Hurricane Florence is all Trump's Fault

[Cow Poke]

- The Trump administration has utterly failed to address the global problem of climate change that many scientists agree is making hurricanes worse and more frequent.

Cite? How much worse and how much more frequent?

[oxmixmudd]

I agree, there needs to be a balance.

Doubling down on your assertion does not make it any less hysterical, Jim. An easy majority of your posts on Trump, from an objective point of view, are rife with hysteria. Your general thrust is that Trump is worse than all other presidents combined, by orders of magnitude. It is quite unsettling to see; I'd always viewed you as much more even-keeled in the past.

I wonder OBP if you are not seeing what you want to see.

If Trump's policies allow businesses to return their businesses to former pollution levels after a battle to give teeth to a law restricting that pollution finally got teeth after more than 10 years of work, would it be hysteria to consider he 'set us back decades'?

Consider: Trump rescinded a rule put in place by Obama preventing coal companies from dumping waste into streams and rivers. But this Obama rule was a clarification of policies from 1977 and 1983 that had unsuccessfully been dealt with by Bush in 2008. All of those represented attempts to stop the practice, but which had holes in them the industry could get around. Is it really then 'hysteria' to consider that Trump rescinding that law which took almost 40 years to finally get teeth is not 'setting us back decades'?

Do we really want coal companies dumping waste containing heavy metals into streams and rivers?

Trump has his eyes on a bunch of air pollution standards related to coal too. Is that what we want? I'm glad most smoke stacks have filters on them now. It is a GOOD thing. And I know I would never want to live in a place like some of our cities used to be before those laws. It that 'hysteria' not to want Trump to succeed on those points?

As for being "even keeled." Talking science doesn't engage a great deal of emotion. These sorts of topics more so. When it comes to what is right and wrong, when it comes to abuse, lying and so on, I can be very passionate. So - perhaps you just only saw one side of me. I am who I am. I try to do what is right, I try to think things through logically. But I'll not apologize for caring about what Trump is doing to our country.

Jim

[Terraceth]

I agree, there needs to be a balance.

Doubling down on your assertion does not make it any less hysterical, Jim. An easy majority of your posts on Trump, from an objective point of view, are rife with hysteria. Your general thrust is that Trump is worse than all other presidents combined, by orders of magnitude. It is quite unsettling to see; I'd always viewed you as much more even-keeled in the past.

Has oxmixmudd ever actually stated he was worse than all presidents combined, or even the worst president? Maybe he has, but despite his strong criticisms of Trump I haven't seen him make that statement (I think he may have called Trump the most immoral--or maybe it was just one of the most immoral--but that's different from worst).

If he has claimed Trump is the worst, then he'd be dead wrong because James Buchanan was president. But unless he's made that specific claim, I think it's unfair to put those words into his mouth.

[Starlight]

If he has claimed Trump is the worst, then he'd be dead wrong because James Buchanan was president.

The only comparative scholarly survey for ranking presidents that we've had since Trump has been in office, ranked him the worst ever President, one worse than Buchanan. It seems bizarre to me that you state your own subjective opinion on the matter as if it were an objective fact.

[oxmixmudd]

Has oxmixmudd ever actually stated he was worse than all presidents combined, or even the worst president? Maybe he has, but despite his strong criticisms of Trump I haven't seen him make that statement (I think he may have called Trump the most immoral--or maybe it was just one of the most immoral--but that's different from worst).

If he has claimed Trump is the worst, then he'd be dead wrong because James Buchanan was president. But unless he's made that specific claim, I think it's unfair to put those words into his mouth.

Thanks for the defense. Someone will produce the quote if I said it.

Jim

[Mountain Man]

Setting aside the silly OP. My concerns on the topic are:

- The last hurricane, Maria in Puerto Rico, caused the biggest death toll (2,982) of any US natural disaster in the last 100 years. And most of those fatalities were preventable and occurred after the hurricane due to loss of power & water supplies. The Trump administration did a worse job of handling it than Bush did of Katrina. Less than 2 weeks after Maria I said Trump should resign due to his atrocious handling of the recovery, and a year later when it has become clear how many thousands of Americans died due to the incompetence of the response, Trump still refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever and literally rates his handling of the event as "higher than A+".

Evidence says that Trump did his job, and the breakdown was with corrupt Puerto Rican government.

Source: Massive stockpile of bottled water found in Puerto Rico a year after Maria

(Sept 2018) Hundreds of thousands of water bottles meant for victims of Hurricane Maria are still sitting at a Puerto Rico airport — nearly a year after the deadly storm, according to a report.

A photo showing the bottles in boxes and covered in a blue tarp on a runway in Ceiba was shared widely on social media Tuesday evening.

“Although you don’t believe it… almost a million boxes of water that were never delivered to the villages,” posted Abdiel Santana, a photographer working for a Puerto Rican state police agency who took the pictures. “Is there anyone who can explain this?”

FEMA acknowledged to CBS News on Wednesday that the bottles were brought inland in 2017 in the wake of the hurricane and that they were turned over to “central government.”

It is unclear where the breakdown that caused the bottles to never be distributed was caused.

https://nypost.com/2018/09/12/massiv...r-after-maria/

© Copyright Original Source

Source: Food Donated To Puerto Rico Hurricane Victims Found Rotting In Parking Lot

(August 2018) Ten shipping containers filled with food, baby products, and over-the-counter medications like Tylenol — all supplies desperately needed in the days and weeks following Hurricane Maria — were found rotting in a Puerto Rico parking lot last week, never distributed.

The New York Times reports that a local Puerto Rican radio station found the goods, melted, spoiled, and covered in rat droppings, in a parking lot outside one of Puerto Rico's state elections offices. The goods were clearly meant to help Puerto Ricans in need, many of whom went weeks without electricity and running water last summer in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

The items, Radio Isla reports, were all private donations made by non-profits. Those items were "collected at the election commissions offices, and then distributed to the National Guard," who gave the items to struggling residents. After the crisis subsided, though, Puerto Rico's government officials apparently gave up on distributing supplies and left them rotting, still in their trailers, just outside their offices in San Juan.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/34398...-emily-zanotti

© Copyright Original Source

Stories like this certainly lend credence to rumors at the time that Puerto Rican government officials were refusing to distribute supplies for political reasons.

But it's all Trump's fault. No, really.

[Starlight]

Evidence says that Trump did his job, and the breakdown was with corrupt Puerto Rican government.

The buck stops with the President. Americans died on his watch. He could have stopped it. He didn't.

Immediately after the storm there were immediate reports of massive issues on the ground with electricity and drinking water and mass deaths. If I had been the US President I would have immediately deployed the entirety of the available US armed forces in the region there to provide water and generators and to air-drop supplies in.

Obviously after the Nov elections the House Dems will launch some big investigations into what people knew and when they knew it and who exactly was responsible for all the deaths. But for me, the buck stops with the President. He could have acted, and he didn't, and Americans died. This is like Bush with Katrina, but 10 times as bad.

[Mountain Man]

What a sad little bubble you live in.

[Terraceth]

The only comparative scholarly survey for ranking presidents that we've had since Trump has been in office, ranked him the worst ever President, one worse than Buchanan. It seems bizarre to me that you state your own subjective opinion on the matter as if it were an objective fact.

I was being slightly facetious with stating it as an objective fact. Nevertheless, I do strongly believe that for whatever failings Trump has (and there are many), he's not as spectacularly bad as Buchanan was.

Admittedly, I'm also of the opinion that one cannot truly attempt to rank any sitting president until they have left office, so I'd dislike the moniker of worst (or best) president being applied to any sitting president regardless.

[Starlight]

I do strongly believe that for whatever failings Trump has (and there are many), he's not as spectacularly bad as Buchanan was.

I will admit to personally knowing next-to-nothing about Buchanan, but having a quick read of the internet it seems his primary failing is viewed to be failure to prevent the civil war. This seems somewhat bizarre to me in the sense that why would one person be to blame for what was clearly a systemic problem since the creation of the US? It strikes me as like blaming Jared Kushner for any wars in the middle east because his current job titles include responsibility to bring peace to the middle east. Obviously the area has generational problems and wars there are not specifically his fault. Wasn't it Lincoln's deliberately divisive policies that were the actual trigger for the start of the civil war because of his election and implementation of them? So why is Buchanan blamed and not Lincoln? And why would either be blamed for something that had been a systemic problem for their entire lifetimes? I'm not trying to say Buchanan was good - I know virtually nothing about the man - but the headline claim as to why he was bad that the internet gives me strikes me as a bit bizarre, so perhaps you could explain it to me?

[rogue06]

Setting aside the silly OP. My concerns on the topic are:

- The last hurricane, Maria in Puerto Rico, caused the biggest death toll (2,982) of any US natural disaster in the last 100 years. And most of those fatalities were preventable and occurred after the hurricane due to loss of power & water supplies. The Trump administration did a worse job of handling it than Bush did of Katrina. Less than 2 weeks after Maria I said Trump should resign due to his atrocious handling of the recovery, and a year later when it has become clear how many thousands of Americans died due to the incompetence of the response, Trump still refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever and literally rates his handling of the event as "higher than A+".

- The Trump administration has funneled $10m out of FEMA to fund ICE. So despite their past failures at hurricane recovery, and their knowledge that more hurricanes are coming, they instead want to spend the money separating families and imprisoning babies.

- The Trump administration has utterly failed to address the global problem of climate change that many scientists agree is making hurricanes worse and more frequent.

As recently posted in another thread...

Actually, while he certainly didn't do well there was really not much he could do. The power grid had been allowed to deteriorate to such a degree over the years due to corruption and incompetence that it was in effect being held together by the proverbial spit and bailing wire

Source: The story of Puerto Rico’s power grid is the story of Puerto Rico

Maria’s fury would have battered any grid, but the scope of the damage, the sluggish pace of repairs and the suffering from weeks without power have almost as much to do with mismanagement as they do with wind and rain. Last year Synapse Energy, a consultancy based in Massachusetts, carried out the first-ever audit of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and found that the power lines were “cracking, corroding and collapsing”. The utility had been operating for decades without regulation or oversight. Imprudent spending was accelerating a decade-old debt crisis. “The results are grim,” the authors wrote. “PREPA’s system appears to be running on fumes.”

The story of PREPA is the story of Puerto Rico. The utility, created by a New Deal governor in 1941, powered rapid industrialisation in the 1970s as American pharmaceutical and other firms flocked to the island to take advantage of federal tax benefits. By offering stable, well-paid jobs to electrical workers, PREPA helped create a Puerto Rican middle class, says José Caraballo Cueto, an economist at the University of Puerto Rico. The boom was short-lived. When the federal government peeled back the tax perks in 1996, factories started leaving and PREPA began losing customers.

Declining revenues were exacerbated by political patronage, corruption and inefficiency. Municipalities and government agencies do not pay for electricity in Puerto Rico. Successive governments spent tens of millions of dollars evaluating solar and natural-gas projects in order to wean PREPA off its dependence on oil, but did next to nothing. Less than 3% of the island’s energy came from renewables.

PREPA is responsible for $9bn of Puerto Rico’s $73bn of debt. As PREPA and other agencies borrowed billions of dollars from international creditors (and from each other, a practice some have compared to a Ponzi scheme), the utility started skimping on maintenance. In 2014 an austerity law prompted hundreds of experienced employees to retire and claim their pensions before cuts took effect. They were never replaced. The result, according to Synapse’s report, was generator failures, blackout rates four times higher than other American utilities, rising consumer costs, environmental violations and an increasing numbers of worker injuries and fatalities. A three-day blackout in 2016 caused by a fire at the Aguirre plant foreshadowed the darkness and economic standstill Hurricane Maria would bring. “We took the risk and we are paying the price,” says Mr Torres, peering at his poster.



Source

© Copyright Original Source

And the situation was exacerbated by continuing corruption after the hurricane struck slowing things down even further.

Source: Armed Federal Agents Seize 'Massive Store' Of Rebuilding Materials Kept From Puerto Rico's Hurricane Victims

Puerto Rico electricity provider was "hoarding" critical items needed to restore electricity to the island

Months after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, nearly half the island's residents are still without power. Despite the Federal Emergency Management Agency sending hundreds of workers to the area to help restore the electrical grid, they've been at a loss as to where critical construction items, shipped to the island as part of the recovery effort, have gone.

Now, armed federal agents are reportedly taking the situation into their own hands. Over the weekend, FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began raiding warehouses, where the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority has been "hoarding" these "critical materials" out of reach of aide workers.



Source

© Copyright Original Source

For years the experts had been warning Puerto Rico of a catastrophic failure of their power grid do to the state of disrepair it had been allowed to fall in and how a major hurricane could wipe it out and when it happened everyone expected the U.S. government to step in and rebuild a system pretty much from the ground up overnight.

You might have also noticed that right after Maria the MSM started blasting Trump about his supposed inaction, but as the facts emerged most of them quickly all but dropped it. This is the same media that has gone on for nearly two years about the supposed collusion between Trump and Putin in spite of there not being a shred of authentic corroborating evidence and yet they dropped this instead of relentlessly pounding on him about it 24/7. So unless you think the MSM is now trying to cover up for Trump like they were covering up for Harvey Weinstein even they understand that all the evidence shows that this was a horrible tragedy just waiting to happen and very little can be done to fix it quickly.

With the high death count Trump's statement the other day saying that the response was "incredibly successful" displayed an incredible tin ear. While a case could be made that the response was a major logistical success (especially when you consider that we're dealing with an island where things needed to be shipped in rather than simply brought in by truck -- and the hoarding by the Puerto Rican agencies of everything from critical supplies and equipment to much needed bottled water), to call it "incredibly successful" was profoundly insensitive.

[rogue06]

The buck stops with the President. Americans died on his watch. He could have stopped it. He didn't.

Immediately after the storm there were immediate reports of massive issues on the ground with electricity and drinking water and mass deaths. If I had been the US President I would have immediately deployed the entirety of the available US armed forces in the region there to provide water and generators and to air-drop supplies in.

Obviously after the Nov elections the House Dems will launch some big investigations into what people knew and when they knew it and who exactly was responsible for all the deaths. But for me, the buck stops with the President. He could have acted, and he didn't, and Americans died. This is like Bush with Katrina, but 10 times as bad.

As already shown huge stockpiles of drinking water and food were simply left where they were by the Puerto Rican government after they arrived. The electric grid had been allowed to deteriorate by the local government to the point it had to be rebuilt from the ground up^[[1]. And again as noted equipment and supplies for that were also being hoarded and had to be literally seized at gun point because the island's government agencies were refusing to release them.






1 As the head of FEMA, Brock Long, stated on Good Morning America "We faced a crumbling infrastructure, it was rotted and decayed, and FEMA can’t help that."

[Starlight]

With the high death count Trump's statement the other day saying that the response was "incredibly successful" displayed an incredible tin ear. While a case could be made that the response was a major logistical success (especially when you consider that we're dealing with an island where things needed to be shipped in rather than simply brought in by truck -- and the hoarding by the Puerto Rican agencies of everything from critical supplies and equipment to much needed bottled water), to call it "incredibly successful" was profoundly insensitive.

I personally think that one of the most egregious failures of the response was the mass deaths of everyone in hospital intensive care units due to the hospitals running out of fuel to power their backup generators and thus unable to provide power to their patients life support systems and their hospital equipment. It cannot be that hard, all things considered, to deliver ongoing supplies of fuel to hospitals to ensure that backup power generators can be run continuously. Whether that means sending in petrol tankers, doing resupply drops from planes, or loading a helicopter's monsoon bucket up with diesel and delivering it to the hospitals, it's very doable. Regardless of what state the wider island's electricity grid was in, every hospital should have been kept with power on 24/7 and been resupplied constantly with fresh bottled drinking water to hand out to their local communities.

The failure to do that, and instead the "well we delivered the drinking water to the warehouse near the airport... oh, everyone died, oh well" attitude simply astounds me.

By day 2 after the hurricane I was hearing news 3rd hand from someone who'd called their relative on the island that there were serious problems because all the hospitals were out of power and their backup generators were out of fuel. And if I was hearing that, why hadn't the President been informed of that 24 hours earlier and why wasn't the President acting on it? That's "I'm calling in the military, I'll be in the situation room" time. And the news got worse from the island every day after that. After 2 weeks, it was clear there had been mass casualties and the President had fiddled while Rome burned. Now the guy grades his response as better than A+. A reasonable person would offer their resignation after failing that badly and getting so many Americans needlessly killed on their watch.

[Sparko]

Did you read my post or just react to the fact I didn't happen to agree with the majority take on it?

It would appear it is the latter because I certainly didn't offer any agreement whatsoever with the idea Florence is somehow Trump's fault. I criticized that approach to the headline in fact.


Jim

You were excusing the article by trying to say it wasn't actually blaming Trump for the hurricane when in fact it was blaming it on Trump. Then to "explain" their accusation they used "his policies" which could not have had any effect on the weather.

[Sparko]

Setting aside the silly OP. My concerns on the topic are:

- The last hurricane, Maria in Puerto Rico, caused the biggest death toll (2,982) of any US natural disaster in the last 100 years. And most of those fatalities were preventable and occurred after the hurricane due to loss of power & water supplies. The Trump administration did a worse job of handling it than Bush did of Katrina. Less than 2 weeks after Maria I said Trump should resign due to his atrocious handling of the recovery, and a year later when it has become clear how many thousands of Americans died due to the incompetence of the response, Trump still refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever and literally rates his handling of the event as "higher than A+".

- The Trump administration has funneled $10m out of FEMA to fund ICE. So despite their past failures at hurricane recovery, and their knowledge that more hurricanes are coming, they instead want to spend the money separating families and imprisoning babies.

- The Trump administration has utterly failed to address the global problem of climate change that many scientists agree is making hurricanes worse and more frequent.

Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the government in PR. There were literally tons of supplies sent over there that sat undistributed. And any money Trump took out of FEMA wasn't done at the time of Maria was it?

FEMA is independent of Trump. I find it funny how you keep blaming Trump personally for the actions of government agencies like ICE or FEMA and never accuse Congress for any of it, or the agencies themselves. Apparently in your world Trump personally supervises every agency in the US government. He is such a busy guy.