Neither the Federal Emergency Management Agency nor Pres. Bush was responsible for Hurricane Katrina striking New Orleans and Mississippi. Some of us wish we could blame them for it, but we can’t.
What we can blame the Bush administration for is what it did in the wake of the storm, and even hours before it struck.
Even three weeks after the monster storm sent flood waters spilling into the streets of New Orleans, even after Bush replaced the head of the agency responsible for helping the victims of natural disasters, FEMA is still under attack for being painfully sluggish in bringing aid to the hurricane-ravaged areas.
Acknowledging that the massive relief effort was enough to put a strain on FEMA and on local agencies, the fact remains that the federal government was, some claim, criminally negligent in its response.
It’s incredible how naïve the president was shortly after the levees gave way. He said he was taken by surprise that it happened and that nobody foresaw the possibility of the levees breaking.
Nobody could have seen it coming, unless you count the entire scientific community, the Army Corps of Engineers, and most of the local politicians and emergency planning agencies in Louisiana.
Bush initially praised Michael Brown, the head of FEMA when the storm struck. That was shortly before Bush decided to replace Brown after he received the brunt of criticism for the slow response.
Ben Morris, mayor of the town of Slidell outside New Orleans said as recently as last Friday that the town, which suffered major damage, had received no help from FEMA. He called the agency “useless.”
Radio stations in the ravaged area have taken calls from dozens of people complaining that they spend hours trying to get through to FEMA but with no luck. Some even say their pleas have been ignored.
Oh sure, a couple of weeks after the storm, Pres. Bush finally took the blame for the slow and unimpressive response of the federal government. That was the first and only thing he has done right throughout the entire relief effort. The rest of his time was spent paying lip service to what ought to have been measurable actions.
In the wake of 9-11, Bush pushed for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to combat terrorism. He merged FEMA with that department, making it much more bureaucratic. It was a dumb decision.
An emergency management agency, almost by definition, must be ready to act quickly, precisely, and efficiently. Emergencies don’t wait for bureaucrats.
This is just the latest of a long string of bad decisions by our Chief Executive. Even many of those who voted to give him a second term now believe they made a mistake in choosing Bush’s moral imperative over substantial leadership.
But that’s in the past. Bush still has three full years to go. And some wonder if our country can survive another three years of Bush’s incompetence.
On his watch, we have lost the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon has been attacked, we’re fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq, the economy is weak, the rich is getting richer at the expense of the poor, scientific research has been thwarted, and the City of New Orleans has been lost to a preventable disaster.
Our nation now must spend $100 billion or more to recover and rebuild a stretch of the Gulf Coast that could have been protected by modernized levees that would have cost less than one-tenth that amount.
The House of Representatives impeached Pres. Clinton for lying about having sex. Predictably, there is no talk of impeaching Bush, since both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans.
But the president should do what he has always done best. He should quit and walk away. And he should take Cheney with him.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Friday, September 09, 2005
Cuba Wants to Help and We Should Let It
You know how sometimes next door neighbors just can’t seem to get along? Sometimes it’s a spat over a property line or because the dogs bark at night or maybe one neighbor’s tree sheds its leaves in the other one’s yard.
Sometimes a dispute can go on for years. Sometimes, like with the story of the Hatfields and the McCoys, the incident that started the feud isn’t even remembered.
It’s too bad, because a simple, unimportant incident that has blown up to large proportions might be preventing close neighbors from becoming best friends.
Well, it’s not only households that sometimes get into feuds over picayune matters. Occasionally, two governments embroil themselves in bitter disputes that never lead to war, but that prevent what could have been a mutually beneficial relationship.
The U.S. and Cuba are such quarrelsome neighbors and have been for decades. It started in the late 1950s when Fidel Castro took over as leader of the small Caribbean country and set up a Communist government with the former Soviet Union as a good friend.
The quarrel almost escalated into a world-wide nuclear holocaust in October, 1962 when Castro decided he would allow the Soviets to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy wouldn’t hear of it, so he set up a “quarantine” (read, blockade) of Cuba.
It was a week and a half of nail biting and white knuckles as Kennedy and Soviet lead Khrushchev played a dangerous game of brinkmanship. But the Soviets finally backed down.
Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, Kennedy and Castro began to engage in some back-door diplomacy that most likely would have led to normalized relationships between the two nations had Kennedy not been assassinated.
Unfortunately, Pres. Johnson chose not to pursue the diplomatic track with Cuba and the rest is history.
Today, Cuba and the U.S. remain uneasy neighbors. There’s no more saber rattling, but relationships are far from normal.
Last week, Castro offered to send 1,500 doctors to the region struck by Hurricane Katrina. The doctors have been brushing up on their English in anticipation of coming to the U.S. to help.
Unfortunately, Pres. Bush has chosen politics over humanity and has thus far refused Cuba’s offer of help. The administration said Castro might do better freeing his own country from its Communist form of government.
That might be true. Soviet-style Communism as a means of running a nation has failed worldwide, except for the three holdouts of North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. China is also Communist, but it also embraces capitalism.
This country has gone a long way to normalize relationships with former foe Vietnam. It is an active trading partner to China. Even when the Soviet Union was still in existence, Pres. Nixon pursued détente with the Soviets and Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush became good friends with its former leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the late 1980s.
So why is it so tough to accept Castro’s ovations of friendship? He wanted to pursue warmer relations with us way back in the 1960s. We snubbed him then, and we’re still snubbing him.
Don’t get me wrong; Castro is a power-hungry dictator. We need to approach normalization with Cuba cautiously. But we should still pursue a good relationship. It’s in both countries’ best interests.
And we should start by accepting Castro’s offer to send doctors to help those who need it in New Orleans and Biloxi.
Sometimes a dispute can go on for years. Sometimes, like with the story of the Hatfields and the McCoys, the incident that started the feud isn’t even remembered.
It’s too bad, because a simple, unimportant incident that has blown up to large proportions might be preventing close neighbors from becoming best friends.
Well, it’s not only households that sometimes get into feuds over picayune matters. Occasionally, two governments embroil themselves in bitter disputes that never lead to war, but that prevent what could have been a mutually beneficial relationship.
The U.S. and Cuba are such quarrelsome neighbors and have been for decades. It started in the late 1950s when Fidel Castro took over as leader of the small Caribbean country and set up a Communist government with the former Soviet Union as a good friend.
The quarrel almost escalated into a world-wide nuclear holocaust in October, 1962 when Castro decided he would allow the Soviets to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy wouldn’t hear of it, so he set up a “quarantine” (read, blockade) of Cuba.
It was a week and a half of nail biting and white knuckles as Kennedy and Soviet lead Khrushchev played a dangerous game of brinkmanship. But the Soviets finally backed down.
Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, Kennedy and Castro began to engage in some back-door diplomacy that most likely would have led to normalized relationships between the two nations had Kennedy not been assassinated.
Unfortunately, Pres. Johnson chose not to pursue the diplomatic track with Cuba and the rest is history.
Today, Cuba and the U.S. remain uneasy neighbors. There’s no more saber rattling, but relationships are far from normal.
Last week, Castro offered to send 1,500 doctors to the region struck by Hurricane Katrina. The doctors have been brushing up on their English in anticipation of coming to the U.S. to help.
Unfortunately, Pres. Bush has chosen politics over humanity and has thus far refused Cuba’s offer of help. The administration said Castro might do better freeing his own country from its Communist form of government.
That might be true. Soviet-style Communism as a means of running a nation has failed worldwide, except for the three holdouts of North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. China is also Communist, but it also embraces capitalism.
This country has gone a long way to normalize relationships with former foe Vietnam. It is an active trading partner to China. Even when the Soviet Union was still in existence, Pres. Nixon pursued détente with the Soviets and Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush became good friends with its former leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the late 1980s.
So why is it so tough to accept Castro’s ovations of friendship? He wanted to pursue warmer relations with us way back in the 1960s. We snubbed him then, and we’re still snubbing him.
Don’t get me wrong; Castro is a power-hungry dictator. We need to approach normalization with Cuba cautiously. But we should still pursue a good relationship. It’s in both countries’ best interests.
And we should start by accepting Castro’s offer to send doctors to help those who need it in New Orleans and Biloxi.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
No Cash? No Problem!
Back in the mid-1970s when I was just getting started on my journey into the “real world,” after graduating college, I was eager to open a bank account at one of the large Indianapolis banks that had bank machines. These were new-fangled gadgets at the time, and I wanted to make full use of them.
I moved to Indianapolis shortly after graduation, after landing a teaching job at a small school west of the city. And I opened an account at Merchant’s Bank which, like all the other banks of the time, no longer exists.
It was amazing. I could actually go to the bank in the middle of the night and deposit or withdraw money. What a great invention, the ATM.
Of course, you were even more limited then as to how much you could withdraw and in what denominations. Some banks, for example, sorted cash into envelopes of $25 or $50. That’s all you could withdraw at a time.
And most of the ATMs didn’t have a CRT monitor to give you instructions. They had rotating cylinders with words written on the edges. Each instruction would rotate into view as needed to let you know what to do next.
Also, if you had an account at Merchant’s then you could use only their ATMs. The same was true for any other bank. If you needed cash and there was an Indiana National Bank ATM right next to you, you couldn’t use it if you only had a Merchant’s Bank account.
ATM cards could only be used at ATM machines, not at gas stations or grocery stores. There were, of course, credit cards, but you certainly couldn’t buy a Big Mac with one. Basically, only gas stations, hotels, department stores, and full service restaurants accepted them.
Nobody thought of using them to purchase groceries or to buy fast food.
Today, of course, you can use not only your credit card, but your ATM or check card almost anywhere. It made the national news when the first McDonald’s restaurant started accepting credit cards. Now, there is a card scanner hanging on the outside of the drive-through window at White Castle.
Although a few small stores still require a minimum purchase to use a credit or debit card, most do not. In fact, I’ve gone online and purchased a single song from Wal-Mart’s music download site for 88 cents, charged to my debit card.
New technology is emerging that will allow you to simply tap your card on a pad at the checkout. A radio frequency transmitter chip is located in these cards, which sends all relevant information to the retailer. The magnetic stripe will soon be a thing of the past.
In a few years, I predict you will be able to use these computer-chip credit cards to buy a candy bar and soft drink from a vending machine.
You will also be able to carry out person-to-person transactions with credit or debit cards, because everyone will own a tiny, personal card scanner. So if you owe your friend 20 bucks, just tell him to whip out his card reader attached to his key chain, tap it with your credit card, and key in an amount. The funds will transfer from your bank to his instantly.
Just think, no more change to weigh down your pockets. No more waiting in line for little old ladies to fumble through their purses searching for exact change at the checkout. Just tap your card on the scanner and let the computer do the rest.
In fact, that technology might just signal the end of the ATM. Who needs to run out and get cash from an ATM when you can pay for everything by tapping your card?
I moved to Indianapolis shortly after graduation, after landing a teaching job at a small school west of the city. And I opened an account at Merchant’s Bank which, like all the other banks of the time, no longer exists.
It was amazing. I could actually go to the bank in the middle of the night and deposit or withdraw money. What a great invention, the ATM.
Of course, you were even more limited then as to how much you could withdraw and in what denominations. Some banks, for example, sorted cash into envelopes of $25 or $50. That’s all you could withdraw at a time.
And most of the ATMs didn’t have a CRT monitor to give you instructions. They had rotating cylinders with words written on the edges. Each instruction would rotate into view as needed to let you know what to do next.
Also, if you had an account at Merchant’s then you could use only their ATMs. The same was true for any other bank. If you needed cash and there was an Indiana National Bank ATM right next to you, you couldn’t use it if you only had a Merchant’s Bank account.
ATM cards could only be used at ATM machines, not at gas stations or grocery stores. There were, of course, credit cards, but you certainly couldn’t buy a Big Mac with one. Basically, only gas stations, hotels, department stores, and full service restaurants accepted them.
Nobody thought of using them to purchase groceries or to buy fast food.
Today, of course, you can use not only your credit card, but your ATM or check card almost anywhere. It made the national news when the first McDonald’s restaurant started accepting credit cards. Now, there is a card scanner hanging on the outside of the drive-through window at White Castle.
Although a few small stores still require a minimum purchase to use a credit or debit card, most do not. In fact, I’ve gone online and purchased a single song from Wal-Mart’s music download site for 88 cents, charged to my debit card.
New technology is emerging that will allow you to simply tap your card on a pad at the checkout. A radio frequency transmitter chip is located in these cards, which sends all relevant information to the retailer. The magnetic stripe will soon be a thing of the past.
In a few years, I predict you will be able to use these computer-chip credit cards to buy a candy bar and soft drink from a vending machine.
You will also be able to carry out person-to-person transactions with credit or debit cards, because everyone will own a tiny, personal card scanner. So if you owe your friend 20 bucks, just tell him to whip out his card reader attached to his key chain, tap it with your credit card, and key in an amount. The funds will transfer from your bank to his instantly.
Just think, no more change to weigh down your pockets. No more waiting in line for little old ladies to fumble through their purses searching for exact change at the checkout. Just tap your card on the scanner and let the computer do the rest.
In fact, that technology might just signal the end of the ATM. Who needs to run out and get cash from an ATM when you can pay for everything by tapping your card?
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