The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by BadTux:

As a native Louisianian, let me tell you how the Mexican thing goes. There's a lot of people out of work in Louisiana. Their business or workplace got destroyed when Katrina blew through the defective levees (East New Orleans would have flooded regardless, but was mostly residential. West New Orleans, where most businesses were, would have stayed high and dry if the levees hadn't been defective -- the levess there were *not* overtopped). There's a lot of Louisiana contractors who have crews just ready and waiting to hire all those people... if they could get contracts from FEMA to do some of that cleanup work. Otherwise they're in the same boat as everybody else.

So who is getting the cleanup contracts? You guessed it -- Dear Leader's pack of Texas cronies. Who then round up crews of illegal Mexicans from where they're based (Texas), bus them over to New Orleans, and dump them off in the streets, saying "Show up when we need a work crew and we might give you $50 a day."

See, the deal is that then they get to pocket all the money that they're supposedly paying the Mexicans, funnel it off to their offshore bank accounts, and the Mexicans aren't going to complain if the GAO starts auditing where the money's going -- they're just going to fade into the background, because they fear being deported. Whereas if they "hired" Louisiana workers, there's the possibility that the GAO might actually *find* some of those Louisiana workers, and find out that the billions that FEMA is supposedly paying for the "cleanup effort" (HAH! There isn't any, except what people have managed to do for themselves!) never made it to the workers who were supposedly being paid with it.

In other words, it's all a corrupt scheme by the Presidential Cronies to rip off the taxpayers for yet more money. In my opinion, we ought to give all the money to the people who actually live there. Yeah, the New Orleans government is notoriously incompetent and corrupt. But look, can they be any more corrupt and incompetent than Dear Leader's administration, which can't even manage to properly conquer some decrepit sandpit overseas without screwing it up? At least the people actually there in Louisiana have an incentive to actually use the money to clean up the place -- they live there, after all! What does some Dallas businessmen crony of Dear Leader care if his Mexican work crews never manage to do anything except move a pile of trash from one side of Central Park to the other, then back again? I mean, it's not as if his contract thingy has any kind of performance penalities in it, perish the thought!

- Badtux the Louisianian

According to a doctor working on the ground, all aid workers and first responders are being vaccinated for Hepatitus A and B due to the unsanitary conditions. This doctor calls New Orleans "a bowl of disease-filled sewage" and says merely touching the water could cause disease if you have even the tiniest scratch. He is even recommending gamma gobulin (some evil sh*t) for the first responders who waded through the disease-filled waters searching for survivors.

No monkeys required. Alas.

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