Pretty Much

About the Bush Administration on the break-ins into private passport files at the Department of State, Katrina, and the Iraq Occupation: "They just don't do well at anticipating or management." (Hillary Mann Leverett, Frm Foreign Service Officer and former Bush Administration employee, on "Countdown with Keith Olberman," MSNBC, March 21, 2008)

Make It Right NOLA

Remember what we did, together, for the people wiped out by the tsunami? Remember how Americans dug into our hearts and pockets for people on the other side of the world and sent millions to people we never laid eyes on, to help them rebuild?

Remember how we didn't ask whether they deserved our help, or if they were upstanding good people, or whether they all had jobs, or whether they should build there again? Remember how we just helped?

That's what we can do now.

We have that chance.

We can join Brad Pitt at makeitrightnola, and help our fellow Americans. It doesn't take much. It only takes putting yourself, for a moment, in their shoes. It only takes remembering how much you love New Orleans, and realizing that that love? There wouldn't be a New Orleans for you to love so much if it weren't for the people who make New Orleans what it is. The people you see, the people you don't see.

It's about the waiter at your table, the maid who made your beds. It's about the taxi driver and the trolley driver and the shop keeper and the feller who made your cafe au lait. It's about the doctor at the hospital you could land in, and the nurse, and the pharmacist. It's about the people who work the docks and haul the goods that make your life a little better every day. It's about blue dogs and rarified antiques and Newcomb pottery. It's about the history of New Orleans -- the slaves, the Creoles, the jazz Greats, the jazz not-so-greats. It's about the Saints and the sinners. It's about the drag queens and the Mardi Gras floats and the Hurricanes and the beads and the people who made them for you. It's about the funerals, the live oaks, the red beans and rice. See what I'm sayin'? Somebody made the jambalaya, the red beans and rice, the mudbugs, and the chances are pretty good that that somebody lived in the 9th Ward or loved someone who did.

Step up. Put the judgment down. Leave that to Somebody in a better position to do it right. For now, just step up and help out. Just do it. Don't say New Orleans never gave you anything.

You know better than that.

Revisiting National Disasters

We're a very strange country. I wrote this during the Virginia Tech shooting massacre and still think it's worth considering.



I'm appalled by the massacre at Virginia Tech. I grieve with Blacksburg and the Hokies, and for our nation, which, to paraphrase Jack Cafferty, seems to have a monopoly on campus massacres.

Maybe I'm projecting, but I have to think that, as the days grind on, the sympathetic focus on the horror at Virginia Tech must be difficult for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. That is, the relentless spotlight, all but totally decontextualized, on the slayings of 33 people must be doubly painful for residents of a region whose losses numbered in the thousands.

I mean that since the folk in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast are as capable as the rest of us of selfless grief and feelings of horror, I know they are joined with the rest of us in shocked outrage and deep sympathetic concern.
Yet I can't see how they can help but contrast the outpouring of unalloyed compassion directed at VA Tech, the national rally to find prevention protocols, and the President's instant come-a-callin' sympathy, with the nation's cheap, mean-spirited, and hostile reaction to the people drowned by the levee failure and wiped out on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina.

We're a very strange country. No flags flew half-staffed for New Orleans, Gulfport, or Pass Christian--not that I recall, anyway.

I'm not saying that the response to VA Tech is inappropriate. I'm saying that the nation’s response to Katrina was and continues to be grotesque, shabby, scolding, and parsimonious, to put it mildly.

Questions wander in my mind, each one trailing unthinkable implications about competence, negligence, political affiliation, class, race, social position, power, fraud, and profiteering. Questions whose answers don't necessarily align neatly. Questions that just won’t go away.

I write in hopes that there are others who have not forgotten, and who are willing to shine a relentless spotlight on our Gulf South until we respond with dignity, justice, and compassion.

Massacres are horrible whether they're engineered by bad levees or by messed-up boys with pistols. National tragedies are national tragedies whether they’re man-made or weather-born. In the end, it isn't the cause or even the magnitude of a disaster that defines it in our national memory. It's what we do for the survivors.

I wonder what kind of people we are that we will not ensure our own children a safe and affordable education, and that we have not ensured that our own fellow citizens are at least made whole in housing and safe in civil infrastructure.

There are some things a decent people just do.

We aren't doing them. We're a very strange people.

Remembering Katrina Part III: Reprise

Written on August 31, 2005, with some recent editing for clarity --


These are random thoughts, feelings.

My dearest friend of 40 years, and her family, live in Gulfport, and there's no way of knowing for sure whether they're alive or not. She's a life-long resident and a minister. I change my mind every second about whether she left or stayed, lived or died. The emotional roller coaster is text-book. I feel desperate and crazed.

If I'm feeling crazed, here at home, safe, dry, fed, watered, well, and with all the support in the world, can I begin to comprehend something of the desperation they and all the dear souls in New Orleans and on the Coast must be feeling?

I can't express my shame and rage that this is occurring in my country. Past the grief and shock of the natural disaster is the utter shame at the boggling incompetence in response to the chaos in New Orleans and on what was the Coast. I can't. I stammer. I find it hard to breathe. Sometimes I feel such rage and frustration that I think my chest will burst.

At last I hear somebody REAL on TV. CNN's Jack Cafferty said something like ". . . and the elephant in the living room that nobody's willing to talk about, the race and class factor going on here." I could weep for relief that the Glad-wrapped whiteout is finally beginning to break down. That it took a -- what, what do you call this? Disaster? -- an obliteration of this size to reach the flinty little hearts of the corporate newsfaces absolutely appalls me, but I'll force myself to find the good news: At least something real is being reported now.

I heard our new national Director of Homeland Security first thing this morning give a press conference on how September is "preparedness month." The mind congeals. I laugh for the first time in days. It's not a happy laugh.

My questions are simply without end. I imagine Europe looking on. I imagine a world led for decades to believe that the mighty USA could never fail, now watching, live, in real-time, a display of incompetence and callousness of surely unprecedented dimensions. I’m in shock. I, too, grew up thinking the USA is the most technically competent, together nation in the world, the nation everybody else calls on for help, and I grew up on the idea that Americans are the most generous people on earth. There’s a breakdown here. The old known world is shattered. I don’t recognize this one. I can’t process what I’m seeing and hearing.

This morning I opened one of the survivor link-up sites. I had posted two search messages there, one for each of my friends. The site format limited what I could say to listing the names and locations, and a drop-down menu of "alive," "dead," "missing," and "unknown." I had chosen "unknown." I opened the site this morning, dully, numb and despairing, and clicked on my post for Jane, expecting what I've found for two days: no news. But someone has changed "unknown" to "alive." I feel something shift inside. My heart ca-thunks. I am clinging to this, using every power of faith I can muster to believe it. Believe. Believe.

Memories of the Coast at Gulfport. [I went to junior college in Long Beach, just down the way, for two years.]

The beach where caskets lie like pill boxes now is the beach I walked on almost every day for two years. I remember the sounds of the surf, the smell at low tide, the lovely pale sunrises, the creamy sand, tranquil and silent. Girls in senior whites around a bonfire. My then best friend could watch the sea like no one else I've ever known. She seemed to meld with it, finding in it a consolation for wounds that no one else could know. I learned something about that in my two years there, about the need to find consolation.

My favorite teacher and I crossing 90, heading back to campus from a walk on the beach when a dog darted across in front of us. I knew it would be hit. It was. Afterward, I told her so, to which she said, “Did you will it to happen?” Outraged. It took a while to get her point. I hear its shreik.

The very first time I ever got drunk in my life was on that beach, the first week of my freshman year. A pack of Keesler AFB men had come to hunt us, bringing booze and inner tubes whose holes were covered with rubber on one side to serve as floating coolers. They had tied ropes to the tubes and floated them out into the seawater to chill the gin and Southern Comfort, vodka, bourbon, rum, and coke. And to keep it from prying eyes, I guess. Who knew not to drink in the hot sun? Who knew not to mix the liquors? Who knew how much to drink? Certainly, not I.

There are women alive now who may remember dunking me in ice-cold water in the tub until I was sober enough to take the carefully meted-out hazing that the upper class dispensed, especially at such times. After all, it was an act of idiocy that could have cost my parents the tuition and me my education.

Walking west on Hwy 90, along the upper embankment, my feet crunching acorns from the live oaks, my hands swatting at mosquitoes, past the little Catholic church on Sunday morning to Little Man's, the tiny cafe where we hid out to escape mandatory church attendance. We wore only what we had to wear to pass the check-out: heels, hose, underwear, and a trench coat. That’s it. Breakfast and coffee punctuated with frequent glances, fervent prayers that no housemothers would show up on this day.

The damp chill of a wintry Coast morning. A wet doggy smell, a low tide smell.

Fog.

Springtime. Gardenias and orange blossoms in the air.

The sound and feel of the sand on the pavement under my feet, in my dorm room, the feel of it in my swimsuit, my crotch, my ears. Ubiquitous.

Now I see coffins upended, freight cars on their sides right on the waterline. North of where the highway was, there’s nothing except more horror.

I sit wondering at the white men who are right this minute making decisions that will seal the fate of thousands of my countrymen and women, and, like every other American, I imagine, I’m wondering where I'll be when my fate depends on their wisdom and, dare I say it, compassion. I have a better sense now where I'll be. I hate them.

Governor Good Hair, will you house queer refugees in your astrodome?

I watch the white boys lie, and lie, and lie. I hear the black people screaming, crying. How much shame is enough to atone for this? Is there enough?

I just heard that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert thinks it's a waste of good money to rebuild the Big Easy. What does that mean?

What. Can. That. Possibly. Mean.

Remembering Katrina: Part II

Remembering Katrina: Part I, Part III

Nobody, including me, starts out thinking any President would block emergency aid to any desperate citizen for any reason. So until you’ve done your own homework, don’t call me paranoid if I’m now persuaded otherwise.

Both parties reek of partisan patronage, but flagrant partisan patronage when the people’s welfare is on the line is a new thing, a Bush/Cheney/Rove hallmark. Remember Cheney’s crony energy policy council? Oh, and, um, Brownie?

Several reports show that W’s Health and Human Services (HHS) and Homeland Security (DHS) departments are shoveling tax dollars to ideological pals and red states, absent justification. Others document W’s habit of burying inconvenient facts and refusing correction even when global warming, a mother’s health, the air we breathe, the seafood we eat, and our kids’ toys are at stake. Oh, and forget about pet food.

Each category, never mind all of them together, shows that this administration uses its power and our money to reward its friends and pursue its ideology no matter what happens to the people. This suffices as evidence for me. Given what I saw unfold the week following landfall, I did my own snooping.

You’ll remember that early in September 2005, leaks had already sprung about partisan games between Bush and Rove and Blanco and Nagin, about emergency declarations, timing, scope, and authorities.

Because I hadn’t seen any actual line-by-line comparisons of Blanco’s first two emergency statements and the resulting White House proclamation, I went looking.

(1) Despite Rove-orchestrated White House allegations about unconscionable delays, on August 26 at 5 pm, Blanco issued her first emergency declaration, covering the entire state of Louisiana until September 25, 2005. It triggered Louisiana’s entire emergency response and recovery program, put the state government on standby in case it would need to mobilize the National Guard, and launched state preparations for emergency support.

(2) On August 27, Blanco issued her “State of Emergency Letter to the President.” As I understand it, this is the document required to trigger a federal response. Please note: It stated, in part: “The affected areas are all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area and the mid-state Interstate I-49 corridor and northern parishes along the I-20 corridor that are accepting the thousands of citizens evacuating from the areas expecting to be flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina.”

(3) On August 27, Bush, vacationing in Crawford, TX, responded to Blanco’s request for a presidential “Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance” with a presidential proclamation that, please note, did not cover Orleans and the southeastern parishes, among others. It also clearly indicated that no further actions from Louisiana were required for FEMA to act promptly and comprehensively.

Is it not mystifying? Among the parishes that the presidential proclamation did not cover were Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Tammany, Terrebonne, St. Bernard, Lafouche, St. James, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, Tangipahoa, Assumption, Iberville, and St. Mary. These parishes are nearest to or on either the Gulf or Lake Ponchartrain.

So naturally, I compared these parishes against a map showing parish voting results for the 2004 presidential election. Overall, it shows that most of the state voted Republican, but only weakly—the greatest exception, of course, being New Orleans. Half a million persons lived there, of whom 67.3% were African American and 5.5% were other minorities. Some 27.9% lived below the 1999 poverty level. However:

Only one of the parishes that Bush excluded, St. Tammany, voted “strongly Republican,” while of all the parishes he included, only two were Democrat. Of the parishes he included, eleven voted “strongly” or “very strongly” Republican, and the remainder were moderately or weakly Republican. (Six others either voted 50/50 or were not ranked by CNN at all: Bienville, Madison, Tensas, St. Landry, Pointe Coupee, and Webster).


OK I’m neither a lawyer nor a politician. If I were, maybe I’d see an explanation sweet as puppy’s breath. As it is, I don’t.

I do see that, by itself, this doesn’t necessarily nail the White House for initially authorizing federal disaster support based solely on party affiliation. Also, we all know that later federal directives from HHS and others seemed to cover all the affected areas, whether because of global media coverage or a Divine tap on Bush’s cinder-like heart, I can’t say.

But I can’t think why the President didn’t of course include the most vulnerable part of the state, at the very least, if not the entire state. Was he so parsimonious with Florida? Or this year with Texas, Ohio, or Kansas? I doubt it. So I have to ask: If not partisan retribution, exactly what was going on in Crawford on August 27, 2005? Karl Rove?

For what it’s worth, I sent these findings to my US congressman, a Democrat, asking him to investigate. He never got back to me.

Even now, we don’t truly know what went on in the run-up to landfall and after; what the Administration knew and when; what it shared with state officials, and when, and under what conditions. Although we know that Bush whacked LA levee construction budgets prior to the 2005 hurricane season, too little has been said, clearly, publicly, about the Army Corps of Engineers’ responsibility for the failed levees, and about federal, state, and local budget priorities during the years over which they were constructed. Even less has been said about how the Fed’s response in MS, FL, and AL has differed from its response to LA. And although Truthout and Mother Jones are closing in on it, as yet we have no clue to whom our tax dollars have been allocated or how they’ve been utilized in all the strike zones.

I guess that’s understandable. After all, we’ve had Hurricanes Britney and Paris to cover, and Larry Craig got caught in the men’s room. High level . Big time.

As I said, nobody wants to believe this stuff, including me. Or to believe that FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers knew at 11 a.m. Monday, August 29, that the leeves were breaching, and even video’d the breach at the 17th Street Canal, but didn’t tell state emergency authorities. Or that the President would lie to us about FEMA’s expectations and preparations.

But many facts contradict the Liar-in-Chief’s “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” statement. Thirteen months before Katrina, FEMA itself conducted its Hurricane Pam emergency planning scenario, which projected pretty much exactly what happened in the “bowl.” Everybody anticipated a breach of the levees, including Mr. Bill, who made public education video about it 2004.

Today, I fear this stuff continues to happen, along with price gouging and the GOP’s new version of “revenue sharing” – all to the soothing sounds of Rush Limbaugh and the Freepers jeering, “Get a job, N-word.”

But there ain’t many jobs left in the miles of mud and rubble called Greater New Orleans, Waveland, and Gulfport. Besides, the contracts are being awarded to KBR and other out-of-state Republican-owned firms that, we’ve been told, prefer to hire and cheat illegal immigrants. What’s worse, with the prodding of Grover Norquist and others, the Bush administration has taken every opportunity to try to cheat the locals out of fair wages and regulatory safeguards.

Call it “compassionate conservatism.” “Privatization.” I call it the GOP.

If they can do this to the Gulf South, they can do this anywhere.

Hadn’t we better call for impeachment?

Remembering Katrina: Part I

Remembering Katrina, Part II, Part III

Ask most Americans what is wrong about the federal government’s response to Katrina and the answer will be brief: “Everything.” But to this administration, the answer is, “Nothing.”

Cynical? I don’t think so. Here’s why.

Much has been said about the administration’s stunning incompetence, about crony boys in grown-ups' jobs. But for these people, as W himself epitomizes, qualifications are irrelevant. For him, it’s not about capability or performance. It’s about sinecure. Such priorities are incompatible with genuine concern for the people's wellbeing.

Bush’s Gulf South response was and is scripted by the likes of Grover Norquist. It was and is a demonstration project meant to convince us that big government is inherently unreliable. Some even say that FEMA’s fantastic incompetence was intended to set us up for Bush’s government dismantling strategy, but I haven’t seen much dismantling.

In fact, just as Bush’s Department of Homeland Security is a mammoth, Rovean Republican patronage spigot, Bush’s response to Katrina is a demonstration project in “privatization,” a novel form of wealth redistribution in which your taxes and assets end up in the portfolios of the top 5 percent of America’s richest families.

But wait; there’s more.

In Politics and Vision (expanded edition), Professor Sheldon Wolin said of Nazi totalitarianism that it

represented the precise inversion of the modern conception of revolution. Like Nietzsche it identified with the strong and aimed at the weak—Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, social democrats, communists, trade unionists, the sick, deformed, and mentally ill. (xix)

It seems to me that everything about the administration’s response during those excruciating hours between August 29 and (roughly) September 6, 2005, showcased precisely that: a thoroughly Nietzchean “revolution in reverse.”

Person to person, the President and his Cabinet appalled the world with their indifference. Cheney went fly fishing. Bush and McCain ate birthday cake and W played his air guitar. Rice went Ferragamo hunting. That night, she took in Spamalot, and the next day she played tennis with Monica Seles.

For calculating political pros -- remember, Katrina was before the crucial 2006 elections -- such actions are strategically inconceivable. That's why I conclude that they were meant to signify a new theory of the role of government, the "Stuff Happens" theory.

The strong (the President, his Cabinet, and his patronage chieftains), I believe, are operating the federal response to Katrina exactly as they are operating the Iraq war--from within an ideological framework that tacitly sanctions just what we saw take place. Anyone who thinks this is mere incompetence had better sit down and take a deep breath. This is purposeful. This is looting, officially sanctioned.

The President and his minions know that for that top 5% to get maximum bang for their contribution bucks, as many as possible of the weak must perish and/or be relieved of their real property assets. And that is exactly what happened and what continues to happen even as we speak.

In these case studies, Iraq and the Gulf South, the weak are oil-rich countries abroad unable to withstand an American occupation. At home, they may have the misfortune to be sitting on some prime real estate, or they may simply be people this administration views as drags on the economy, people who can testify to the vapidity of an “Ownership Society.”

That would be folks who are working three jobs but permanently poor, the frail elderly, the single moms, the diabetic, the overweight, the gay, the mentally ill. Most but not all were African Americans, and most whose assets were literally washed away were also Democrats. In Bush’s eyes, that’s a three-fer.

Almost immediately the ideological cover for what I believe to be deliberate federal inaction played out across our televisions. Any “lootin’, shootin’, burnin', and carryin’ on” was magnified out of all semblance to reality, we found out. We know now that most of the looters were looting from dire desperation (and we know that in their place, we’d do the same thing). We know now that the city wasn’t crawling with armed killers after all. We know there was a handful of thieves and armed thugs—all in all, pretty remarkable for a city in extremis, full of frantic, starving, dehydrated, dying, and despairing people.

We later found out that, in truth, there was no baby raping, and we are asked to believe that a few shots kept federal relief at bay, even though they didn’t intimidate news media from around the globe, or the US Coast Guard, or the “Cajun Navy,” that brave flotilla of local lifesavers and out-of-town volunteers.

We learned what Lt. General Russel Honoré already knew: Those people weren’t dangerous. They’re our neighbors: “Put those goddamn weapons down.”

But if we learned later that 80% of the Ninth Ward are home owners, the meme pumped out from dawn to dark was that those gang-bangers and welfare queens deserve exactly what they get. The meme gave the Bushies a little cover because it functioned as intended: to align observers for a while with the President’s perspective. Most folks bought in.

All of this, in my view, is wholly consistent with intent, as are the two events that marked the finale, at least from the administration's vantage.

As a horrified world and a shamed, grief-stricken America watched corpses waiting on main street sidewalks and bloating in mile after mile of disgusting brown sewage, as we watched little African American kids being separated from their families and sent willy-nilly, hither and yon, without escort or explanation or even a tracking system, Bush’s mother shared with us the Administration’s official spin:

What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they want to stay in Texas. . . . So many of the people in the arenas here were underprivileged anyway, this is working out well for them.

And just as soon as W’s last syllable bounced off a garishly blue-lit Cathedral, the feds shut down his little son et lumière and pulled the plugs again on New Orleans.

Remembering Katrina, Part II

2nd Unhappy Anniversary

Hurricane Katrina wiped out the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and was the straw that broke the shabby levees that wiped out New Orleans two years ago today. Both the Coast and the Crescent City remain in shambles. More later as we remember the people and places of the Gulf South, and consider the implications of these past two years for America and Americans.

They Knew This, Too

Greg Palast reports yesterday that the White House and FEMA knew at 11 a.m. on Monday that the levees were going to breech, and that at 2 p.m., FEMA helicopters flew over the 17th Street Canal and took videos of the breech. But the White House, FEMA, and the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t alert state authorities responsible for emergency preparations.

Palasts’s source for this stomach-churner is unimpeachable: Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on the hurricane's progress and expected effects.

The reason the White House sat on its information, Palast explains, is

Political and financial cost. A hurricane is an act of God - but a catastrophic failure of the levees is a act of Bush. That is, under law dating back to 1935, a breech of the federal levee system makes the damage - and the deaths - a federal responsibility.

This leaves unanswered why not alerting state and local authorities would mitigate, much less invalidate, federal responsibility. If the levees failed, the levees failed. And the levees failed. As Palast reminds us, Katrina didn’t strike the Crescent City. It struck east of the city. It wasn’t Katrina. It was the failure of Army Corps of Engineers' levees, and that's important to keep repeating.

The White House/FEMA/Corps failure to tell state and city officials about cracks in the levee at 2 p.m. Monday led inexorably to 1,500 deaths that might well have been saved otherwise. It also adds to a mountain of incomprehensible failures of this Administration, failures any one of which would warrant impeachment.

But what better way to shrink the rolls of Democrat voters? Delay, incompetence, and malice aforethought. That’s our W.

More on the Bush/Katrina inundation forthcoming.

American Travesty

I got a message this morning from a dear friend of 40-something years, a minister and educator in Gulfport, MS. A life-long resident there, she stayed through Katrina to shelter 18 people in her home. Ever since, she's been up to her eyebrows sheltering, clothing, feeding, and caring for her community. Here's what she has to say about the Mississippi Gulf Coast today, August 22, 2007:

The coast is still a mess, and I do mean a mess. Garbage and debris still line most streets; too many houses still have blue tarps for roofs; building materials are so expensive here (moreso by far than in towns 50 miles away); contractors are starting jobs and not finishing because they underbid, not expecting suppliers to raise costs willynilly; non-decisions by government officials re: permit fees, height regs, etc. Most of my friends who lost everything are not rebuilding because insurance costs are prohibitive. One family has a quote to rebuild their smallish size house south of the railroad track that they can handle. But the insurance is $40,000 a year! Can you believe it???