Op/Ed: Beyond Salvage: Was New Orleans Destroyed on Purpose?

Hey I have to add that due to the hurricane also 30 years fixed rate loans are at a 5.6 low, and that is a great opportunity for refinancing.

Is always somebody that will profit from death and destruction, that is the way things are.

I still don't see how anyone is supposed to profit from this mess. The housing sector will be depressed for years, since a lot of people just lost their savings and property (and thus their ever-important ability to borrow money).

The oil business is missing a lot of profits, since American company's aren't bringing it in out of their holdings in the gulf--it'll have to come from overseas, and that means more money for OPEC, and higher prices (profits) for Big Oil's overseas competitors.

One thing about executives is that they are so incredibly predictable. Whether it supports their ideology or not, they ALWAYS move in the direction of greater profit. And I just don't see how this helps anybody's bottom line more than it hurts the profits.

But hey. I'll keep reading and let the rest of you point it out for me. I'm just saying, it's missing from the arguements I've seen here.

I have to say I don't believe your theory because the more people involved in a conspiercy the less likely it will remain a secret and this would HAVE to remain a secret...that being said I wouldn't be surprised at such ideas kicking around in this administration and those corporate circles at all.

Originally posted by marg6043
Hey I have to add that due to the hurricane also 30 years fixed rate loans are at a 5.6 low, and that is a great opportunity for refinancing.

Is always somebody that will profit from death and destruction, that is the way things are.

Anyone considering the purchase of a house now, or in the near future, please make sure you can still afford the mortgage payments even if you were to lose a substantial portion of your overall income. (i.e. either spouse's income, layoff, downsizing, etc.)

The housing bubble is near bursting and Katrina could very well be the proverbial straw.

Greenspan stepping down as head of the federal reserve commenting on the volatility of the current housing market/trend. He's been at the reins of the longest surge in the US economy in many years. Historically, the longer/greater the growth/surge . . . the harder/bigger the fall.

Just be careful, and most importantly confident as to your overall income's long term security.

US heading for house price crash, Greenspan tells buyers


Greenspan: Housing bubble may burst

[edit on 8-9-2005 by 12m8keall2c]

Originally posted by 12m8keall2c

Anyone considering the purchase of a house now, or in the near future, please make sure you can still afford the mortgage payments even if you were to lose a substantial portion of your overall income. (i.e. either spouse's income, layoff, downsizing, etc.)

I am OK, we got our home in the 90's when the economy was good but the interest rate is a bit to high, for a veteran's backed loan.

The mortgage is still low and is clean from second loans, no problem here.

Greenspan stepping down as head of the federal reserve commenting on the volatility of the current housing market/trend. He's been at the reins of the longest surge in the US economy in many years. Historically, the longer/greater the growth/surge . . . the harder/bigger the fall.

You maybe on something here, Greenspan has been warning about the economy for quite sometime but nobody listens.

Just be careful, and most importantly confident as to your overall income's long term security

Beside the pension my husband has we are one of those that benefit from the big bad and evil corporations.

I guess is just life.

Originally posted by dr_strangecraft

I still don't see how anyone is supposed to profit from this mess.

Try all the Federal grant money that is going to the construction firms for the cleanup and "disposal".

The housing sector will be depressed for years, since a lot of people just lost their savings and property (and thus their ever-important ability to borrow money).

Perfect time for wealthy real estate financiers to come in and buy land at a discount.

The oil business is missing a lot of profits, since American company's aren't bringing it in out of their holdings in the gulf--it'll have to come from overseas, and that means more money for OPEC, and higher prices (profits) for Big Oil's overseas competitors.

False the current big three US oil Companies have posted records profits this year to the tune of an additional 65% increase over last year.

Originally posted by robertfenix
False the current big three US oil Companies have posted records profits this year to the tune of an additional 65% increase over last year.

Yes I can testify on this one I did a nice thread on them a few months ago, their profits are in the tens of millions.

They can afford to used some of their profits for incentives to ease on the gas prices but they rejected.

I don't fee sorry for anything that they lose, we after all are still paying the prices at the pump anyway.

I got rid of my big gas cow and now we all have small compact cars.

Found the link, some of the links provided may be old by now some others works.

politics.abovetopsecret.com...



[edit on 8-9-2005 by marg6043]

Yeah team! Good stuff here.

...Majic - hang in - we all need our crits, and we do appreciate you, including me.

RE: Profit potential. More dibs on tax dollars (the golden goose), boom in Houston, power and land grab, fire sale on prime real estate, long term positioning.

A few tidbits:

The Mystery of the Misplaced Scripts, or How could these guys already know they "had to rebuild," but have no clue the survivors were in desperate straits?

"It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's seven feet under sea level....It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." - House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Aug. 31, 2005 (Source)

"Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well." - FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005 (Source)

"I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water." - Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, on NPR's "All Things Considered," Sept. 1, 2005 (Source)

"...those who are stranded, who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city..." –FEMA Director Michael Brown, on New Orleans residents who could not evacuate because they were too poor and lacked the means to leave, CNN interview, Sept. 1, 2005 (Source)

"We've got a lot of rebuilding to do ... The good news is - and it's hard for some to see it now - that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." (Laughter) - President Bush, touring hurricane damage, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005 (Source)

"I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.” –Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), Sept. 6, 2005 (Source)


[edit on 8-9-2005 by soficrow]

Consider the situation of Galveston/Houston. Galveston was once an up and coming town. After repeated abuses from Gulf hurricanes, the town is little more than an historic district and a port center. All the good stuff moved north to Houston.

Why not do the same thing to NO? Restore the French Quarter. Drop in a refinery or two in the areas that will likely have to be razed as a result of flooding and move all of the culture/people/industry up to Baton Rouge.

Originally posted by chaosrain
Consider the situation of Galveston/Houston. Galveston was once an up and coming town. After repeated abuses from Gulf hurricanes, the town is little more than an historic district and a port center. All the good stuff moved north to Houston.

Why not do the same thing to NO? Restore the French Quarter. Drop in a refinery or two in the areas that will likely have to be razed as a result of flooding and move all of the culture/people/industry up to Baton Rouge.

All good and sensible points, and maybe a good plan. But...

New Orleans is about 300 years old, steeped in tradition and vibrant history.

The French Quarter was not really flooded - it's higher.


AND

If such decisions are taken - the public needs to be properly informed, maybe even participate in the decision-making process. (Radical, really revolutionary thinking, I know...)

Saying - after the damage was done - that they were 'told to evacuate' just doesn't cut it.


.

sofi, I will not bother to go back and forth with you on this as I don't see the conspiracy and never will and you see it and won't back down. this is like the idea that gwb brought down the wtc. I don't see it and won't see it.


your comment about how it is virtually guaranteed that hurricanes will hit New Orleans each cane season is something to look at for another reason.

the city lies in an extremely prone spot and every so often we get these doomsday warnings that hurricane him or her is heading toward the big easy and this is going to be the one that wipes the city out. year in, year out it didn't happen. take a look at the history of the city vs. hurricanes. New Orleans has fared extremely well. For whatever reason, the storms always lose strength, veer left, veer right, or turn around and head toward florida again. for a city lying in a spot that virtually guarantees a hit each season, it hasn't been hit like this in years.

I lived there for 4 years. never even warned of an incoming storm. no evacuations while I was there. one year after I left there was a storm that was coming close enough that there were evacuations. the city got rain and wind but nothing worth writing home about.

that's your conspiracy. whomever has their hand on the weather machine has been saving New Orleans each year. Maybe they were tired and took a break.

You know with the new development coming from this administration and now the The Davis-Bacon law that Bush has tapped into to favor corporate power I am starting to see Sofi’s conspiracy coming to shape.

Yes our government is taking advantage of the events in the south and the truth can not be denied.

American and the poor in our country are getting slapped in their faces and slave labor is coming back.

I guess all the workers rights gain in the 60’s are going back down the drain.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Communications Strategies and Contradictory Information

"Communications strategies" are standard - they are plans used by government and business to inform the public, control situations, and mold public opinion. When officials provide contradictory information, or start flip-flopping and backtracking, it's a sure sign that the communications strategy is more about serving a questionable agenda than serving truth or the public good.

Officials have been contradicting themselves and each other throughout the Katrina debacle, then playing the "but we didn't know," and the "we're waiting for confirmation and final information" cards when the contradictions are caught out. The end result? ...They've got an excuse for every eventuality, and their butts covered six ways to Sunday.

Many, if not all of the contradictions result from distinct focuses in different agencies - it takes a catastrophe to bring the discrepancies out in the open, where officials are tripped up publicly. Even so, only significant effort will reveal the truth.

The contradictions in "public health" information have not received due attention - in part because the threat of infectious disease is scary, and most people already assume 'dirty' is risky. Also, the science is complicated, and analysis is elusive.


CONTRADICTORY INFORMATION RE: Public Health

From the outset, FEMA and other security officials were warning the public that the flood waters carried high risks from infectious disease.

At the same time, official information released by the CDC contradicted the warnings about disease risk coming from security agencies: "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it did not expect serious outbreaks. ...Decaying bodies create very little risk for major disease outbreaks, and the CDC noted that outbreaks of infectious diseases following hurricanes are rare in developed countries such as the United States. It said foodborne illness such as salmonella poisoning was more likely."

The OFFICIAL FLIP FLOP came on Wednesday, September 7:

"Police and soldiers went house to house in New Orleans Wednesday to try to coax the last 10,000 holdouts to leave the shattered city because of the risk of disease from the sewage-laden floodwaters. ...In fact, the first government tests confirmed Wednesday that the amount of sewage-related bacteria in the floodwaters is at least 10 times higher than acceptable safety levels. Dr. Julie Gerberding, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned stragglers not to even touch the water and pleaded: "If you haven't left the city yet, you must do so." "

On another public health front: EPA officials have issued dire warnings that the flood waters are dangerously contaminated with tons of poisons ranging from heavy metals and hydrocarbons to industrial waste and more.

"This is the worst case," Hugh B. Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, said of the toxic stew that contaminates New Orleans. "There is not enough money in the gross national product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area."

See ATS: Potential Disaster


So what's the truth here? Is there a risk of disease, or not? Is the city dangerously contaminated with toxic chemicals, or not?


Health Analysis:

As the DCD originally reported, normal infectious diseases are likely of little concern. The greatest danger from infectious disease in New Orleans results from new disease mutations. The contaminated flood waters are a "chemical soup" of pesticides, drugs, oil, and other toxins - which can mix together to create unknown new chemical compounds. Besides being potentially poisonous in their own right, these new compounds may interract with bacteria and other microbes, facilitate mutations, and speed their rate of reproduction. This mutation process can occur in the water, or inside the cells of an infected/contaminated host (human or animal).


Strategy Analysis, the Challenge:

The handlers are trying to have it both ways, as per usual. They need to push the 'threat of infectious disease' position hard enough to justify complete evacuation by force, and to rationalize land appropriation - but NOT so hard that the clean up issue might obstruct unfettered development. They do NOT want New Orleans to become a Superfund site, which would cut into the take on high-profit clean up contracts.

"Death from infectious disease" likely will be used to explain the heavy death toll - but again, this one could blow up in their faces, and force a real clean up.

Detainment Camps: Authorities are leaking information through 'unofficial reports' to suggest refugees are being detained in 'quarantine' to prevent the spread of disease. Again, the contradictions reveal the truth - if authorities honestly were concerned about the spread of infectious disease, then ALL refugees would be detained, not just some.

Quarantine Policy Background


NOTE: These are notes, meant to provide a basic framework for investigation. Please evaluate and criticize as a work in progress.

Cognitive Dissonance

soficrow's point about official self-contradiction is an important one.

While government flip-flops can be explained by incompetence as rationally as they can be explained by an intent to deceive, the fact remains that regardless of the explanation, the government, by contradicting itself, is lying.

Cognitive Dissonance is one of many tools used to confuse and control people on a mass scale.

When used as part of a disinformation campaign, it can effectively influence people to adopt attitudes and opinions that they would never otherwise embrace.

Whether it is part of a deliberate campaign of domestic perception management (which I strongly suspect) or simply an “accidental” consequence of bureaucratic bungling (which I doubt) is irrelevant.

Either way, cognitive dissonance is making its way into the Katrina Aftermath debate, and in doing so, is molding public opinion.

For what it's worth, cognitive dissonance is used extensively and (apparently) deliberately to influence public opinion in support of Global Warming (“It's too late, so we must act now!”), which is one of the reasons I am highly skeptical of those who promote the Global Warming Scare.

Rescuing The Truth

Skeptic that I am (I'm still a long way from “New Orleans was flooded for money”), I think soficrow is definitely on the right track by examining the self-contradictory claims of public officials, and how they are being used to manipulate the public.

Aside from having the advantage of being matters of verifiable public record, analysis of these logical anomalies may well be the best way to track down what is really going on behind the scenes.

Regardless of your political alignment or suppositions about Hurricane Katrina, I am confident that where investigations such as this one lead is something every American should know.

Meanwhile, in light of what America is up to these days, I am also confident that ATSers in other countries would be well-served to have a clearer idea of what is going on in ours.

One thing is increasingly clear: what's being publicly reported often bears little resemblance to the underlying truth, and the truth -- in this case and many others -- is not reassuring.

``

i wouldn't say Money was the reason for letting New Orleans Flood'

there are few events in history that past administrations would relish more
than to be presented the Legacy Opportunity of Re-building, Re-Directing, Ressurrecting...a major City which suffered a Catastrophic-apocalyptic destruction & migration of the population.

throw in the viewpoint that the poverty class in New Orleans was the
final face of what the liberals & LBJs 'Great Society' ex$periment produced.

yes, i can well concieve that some Think-Tank denizens, who go on to become Cabinet Members,
& the inner-circle surrounding a President,
would share the mind-set that "Something" needed to be done about the problem of New Orleans...
an unspoken knowledge shared by Cabinet Level leaders since Fords' administration...
that any 'Act of God' would be aided, abetted by the hand of men....when the opportunity arose.


Upper echelon government was not alone in this meme,
here's a blurb from a person of stature & heritage in the New Orleans aristocracy; concerning the rebuilding of N.O.,

....The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services
and fewer poor people.....

Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way:
demographically, geographically and politically, he says...

Thursday, September 08, 2005 at xymphora.blogspot.com...

another angle, is that the PNAC neocons, Rumsfeld, Cheney & others in the Bush regime, all have the Dominionist mindset included in their internal dialogue and between each other...ordained or destined to be in power at this time, this cadre of elites were generally in contact with one another or within the extended think-tank connections for decades,
get the drift?

I believe the Regimes' tagline is "Full Spectrum Supremacy"
and the goals include reshaping America
New Orleans would be a fine start as a new Port Orleans .



[edit on 9-9-2005 by St Udio]

the contradictory statements are a result of everyone across the board screwing this thing up. top to bottom, heads should roll.

soficow, read this little article about the importance of New Orleans as an economic tool.

www.stratfor.com...

Originally posted by robertfenix
Perfect time for wealthy real estate financiers to come in and buy land at a discount.

land will be going cheap. dirt cheap. you won't need to be wealthy.

take, for example, dune road in westhampton beach in NY. a few years back during "the perfect storm" the ocean broke thru the road, destroying homes and removing the land that divided the ocean and moriches bay. the army corps of engineers were brought in to deal with the situation. in the interim, the land was being given away. lots could be had for $70,000. I know this because I was awaiting a signed contract so I could buy one of these lots (it was, at the time, merely a square in the middle of the water). the seller backed out and later sold the lot for $250,000 when the announcements were made as to what the plan was for the area.

those same lots are worth about a million a pop today, maybe more.

the land down there will be dirt cheap for a while. if you study the real estate values of areas hit by major devastations such as this you will see that a small investment will wreap major rewards.

I've been following this thread, and felt compelled to comment on this:

CONTRADICTORY INFORMATION RE: Public Health

From the outset, FEMA and other security officials were warning the public that the flood waters carried high risks from infectious disease.

At the same time, official information released by the CDC contradicted the warnings about disease risk coming from security agencies: "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it did not expect serious outbreaks. ...Decaying bodies create very little risk for major disease outbreaks, and the CDC noted that outbreaks of infectious diseases following hurricanes are rare in developed countries such as the United States. It said foodborne illness such as salmonella poisoning was more likely."

The OFFICIAL FLIP FLOP came on Wednesday, September 7:

"Police and soldiers went house to house in New Orleans Wednesday to try to coax the last 10,000 holdouts to leave the shattered city because of the risk of disease from the sewage-laden floodwaters. ...In fact, the first government tests confirmed Wednesday that the amount of sewage-related bacteria in the floodwaters is at least 10 times higher than acceptable safety levels. Dr. Julie Gerberding, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned stragglers not to even touch the water and pleaded: "If you haven't left the city yet, you must do so." "

Emphasis added.
Where is the flip-flop??? One communication talks about risk of disease from decaying bodies (minimal) and the next talks about extremely high levels of sewage-related bacteria (much higher risk)


[edit on 9-9-2005 by jsobecky]

Having replied quite a bit in this thread, Another Op?Ed, which for the life of me seems to be an early version of this one I will make the following observations:

1) It also looks like Halliburton's KRB was contracted to "clean-up" and level New Orleans - the contracts might be extended to landfill the city to sea level, and maybe, rebuild.

What else would you do there? Most domestic structures made of wood and drywall and will have to be built from the ground up and are a total loss.

2)The survivors who chose to stay can't stay because NO needs to be considered ''completely destroyed,'' and depopulated for the land to be appropriated, so Halliburton and cronies can make hay. The survivors who chose to stay are in the way.

Hmmm can't have it both ways now can we. If the government does not and leaves them to thier fate, then we get another op/ed decrying the ethnic clensing going on. However since a case was attempted to be made in the other ATSNN thread linked above that looting im not sure if any responce of the government would fit the your expectations.

Originally posted by FredT

2)The survivors who chose to stay can't stay because NO needs to be considered ''completely destroyed,'' and depopulated for the land to be appropriated, so Halliburton and cronies can make hay. The survivors who chose to stay are in the way.

Hmmm can't have it both ways now can we. If the government does not and leaves them to thier fate, then we get another op/ed decrying the ethnic clensing going on. However since a case was attempted to be made in the other ATSNN thread linked above that looting im not sure if any responce of the government would fit the your expectations.

But that's the point Fred - All these people are NOT the same - they are NOT all criminals, OR all sweet, and some want to get out, while others want to stay.

It's expedient to lump everyone together in the same basket, and treat them the same, and give them the same services - but it's foolish, and totally wasteful, and unjust.


.