Planet of the Japes

"Cuban. It must be Cuban."

It's a good place to edit your blog, on a cloudy Tuesday in Berkeley. Just enough activity to provide inspiration without being too distracting. And the coffee, even if it isn't the best in the world, is fresh and plentiful, and the Internet works. And across the street a man who looks like an ape with sunglasses smokes slowly, in the same place he was yesterday. Slowly smoking. Not going anywhere. Just standing there looking like an ape and a man at the same time, smoking, slowly.

Sorry, Dave, but I'm a smoker and there's nothing...

And so it goes...

Link courtesy of Bruce

Bruce Gilbert, Universal's general counsel, told me yesterday, "Those supplies were in fact taken from us by FEMA, and we were unable to get them to the hospital. We then determined that it would be better to send our supplies, food and water to Lafayette [130 miles from New Orleans] and have our helicopters fly them from Lafayette to the hospital."

Significant relief began to reach the hospital on Thursday, and by Friday evening everyone had been removed from the ruined premises. They had endured the agonies of the damned, and for all practical purposes had been abandoned by government at all levels.

When you consider that the Methodist Hospital experience was just one small part of the New Orleans catastrophe, you get a sense of the size of the societal failure that we allowed to happen.

Welcome to the United States in 2005.

Bob Herbert | Sick and Abandoned

Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The Independent | Cover-up: toxic waters 'will make New Orleans unsafe for a decade'

Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force.

t r u t h o u t | Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans

What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.

The Observer | Exiles from a city and from a nation

The Pentagon has drawn up a new strategy, built on the 2002 "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive military strikes, that would allow the United States to make first use of nuclear weapons to thwart an attack using weapons of mass destruction against the country.

Under the scheme, developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff but yet to be ratified by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, commanders would be able to request permission from the President to use nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios.

The Independent | US develops strategy for first use of nuclear weapons against WMD

The New Orleans debacle exposed America 's "heart of darkness" to the world as its leaders allowed their own to suffer or die. Many throughout the world were aware of the damage the US government was capable of inflicting upon people of other nations, but Hurricane Katrina showed what America ’s decision-makers were willing to do to their own. The twin evils of raw capitalism and imperialism were on full display as the human race watched the events unfold on the Gulf Coast . As Mother Nature unleashed her ferocity, Americans witnessed the destruction of a jewel of a city and the pleasant fiction of the "American Dream" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Jason Miller | New Orleans Unmasks "Apartheid, American Style"

Before the moment passes, and Bush's atrocities and lies in Iraq are again allowed to proceed, it is worth connecting his disregard for the suffering in New Orleans with other truths behind The Facade. The unchanging nature of the 500-year western imperial crusade is exemplified in the unreported suffering of people all over the world, declared enemies in their own homes. The people of Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi town now in the news as "an insurgent stronghold", refused to be expelled from their homes, and as you read this, are being bombed and shelled and strafed, just as the people of Fallujah were, and the people of Najaf, and the people of Hongai, a "stronghold" in Vietnam, once the most bombed place on earth, and the people of Neak Loeung in Cambodia, one of countless towns flattened by B-52s. The list of such places consigned to notoriety, then oblivion, is seemingly endless. Why?

John Pilger | News From Behind The Facade

Let's be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened in the past week — the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to death, chaos and disease ­ will change the Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. The Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal policies; its Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House; the national Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as before.

Chris Floyd | No Direction Home

Chris Floyd's article, sadly, says it all...

The Rule Breakers

"The New Pearl Harbor" by David Ray Griffin. Full text.


'Coincidence' is merely Conspiracy in Denial.

"The NewRuleSets.Project began in the spring of 2000 as a multi-year, five workshop effort designed to explore how the spread of globalization alters the basic "rules of the road" in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes redefine the U.S. Military's historic role as "security enabler" of America's commercial network ties with the world.

"The project was hosted by the Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which participated in the design of the three workshops held atop World Trade Center 1 at the Windows on the World conference facility (May 2000, October 2000, June 2001). That particular workshop series ended with the tragedy of 9/11, as did Cantor's participation in the research."

NewRuleSets.Project

I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002

Federal Aid

Helping the rich to help themselves...

New Orleans is no longer part of America. It is a brave new world devised by FEMA and the Ministry of Homeland Security. In the new New Orleans, there are no constitutional rights. Not only are soldiers allowed to break down doors (as they do in Iraq) in violation of the Fourth Amendment and even "shoot to kill" if they believe they are threatened (as soldiers in Iraq "shoot to kill" grandmothers and kids at Israeli-styled checkpoints), now the Second Amendment no longer exists.

Of course, the trashing of the Second Amendment is restricted to poor people. Rich people will be allowed to hire armed guards. Nixing the Second Amendment "apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16’s and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons."

Kurt Nimmo | Second Amendment Nixed in New Orleans


Watching out for the wealthy...

Back in the mid-1990s during the Rwandan genocide, Robertson appealed for assistance for Operation Second Blessing on his 700 Club for money to fly relief supplies to the Rwandan refugees in Zaire. What he -- it turns out that an investigation later by the Virginia Attorney General's office revealed that the planes that were bought by the charity were actually ferrying mining equipment for a diamond mining operation, the African Development Corporation, and low-and-behold, who is the principal shareholder of this private corporation? None other than Pat Robertson himself.

DemocracyNow | FEMA Promotes Pat Robertson Charity


Opening doors of opportunity...

In 1927, the so-called Great Mississippi Flood was used to ethnically cleanse African-Americans. "As the flood approached New Orleans, Louisiana 30 tons of dynamite were set off on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana," explains Wikipedia. "This prevented New Orleans from experiencing serious damage but destroyed much of the marsh below the city and flooded all of St. Bernard Parish... During the disaster 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Over 13,000 refugees near Greenville, Mississippi were gathered from area farms and evacuated to the crest of an unbroken levee, and stranded there for days without food or clean water, while boats arrived to evacuate white women and children. Many African-Americans were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts... The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities."

Kurt Nimmo | Business Elite Ethnically Cleanse the Poor in New Orleans


Dignity...

When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimising them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami".

There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic". The council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels.

Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: while their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatised French Quarter (where only 4.3% of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans's reputation means a great place to have a vacation, but don't leave the French Quarter or you'll get shot," Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labour organiser told me the day after he left the city by boat. "Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification - poor people."

Naomi Klein | Let the People Rebuild New Orleans

Note: Among many newsworthy briefs, Shiela Lennon brings it all back home relating the story of the man, Dr. Ben Marble, who suggested Cheney bring himself back to Earth with a bang. The file is also available here.

Telling it like it is...

'One of the worst diasters to hit the U.S.' **

"What have the dead taught the living? Responsible and effective government matters. At this moment, we have neither. We are, simply put, on our own."

William Rivers Pitt | Let the Dead Teach the Living

** The 593KB "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney" wmv file to which the graphic links should launch automatically in Windows Media Player.

Crocodile Street

"Your security is in your own hands."

Alligators were eating people. They had all kinds of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water. We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people. People that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old-folks homes.

Charmaine Neville | How We Survived the Flood

"No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

"But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred."

[...]

"...the darkness of the black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America."

[...]

"The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.

"In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors."

[...]

"And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance."

[...]

"...Bush's hands are stained with the blood of all those killed from both sides, all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business."

[...]

"And know that: "It is better to return to the truth than persist in error." And that the wise man doesn't squander his security, wealth and children for the sake of the liar in the White House."

[...]

"Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security."

Usama bin Ladin | State of the Union Address, November 1, 2004.

Once in Chicago while performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West, Sitting Bull spoke through his translator to the huge crowd of ragged white men, women, and barefoot children: "I know why your government hates me. I am their enemy. But why do they hate you?"

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | John Wayne and New Orleans Indians

See also:

• Dan Barry | The Corpse on Union Street
• Tom Matrullo | for want of a pencil
• Mike Whitney | The Siege of New Orleans; a beachhead for the new world order
• Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky | Trapped in New Orleans
• Tom Engelhardt | The Perfect Storm and the Feral City
• Mike Davis | Poor, Black, and Left Behind [September, 2004]
• Information Clearing House | FEMA Blocking Relief Efforts

Food for Thought

South Africa is lower on the UN Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI) than the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The UNDP's HDI measures achievement in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income.

South Africa is 120th on a list of 177 countries. Palestine is 102nd.

The report was released in New York at noon, South African time, on Wednesday. Journalists were, however, briefed on its contents on Tuesday.

In Johannesburg, UNDP resident representative in South Africa, Scholastica Sylvan Kimaryo told reporters Norway, Iceland and Australia occupied the top three positions and Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and Niger the bottom three rungs.

Of the 32 countries that scored lowest in the HDI, 30 were in Africa. The two exceptions were Yemen and Haiti.

Business Report

Note See also The Millennium Development Goals Report 2005 [pdf].

Not the National Guard

FEMA's Homeland Insecurity

So what are those lessons to be learned from a destroyed city with thousands dead, little or no relief for survivors, and lawlessness taking over from wind and water as the greatest threat to life? Not very nice lessons unfortunately. As the bodies of the poor, black, disenfranchised southerners bob to the surface of the rat-infested and sewage-infused waters, we’re reminded that America’s position as a big, safe, morally decent democracy with opportunity for all is one of the world’s biggest lies. The American dream that is being held up as the cause worth dying for in the Middle East is as rotten to the core as its demonic administration.

Sunday Herald | Why the American dream is one of the biggest lies

"We need to prepare the country for what's coming. We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff


Nobody...

It already is, Chertoff. It already is. FEMA, beloved of Tom Matrullo as an instrument of federal indifference and self-interest, is fast lending credence to theories defining its role as an agent provocateur for a fascist regime hell-bent on bringing down the walls of the temple. A couple of days ago, in the wake of New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin's plea to assist thousands dying across three states, The Conservative Voice—using a grade-school grammar befitting its lobotomized readership, slammed the Southern mayor as "...no Rudy Giuliani".

The comment, as well as this piece of execrably blind and illogically partisan putrescence, comes as something of a compliment to Nagin. Giuliani, a slimy goombah with the mind of a rubber mallet and an unnatural interest in the convergence of security and economics, spent September 11, 2001 close to his 50,000-square foot, $13 million, bomb-proof, 23rd-floor WTC 7 command post overseeing the implosion—apparently at Larry Silverstein's behest [mp3] (Silverstein was to pick up $2-6 billion in recompense), of the WTC complex's main towers. In an event soon relegated to offical obscurity and muddied by obfuscation, the damaged 47-floor WTC 7 and Rudy's bunker were "pulled" later that day (a demolition impossible to organize in eight hours), taking with them—so it's claimed—invaluable records and intelligence in the 'safe keeping' of the CIA and FBI.



Launch in external player

On September 10, 2001, FEMA officials and members of Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management visited the WTC, the security of which had been entrusted to John O'Neill, The Man Who Knew, and who was to die in the debris. Their inspection resulted in a lack of access to the towers' rooftops and the needless deaths of hundreds. And now Louisiana's Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard intimates that FEMA deliberately hindered New Orleans rescue operations on at least three occasions; a) when it turned back three trucks of Walmart-donated water, b) when it stopped attempts to take delivery of a thousand gallons of Coast Guard-delivered diesel fuel and c) when it cut the city's emergency communications' infrastructure. A further flood of "bureaucratic" delaying tactics has prompted what might become the largest diaspora of black Americans since last century's Northern migration.

I disagree with Broussard's assertion that 'bureaucracy committed murder' in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The U.S. federal government, an uncontrolled collection of genocidal maniacs headed by a cabal of neocon Nazis, is prosecuting—in keeping with its intention of subduing increasingly impoverished and disaffected masses suffering increasing wealth disparity, an economically driven resource war against the world and its own people, be they deluded, steak-guzzling rednecks, breakfast-cereal christian airheads, or black and increasingly marginalized victims of institutionalized racism.

Recalling Tom's description of the self-conscious, uncomfortable, publicity shy behavior of so-called FEMA operatives in the area laid low by Hurricane Charley, these people appear to be agents of a body charged with exactly what its name implies, the staging and management of federal emergencies.

Conspiracy theory? Go suck eggs. That people have reason to suspect it is reason enough to sweep aside a fast-growing mountain of mealy-mouthed cover ups, impeach the Stalin-esque gangsters now holding office in the Bush administration, jail a raft of sanctimonious, sneering war-mongering profiteers, and pull the teeth of an increasingly centralized and intensely opaque private-sector dominated security apparatus. Perhaps afterwards, straight up and down people of Broussard and Nagin's ilk will be able to get on with what they do best, i.e. running government.

Note Links courtesy Information Clearing House. If the above Windows media file takes too long to download, this link might serve you better.

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle)—this is working very well for them."

Barbara Bush [via the indefatigable Norm Jenson]

The Good Catholic

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.

One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right into Hector's, and since then Hector's cafeteria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.

All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: "Now, darling, here we are in New York and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Boonville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans..." and so on in the way that he had in those early days.

I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably to make coffee, while he proceeded with his love-problems, for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand "yeses" and "That's rights." My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West. In fact he'd just been working on a ranch, Ed Wall's in Colorado, before marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she'd heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. That night we all drank beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking, and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor. "In other words we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying, otherwise it'll be fluctuating and lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans." Then I went away.

During the following week he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn to write from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment—God knows why they went there—and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, "Hel-lo, you remember me—Dean Moriarty? I've come to ask you to show me how to write."

"And where's Marylou?" I asked, and Dean said she'd apparently whored a few dollars together and gone back to Denver—"the whore!" So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn't talk in front of my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper. She took one look at Dean and decided he was a madman.

In the bar I told Dean, "Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict." And he said, "Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those problems have occurred to me, but the thing I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized..." and so on in that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn't. In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming...

Jack Kerouac | On the Road [published September 5, 1957]

The Color of Rain

The color of rain

"...in a state of emergency, man, you are creative, you figure out ways to get stuff done."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

“A third group of 500 specialists in General Comprehensive Medicine could also be sent, and would arrive in the morning of Sunday, September 4. Consequently, in under 36 hours, 1100 of these doctors equipped with said resources ...which amount to 26.4 tons of medication and diagnostic kits ... will be caring for the neediest people in the aftermath of a hurricane like Katrina.”

Cuban President Fidel Castro

Sometimes, democracy works. Tom points to Jeneane's post carrying CNN's transcript of what it terms New Orleans' Mayor Ray 'Get off your asses' Nagin's "...expletive-laced interview with local radio station WWL-A". Fuck CNN (and thank it and Nagin for carrying the message). As Jeneane, with inimitable style, puts it, "You're not blameless mayor, but when it gets down to it, you go 'head with your badass self. Blast em."

Tom Feeley offers a recording of Ray Nagin's interview. It's a must listen (3.3MB MP3).

Nagin's proof democracy works, speaking for the people he represents. Now if only he lived in a country... Okay, let's not go there.

Jeneane's following posts are even more interesting, allowing others to highlight the role racism is playing in denying aid to a city where countless thousands are drowning in a toxic soup of chemicals, feces, garbage, and bloated corpses. A white South African, I'd not considered racism a possible factor in the state's inability or unwillingness to lend aid to a city Ray Nagin describes thus: "...when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up."

At first it seemed inconceivable race might play a role, but given dumb-white-male dominance of U.S. government and my experience of American indifference to the loss of Iraqi life following the illegal invasion and occupation of that country, why the hell not?

"You're black. Fuck off and die. You didn't vote me into power. I didn't allow you to."

Chris Nolan asks why, as the waters recede from (or settle in) the city, blacks are portrayed as looters while, in the wake of 911, white New Yorkers were painted flag-draped heroes.

Tony Pierce graphically illustrates the vindictively destructive and racist example set by Agence-France-Presse, Associated Press, and Yahoo! (the latter issuing a statement answering the allegations).

Sure there are looters. Listen to Mayor Nagin.

Now you got some knuckleheads out there, and they are taking advantage of this lawless -- this situation where, you know, we can't really control it, and they're doing some awful, awful things. But that's a small majority of the people. Most people are looking to try and survive.

And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders. People don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it. You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will.

And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun.

Welcome to the real world. Looters take advantage of every civil emergency and such press reportage avoids addressing the real issue. Where the fuck are the National Guard and military?

"In Iraq."

"Oh. Yeah, Sorry, I forgot."

And Joe Duemer takes it from there, offering Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's response to what, given the long-term natural, economic and social consequences, amounts to an international crisis. "The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster," he said on NBC’s Today program. "Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part."

Yeah, Chertoff, today the world's laughing at your sorry, heartless ass.

"That man, the king of vacations ... the king of vacations in his ranch said nothing but, you have to flee, and didn't say how ... that cowboy, the cowboy mentality [chuckle]..."

Venezualan President Hugo Chavez

So I get to all this from Jeneane's posts over the past couple days by way of one from Tom. Wow, eh? The power of blogs.

But wait, there's more. Banging out this post, I'm listening to Bob Dylan's exquisite No Direction Home (screening on PBS September 26 and 27). The soundtrack's courtesy of AOL and the link's from Sheila Lennon who, as Jeneane points out, offers both news and inspiring, good ideas designed to ease suffering in New Orleans. She offers more: an awesome overview condensed to succinct, link-filled journalism giving the lowdown on what was a ghastly, easily preventable catastrophe.

She also explores alternatives. In an earlier post, Sheila asks:

Geeks, how do we get homegrown power, or a communications infrastructure that's not dependent on external sources at the mercy of weather or bombs? This gives a whole new meaning to "universal access." In some places, they produce electrical energy with solar generators, wind (the storm itself?), bicycles, exercise bikes ... I read once about a third-world village powered by kids using a playground merry-go-round.

That ain't no power-generating merry-go-round, Sheila, that's a Playpump roundabout [download the Flash movie]. In keeping with this post, and although I presume the principle could be used to generate power, the Playpump, like this post, is all about water.

Getting back to New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin and his statement, "...in a state of emergency, man, you are creative, you figure out ways to get stuff done", Playpumps offer southern African rural communities self-sustaining, inventive, multipurpose and productive sources of water where once there were none.

The story of the six-hundred Playpumps now generating water, fun for the kids, public service messages and advertising opportunities is worth reading and a damned side more heartening than that of the official and media indifference prevailing elsewhere.

"Sometimes you have to tear down and start over, build better. We need to start over. We need to start now."

Dan La Botz | Failing at War, Peace and Dignity

I'm going down the river | Down to New Orleans | They tell me everything is gonna be all right | But I don't know what "all right" even means

Bob Dylan | Tryin' to Get to Heaven

Bringing it all Back Home?

April 11, 2003

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander Louisiana National Guard Joint Task Force

The situation in New Orleans, which had seemed as bad as it could get, became considerably worse yesterday with reports of what seemed like a total breakdown of organized society. Americans who had been humbled by failures in Iraq saw that the authorities could not quickly cope with a natural disaster at home. People died for lack of water, medical care or timely rescues - particularly the old and the young - and victims were almost invariably poor and black. The city's police chief spoke of rapes, beatings and marauding mobs. The pictures were equally heartbreaking and maddening. Disaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees, yet somehow the government was unable to immediately rise to the occasion.

Watching helplessly from afar, many citizens wondered whether rescue operations were hampered because almost one-third of the men and women of the Louisiana National Guard, and an even higher percentage of the Mississippi National Guard, were 7,000 miles away, fighting in Iraq. That's an even bigger loss than the raw numbers suggest because many of these part-time soldiers had to leave behind their full-time jobs in police and fire departments or their jobs as paramedics. Regardless of whether they wear public safety uniforms in civilian life, the guardsmen in Iraq are a crucial resource sorely missed during these early days, when hours have literally meant the difference between evacuation and inundation, between civic order and chaos, between life and death.

New York Times | The Man-Made Disaster—Editorial September 2, 2005

Predictable?


September 2, 2005

As predictable?

“This is making a lot of us think about not reenlisting." ... "We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”

Spc. Cliff Ferguson, 527th Engineer Battalion

Note Read Michael Barnett's amazing blog entries from the lost city.

Couldn't Stand the Weather

Runnin' through this business of life | Rarely time if I'm needed to | Ain't so funny when things ain't feelin' right | Then daddy's hand helps to see me through | Sweet as sugar, love won't wash away | Rain or shine, it's always here to stay | All these years you and I've spent together | All this, we just couldn't stand the weather

Stevie Ray Vaughan | Couldn't Stand the Weather



Death by Water

If New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is to be believed, Hurricane Katrina, official ineptitude and general apathy have killed several thousand people in and around the landmark city.

Nagin ordered the city's late evacuation Sunday, with catastrophic consequences.

Tom Matrullo, who has some experience of hurricanes and, since last year, has provided penetrating analyses of FEMA's Kafkan responses to heavy weather, and Shelley Powers, who lives in the region, offer incisive responses to the devastation caused by inclement Gulf weather.

As far as Tom is concerned, politicians are greedy, self-serving bastards and, in Shelley's view, the people they're supposed to serve are generally loath to plan ahead. In a world where nature displays a remarkably detached indifference to our whimsies, both parties are playing a form of Russian Roulette.

The above graphic of New Orleans in the first I've seen giving me some idea of the city's topography, the function of levees and the stupidity of the human race. Building or living in a city below sea level is no big deal. The Dutch manage it with ease. But to plant such a city in an area trammeled annually by hurricanes—and then being shocked when the inevitable occurs—strikes me as somewhat weird.

The New Orleans disaster is great enough to warrant international sympathy and support. Those who can help, should. But, on their return in some three to six months, will the dumb residents of that city demand that their politicians spend their tax dollars on building a sustainable infrastructure?

I doubt it.

A Game of Chess



Lately, we've been flirting with a similar disaster in Cape Town. A couple of dry winters (a Mediterranean climate) left our dams virtually empty, the water eventually sloshing about at the 25 percent mark. This year, good winter rains have pushed levels up to close on 80 percent, but water restrictions are likely to remain in place. Why? Because the inept bastards we trust to plan our futures have not provided for an influx of people that started way back in the 1970s. We don't have enough water, no matter how full the dams.

Our (and the world's) chief problem is overpopulation, globalization and the swift ramping up of resource wars engendered by fast-increasing global inequity. The weather be damned. Should Cape Town experience drought and run out of water, we'll be deserving of relief, but not sympathy. It's a problem we're bringing into being by refusing to push along plans for new dams and the more effective management of our current catchment areas.

More, and like both the weather and globalization, overpopulation's seen us become indifferent to our basic needs. Focused on surviving in crassly commercialized consumer societies, we're too busy chasing money or building monuments to self-interest to worry about our and others' in-the-world problems. In short, we're too concerned with selfish superficialities to heed fundamental social needs.

The result is that, as individuals under threat, we're closing ourselves off and are starting to live in our heads.

The Fire Sermon



The effect, like Hurricane Katrina, can be cataclysmic. Look at Wednesday's Khadimiya Bridge stampede, a preventable tragedy that killed a thousand people a stone's throw from George W. Bush's privatized terror-generator, the Green Zone. Celebrating the eighth-century martyrdom of Shiite Imam Mussa Khadim, thousands of pilgrims (nervous in the wake of earlier deadly mortar attacks and suspecting poison in the food being sold them by vendors) headed under tight security across the Tigris and Baghdad's Al Aema Bridge towards the imam's Khadimiya tomb.

Rumors of a suicide bomber in the crowd sparked panic and a stampede. A thousand people, mostly women and children, were crushed, their lives trampled from them by a mob panicked into attempting to outrun their greatest fears. (Three suicide bombers had blown themselves up in the vicinity in preceding days.)

Was the Wednesday pilgrimage unsafe? Was there a bomber on the bridge? Sure but, for the latter, he existed only in the minds of those present. Is it safe or wise to live under the sea in the path of hurricanes? Sure it is, but only if you tell yourself so. However, like the pilgrims of Khadimiya and the survivors of Katrina (would that the media gave Iraq such coverage), you shouldn't be too surprised when your fantasies clash with deadly realities you've chosen to ignore.

And so the Iraqis have been visited by fire from the air—man's stupidity visited on the natural order. And the Americans by water; the natural order wreaking havoc on man's stupidity. It amounts to much the same thing. To those of us left somewhere in the middle is The Burial of the Dead.

Yup. It's human nature and someone will profit from it.

If one day you come across me standing in line, waiting to fill my bucket at the water truck, point me to this post.

What the Thunder Said

"This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years."

George W. Bush

And Iraq was going to be an overnight job?

Like a train that stops at every station | We all deal with trials and tribulations | Fear hangs the fellow that ties up his years | Entangled in yellow and cries all his tears | Changes come before we can grow | Learn to see them before we're too old | Don't just take me for tryin' to be heavy | Understand, it's time to get ready for the storm

Stevie Ray Vaughan | Couldn't Stand the Weather