{"id":478,"date":"2005-10-04T18:38:59","date_gmt":"2005-10-04T22:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=478"},"modified":"2005-10-06T21:08:57","modified_gmt":"2005-10-07T01:08:57","slug":"thanks-for-everything-now-get-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=478","title":{"rendered":"“Thanks for everything. Now get out.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nagin<\/a><\/p>\n

After weeks of seeing their city in ruins, working hard, toiling in rescue and reconnaisance efforts, and helping in any way they can, I’m sure the employees of the New Orleans city government had thought they had seen it all and done it all. Evidently, Mayor Ray Nagin agrees with about 3,000 of them<\/a>:
\n<\/p>\n

Nagin said he’s worked for weeks to secure financing that would allow him to keep the city workers on the payroll. But he said in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that isn’t possible. Nagin thanked the workers who have served the city, and said it’s with “great sadness” that he is letting them go. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the time it has taken to drain New Orleans, again, I’ve learned to become very skeptical about what this man says. First and foremost, I thoroughly believe that the mayor has just signed his city’s death warrant by slashing the city government’s work force in half. It takes people to run a city, and it takes even more people to run a recovering<\/em> city. Without those people, the city dies.<\/p>\n

The claim is that the city just can’t find the financial resources to keep the paychecks from bouncing, but I have my doubts. I would think that by now, FEMA as well as Bush’s Fine AdminitrationTM<\/sup> would have learned from the nasty sting they got in that PR fiasco called the Katrina Response, and would be quite happy to offer to some emergency funding. They sure as hell were happy to throw $2.55 billion in “initial response funding”<\/a> to finance ’round the clock police duty for thousands of police officers for months after 9\/11 in New York; this would be chump change by comparison to that response. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that emergency loans or bonds could not have been floated to help jump start the collection of the tax base. Can Nagin possibly<\/em> be saying that not only FEMA, but every bank, every government official, every bond broker, and even the governor of his own state has said no to some temporary emergency funds to keep the government working just a bit longer?<\/p>\n

I guess my skepticism comes from Nagin’s often panicked and tantrumed response to what has happened. He went from helpless bureaucrat to a leading activist and advocate for his people<\/a> when he decried the lack of response by the federal government. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop there, and began trying to bolster his position by making a number of successively outrageous and largely unsubstantiated claims about the situation<\/a>, which certainly didn’t help. Given his demonstrated penchant for hyperbole, I’ve stopped believing everything<\/em> he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mayor Ray Nagin lays off 3,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sociopolitical-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}