, there’s still very little in good news:

While Louisiana officials have not yet confirmed any deaths there, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said there have been reports of bodies floating in the floodwaters.

“My heart is heavy tonight,” Nagin said in the interview on CNN affiliate WWL-TV. “I don’t have any good news to share.”

Nagin said that about 80 percent of the city was flooded and that some areas were under 20 feet of water.
Water poured into the city from Lake Pontchartrain after a two-block-long breach opened in a section of a levee that protects the low-lying city.

In the city’s 9th Ward neighborhood, rescue efforts continued throughout the night, with authorities in boats plucking residents from submerged homes after water topped another levee.

Levees in New Orleans broke, even though the truly devastating parts of the storm hit Mississippi instead. It stands to reason that had the eye been a little further west when it hit land, that the dire predictions of a completely submerged city would have panned out. And Mississippi has over 50 dead, and they have not reached every area yet.

Where’s War President Bush? Apparently, dragging his heels on calling out disaster relief, while traveling in CA talking politics about WWII. Schmuck. He should be on the forefront of helping the survivors of this hurricane.

You’d think Bush would have had the troops standing by ready to go in BEFORE the storm, seeing as it was a Category 5 hurricane, wouldn’t you? Except, he probably would have had them protecting the oil refineries first.

[Update: Crap. It’s being reported that water is still rising in New Orleans. It’s not over yet.]

Stirling has a must-read post on oil prices, economics, and the future. It’s long, but trust me, worth reading, even if you’re like me and don’t really know much about economics.

His conclusions are rather depressing, though, I warn you.

I spent some time talking to City Council candidate Darius Mitchell today (interview transcript will be forthcoming), and he mentioned that he didn’t expect there to be too many candidate forums this year. Then I read this post on the newly discovered Dem for MA blog website (see my previous post), where members in Cambridge hosted a progressives forum for their city council candidates, sponsored by DfMA and Progressive Dems of Cambridge. They got 15 of 18 candidates to come and take questions from the audience.

Obviously, we don’t yet have the progressive infrastructure in Lowell that they do in Cambridge, but why couldn’t citizens, or small citizen groups, sponsor their own forums? What would such a forum look like, how would we reach potential (and even, uninterested) voters and get them to attend, and how would we entice candidates to come? Open-ended questions for you all.

The imminent Drinking Liberally chapter in Lowell (again, more details when I get them) would be a good start to becoming capable of such activities. Do you have other ideas?

Googling around the ‘net (as one is wont to do) on unrelated matters, I came across a little cache of goodies, in the form of the blogroll at City Voices (apparently an LTC venture). It looks like the blog itself has been inactive for months (Felicia, if you’re reading this today, please let me know if it goes active again so I can link to it!). Several of the links in the blogroll are also inactive, but I found two fellow Lowell blogs that have recent postings indicating ongoing goings-on. So I’ve added them to a new category, “Lowell Blogs,” placed above the Mass Bloggers.

First up is the Citywide Parent Council. It is, as the title suggests, a blog of the CPC, which specifically posts about the Lowell schools system and the CPC. And, cool, they are as critical of the Lowell Sun as I am, except smarter about it!

The second link is for Lowell Deeds, which calls itself “The latest on real estate recordings and new technology from the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds in Lowell Massachusetts.” Indeed.

If you know about a local blog, political or not, let me know!

[Update: I also found this nifty group state blog, written by members of Democracy for MA. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the number of MA blogs, most of them are aggregated at Leftyblogs.com, to which there is a little graphic link on my sidebar that gets you directly into the MA state blog aggregator. A great way to see the newest posts by MA blogs.]

This is not good. Not good at all. Hurricane Katrina has strengthened, expected to be a category 4 or 5 by landfall. Worse, the storm’s likeliest track is centering as a direct hit on New Orleans, a disaster that has been waiting to happen a long time. According to people on the ground, there’s a significant number of people not leaving the area (primarily unable to). Given that NO is under sea level, and that the sea marshes which protect the coast from storm surges have been filled in in great number for development:

The root of the problem is location. New Orleans is hemmed in by 300-square-mile Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi to the south and west. Built on newly deposited alluvial soil, the city has been sinking ever since its founding in 1718. Draining land for development has made it sink even faster. And sea levels are rising.

From the same article: “Ivan just missed us by a hairsbreadth,” he said. “The thing that keeps me awake at night is the 100,000 people who couldn’t leave.”

New Orleans has dodged several bullets, but it looks like this one will find its mark. I hope that the predictions of a drowned city are wrong, but I suspect the loss of life will be tragic, and the economic impact will be felt throughout the country and the world in the form of record oil prices on Monday. All over something predictable and preventable if Americans were only capable of long-term thinking.