Trashed

On George W. Bush's watch, we've seen the trashing of the US budget, the city of New Orleans, the US investment banking industry, the US mortgage industry, the US global reputation, the nation of Iraq, and now the Big Three US automakers.

Bad as this sounds, it utterly obscures the savage and ongoing pain that Bush and the Republicans have delivered to average Americans and Iraqis. Pain is too small a word for lives rubbed out and homes and farms lost and lifetime savings wasted by fraud, for a severely trashed job market, for a flood of lost businesses, for homes wrecked and families separated by financial disaster. I don't know that Americans younger than 80-something have any real frame of reference for what has been unleashed on this country.

A handful of men and women, propelled into office by election fraud and a corrupt Supreme Court, have done graver and in some ways more enduring damage and brought more anguish to American families than anything since the other gigantic Republican-induced disaster, the Great Depression.

I'm not trying to state the obvious. It's just that it occurs to me that most of us take a mechanistic view of these developments. We've been told so often that the causes are incomprehensible, complex, remote and technical that we retreat into a kind of dull stupor to numb the anguish.

But the causes aren't remote and incomprehensible. They're all too easy to see. Each of these catastrophes was brought about by an intentional White House policy. All were driven by some combination of greed, dishonesty, flawed ideology, arrogance, and recklessness. These -- even ideology -- are schoolyard sins, only in this case writ infinitely larger. I mean, they're not at all incomprehensible. Everyone knows what they are and what they accomplish.

But I suppose that if go there, we also have to look at ourselves, at our own role in enabling these cataclysms. Apathy, paralysis, support for that flawed ideology, endorsement of those fraudulent officials. That's asking the walking wounded to pile on more pain. Not likely, and probably at this moment not wise either.

But at some point, we have to take at least enough responsibility to explain to our children why this happened, honestly and clearly enough for them to avoid our mistakes.

It's a heck of a record, isn't it? A heck of a job.

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.

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.