New Orleans Mayor, in Tears, Blasts Washington's Response

The New York Times said of a speech he made on Tuesday: "Nothing about the President's demeanour yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."

An exasperated-sounding Mayor C. Ray Nagin did not hold back his anger in an interview with a New Orleans radio station that ended with sounds of the mayor and the interviewer in tears.

"No one can say they didn't see it coming"

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.



There is mounting evidence, both circumstantial and real, that this disaster can be laid at the doorstep of the Bush White House. The catastrophe symbolizes a presidency profoundly out of touch with reality. It’s not just the basic fact, visible on all TV screens, that the victims of this tragedy are poor and black, or that President Bush was on one of his long vacations when the storm hit, or that he did nothing the first full day of the tragedy. It is more than that. The information is still coming in haphazardly, but it is becoming clear that New Orleans was the victim of extraordinary mismanagement by an administration more concerned about war in Iraq than desolation in Louisiana.

With a horrible decisiveness, Hurricane Katrina has sheared off the front of the American doll house, leaving our decimated national infrastructure for all the world to see. The consequences of a generation of looting the funding for public works projects, anti-poverty programs, and local and national administrative capacity coupled with rollbacks of federal energy and environmental regulation have been revealed in all their stark reality by this epic storm.