To The Rescue

It's been more than a year since that hurricane destroyed my city, and something significant may finally happen in the rebuilding of it. Nope! It's not that rebuilding is going on now. Little of that is on going. We still largely resemble what we looked like the day after the storm- a wrecked city of rubble and little restoration.
But guess where my city is looking for help in rebuilding? It's not the awful Bush administration, which cares nothing about anything other than it's phony war on terrorism and about pandering to the electorate that keeps voting for it. It's not the incompetent and corrupt state and local government we are subjected to here.
No...we have given up on those units and have sent an emissary, a delegation of New Orleans business and government leaders to...Shanghai, China..for help. The delegation is in search of Chinese investment and export to ruined and floundering New Orleans. Organizers said the goal of the trade mission is to find affordable Chinese building products and furnishings to New Orleans and to the other areas torn apart by the storm. And why not? If the United States itself isn't interested in helping rebuild the area, maybe we can buy those goods from China at a much cheaper cost and rebuild faster ourselves.
Chinese manufacturers have expressed interest in the project and one has even announced it would like to build a one million square foot warehouse where it can show and sell their goods (at a much cheaper price than can be bought from anyone else). Haha Almost everything made today is manufactured in China anyway, so it makes sense to buy it directly from Chinese manufacturers.
New Orleans was the world's second largest port before the storm and is still quite big (after the storm the Bush administration made sure the port was functional, given the importance of it to the entire U.S. economy). No doubt those goods can be shipped cheaply to our port, providing residents and businesses here a cheaper way to rebuild their homes and business. The cost savings come through eliminating the "middle man".
The head of this trade delegation also says that the Chinese government wants to buy more of our agricultural products. My state sells huge amounts of farm goods including (believe it or not) rice, to China. This is beneficial for both countries and could be the beginning of other international help in rebuilding the area.
It's all quite ironic- that the horrible Bush administration, an unsympathetic U.S. congress and our corrupt local government can't seem to take much interest in the welfare of New Orleans, but that we may be saved by the outside world, starting with this Chinese investment in New Orleans. Always clean your own mess.
That's the lesson one fellow in Germany learned the other day. It seems that some imaginative thieves stole 7,500 euros ($9,554) from a man by throwing feces at him from behind and then pick-pocketing him while they pretended to help clean up the mess, Glessen, German police authorities said. After withdrawing 8,000 euros from a bank for a holiday the man was struck in the back of the neck by human feces said. "Immediately afterwards two large women (well, they looked like women) came up to him from behind and claimed they had seen someone excreting down onto the street from above," police said in a statement.
The two women then began briskly wiping the filth from the man's clothing with paper towels they had with them. They were soon joined by a third man, who also came bearing paper towels. Only when the smelly victim went to take his foul-smelling trousers to cleaners did he notice that the money had been taken from his back pocket by one of the would-be helpers. Apparently the victim not only smells, he is also a bit stupid as well.