Some last thoughts about Katrina for the time being

Chris Floyd blogs in Empire Burlesque:

1. No Direction Home

"How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home…."
-- Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"

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.

One proof of this can be found in the first polls coming out after the disaster, which show that around 45 percent of the American people approve of Bush's handling of the relief effort. It seems inconceivable that any sentient being could witness the agonizing results of the Bush team's dithering, dilatory response -- an agony played out in the full glare of non-stop media coverage -- and not come away with a sense of towering anger at this criminal incompetence. But it's obvious that nearly half the American people have now left the "reality-based community" altogether; they see only what they want to see, a world bathed in the hazy, golden nimbus of the Leader. The fact -- the undeniable truth -- that behind this carefully-concocted mirage lies nothing more than a steaming pile of rancid, rotting offal means nothing to these true believers. The Lie is better, the Lie is more comforting, the Lie lets them keep feeding on the suffering of others without guilt or shame.

This painful split between obvious reality and popular perception is nothing new, of course. Today we look at old footage of Adolf Hitler and wonder how on earth such a pathetic and ludicrous creature could ever have commanded the adoration and obedience of tens of millions of people. Yet he did. As Eliot said, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

The fact that a few conservative commentators and politicians are making mild criticisms of Bush means nothing. There has been much trumpeting of the remarks by David Brooks of the New York Times that Bush's manifest failures in the Delta -- coming after the debacle of the Iraq occupation, the torture revelations, etc. -- could be a "watershed" moment when the nation loses faith in its institutions, a situation Brooks likened to the 1970s.  But even in making these comments on one hand, Brooks was taking them back with the other, saying clearly that he might "get over" his disappointment with Bush soon enough. Think of it: Brooks has watched people literally dying before his very eyes after being abandoned to their fate for days by Bush's criminal negligence - and he thinks he can "get over" that at some point, and give his full-throated approval to the Leader once again.

This is the general mind-set (if you want to dignify the inch-deep shallowness of Brooks' intellect with the word "mind") of all the conservative critics: gosh, Bush really dropped the ball on this one! He'd better turn the PR thing around, or he might lose some of the "political capital" he needs to "advance his second-term agenda." That's it. That's as far as it goes.

After all, they fully support the "agenda" -- more war, more tax cuts for the rich, more impunity for big corporations, more welfare for the oil barons, the coal barons, the nuke barons, more coddling of elite investors, more state power for Christian extremists, more media consolidation, more graft, more kickbacks, more easy money for greasy palms. And now that Karl Rove has finally figured out his response -- employing brazen lies to smear state and local officials -- you will very quickly see the conservative critics, especially in Congress, fall into lockstep with the porcine counsellor's program.

2. The Perfect Storm: The Death of the Common Good in the Non-Abstract

The river rose all day,
The river rose all night.
Some people got lost in the flood,
Some people got away all right.
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemine:
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.
Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away,
They're trying to wash us away.
-- Randy Newman, "Louisiana 1927"

The destruction of New Orleans represents a confluence of many of the most pernicious trends in American politics and culture: poverty, racism, militarism, elitist greed, environmental abuse, public corruption and the decay of democracy at every level.

Much of this is embodied in the odd phrasing that even the most circumspect mainstream media sources have been using to describe the hardest-hit victims of the storm and its devastating aftermath: "those who chose to stay behind." Instantly, the situation has been framed with language to flatter the prejudices of the comfortable and deny the reality of the most vulnerable.

It is obvious that the vast majority of those who failed to evacuate are poor: they had nowhere else to go, no way to get there, no means to sustain themselves and their families on strange ground. While there were certainly people who stayed behind by choice, most stayed behind because they had no choice. They were trapped by their poverty -- and many have paid the price with their lives.

Yet across the media spectrum, the faint hint of disapproval drips from the affluent observers, the clear implication that the victims were just too lazy and shiftless to get out of harm's way. There is simply no understanding -- not even an attempt at understanding -- the destitution, the isolation, the immobility of the poor and the sick and the broken among us.

This is from the "respectable" media; the great right-wing echo chamber was even less restrained, of course, leaping straight into giddy convulsions of racism at the first reports of looting in the devastated city. In the pinched-gonad squeals of Rush Limbaugh and his fellow hatemongers, the hard-right media immediately conjured up images of wild-eyed darkies rampaging through the streets in an orgy of violence and thievery.

Not that the mainstreamers ignored the racist angle. There was the already infamous juxtaposition of captions for wire service photos, where depictions of essentially the same scene -- desperate people wading through flood waters, clutching plastic bags full of groceries -- were given markedly different spins. In one picture, a white couple is described as struggling along after finding bread and soda at a grocery store. But beneath an almost identical photo of a young black man with a bag of groceries, we are told that a "looter" wades through the streets after robbing a grocery store. In the photo I saw, this evil miscreant also had a -- gasp! -- pack of diapers under his arm.

Almost all of the early "looting" was like this: desperate people -- of all colors -- stranded by the floodwaters broke into abandoned stores and carried off food, clean water, medicine, clothes. Perhaps they should have left a check on the counter, but then again -- what exactly was going to happen to all those perishables and consumer goods, sitting around in fetid, diseased water for weeks on end? (The mayor now says it could be up to 16 weeks before people can return to their homes and businesses.) Obviously, most if not all of it would have been thrown away or written off in any case. Later, of course, there was more organized looting by criminal gangs, the type of lawless element -- of every hue, in every society -- whose chief victims are, of course, the poor and vulnerable. These criminal operations were quickly conflated with the earlier pilferage to paint a single seamless picture of the American media's favorite horror story: Black Folk Gone Wild.

But here again another question was left unasked: Where were the resources -- the money, manpower, materiel, transport -- that could have removed all those forced to stay behind, and given them someplace safe and sustaining to take shelter? Where, indeed, were the resources that could have bolstered the city's defenses and shored up its levees? Where were the National Guard troops that could have secured the streets and directed survivors to food and aid? Where were the public resources -- the physical manifestation of the citizenry's commitment to the common good -- that could have greatly mitigated the brutal effects of this natural disaster?

President Coolidge came down here in a railroad train,
With a little fat man with a notebook in his hand.
The president say, "Little fat man, isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker's land?

Well, we all know what happened to those vital resources. They had been cut back, stripped down, gutted, pilfered -- looted -- to pay for a war of aggression, to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest, safest, most protected Americans, to gorge the coffers of a small number of private and corporate fortunes, while letting the public sector - the common good -- wither and die on the vine. These were all specific actions of the Bush Administration -- including the devastating budget cuts on projects specifically designed to bolster New Orleans' defenses against a catastrophic hurricane. Bush even cut money for strengthening the very levees that broke and delivered the deathblow to the city. All this, in the face of specific warnings of what would happen if these measures were neglected: the city would go down "under 20 feet of water," one expert predicted just a few weeks ago.

But Bush said there was no money for this kind of folderol anymore. The federal budget had been busted by his tax cuts and his war. And this was a deliberate policy: as Bush's mentor Grover Norquist famously put it, the whole Bushist ethos was to starve the federal government of funds, shrinking it down so "we can drown it in the bathtub." As it turned out, the bathtub wasn't quite big enough -- so they drowned it in the streets of New Orleans instead.

But as culpable, criminal and loathsome as the Bush Administration is, it is only the apotheosis of an overarching trend in American society that has been gathering force for decades: the destruction of the idea of a common good, a public sector whose benefits and responsibilities are shared by all, and directed by the consent of the governed. For more than 30 years, the corporate Right has waged a relentless and highly focused campaign against the common good, seeking to atomize individuals into isolated "consumer units" whose political energies -- kept deliberately under-informed by the ubiquitous corporate media -- can be diverted into emotionalized "hot button" issues (gay marriage, school prayer, intelligent design, flag burning, welfare queens, drugs, porn, abortion, teen sex, commie subversion, terrorist threats, etc., etc.) that never threaten Big Money's bottom line.

Again deliberately, with smear, spin and sham, they have sought -- and succeeded -- in poisoning the well of the democratic process, turning it into a tabloid melee where only "character counts" while the rapacious policies of Big Money's bought-and-sold candidates are completely ignored. As Big Money solidified its ascendancy over government, pouring billions -- over and under the table -- into campaign coffers, politicians could ignore larger and larger swathes of the people. If you can't hook yourself up to a well-funded, coffer-filling interest group, if you can't hire a big-time Beltway player to lobby your cause and get you "a seat at the table," then your voice goes unheard, your concerns are shunted aside. (Apart from a few cynical gestures around election-time, of course.) The poor, the sick, the weak, the vulnerable have become invisible -- in the media, in the corporate boardroom, "at the table" of the power players in national, state and local governments. The increasingly marginalized and unstable middle class is also fading from the consciousness of the rulers, whose servicing of the elite gets more brazen and frantic all the time.

When unbridled commercial development of delicately balanced environments like the Mississippi Delta is bruited "at the table," whose voice is heard? Not the poor, who, as we have seen this week, will overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the overstressed environment. And not the middle class, who might opt for the security of safer, saner development policies to protect their hard-won homes and businesses. No, the only voice that matters is that of the developers themselves, and the elite investors who stand behind them.

Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away

The destruction of New Orleans was a work of nature - but a nature that has been worked upon by human hands and human policies. As global climate change continues its deadly symbiosis with unbridled commercial development for elite profit, we will see more such destruction, far more, on an even more devastating scale. As the harsh, aggressive militarism and brutal corporate ethos that Bush has injected into the mainstream of American society continues to spread its poison, we will see fewer and fewer resources available to nurture the common good. As the political process becomes more and more corrupt, ever more a creation of elite puppetmasters and their craven bagmen, we will see the poor and the weak and even the middle class driven further and further into the low ground of society, where every passing storm -- economic, political, natural -- will threaten their homes, their livelihoods, their very existence.

Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away

(Chris Floyd is an American journalist who writes for The Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times, and is author of the book, Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime. He has been a writer and editor for more than 20 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University.)

3. Panic Ideology

In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin wrote that "a state of emergency" is the rule rather than the exception in bourgeois existence. Now, more than ever, Benjamin's prophetic insights appear as an early diagnosis of the unprecedented threat to civilized life presented by the politics of the new right. The election of George Bush [ the first ], this too-perfect organ grinder for multinational corporate interests, and the systematic playing out through the late 1980s of a merciless American foreign and domestic policy, point to the surfacing, not only in Europe this time (in the guise of "popular capitalism" in Thatcher's Britain, Kohl's West Germany, and in technocratic France) but also in North America, of the beast that is at the heart of the western mind. In the face of this state of emergency, it is impossible to be silent. For this is an authoritarian politics which is as relentless in its assaults on democratic struggles in Central America as it is pitiless in its "reality therapy" for the poor, for children, for the aged. We thought Spencer was finally dead, only to discover in the slogans of "supply side economics" the birth anew of social darwinism.(...)

...over and beyond the strident political vocabulary of the new right, something else is happening. The new right is so potentially dangerous because it represents a broader awakening of an "ideology in waiting." And this newly surfacing ideology has its basis in the nihilism of a middle-class gone authoritarian. In the end, fear of loss of privilege, impotence in the face of overwhelming power and despair over the failure of the liberal consensus produce a psychological "readiness" for the therapeutic of the authoritarian state.(...)

Unfortunately, the private zone of emotional stillness sought by the bourgeois mind is itself illusory. One lesson of the hegemonic tendencies of the technological order is that the social as well as the psychoanalytical foundations of identity have already been colonized.
(From Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene -- Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, David Cook.)

4. From Happy Tutor:

NOLA The Social Contract 2005

1. Each of us gets what he or she earns.
2. Each may help others if and only if he or she wishes.
3. No one (outide of family and a few friends) "owes" anyone anything except per a properly executed legal agreement, enforceable by law.
4. Government has a monopoly on force and uses it to preserve the system above from internal and external enemies.

We saw how the conservative/libertarian contract worked in NOLA. Do we as a people still affirm it? Or do we want to say that as a matter of simple justice the poor left to die deserved better than they got?

If you work on the word, "deserved" or the word "justice," you will be doing philosophy, as it was originally done, in the streets. "Justice," said Aristotle is the key virtue of civic life, what makes us a polis, rather than a war zone or marketplace. "Justice is giving each his or her due." Thrasymachus said, "No, justice is whatever works for the powerful, as exemplified in laws and courts they create for their own intersts." I am afraid that Thrasymachus ruled NOLA, will govern the letting of contracts for rebuilding, and will use the social unrest to justify more law and order, more ordered liberty and more cutbacks in civil liberties - in other words, the answer for injustice is more of it: More boots on the ground, more jails, more guns, more graft, more cronyism. And, "giving" by sentimental suckers, really, takes up the slack, here and there, as the wealthy bear it away.

5. From Counterpunch:

Once Looting was the Pay of Imperial Soldiers: Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! by Peter Linebaugh

The NY Times on Saturday may write that Bush made "his first on-the-ground look at the desperation that has gripped the region for the last five days" but they also say he made his tour in a helicopter. He was frightened, and never actually got down to earth except when he left at the airport tarmac if you want to call that "earth". At one time it was part of one of the planet's greatest alluvial systems. Bush with his beady bee-bee eyes had himself a look-see out the window which they call an "on-the-ground look".

In Zora Neale Hurston's great flood novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the people become a chorus to the events of the mighty. "It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. The sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment." This helps explain why Bush could not visit the Convention Center or the Superdome. Tens of thousands sit in judgment.

The history of New Orleans is a history of class war; and class war brings out the actualities in the potential of communism: the thirsty do not ask permission to take a drink, nor the hungry food. Is it the new society? Of course not. But it could be; this is self-activity. The ruling class does all it can to prevent it from happening.

But what about the "looting"? Yes, precisely. Massive media and ideological and legal resources are concentrated on the point, the fears of the ruling class, its guilty self-knowledge for all the commodity capital flowing down the river from the granary of the Midwest, from the one-time factories of the Great Lakes. All down the river and out to sea, past the dockers, the Black Indians, past the slaves and cotton pickers, the prisoners at Angola, the Cajuns, the maroons, and creole, and back again, now as surplus value, as finance capital.

The"loot"? Etymologically, it's a Hindu word with a Sanskrit root, and it signified what was taken from an enemy in war, such as the clothing ('clobber') of the dead. Rudyard Kipling knew all about it, singing to his comrades, the soldiers of imperial India.

If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg be'ind the keeper's back,
If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line,
If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack,
You will understand this little song o'mine.
But the service rules are 'ard, an' from such we are debarred,
For the same with English morals does not suit.
Why they call a man a robber if 'e stuffs 'is marchin' clobber
Withh the -
Loo! Loo! Lulu! Lulu! Loo! Loo! Loot! Loot! Loot!
Ow, the loot!
Bloomin' loot!
That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!
It's the same with dogs an' men,
If you'd make 'em come again
Clap 'em forward with a Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot!
Whoopee! Tear 'im puppy! Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Loot! Loot!

Yes, at one time loot was the soldier's pay, it was part of the wage deal. A generation ago a huge amount of international scholarship was devoted to this process, how criminalization is essential to a) the formation of the wage, and b) the creation of a terrorized, divided proletariat. "English morals" boiled down to little food and worse commons all under the gallows tree. Nowadays loot is nothing less than the surplus value of the capitalist class in a deadly class war, fearful for its surplus in whatever form, commodity, money, production, real estate, futures, assets, development.

In New Orleans when they asked for bread they were given a stone. It's an old story. Lafcadio Hearn was a great nineteenth century creolist, journalist, story-teller, student of Japan, and inhabitant of New Orleans where he was assistant editor for the Item, a readable journal of reform. "Were there Communists in Antiquity?" was the question for its readers on August 23, 1878, only a few years following the Paris Commune. Evidently a correspondent of a rival paper in endeavoring to prove the nuisance of "tramps" in antiquity, made a complete mess of both Greek and Latin philology, and Lafcadio Hearn patiently set them right before moving on to answer the question of the day.

Yes, he concluded, there were communists. "The rich were killed or exiled; their lands and goods shared among the poor. At Megara every wealthy man in the city was exiled _ a punishment which antique society rendered almost equal to death _ and their goods confiscated. At Samos two hundred wealthy citizens were killed, four hundred exiled, and their wealth distributed among the poor. At Syracuse the same thing occurred. So also at Messina." This is the justice that Bush could not risk by standing on the ground. Lafcadio Hearn, a man who could pass within the races, continued his account of classical communism and its grim lesson for his era, as he thought.

"At Miletus, the children of the rich men, who had fled the city, were taken by the rioters and trampled to death by trained oxen. Subsequently the rich party, prevailing after a savage context, revenged itself by seizing the children of the poor, plastering their bodies with pitch, and burning them alive. Yet in those days the hatred of the poor classes against the rich was hardly greater than it is today. At that era the war between the rich and poor invariably terminated in a loss of liberty for the former. The efforts of communism had only a temporary success, and their ultimate result was the establishment of a despotism at once merciless and all-powerful. A violent outbreak of communism in this republic might lead to a change in government which would leave the riotous classes everything to regret."

Is it not the case that in our era the situation is the reverse of that described in antiquity by Lafcadio Hearn? Our tyrants are despotic privatizers; popular commoning must follow them. True, ours are not the riotous classes yet. Nor have we trained oxen to trample the rich. After the Superdome none can now say that the rich have not plastered our bodies with pitch. We have seen the tyrants tremble, the public relations stutter, the leader of the House expresses urbanocide, and the leader of their class peers out the window jaw twitching in premonition of the Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! "Just send cash," he says.

(Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. Email him at plineba@yahoo.com.)

6. Our Moral Culture Was Breached, Too:
•
To the Editor:
David Brooks, in "The Bursting Point" (column, Sept. 4), shed further light on the most awe-inspiring blind spot of the American right. Looking for bright spots in a dark time, he writes that the "moral culture" is strong.

Our current moral culture, as I understand the term, includes the elevation of wealth and commerce over all other considerations; the open neglect of the disadvantaged; the redefinition of American power away from moral authority and toward military might; the worship of American exceptionalism; and the threat of evangelical totalitarianism as social policy.

Our moral culture has never been weaker, nor have our leaders ever had less right to claim the moral high ground. The levees have broken in more ways than one.
Phil Wagar
Bellbrook, Ohio
•
To the Editor:
What can David Brooks be thinking when he writes that the country's "moral culture" is strong?

This is a country that re-elected a president who launched an unprovoked attack on Iraq that has taken the lives of more than 1,800 of our troops and thousands of Iraqis; that acquiesces in tax cuts for the wealthy that only worsen the great gap between rich and poor; that tolerates capital punishment despite evidence that the wrong person is sometimes executed; that accepts gun controls so weak that the United States surpasses all other advanced countries in death by firearms.

If this shameful state of affairs is what a strong moral culture produces, I would hate to see the fruits of a weak one.
John Henry
New York

7. Blame Game, Race Card by Molly Ivins

 George W. Bush has come up with his worst idea since he decided to have the military investigate torture by the military at Abu Ghraib prison. He, George W. personally, plans to investigate to "find out what went right and what went wrong" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

It's hard to guess where Bush will look first, but maybe he should start with the appointment of "Brownie" to head FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. "Brownie" is Michael Brown, who was appointed by some president.

At the time, Brownie was deputy director of the agency under Joe Allbaugh — because he was Joe Allbaugh's college roommate, you see, and Allbaugh was Bush's campaign manager in 2000, you see, which made both of them qualified to manage disasters.

The FEMA press release announcing Brownie's appointment started with his other obvious qualification, "From 1991 to 2001, Brown was the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association." It's unclear whether "Brownie" was fired or resigned from the organization in the wake of financial mismanagement and lawsuits.

Hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Brown wrote his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, to ask permission to send 1,000 FEMA employees to the scene to support rescuers and to "convey a positive image" about the government's response. Brownie said he expected the workers to be there two days later. This apparently inspired Bush's comment, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."

FEMA was once considered one of our better federal agencies (those in the government-is-the-enemy camp may not believe this, but some government agencies are actually known for effective performance). Exactly why the right-wing Republicans chose to make FEMA a political football was never clear — but at any rate, going back to the Reagan administration, conservatives have been hacking away at FEMA. They mostly just under-funded it, one of their favorite tactics, unless a hurricane hit Florida just before an election. Sorry to sound boringly partisan, but that is the record, and the Clinton administration did work hard at rebuilding the agency.

So now those on the liberal side are saying: "See, that's what happens when you starve government in order to give rich folks tax cuts. Government agencies can't do the jobs they were set up to do."

Silly liberals see this as vindication that they have been right all along. But the Bush administration officials are in full blame-shifting mode: First, they announced repeatedly they don't want to "play the blame game." Then, they start blaming everybody else.

According to The New York Times, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, White House communications director, began a campaign this weekend to blame local and state officials. The "woefully inadequate response," said "sources close to the White House," was the fault of "bureaucratic obstacles from state and local officials."

The bottom line is they're playing the race card. As many of you have noted, it IS a racial issue that poor people suffer most in any natural or economic disaster. Because Katrina hit the Deep South, a great many of the poor people affected are black, especially in New Orleans — both hit hardest and majority black to begin with.

I'm not sure what to say about a cable news station that plays a "loop" of black looters over and over — about 20 seconds of actual footage, replayed for four minutes, while the voiceover dwells on the looting problem. Obviously, there are some looters in New Orleans and elsewhere, and equally obviously, there are lots of people who were without food or water for days.

The exhausted and desperate black mayor of New Orleans begged for help in an interview late last week. "They're feeding the public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying down here," Mayor Ray Nagin said, talking about the feds. "It's politics, man, and they are playing games. ...

"Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here! They're not here! It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamned crisis in the history of this country. People are dying."

The mayor was in tears. I heard two nice, white American "ladies" deploring this interview. "Well! He should remember there might be children listening!" Children still without food and water. What happens to people when they talk about race? Of course, most of us don't actually talk about race any more, we refer to it only indirectly, we talk "those people."

Watch carefully, listen carefully — minority groups have always been blamed after natural disasters, since the days when the Hungarians were supposed to have cut the fingers off bodies to get the gold rings in the wake of the Johnstown Flood. Dirty Bohunks.

8. After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go by Gordon Adams

 The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office.

When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.

When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is repeatedly cut by an administration that seems determined to undermine the public responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that the infrastructure could not survive a major storm, it seems clear someone is playing politics with the public trust.

When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the administration to leave town.

When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.

When FEMA officials cannot figure out that there are thousands stranded at the New Orleans convention center - where people died and were starving - and fussed ineffectively about the same problems in the Superdome, they should be fired, not praised, as the president praised FEMA Director Michael Brown in New Orleans last week.

When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.

When repeated studies of New Orleans make it clear that tens of thousands of people would be unable to evacuate the city in case of a flood, lacking both money and transportation, but FEMA makes no effort before the storm to commandeer buses and move them to safety, it is time for someone to be given his walking papers.

When the president makes Sen. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula, Miss., the poster child for rebuilding while hundreds of thousands are bereft of housing, jobs, electricity and security, he betrays a careless insensitivity that should banish him from office.

When the president of the United States points the finger away from the lame response of his administration to Katrina and tries to finger local officials in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., as the culprits, he betrays the unwillingness of this administration to speak truth and hold itself accountable. As in the case of the miserable execution of policy in Iraq, Mr. Bush and Karl Rove always have some excuse for failure other than their own misjudgments.

We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.

They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.

It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.

(Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, was senior White House budget official for national security in the Clinton administration.)

9. Noblesse Oblige? Not our President by Margaret Carlson

As part of his political damage control over the weekend, President Bush sent his staff to the Sunday talk shows and his parents to visit evacuees bused to Houston from New Orleans.

The administration officials fared poorly. On "Meet the Press," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff tried to spin a headline few saw — "New Orleans Dodges a Bullet" — into an explanation of why his department stood by for days as thousands sent to the city's convention center were trapped in their own filth, without food, water or medicine. He looked silly.

But Chertoff gave a boffo performance compared with the president's mother, who left her comfortable house in the West Oaks section of Houston to tour the emergency facility at the Astrodome.

While I saw a teeming mass of displaced people standing in hourlong lines to wash encrusted grime off their children in a tiny restroom sink, Barbara Bush found a bunch of happy campers experiencing a step up in their living conditions. She saw visitors "overwhelmed with the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working [she chuckles here] very well for them."

Oh really? The Bushes have always made fun of Bill Clinton's lip-biting, hands-on governing, but who wouldn't prefer it to this president's upbeat platitudes. Tanned and rested from a vacation so long it would embarrass the French, Bush initially flew over the devastation in Air Force One, promising his prayers on his way someplace else. When he actually arrived in Louisiana a few days later, he reminisced about going to New Orleans "to enjoy myself, occasionally too much," apparently thinking he was at a fundraiser. He topped that in Mississippi: "Out of the rubble of Trent Lott's house … there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

Even to his detractors, the callous, puerile attitude and sheer ineptitude of Bush this past week is shocking. He got off to a slow start on 9/11 but quickly found his bullhorn and Rudy Giuliani. He's got neither here.

One reason for the dismal federal performance is Bush's disdain for government. To him, it's bloated and for chumps who can't provide for themselves — with some exceptions. Bush signed spending bills filled with pork, finding $454 million for his Alaskan Republicans to build two bridges to nowhere in Alaska but not for the levees everyone but him knew were cracking. His administration intervenes but only when there are a lot of cameras and potential political gain, such as in the Terri Schiavo case, when Bush rushed back from his ranch in March to do so. And saying "it's your money, not the government's," he cut taxes for the wealthy, which means less money for boring projects like disaster relief.

If Bush cared about governing, he would have never appointed Michael Brown, the failed director of a trade association that ran horse shows, to run FEMA, which the president folded into the Homeland Security Department. That agency has little to show for itself other than an ineffective color chart and long lines at the airport as arthritic old ladies remove their shoes.

If Bush's first priority were managing the real crisis and not the political one, he'd fire Brown, who ignored the pleas for help from the thousands of people herded like cattle into the Superdome and the convention center. On the contrary, Bush praised his point man for the recovery that hadn't happened: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." If he keeps up the good work, he may end up like those other great officials — Paul Bremer and George Tenet — with a Medal of Freedom around his neck instead of a noose.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we went to New Orleans with the government we have — replete with its Chertoffs, Brownies, Cheneys and assorted other ideologues, cronies and schemers who gorge on patronage, revel in politics and brush off the mundane responsibilities of the offices they hold. They're Big Picture guys who have brought the same management skills to the Gulf states that they brought to that other gulf.

The worrisome question is how much like them are the rest of us? In 2000, even his supporters found Al Gore and his 10-point plans long-winded compared with the affable frat boy rescued from a checkered career by family and connections until he was running the Texas Rangers and then Texas itself. For three years, we watched as Bush created and compounded the tragedy in Iraq, and rehired him anyway. Perhaps now we see that you better treat government with respect. You never know when your life — political and otherwise — might depend on it.

(Margret Carlson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.)

10. So, What Was So Controversial About Kanye West’s Remarks? by Bill Fletcher, Jr.

For the life of me, I am trying to figure out what was so controversial in the remarks by rapper Kanye West at the NBC fundraiser for the Katrina disaster victims. He stated that Bush apparently does not care about Black people. He also expressed concern about how Black families that were fighting for survival were compared with White families in the media, i.e., Black families tended to be viewed as looters while Whites were not.

What was so controversial about that? From the standpoint of any reasonable person, West’s comments seem quite rational and level-headed. The media discrepancy, at least at the earlier stage of the disaster, is fairly well documented. Separately, how can anyone, in looking at the situation and the length of time it has taken for the Federal government to mobilize, or the lack of leadership and urgency from President Bush come to another conclusion about his lack of concern? Certainly it is obvious that there is complete incompetence on the part of his Administration, but the problem must go deeper. Within 36 hours, Tsunami victims in South Asia were receiving aid and support; in the Gulf Coast, it was five days. In the Tsunami crisis, countries victimized readily and immediately accepted foreign assistance for their citizens; in the post-Katrina situation, the Bush administration has refused to reply to countless offers of assistance, such as those coming from Cuba who are familiar with hurricane disasters.

So, why should one portray West’s comments as off-color or over the top? It seems to me that they were appropriate observations that can only be refuted by a change in the practice of the Bush administration. There is no amount of rhetoric that will ever make up for the inexplicable delay in the Bush administration response to the disaster.

Thus, rather than berate Kanye West, we should take off our hats to him. We should applaud his courage and his outrage. We should thank him for being willing to say publicly what millions of us are saying privately: that the post-Katrina disaster reflects the racial and class priorities of an Administration more concerned about an illegal war and occupation in Iraq; more concerned about giving tax breaks to its wealthy friends; more energized to destabilize legitimate governments in other parts of the world, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, than it is about ensuring that the people of the Gulf Coast were protected from the ravages of nature…a nature running wild from global warming, while this Administration closes its eyes and ears and repeats incessantly, that everything is going to be alright.

Right on, Brother Kanye West!

(Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the president of TransAfrica Forum. Email him at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.)

11. File Today's Feelings for Future Use by David Rossie

 Remember the pictures. The bodies floating in the flood waters, the hunger-plagued children, the anguished mothers, the hopeless elderly, the heroic Coast Guard rescue teams. Remember them. Remember them as the city's slow recovery proceeds and the last presidential platitude has mercifully faded away.

Remember that this didn't happen in Haiti or Bangladesh or some other Third World backwater. It happened here. Remember why it happened and who allowed it to get as bad as it got. Remember it when the midterm elections come around a year from November. Keep all of it in mind, because those elections can be, must be, the first step toward reclaiming this once-proud nation's respectability.

The voters of this country made a tragic blunder in 2000 and they compounded it last year, and there is no forcing the genie back into the bottle. But the past does not have to be prologue. If the Democrats can somehow find a voice and an agenda, not to mention a spine, and recapture the House or Senate or both, they can at least slow if not halt the decline of this country toward a social level comparable to that of 17th century England.

The failure of FEMA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, in bringing relief to the stranded inhabitants of New Orleans and the failure of our detached-from-reality president once again to respond to a crisis in a timely manner, were so glaring that even the tame media could not ignore it.

Bush's grandstanding moment with the bullhorn in 2001, and the fact that we had been attacked by external forces bought him 3½ years of slack. But Katrina offered no such theatrical opportunity. Instead, we had to settle for the frat boy telling us how much fun he had in New Orleans before he became an even more carefree president, and how much he was looking forward to sitting on Trent Lott's new front porch.

Shifting blame for the unpreparedness this time is going to be more difficult. Bill Clinton is helping Poppy Bush raise money for relief, so he's out, and there's no indication that Michael Moore or George Soros were in New Orleans when the levees gave way. But that doesn't mean Rove's spinners are without targets. They were to be found on the editorial page of Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. Not the hopelessly inept FEMA director and failed horse show executive Michael Brown; not Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary and consummate bureaucrat, and certainly not Bush. Then who? Why New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, both conveniently of the Democratic persuasion.

Meanwhile, The Great Oz, the true architect of this administration's policies and priorities, who remained out of sight during New Orleans' ordeal, has emerged. Now he's out of hiding and headed for the Big Easy, perhaps to see if there's any work to be had there for Halliburton.

However guilty Cheney and Bush may be of negligence and indifference to human suffering, branding them as racist because most of the New Orleanians trapped in the Super Dome and Convention Center were African-American is a bum rap. Seventy percent of the residents of New Orleans are black. And poor. It was being poor that doomed them, not the color of their skin.

To an administration dedicated to making America's wealthiest even wealthier, the nation's poor have grown in number as they've become increasingly invisible. But they're hard to ignore when they're floating in the streets of New Orleans.

New Orleans is under military control today, and not a moment too soon. And not for the first time or the worst time. That would have been in the spring of 1862, when Union troops under Ben Butler, a Democratic politician from Massachusetts turned Union general, occupied the city. Then as now looting became a problem, but then it was Butler's troops who were doing the looting. Butler himself earned the nickname "Spoons" for his deftness in acquiring silverware from houses in the city, and his brother, not to be outdone, made a small fortune selling confiscated cotton.

After the war, Butler became a radical Republican.

The more things change...

(Rossie is associate editor of Binghamton NY's Press & Sun-Bulletin.)

12. Katrina Underscores Bush's Isolated Style by Steven Thomma

As President Bush flew this week to the Gulf Coast for his second post-Katrina visit, an aide said the trip reflected Bush's usual routine of "seeing as much as possible and getting information from different places."

Not quite.

Bush did not visit with any angry evacuees in New Orleans. As Katrina approached, Bush and his top aides spent days apparently unaware that New Orleans might be flooded - despite many warnings, some from inside his own administration. Afterwards, he heaped praise on officials responsible for the slow and initially disorganized disaster-relief efforts. His aides dismiss demands that Bush hold someone accountable for failure, saying that's merely a distracting "blame game."

None of this should be a surprise. Bush has a long record of avoiding critics, rewarding loyalty even in the face of failure and shunning - even punishing - those who disagree with him. It's a management style that shapes how he governs - disdaining compromise with Democrats in Congress, for example - and one that brushes off whole sectors of the American electorate.

That could come back to haunt him, as is now evident in the two problems - Iraq and Katrina - that together have sent his approval ratings to the lowest levels of his presidency and threaten his second-term agenda.

His style of isolating himself from unwelcome voices pleases his core supporters, who don't want him to compromise, but it sacrifices the broader public appeal that helped Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton weather second-term setbacks. One new poll, from the independent Pew Research Center, suggests he is losing support even from Republicans and conservatives.

To Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the Bush administration's response to Katrina suggested "a real sense of arrogance. Loyalty and never admitting a mistake matters more than the truth. It has a Nixon feel to me."

Bush allies insist he is engaged and pressing the government to fix all hurricane-related problems. But the public isn't much impressed, judging by his plummeting polls. One new survey by independent pollster John Zogby shows Bush would lose a hypothetical election to every modern president, including the much-maligned Jimmy Carter.

Bush's isolated management style is one factor hurting him. While his decision-making is usually cloaked in secrecy, the hurricane crisis showed some characteristic traits.

Denial of unpleasant realities, for example. On Sept. 1 Bush contended that no one could have foreseen that New Orleans might be flooded: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Actually, a lot of people saw it coming. Three years ago, The New Orleans Times-Picayune published a lengthy examination of how likely that scenario was, and it got wide attention. In fact, Bush's own administration participated in a disaster drill for almost exactly this kind of catastrophe.

Bush himself has admitted in the past that he does not reach far for information.

"I glance at the headlines," Bush told Fox News in September 2003, but "I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who ... probably read the news themselves ... And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Inside his administration, dissenting views are often stifled, and dissidents punished.

In 2002, the administration fired the head of the Army Corps Engineers after he continued to advocate spending increases for flood control after he'd been overruled. Michael Parker, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi, wanted a 40 percent spending increase, while Bush wanted a 10 percent cut.

When Bush convened an economic summit in 2002, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later told writer Ron Suskind, the White House wanted to hear only from people who already supported Bush policies.

"A carefully vetted group of more than 240 executives, economists, and even a few labor leaders was being assembled," Suskind wrote. "They'd seem diverse and independent to the untrained eye. In fact, nearly every one would be a Bush supporter and many were major fundraisers. Attendance was, in a way, a reward for support."

While Bush likes to be surrounded by friendly faces, he avoids frowning ones. Since Katrina hit, Bush visited the Gulf Coast twice, but both times avoided angry evacuees - ostensibly so he wouldn't interfere with relief operations.

Some veteran Bush-watchers are skeptical of that White House explanation.

"They didn't want anything to be on TV showing a bunch of angry people hollering at the president," said George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. "It would not have been a favorable scene unless he could handle it well, which he can't. Clinton could. He would be down there feeling their pain. But Bush can't."

The president also has refused to speak to two major groups that represent millions of Americans, but have criticized him.

After one brief phone conversation in 2001, Bush has never met with the president of the AFL-CIO. He is the only president in the last half century who has not.

And Bush has never addressed the NAACP as president. "You've heard the rhetoric and the names they've called me," he once explained.

13. Clash of Representations: "Bush the Protector" vs. "Bush the Menace" by Norman Solomon
  
For President Bush, a classic political question - "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" - must be answered with a resounding "No."

    In 2001, within days of 9/11, mass media touted Bush as a walking FDR and hailed him as the nation's visionary leader. The president settled into a jerky rhetorical rhythm that had the Washington press corps tapping its feet.

    With major assistance from the news media, Bush struck a pose as the country's protector-in-chief. That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

    But now, in the wake of the hurricane, Bush is widely seen as the nation's menace-in-chief.

    The media storyline for the cataclysm of 9/11 - echoing countless narratives from Bush and others in the administration - was a continuous tale of American virtue in a mortal struggle with its opposite. Few journalists challenged that simplicity, and many of the ones who did ended up facing insinuations (or outright accusations) that they were soft on terrorists.

    But now, to the extent that the media storyline for the catastrophe of New Orleans has a villain, it's the Bush administration itself. And White House operatives have less media leverage. Journalists who explore tough questions are unlikely to encounter the accusation of being soft on hurricanes.

    As of last week, President Bush's media image as the national protector has been largely replaced by an image of someone whose inexcusable behavior took American lives. Polling indicates that a solid majority of the public blames the federal government for lethally inadequate responses to the hurricane before and after it reached the Gulf coast.

    A week after levees collapsed and drowned New Orleans, the president was on a PR offensive. Bush made a somber declaration: "I'll lead an investigation of what went right and what went wrong."

    That statement came from the same president who - as misery and death engulfed southern Louisiana and Mississippi - was far away at a political fund-raising event, jovially strumming a guitar.

    Days later, the media spinners advising Bush obviously want to give the impression that he's engaged with current relief efforts - and determined to get to the bottom of the government's failures during the hurricane's lead-up and aftermath. But the president's resolute offer to "lead an investigation" of his own administration is impressive only to those who are eager to be impressed. The maneuver is reminiscent of when - in the midst of a growing scandal a third of a century ago - President Nixon pledged to get to the bottom of the Watergate break-in.

    On the White House propaganda calendar, this week was scheduled to culminate with a blitz of oratory marking the September 11 anniversary. But Hurricane Katrina has rained on President Bush's 9/11 parade, and his militaristic pomp will lose some luster.

    Of course, Bush is feverishly trying to repair the damage to his image in the wake of the hurricane. But even for a prodigious spin-meister like Karl Rove, that must be a somewhat daunting task.

    The actual George W. Bush of today isn't much different from the actual George W. Bush of mid-September 2001. But in the universe of media and public perceptions, they're light years apart.

(Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to: WarMadeEasy.com.)

14. Let the People Rebuild New Orleans by Naomi Klein (from the September 26, 2005 issue of The Nation)

On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants.... We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."

The statement came from Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans. It went on to demand that a committee made up of evacuees "oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations collecting resources on behalf of our people.... We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans."

It's a radical concept: The $10.5 billion released by Congress and the $500 million raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government; it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.

Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimizing 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 Business 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 corporatized French Quarter (where only 4.3 percent of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans' reputation is '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 labor organizer 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."

Here's a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimized by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass Senior High School into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn't they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?

For a people's reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster's starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. "We had no caretakers," he says. That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi -- many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood -- need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organizing evacuees -- currently scattered through forty-one states--into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.

These ideas are not without precedent. When Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1985, the state also failed the people: poorly constructed public housing crumbled and the army was ready to bulldoze buildings with survivors still trapped inside. A month after the quake 40,000 angry refugees marched on the government, refusing to be relocated out of their neighborhoods and demanding a "Democratic Reconstruction." Not only were 50,000 new dwellings for the homeless built in a year; the neighborhood groups that grew out of the rubble launched a movement that is challenging Mexico's traditional power holders to this day.

And the people I met in Sri Lanka have grown tired of waiting for the promised relief. Some survivors are now calling for a People's Planning Commission for Post-Tsunami Recovery. They say the relief agencies should answer to them; it's their money, after all.

The idea could take hold in the United States, and it must. Because there is only one thing that can compensate the victims of this most human of natural disasters, and that is what has been denied them throughout: power. It will be a long and difficult battle, but New Orleans' evacuees should draw strength from the knowledge that they are no longer poor people; they are rich people who have been temporarily locked out of their bank accounts.

Those wanting to donate to a people's reconstruction can make checks out to the Vanguard Public Foundation, 383 Rhode Island St., Suite 301, San Francisco, CA 94103. Checks should be earmarked "People's Hurricane Fund."

(Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, and most recently, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate.)