I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but

George W. Bush was in New Orleans to deliver a clear and unmistakable message: Drop Dead. And then, according to various reports, he went off to play golf.

Little in our history can match his administration's astounding non-response to this excruciating human catastrophe.

Before Katrina, even Bush's harshest critics might have found non-credible his leaving tens of thousands of American citizens to suffer and die in utterly gratuitous squalor, disease, hunger and thirst.

Taxpaying American citizens are dying in the heart of a great city because their government can't be bothered to get them clean water. Or a bed. Or to a hospital.

The weather has been clear since Katrina passed. Bush commands the world's most advanced armada of land, sea and airborne vehicles. The resources to save our brothers and sisters are readily available.

But we see our elders, black and white, sitting confused and in pain, dying of heat and thirst and utter neglect in clear, sunny weather while the President of the United States babbles aimlessly and the Secretary of State shops for shoes.

We're told the 911 attacks changed everything for America--that they ushered us in to a new and more dangerous world, where we could no longer afford old illusions. If we take its full lessons, the disaster of Hurricane Katrina challenges us even more profoundly.

If the comparison seems overstated, the death tolls from Katrina may well exceed the number of those lost at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The projected cost of rebuilding New Orleans and its surroundings is now projected at $25 billion and may even approach the $40 billion paid out by insurance companies worldwide related to the 911 attacks. And while New York City beyond the Twin Towers remained intact, a refuge to flee to and base from which to assemble emergency resources, New Orleans is a sea of desolation, a wet and desperate landscape with no place to hide. New York City and the national economy rebounded relatively quickly from the attacks. The New Orleans projections are far grimmer.

911, we were told, required Americans to place unprecedented trust in their president and his advisors, and to scrap longstanding rules of international

CHICAGO – One day after rescuing about 450 students stranded in dorms and on thoroughfares in New Orleans, Rev. Jesse Jackson returned to the predominantly black city with more buses to transport some of the hungry and desperate citizens who remained in the city five days after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

“President Bush has come very late with very little,” said Rev. Jackson, describing the dire scene in New Orleans as looking like “the hull of a slave ship.” “I’m leaving once again from the City of New Orleans and there still is no plan to rescue, nor is there a plan to relocate them. The president has not put together a federal program or a coordinated effort to address this massive crisis. Mr. Bush came today and did what can be described as a ceremonial tour of the area. He would not touch the ground in New Orleans where suffering black people are dying”

Two years ago this month, a Blackout plunged 50 million people in Northeastern U.S. and the Canadian province of Ontario into total darkness for more than a day, wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy. Now, it's the devastation in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi wrought by Hurricane Katrina that has killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

The common thread in both disasters is that energy and environmental experts sounded early alarms about the potential for catastrophes like this unless the White House immediately took the necessary steps to upgrade the country's aging power grid to stave off widespread power failures, and in the case of Hurricane Katrina, backed the Kyoto protocol, which aims to curb the air pollution blamed for severe climate changes that is no doubt the reason Katrina turned from a relatively small hurricane to a destructive monstrosity due to high sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Weather Service.

While supporting the Kyoto treaty would not have done anything to prevent an act of God like Hurricane Katrina or the destruction left in its