For all the talk during last week’s Senate Democratic caucus about how Joe Lieberman went South forty years ago to march for racial equality and justice, did anyone even ask about his oversight of the Homeland Security Department that’s created Katrina Kids, the sickest ever?
Now, the children of Katrina who stayed longest in ramshackle government trailer parks in Baton Rouge are "the sickest I have ever seen in the U.S.," says Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. According to a new report by CHF and Mailman focusing on 261 displaced children, the well-being of the poorest Katrina kids has "declined to an alarming level" since the hurricane. Forty-one percent are anemic—twice the rate found in children in New York City homeless shelters, and more than twice the CDC’s record rate for high-risk minorities. More than half the kids have mental-health problems. And 42 percent have respiratory infections and disorders that may be linked to formaldehyde and crowding in the trailers, the last of which FEMA finally closed in May.
The "recovery" from Katrina may be worse than the initial response itself:
The "unending bureaucratic haggling" at federal and state levels over how to provide services and rebuild health centers for the Gulf’s poor has made a bad situation much worse, says Redlener: "As awful as the initial response to Katrina looked on television, it’s been dwarfed by the ineptitude and disorganization of the recovery."
The criminal neglect is ongoing and could certainly benefit from some, um, Oversight:
The agency’s case-management program also "has yet to provide any services for thousands of families," according to the report, and funding for the program expires in March. Redlener is optimistic that funds will be extended at least through mid-2010, since all that will require is "a stroke of the pen" from the new administration. But, he adds, he’s "not Pollyanna-ish about how rapidly" the disaster-planning system will get its act together and come up with long-term plans for the impoverished families—or whether that will be accomplished in time "to make sure this doesn’t happen again" with the next storm.
Tell me again, Senate Democrats, about how denying Joe Lieberman his Senate Homeland Security and Government Oversight gavel was all about retribution? No, it was about incompetence, criminal neglect, poisoning of children, crony contracting, and worthless government services — all of which were enabled by the independent Senator from Connecticut.
Heckuva job, Joe.
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dugg
Thank you for this, Teddy.
There is no hell hot enough or deep enough…
These are lifelong afflications the children are suffering; there is no remedy. Their illnesses will outlive Joe.
“Unending bureaucratic haggling” seems like something a congresscritter with any integrity could sink his/her teeth into, but not Joe.
Teddy – but besides the basic human suffering – what we’re talking about here is human waste – the waste of human lives. One of those kids might have written the best novel ever; one of them might have been the scientist who discovered the cure for Alzheimers; one of them might have been a fantastic artist. one of them might have been president or a senator. Instead, we have basically said, “It’s ok to abandon you to filthy, chemically destructive housing units because..you are not important; you are not people who have a voice. You are people who we can forget. The MSM forgot them a long time ago – they constantly ‘move on’ to the next shiny object, leaving behind a broken city, people who are being warehoused in health-sucking living units, and children whose lives are being sacrificed because they are not important enough for anyone to remember. They are easy to forget because they are not white. they are easy to forget because they are not rich. They are easy to forget because we LIKE to forget stuff like this – we don’t like the feeling that we ‘owe’ anyone anything, that we have a responsibility to care for anyone else. We are basically selfish and self-centered. We pick and choose who we wish to rescue — and today’s rescued people in another country might just be next week’s refugees because we’ve invaded their country. The only difference here is that these are the refugees of Katrina who we decided were not important enough or appealing enough for us to rescue in a meaningful way. And frankly, in a purely dollars and cents way, we will be paying for the destruction of these people’s brains and lives for a very long time to come, not just through welfare and so on, but through the loss of their brain power and creativity and contributions to our country’s life. But then again, the people who had/have the ability to actually do something about this …just do not care. The people they care about are middle and upper class, educated, largely white, work for the finance industry, live in the northeast and have a lot of people who speak for them to Congress. Poor people and people of color by and large do not have lobbyists making loud noises in DC.