OBAMA/HOLDER APPEAL VERDICT TO COMPENSATE VICTIMS OF KATRINA

Greg Palast on President Obama and Eric Holder filing an appeal against Judge Duval's verdict for the government to compensate people whose homes were destroyed and loved ones killed.

The Corps plugging its ears to the warnings was nothing less than "negligence, insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness."
That list of fancy epithets poured from the angry pen of Federal Judge Stanwood Duval who heard the evidence in a suit filed by the surviving residents of the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard's Parish. His Honor ruled that the drowning of the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish was a man-made disaster.

In November 2009, Judge Duval ordered the federal government to pay to rebuild homes, and compensate families of the dead.
The day Duval issued his verdict, I wrote in my notebook, "Barack Obama has before him a choice to make, one that will reveal the soul of his Presidency more than his choice of troop levels in Afghanistan: whether he will compensate the families who lost all they ever had, or appeal the court's decision, and thereby 'Bush' New Orleans once again."
But President Hope said 'Nope.' As the fifth anniversary of the drowning of the city approached, Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder flat out refused payment and filed a notice of appeal.

It was George W. Bush who gave the middle finger to the victims of the Corps’ cruel negligence and fought the claims for compensation. Now, Obama has made Bush's pitiless renunciation of New Orleans his own policy just as Obama turned Bush's war in Afghanistan into his own. 

Read the rest of Greg Palast's article , it's brilliant as usual.  

I guess President Obama feels when oil companies directly cause disasters they have to pay up, but when governments dig a canal so oil companies can move their oil tankers around knowing they are compromising the safety of people in a city, no compensation is needed.