Cajun Cassandra

Awesome piece from the LA Times: calendarlive.com: A warning sent but left unheeded -- if you read only one hurricane-related column, let it be this one, as it underlines the greatest tragedy of the last week: we saw it coming.

Politics may have failed the people of New Orleans. Politicians certainly failed them. They may have failed themselves by not demanding better. But their newspaper and other important segments of the American press did not fail them.

NOLA: Talking is not leading

The men of the hour appear to be Ray Nagin and Anderson Cooper. ( Why? Because they're awesome. )

NOLA: Escaping blame by purging archives

I know, I know, like you need another reason to be outraged. Via Neil Gaiman, from Lenin's Tomb: Remember my earlier point that disaster management in New Orleans had been privatised, the 'catastrophic hurricane disaster plan' having been handed over to Baton Rouge-based Innovative Emergency Management last year? Watching this nightmare unfold, I've been wondering why no fucking one is asking what exactly IEM got paid for.

It's turning out to be very hard to find out, for rather startling reasons....

...That's right. The evidence that hurricane-management was privatised and handed over to IEM has been eradicated from the IEM website. It's almost as if someone was trying to evade responsibility for incompetence that's resulted in the deaths of thousands, or something....