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Showing Original Post only (View all)Chris Hedges: Katrina, All Over Again [View all]
from truthdig:
Katrina, All Over Again
Posted on Dec 2, 2012
By Chris Hedges
Avgi Tzenis, 76, is standing in the hall of her small brick row house on Bragg Street in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She is dressed in a bathrobe and open-toed sandals. The hall is dark and cold. It has been dark and cold since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast a month ago. Three feet of water and raw sewage flooded and wrecked her home.
We never had this problem before, she says. We never had water from the sea come down like this.
Hurricane Sandy, if you are poor, is the Katrina of the North. It has exposed the nations fragile, dilapidated and shoddy infrastructure, one that crumbles under minimal stress. It has highlighted the inability of utility companies, as well as state and federal agencies, to cope with the looming environmental disasters that because of the climate crisis will soon come in wave after wave. But, most important, it illustrates the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services and abandons the wider population.
Sheepshead Bay, along with Coney Island, the Rockaways, parts of Staten Island and long stretches of the New Jersey coast, is obliterated. Stores, their merchandise destroyed by the water, are boarded up and closed. Rows of derelict cars, with the tires and license plates removed and the windows smashed, line the streets. Food distribution centers, most of them set up by volunteers from Occupy Sandy Recovery, hastily close before dark every day because of the danger of looting and robbery. And storm victims who remain in their damaged homes, often without heat, electricity or running water, clutch knives against the threat of gangs that prowl at night through the wreckage. ..............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/katrina_all_over_again_20121202/
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Is there anyway we (the 98%) can revolt against the media and drown out their propaganda for the RW?
kelliekat44
Dec 2012
#16
I read it as "it would have crumbled under minimal stress, Sandy came and worse is to come." n/t
Junkdrawer
Dec 2012
#5
I read it the way you did. Sandy, by the record 940 barometric pressure alone, was a Cat 3 storm...
OldDem2012
Dec 2012
#8
As we keep chasing growth with Drill Baby Drill, Nature keeps erasing our "gains"...
Junkdrawer
Dec 2012
#15
"Many of the 305,000 houses in New York destroyed by Sandy will never be rebuilt."
dixiegrrrrl
Dec 2012
#36