Listen to this. This is what is happening in New Orleans. This disaster is so much more than a natural disaster. This is an ethical disaster, a governmental disaster, a human-rights disaster. People are dying and starving and rather than helping them, they're treating them like criminals. They're FINALLY letting the victims out of the city (they were locked in and barred from exiting by the National Guard), and they're going to send them to a camp where they'll be met by the National Guard who will check them for guns.

MeFi thread with lots of links: "The Red Cross has been ordered to stay out of New Orleans. Critical firefighting equipment is being left untouched. Chicago's offer of manpower and equipment is "snubbed" by FEMA, according to the Mayor. FEMA "forgets" to tell the military to airdrop food and water to the survivors. Northern Command has been ready for days, just waiting for the President to give the orders. Feds delayed paperwork giving permission for National Guard to act. Louisiana begged for federal help on Sunday in a formal request, but the Bush administration says they didn't know anything about problems until Wednesday. Meanwhile, reporters apparently grow weary of the spin doctors."

MeFi thread with link to incredible video of reporters just LOSING IT: FOXNews reporters finally tell the truth about something and disagree with the party line.

Reuters report, Friday:

"I had to walk two blocks to get here and I have arthritis and three ruptured discs in my back," said Selma Valenti, 80, as her husband lay beside her, being revived by a policeman in riot gear. The two had eaten nothing since Wednesday. Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.

"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said, sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people in charge told us this morning."

Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder. Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and murdering children. She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the convention center. "She was raped for four hours until she was dead," Joseph said through tears. "Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night."

All this while being LOCKED IN THE SUPERDOME and being told by the National Guard that they're not allowed to walk over the highway bridge to another part of Louisiana. Not allowed! What the fuck!

Couple that with Bush staying on vacation until Wednesday, and Condi going shoe shopping while people in NO are dying.. they just don't give a shit. And they weren't letting foreign aid into the country until what -- Friday? Even Venezuela was offering aid -- Venezuela! It's not like they're on good terms with the US! But the government just didn't get around to dealing with offers of aid until... you know... after a good amount of poor black people had died. Now they're sending in armed guards and talking about "looters" and "insurgents" in New Orleans. Maybe these "looters" haven't eaten in three days and are starving, has the government thought of that? Maybe all that food in the abandoned and flooded grocery stores is going to go bad long before anyone can get back to sell it. If you're not going to let aid into the city, but you're not going to let them eat what is already there, WHAT THE FUCK??!

I find this so disturbing. I am SO angry. And at the same time, I'm kind of glad that this happened now, because Bush's mid-term elections are coming up and this reveals what a sorry excuse for a leader he is. Maybe this will help to strip him of some power. This is just one of the effects of the Iraq war on the American people. They've known that those levees needed to be reinforced for years, and that project was stripped of funding and the money was diverted to Iraq. This is what happens when you take care of the rich and abandon the poor. This is what happens when you send in the army instead of aid workers. This is what happens when you push the American Dream to the limit and just don't give a shit about people who haven't managed to make their millions. You treat them like lazy good-for-nothing criminals. You stop aid from getting through until you've gotten your photo-op.

I don't know how to deal with stuff like this. There are disasters, and then there is cruelty.