Three Strikes, You're Out Mr. Bush
Sept 5, 2005, updated March 5, 2005
"We finally cleaned up public housing in New
Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Louisiana
Republican Congressman Richard Baker speaking publicly about the effects
of huricane Katrina
Very
quickly the hideous story of New Orleans is becoming a deluge of
anti-Bush criticism.
Yet, I see another story/storm brewing just over the horizon.
This one isn’t just about the disconnected, arrogant SOB’s in
the White House and FEMA.
Pseudodemocrats since Clinton have been falling over themselves to
support this nonsense too. This story is a tale of the failures of privatization and the
handover of public sector functions to “faith-based organizations.”
That's why I'm locating this Hurricane Katrina article in the Religion
& Ethics section of my site.
Right
wing ideologues like Grover Norquist and his anti-tax, anti-gov'ment
zombie minions have been telling us for years that the government
can’t do anything right. I guess that we're supposed to ignore
the realities of capitalism, especially under stressful
circumstances. Don't think about the oil companies' windfall
profits. Don't think about price gouging. Let's think
about the alleged failures of government. Don't think about your
grandma's social security check. Don't think about the federal
Interstate Highway System. Think instead about all those
inefficiencies of governments--not such cases as what Halliburton is
doing right now with your tax dollars. Never mind the deregulated
airline industry that is bankrupting itself by undercharging to beat the
competition and then taking tax dollar funded bailouts. Instead, think about all
those horrendous failures of federal government programs and
regulations. You get the point, right? They get away with
this nonsense in spite of the fact that the only evidence they have is
the deregulation of telecommunications leading to the beloved locker
room cell phone camera. That's why they can't stand the anarchic
internet, which exists without any one entity profiting from the network
itself. Little wonder Linux makes them so nervous. They
aren't really for privatization, but rather parasitization and
hierarchy. For a more thorough look at these facts about the right
wing ideas, click here.
So
how do the right wingers, especially since Reagan, convince so many
former union-protected employees that market-based solutions are the
only ones that work, while simultaneously driving down wages and busting
unions? One of their favorite strategies for
doing this is to put the “fox in the henhouse.”
In other words, fill all the leadership positions within these
“undesirable” institutions with people who are utterly incompetent
(such as "Brownie", the horse judge who was fired, and now
directs FEMA) or who will help gut those organizations and sell the
carcass to the lowest bidders (such as Michael Powell and the FCC), or
better yet, to the favored sectarian fanatics (like Pat Robertson).
This not only streamlines the process of privatization (i.e.
cutting up and selling off the public sector jobs), but it also gives us
lots of examples of how incompetent the government is, thus further
fueling the vicious circle of republican pseudo-logic.
Their
mantra sounds quite pathetic and absurd now, don't you think? They
tell us that this is the fault of our "idolatrous" reliance on
government rather than private corporations and Protestant relief
organizations. But, this is a huge lie because disaster relief has
already been privatized, and the unilateral executive mandate for
faith-based initiatives has been quietly sucking up much of the rest of
the available money for such things.
FEMA is helping fund the Evangelical Protestant Pat Roberston,
and has been explicitly ignoring older, more substantial groups like Catholic
Charities. Expect to see
Halliburton muscling up to the trough as well. The Great Flood
of New Orleans is the result of a lack of incentive for rescuing poor,
Black, Catholic, Democratic voters in a French city.
The largely Protestant army of Bush's Faith Based Soldiers thought that
all the Republicans got out of town, and the rest were probably just the
condemned riff-raff of that town where George W. Bush reminded us that
he used to party too much. Walmart knows that the poor who survive
will eventually come to buy budget furniture made by slave labor in Asia
as soon as they settle in new low-income housing. Walmart will
want to make sure they live, so they brought water. But what will incentivize
Halliburton? They don't own shopping malls. They only
benefit from fixing what's broken. As we have already seen, the
rescue of a large city's population is not easy, especially
if they're poor and angry.
Whether true or not, it is inevitable that a number
of African Americans will interpret the horrors of the Superdome as the
21st Century version of a concentration camp. Ethnic
cleansing at worst, or new age Jim Crow at best. Nobody needs me to suggest that idea. It's
already seething out there. (In October 2005
Bush's popularity among African Americans dropped to a record 2%, and
rumors of an intentional breaking of the levies so as to drive out the
remaining, poor blacks.) However, it seems that the evidence
isn't backing up a lot of the apocryphal stories that came out of the
Super Dome or the Convention Center, nor many of the other
disturbing rumors that the media relayed to us without checking facts. I'm not really talking about that
anyway. I'm pointing to the sheer lunacy of expecting that
profit-motivated companies like Halliburton will rush into a dangerous
location to save a lot of people who can't afford to vote Republican. Or
perhaps more bizarre, expecting a mentally deranged, sectarian
megalomaniac like Pat Robertson to work just as hard to save a French
Catholic party town like the Big Easy, or the dramatically Muslim
Dearborn, Michigan as he would to save Tampa, Florida or Savannah,
Georgia or Kennebunkport Maine. You couldn't ask for a better
argument against federal outsourcing of disaster relief, or even
charitable works of any kind. It's a really bad idea to set this
situation up at all. Market-based solutions for dealing with
disasters will assure that wealthy Republicans get priority treatment
while poor minorities will be treated like Jews were in Nazi
Poland. It's that simple. Let the market decide, and
you'll be assured a racist, classist and sectarian result.
Apparently, leaving God to take care
of sinners isn't very effective either. For example, the most
decadent, homosexual area of the city of New Orleans, the French
Quarter, was among the least affected by the disaster, though
several Jesus Bullies told us that God was punishing them for their
lib'ral sins. This fails to explain the even more devastating
havoc Katrina caused in the predominantly Republican St. Bernard Parish,
(66% Bush, 33% Kerry with about 40,000 voters, as opposed to Orleans
Parish 78% Kerry and almost 200,000 voters). Perhaps karma
explains the media, and the public's choice, to focus their
attention on the race and class issues evoked by New Orleans rather than
the conservative swamp and beach front suburbanites just East and South
of New Orleans. Right wingers can attempt to blame this disparity
in the media on a liberal media, but the truth is that it is absolute
proof of a liberal population in spite of the "conservative"
propaganda catapulted by the Bush Administration.
The
CATO Institute, a conservative think tank without interest in the absurd
Jesus Bully discourse of the radical clerics in Bush's Taliban, is
blaming Katrina on a big government spread too thin. [Federal
Failure in New Orleans, A
Government Spread Too Thin, Storms
of Stupidity ] There is some
truth to that. They have some points wrong, and it's easy to
understand why--they represent the people who stand to benefit from
government contracts. Yes, Bush is a dictatorial, repressive and
violent, big spending nationalist-socialist in the tradition of
Mussolini and Stalin. Most of the CATO staff would agree with me
on that. What they won't admit is that Bush's big government is
little more than a tapeworm that feeds private corporations.
Instead of doing the work with government, secularized, trained and
non-partisan employees, they are relying on private contractors, most of
whom you may have noticed listen to Limbaugh and vote Republican.
Get my drift? They are creating a system that favors members of a
single party, and also creating a single party system, just like Lenin,
Stalin or even Saddam Hussein.
Liberals
must focus on getting people to see the truth.
When the cheap labor conservatives and the anti-government
whackos tell you that “This is what happens when you rely on the
government.” We must respond with the truth: “No, this is what
happens when you allow profit motivated private corporations decide
whether or not to rescue extremely poor people.
This is what happens when you let a radical protestant cleric
decide how he will go about using your tax dollars to rescue
black, Catholic Democrats in a Southern city that is…oh, the
horror!...French!! This is
what happens when you let a “market-based solution” to exert
life-or-death power over the weak, the poor and the infirm.
This is the end result of Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of
America.” If we play this
the right way, we could not only get rid of that lousy excuse for a
president, but we just might get up enough public outrage to force these
bought-and-paid-for politicians to reset a lot of this privatization
stupidity. Don't forget that the
Bushies vehemently resisted the creation of a government run office of
Transportation Safety Administration to secure airplanes. Bush and
his anti-government, anti-union Evangelicals had to be drug kicking and
screaming into this. I suppose that McDonald's employees would
do the work for $1.00 more per hour. Get the picture? These
people didn't even want to spend the right kind of money to get the
right kind of airplane security.
But, enough beating that river-bloated sacred cow of Republican
dogma. Let's tear into the Bushies. Finally, the wisdom of that good old
"law-and-order-conservative" mantra may have dawned on
America. Mr. Bush now has three major strikes against him. What
are his three strikes? Well, for those who might wonder how they
could be reduced to only three, let me clarify that I am abstracting the
panoply of errors into three major groups which have cost thousands of
lives and dollars, and will probably ultimately undermine the economy of
our nation for generations. Environmental policies are
probably even more destructive in the long term, but the Bush
Inquisition has brought us back to 1600 again with that old debate
between faith and science. Global Warming is as false as the
heliocentric universe, but we are required to deny it lest the corporate
right wing condemn us to the rack. So, I'm limiting his errors to
the three really obvious and immediately deadly ones.
Error #1) Lack of preparedness for the attacks of 9-11, underscored
by the various failures outlined in the 9-11 Report.
Error #2) Starting a war on false pretenses, and then managing that
war very badly--including, but not limited to, failure to start the
draft again.
Error #3) Completely botching hurricane Katrina. Perhaps most embarrassing
is the simple fact that conservative policy decisions have created a
scenario that directly contradicts the theories of the Federalist
Society and the Christian Taliban.
(namely, that we shouldn't rely on government to save us, but rather
that we should rely on churches and private corporations.)
In the first two cases, the conservative puppets in the American
media have pretty successfully diverted attention away by blaming 9-11
on Clinton (a favorite logical fallacy of the right wing), and shifting
the purpose of the Iraq War to "democratization" (which has
not been going to well either.) These three strikes are pretty
much echoed by conservative columnist David Brooks of the NYT, who
said:
The first rule of the social fabric - that in times
of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor
in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the
battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.
And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural
moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a
string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have
cumulatively changed the nation's psyche. From
the New York Times column "The Bursting Point"
Keith Olbermann
states the obvious rather eloquently here:
…nationally, these
are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their
opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised
protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
Then, just in case anybody found it hard to draw a connection
between a breached levy and a terrorist blowing up a levy, he said,
with no small irony:
[The Bush administration] has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological
weapon called standing water.
It was plenty clear to anyone, even a partisan or conservative ideologue
that the main difference between the hurricane causing the Great Flood
of New Orleans, or a broken levy caused by a small, conventional
terrorist bomb is that the hurricane happens with more than a week of
warning. Imagine what New Orleans would like today if Al Qaeda had
blown up a levy back on August 28th when Dubyah was still on
vacation. We'd be looking at multiple hundreds of thousands dead,
and more contamination. It didn't happen, no. But the
whole point of disaster preparedness is to be prepared,
right? Instead of building new and bigger levies in New Orleans,
Alaska got some new bridges that will connect Middleofnowhere to South
Nowheresville. Sure, the money would have been too late, but the
point is that they showed a hint of awareness that this might be a
problem. It's super-evident that New Orleans died of
neglect. Republicans ought to ask themselves why it would be that
New Orleans, a widely known risk to our energy supply, and a huge number
of people who could be wiped out by "standing water" in a
matter of minutes did not rank high enough on the list of priorities in
comparison to those of Alaska.
Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, bragged to his
constituents that the transportation bill (which Young loves so much
he named
it after his wife) was "stuffed like a turkey" with
handouts for his state, and he was not exaggerating. The $721 million
in tundra spending includes:
a $2
23 million "bridge
to "nowhere,"
connecting the 8,900-person town of Ketchikan to an airport on Gravina
Island, whose population is 50; a $200 million bridge connecting
Anchorage to a rural port so insignificant even the Anchorage Chamber
of Commerce tried to block the project; and $15 million in seed money
for a 68-mile, $284 million access road to Juneau. (This last one is
opposed by not only the Environmental Protection Agency but a majority
of the area's residents.) [Tim Cavanaugh of Reason]
Explain to me how this project merited anything more than a snicker
from any self-respecting fiscal conservative who whines about pigs at
the government trough. The answer is so simple, really. Our media has been a key player and tool in Bush's Corporate
Dictatorship of America. All along, we have seen snakelike talking
heads like Tim Russert slithering their cold tongues into the bungholes
of the Bush administration. Fortunately, media sources outside
this country, even in England, our ally, have done a great job
dismantling the hogwash. [this
excellent BBC article outlines the ramifications for us.] Outside of
this country, it's common knowledge and accepted fact that our media has
been completely controlled by Bush.
The CIA leak story wasn't one of the 3 strikes I count, but I believe
that it was the key precipitating factor which inspired the media to rebel,
and thus create "Katrinagate." The signs of Bush's
impending doom are palpable. Already we are seeing the heavily
insulated pseudo-president have to respond to real and damning
questions--something from which they had protected him for five
years. Maybe I'm just dreaming, but I detect that they smell blood
in the water. It would appear that the media is in open revolt. Even
if Russert is still pretending that people are over-reacting to the mess,
it is evident that Mr. Bush is in trouble and may face some of the
harshest criticism and reality of his entire, pathetic life.
In my opinion, the strangest and most damaging remarks are coming from
Bush himself--and his mother.
An
interesting metamedia article from 1010 Wins anthologizes, with minimal
irony and commentary some of the strange remarks emanating from the
administration, like this little tidbit:
Bush had raised eyebrows on his first trip by, among
other things, picking Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. - instead of the
thousands of mostly poor and black storm victims - as an example of
loss. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his
entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking
forward to sitting on the porch," Bush said with a laugh from an
airplane hangar in Mobile, Ala.
And this from the president's mother:
"What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is
they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the
hospitality.
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were
underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is
working very well for them."
Remember in the movie Farenheit 9/11 when
Bush sat with his thumbs up his arse at the grade school as
planes crashed into the World Trade Center?
Would you believe that he set himself up even better for the next
Michael Moore extravaganza? Check
out what Mr. Bush was up to on the day he finally decided to pay
attention to the hurricane.
I mean, can you get any more creepy than that? Could Jon
Stewart or The
Onion even make things up that were this strange and
thoughtless? Michael Moore, Jon Stewart and the Onion must be
eternally grateful to George W. Bush for keeping them in business with
this surreal and sinister tragicomedia.
From my left-tilted perspective, the best aspect of this horrid
scenario is the clear and distinct evidence that, in
spite of right wing Jesus-Bully rhetoric against reliance on government,
we see now that the alternative is watching on CNN and FOX as the Gulf
Coast is transformed into (or revealed as) a third world country.
Of course, I'm still hearing some of these angry morons frothing on AM
talk radio from those who are still living in a fantasy world where Pat Robertson's
Operation Blessing would come down from the skies on angels' wings and
rescue them. Those angels never showed up and radical cleric Pat
Robertson is quickly becoming a liability. Although lots of "gov'ment
hating" Christians are screaming "That's what happens when you
rely on the government!", I'm guessing this will backfire on
them. A whole lot of Americans are extremely pissed off, and I'm
thinking that they won't like to hear that Bush's radical cleric buddy
is getting federal money to do the job of the secular FEMA. "Religious
outsourcing" has a deeply disturbing ring to it after Katrina,
don't you think?
As this metaphorical hurricane wreaks havoc in the White House, I
have no doubt that the pissed off media will tell the American public how Bush
has been piping disaster relief money from FEMA into the coffers of
radical Christian Taliban cleric Pat Robertson. Naturally,
FEMA has removed the offensive link on the web site, but Google still
carries the traces of that connection. If you want to donate money
to the victims of Katrina, I suggest that you avoid sending money to the
Red Cross, which is controlled by the government, which we have now seen
is actively and criminally negligent. FEMA, thanks to loopholes
created by Bush's "Faith Based Hornswoggle" is piping money
right into Pat Robertson's relief organization so they can send
protestant Bibles and propaganda to the Catholics of New Orleans.
Governor Blanco has rejected the leadership of the Federal Government
via FEMA, opting instead to hire Bill Clinton's former FEMA head and
creating a private charity to make it all work. Send
your money to that instead, and help them make the Bush administration
look even worse.
Whether or not Bush "dodges the bullet" of Katrina, the key point that liberals must never let go of on this is the
observation that private and religious institutions are not capable of
handling such a crisis, even if they really did have the hand of God
behind them (which I seriously doubt anyway.) A few whackos might
not give a damn about the plight of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but
I predict that in the upcoming elections we will see this
anti-government rhetoric transformed from Bush's dismantling of
government social programs and institutions to the dismantling of the
Bush political/media machine. The possible political motives
do not look good either. Consider, for example, the implications
of replacing the secular/public FEMA with sectarian fanatics like the
radical protestant clerics. Do you suppose that they would respond
to a disaster fairly if it happened in a predominantly Democratic and/or
Catholic city, like, say... New Orleans? I guess that's what
you get when you rely on privatized and faith-based disaster relief,
huh? Take note that the privatization and sectarian religious
takeover of public institutions is already well underway.
Also, we must all take another, much closer look at the realities and
possibilities of homeland security--both as a goal and as a government
program. How much money do we need to spend to be safe, especially
if we want to maintain a substantial military presence in Iraq and
Afghanistan? Can we ever hope to create enough security, or should
we be looking at other, more creative ways to make America safer, like
perhaps dumping John Bolton and trying to make some friends at the U.N.
again? It's time we started ignoring the harpies on the right who
cackle and shriek about diplomacy as "appeasement."
Something tells me that Bush is in for some pretty uncomfortable
questions coming from his once docile lapdogs. Will this lead to
impeachment? Who the hell knows? I really can't explain how
Bush even survived his first full year in office back in 2001.
Bush may be incompetent and he may be an irritating slack-jawed dimwit,
but he has managed to survive it all, rather like Castro or Saddam
Hussein... [Jon Stewart's parody--the
government and FEMA have turned all their energy toward rescuing the
beleaguered president.]
What will be the outcomes of Katrina in New Orleans? This is
the question that most disturbs me. New Orleans is one of the few
cities south of the Mason Dixon line, along with Austin, TX, which I
could possibly find livable. They are full of a diverse mixture of
people, and both cities are very musical, artistic places. From a more
pragmatic perspective, they are Democratic strongholds in the red state
territory. Kerry
took Orleans county 78% to 22%. In fact, in most of the cities in
Louisiana, Kerry made showings well above 40%. Yes, Kerry won in Austin, TX
too 56% to 42%. Austin is where Governor Bush had his last big
job, remember? Oh, and for the sake of comparison, the three
coastal counties of Mississippi voted 87,418 for Bush and 43,755 for
Kerry (67% to 33%). Notice how little we have heard about FEMA
problems in Mississippi.
The displacement of large numbers of poor African
Americans will have powerful effects on everyone. I wonder how
many Democratic voters will never come back to vote against Trent
Lott? I wonder how many underperforming students will never have
to be counted again on the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama No Child Left Behind
spreadsheets? I
wonder how many dollars in welfare money will be saved? I wonder
how many poor, black musicians will never again enliven the streets of
New Orleans for
Republican tourists? I wonder how many hypocritical right
wingers will accuse liberals of being glad that hurricane Katrina is
sinking George Bush in a rising tide of dissent and gale force winds of
criticism?
I'll close my rant here with another quote from Keith Olbermann, who
is quoting the conservatives' favorite, Winston Churchill:
"The
responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British
Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no
mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into
existence."
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage
itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on
whoever is in the White House.
For that, may these scumbags rot in
the very Hell that they have invented. And we are left to pay the
bill for a crazy plan that would never have worked anyway.
Follow-up links to more disgusting news about this disaster:
Hurricane Reality vs.
Right-Wing Ideology: Excellent article on the failure of
privatization and the threats of nervous conservatives who sense their
house of cards is about to fall.
Rita's
Victims vs. Katrina's--in simplest terms, Rita crashed into a
comparatively wealthy, low population density area with cars, whereas
Katrina hit a poor, densely populated area of Democratic voters.
Interestingly, Jefferson
County voted 51 to 49% for Kerry and it is 34% Black (New Orleans
was 67% Black), and it was right on the front line. Rita then
plowed through rural Republican areas. A bit more sheltered
was the adjacent Orange County, which voted 64 to 36% for
Bush. Just in case you were hoping that everyone will see
how much better the response was this time...
Breakdowns
Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy (NYT article) Nice
synopsis of the screwups, though the article avoids blaming any one
party for the errors.
Swimming to New
Orleans, a journalist goes into New Orleans during the disaster and
encounters sights and stories that seem unbelievable. The current trend
in post-hurricane propaganda is that the horror stories we heard were
false. It does appear that much of it was, and those rumors figure
into this story. However, Nick Glassman of Pacific News Service
does tell a story that seems plausible enough, and it is a good prose
work for describing the experience of going straight into the disaster
area--the terror of rumors spreading through a watery hell.
Exaggerations
and Lies about the violent acts committed by the victims of Katrina.
Of course, it's no surprise to me to discover that Michael Brown and
those who were working hard to shift the work of FEMA over to radical
cleric Pat Robertson were telling us lies about what the trapped victims
in New Orleans were doing. They need a reason why they couldn't go
in and prevent more suffering. This article is extensive, and goes
over just about all the stories you've heard.
July
2004 National Geographic article predicts with amazing accuracy the
Great Flood of New Orleans.
Video
of Jefferson Parish President Broussard's impassioned pleas.
This video is powerful stuff that will haunt the Bushies for decades, I
think, especially since this beach front and suburban bayou real estate
is populated with loyal Republicans.
Pumping
the water out of New Orleans is the easy part. What about the
motor oil, gasoline, battery acid, raw sewage, rotting flesh... ?
How much will it cost to clean that mess out of the environment?
By the way, where did New Orleans get its drinking water
anyway? Naturally, six months later, the media is telling us
that all these scenarios were false or exaggerated.
Barbara
Bush: Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans
Why
are refugees being held at gunpoint behind barbed wire in Utah?
Do we have an American insurgency?
Three
Duke University students drove all the way to that Civic Center in a
2-wheel drive Hyundai on Saturday!
Scott
McClellan's Sept 6, 2005 Press Conference--his opening speech is
pure drivel, but if you scroll down to the Q&A, you'll see the
growing tide of seething anger from the media. No more softball
questions for these scumbags! This is right off the White House's
own web site, folks. Read it and weep GOP faithful.
Disneyland is now closed. Welcome to reality.
Pew
Research Poll reveals that 2/3 of African Americans believe that the
people of New Orleans would have been saved if they had been white,
whereas 70% of white crackers didn't believe the government is so
racist. Fancy that. Oh well, I can't imagine that Bush will
be making any trips to New Orleans to meet with victims unless they come
from the 12% of the population there that voted for him.
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