Cleaning Up From Tornadoes, Both Natural And Financial - FDL

[WillyT]

Cleaning up from Tornadoes, Both Natural and Financial
By: Peterr Saturday - FDL
April 30, 2011 3:21 pm

<snip>

According to the NYT’s reporters Kevin Sack and Timothy Williams, the government response thus far to the tornadoes that spun their way across the South last week has been a marked improvement over the response to Katrina — the last major natural disaster of a similar size. Local, state, and federal agencies are working better together and coordinating their work with the various charitable groups to deal with the immediate needs for food, shelter, and the like.

President Obama, too, appears to have learned from the past:

Stung by criticism that he waited 12 days to tour the Gulf Coast after last year’s BP oil spill, Mr. Obama took barely 40 hours to land in Tuscaloosa, the hardest-hit area in the seven Southern states struck by tornadoes last week. The death toll stands at about 350 people; Alabama officials said that included 249 in their state, with 39 in Tuscaloosa County.

“I’ve never seen devastation like this,” Mr. Obama said after Friday’s tour. “It is heartbreaking.”

It is indeed. I have clergy friends who are giving thanks for the twisters having missed their churches and the cities in which they live, and others who are mourning the loss of both lives and property.

But I’m struck by the quote from Obama.

There’s another disaster that has wreaked havoc on community after community across the nation. I’m speaking of certain urban areas that have been destroyed not by tornadoes and forces of nature, but torn apart by the financial meltdown, the mortgage mess, and the foreclosure crisis.

Like parts of Alabama after last week’s tornadoes, these areas have block after block of blighted homes and empty lots. Plywood covers the doors and windows of some, while others simply fall to pieces. They didn’t get that way by an “act of God” but by virtue of deliberate acts of human greed and callousness on the part of unscrupulous lenders, mindless robosigners, and coldly calculating investment bankers.

<snip>

More: http://my.firedoglake.com/peterr/2011/04/30/cleaning-up-from-tornadoes-both-natural-and-financial/

:kick: