marx and pavlov

The Bush culture has made it pretty clear that Marxist class analysis must be supplemented with Pavlovian psychology. The governing class in this country salivates to the bell that opens the NYSE every morning – and that is their only physiological/moral response to any public event, the cue that creates their entire world. The world of the dog in the cage is intentionally narrowed by the scientist. The world of the rich has also been narrowed, by self-choice, during the last twenty five or so years. Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy, in retrospect, signaled not just a change in a particular phase of American history (the return of a particular set of oligarchs), but looks, now, like a monument to the end of the civic sense among the oligarchs tout court. Among the governing class, the civic sense, with its complications of ritual, its sacrifices, its seriousness, its orientation to an imagined social collective, has been pretty much taken down, like an old and drafty building. In its place is a new, sleeker building – one composed of a degree of inhumanity and cultural blindness that is very difficult to reckon with if one is operating with the old tools of analysis, the old sense of some shared value system, the old responsive angers that once powered the Left, dependent as they were on a dialectical relationship with the builders of the post-war order. Dependent, that is, on a system of recognitions, however skewed.

This decade has given us the full flavor of the new order. The manysplendored disasters of Iraq and now New Orleans produce a schizoid split in assessment – for where, on the level of the cornered class, one sees failure and misery, on the level of the contracting class, one sees endless opportunity. The Bell rings, and out come the Pavlovian rich, salivating to beat the band, lining their pockets with the sweetest little contracts to come down the pike since God signed that no-bidder with Adam and said let her rip. And Adam didn’t get cost overruns. Halliburton, of course, does.

So it is no surprise that the money now pouring out of Washington (and there goes that little decline in the deficit the Bushies were so proud of – who knew that unexpected things could impact a budget?) is going to be spent largely to enrich the circle of the Bush culture’s favored companies.

This WP article about Bush’s campaign manager and ex head of FEMA, Joe Allbaugh, has been much circulated in the blogosphere. Still, there are touches of marvelous obscenity in the article. Our favorite of all is distilled in these two grafs:

Among those clients [which Allbaugh’s consulting company represents] are: the KBR division of Haliburton; TruePosition, a manufacturer of wireless location products, services and devices; the Shaw Group, a provider of engineering, design, construction, and maintenance services to government and the private sector; and UltraStrip, which is marketing the first water filtration system approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The firm's Web site quotes Allbaugh: "I carry pictures of close friends who died in the September 11th terrorist attacks as a constant reminder of what we lost that day. It's my personal commitment to always honor their memory by working to protect this nation. I'm dedicated to helping private industry meet the homeland security challenge."

A man who will pimp his dead friends is certainly a man to trust in trying times. I would bet that the upper management of the companies on the client list are going to have great Christmas parties this year. At LI, we wish them the best of luck and hope that all the delicacies they devour at those end of the year parties taste of human blood, mixed with a little toxic Mississippi river water.

That debbil GOP

Scratchings linked to our post about Lieberman the other day. I was interested to read one of his commentators accuse me of being a Republican.

I have been accused of many things, but this is a new one for me. Yet, in one way, it is a very just accusation. Lately, from my point of view (that of an extinct beast, much like the mastodon), I have been trying to sort out the relationship between the sense that this decade has seen the great American failure and the sense that the two party system here is broken. That sorting out begins with the premise that the parties are secondary to the real political life of the Republic. This premise is a hypothesis – I’m not going to defend it as the ultimate truth of the matter, but I think there’s a strong case to be made for constructing an analysis from it.

That analysis would trespass on the current verities of political analysis on my side, the liberal side. Given my premise, the question I want to put is: why did liberalism become so attached to one of the parties? I think there are good reasons for thinking that that attachment was devoutly wished by academic political scientists in the fifties and sixties, who felt that American political parties weren’t following the more rational European pattern – a pattern that sorted out the conservatives into a Conservative party, the Socialists into a Socialist party, etc. Rather, the American pattern was rather a jigsaw puzzle, in which populists would pop up as Republicans and segregationists would pop up as Democrats, etc. The rationalization of politics, according to the school prevailing in the fifties and sixties, would create parties as monopolists of ideologies.

This idea so sank into the framework of official political discourse that it is now presupposed. So when, for instance, a “radical” analysis of politics appears – for instance, Thomas Franks “what’s the matter with Kansas” – the problem goes something like: why don’t Kansans vote for their economic self interest, i.e. Democrats?

Myself, I think the process of this rationalization has been a disaster. The real question, to me, is: why have Kansas Republicans deviated from the old Progressive Republican norm? I think the answer is: the monopolization of ideologies by the parties has destroyed the machinery that made progressive politics possible in this country.

Take, for instance, Texas, where I live at the moment. The next Senatorial election here is going to be utterly predictable. The Republican candidate will be a rightwinger from hell. The liberal element in the state will concentrate exclusively on finding a Democrat of acceptable views to lose to him or her. The liberal element will devote an incredible amount of creativity and passion in a project that, intellectually, they know is doomed to failure. The Democrat they pick will, in the campaign, veer farther to the right than any New York State Republican. And that will be that.

Lefties will proceed to bitch and moan about the rightwing Dem, and propose that we all rush into the Green party. The right, which will have no competition whatsoever within the Republican party, will use its leverage to make its reactionary candidate even more reactionary – while at the same time guaranteeing that the freerider politics of borrowing and siphoning money disproportionately from the Federal government to Red states continues. This money will, in truth, be less than the money siphoned from the primary products extracted in the Red states which profit the investors living in New York City and the surrounding wealthy states.

Now, a fair question for a liberal to ask is: what is the weak link in this chain? To me, the obvious answer is: continuing to support the Democratic party unilaterally. By refusing to contact the Republican party, liberalism loses any of the leverage it used to have. Period. Instead of searching for Republican Yarboroughs, the liberal element will continue to stick with promoting losers at the statewide level. Instead of seeing that the Republican base is avid to exploit the government, as rational economic agents, the liberals will continue to affirm that the Republicans stand for small government – under the cover of which delusion Republicans will continue to maintain an expanded government. The reality is that this is a non-issue – in the Keynesian world system, the GDP taken up by a modern industrial state will probably range about the same percentage, regardless of the party in power. The last thirty years should have taught us that much, at least.

I had an Edward till a Michael Brown killed him

Tell o'er your woes again by viewing mine:
I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard kill'd him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him;
-- Richard III

In a previous post, the Counted and the Uncounted, LI wrote:

"One expects that the clearance of the Convention Center, since it is administered by thieves and murderers, will probably encompass hiding a number of corpses. This is evidence, after all, and you want to burn or bury evidence. So LI hopes that all those who knew the victims – the parents, or children, or friends – will not give up when the victims turn up in the “missing” list – will point the finger and make as much noise as possible."

This morning, in the LA Times, we read this:

"FEMA Wants No Photos of Dead
From Reuters

NEW ORLEANS — The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected journalists' requests to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims."

We saw them crushed in life, jeered at as they struggled to survive, and burned furtively by the criminals that rule in D.C. We can only offer a voodoo hope that the murdered of New Orleans will be revenged in one way or another.

tales from FEMA

I don’t know if I’ve told this story in some post. But here goes…

I once worked, temporarily, for FEMA. I was in Santa Fe, trying to write a novel. I needed a job, so I went to a temp agency and was sent out on various jobs.

The instructions I’d get from the temp agency sometimes merely consisted of an address. One morning I set out for one of those addresses. The previous night I’d been at a party, and indulged in a little doobie. I still felt a bit of the pleasant bloodborne vertiginousness of the joint in my system as I found myself driving into the parking lot of what looked like a police station. Vertigo turned immediately into paranoia. I went into a building that seemed occupied by cops, and went down several flights of stairs until I found the office I was to report to.

It was FEMA.

The place was crawling with ex military. My boss was recently retired from a fat gig with NORAD, about which he liked to reminisce at lunch time with the other ex Norad boys – the times they would commandeer planes and go to Labrador on fishing expeditions, or parties to which they would fly in girls, etc. It sounded like the defense of our nuclear capability was a lot of fun if you were in the right circles. That first day, however, when I was briefed as to what they wanted me to do, I had this feeling that I must have smoked more than pot the night before. This was their plan: they wanted me to transcribe into a computer a typed up list of places in New Mexico that had, check one, toilet facilities, check two, kitchen facilities, three sleeping facilities. This list was supposed to be pulled out in case of nuclear attack. My boss even, helpfully, pulled out a diagram illustrating nuclear attack on a city, with circles of the various degrees of salvation radiating out from the dead center.

I should point out that this was 1993. I should point out that my boss wanted this work done because they had the funding to do the work, even though, as he acknowledged, it might not be the most useful work. I should point out that the list I was using was last updated in 1970.

So for the next two weeks I became an expert on where New Mexicans could take a dump in 1970.

…
In my last post, I was trying to analyze the culture of busyness that, I believe, intersects with the macro ineffectuality which plagues all plans floated in the Bush culture. The emphasis here is that busyness can operate even better as the content of busyness – the acts of busyness – tend towards zero. At zero, there can be complete speed and control. The ur-Bushites – Bremer and Brown – were peculiarly talented in pushing busyness towards the zero. My little FEMA job (under Good King Clinton, it should be added) was no more nor less busy than other jobs I have had, but it is distinguished by its outstanding uselessness. It had one justification – it was funded.

Those who would say, hey, that is the government. Private enterprise can’t afford such luxuries should study the exemplary career of the CFO of Enron. Profit is not a sign of content, as any hedge fund trader could tell you.

...
Eventually, I was displaced from my office at FEMA by the Governor of New Mexico, as a real moral panic arose in the state. There was an outbreak of a hantavirus carried by field mice that seemed especially potent, and the Governor commandeered an office in FEMA to make it seem like he was in charge.

pissing while

“Many people use their social activities to mark time rather than the other way around. In parts of Madagascar, questions about how long something takes might receive an answer like "the time of a rice cooking" (about half an hour) or "the frying of a locust" (a quick moment). Similarly, natives of the Cross River in Nigeria have been quoted as saying "the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted" (less than fifteen minutes). Closer to home, not too many years ago the New English Dictionary included a listing for the term "pissing while"—not a particularly exact measurement, perhaps, but one with a certain cross-cultural translatability.” – Robert Levine.


It is no news that the President was not born the twin of industriousness. But blaming Bush’s indolence doesn’t really get us too far in understanding the culture that allowed New Orleans to drown, and the cornered class to either fight or starve; nor does it explain the spectacle of seeing the governing class and its thugs in the press jeering at drowning wheelchair victims for “not getting out when they were told” while waiting for their “welfare checks” (which is apparently what a social security payment has become).

That culture – the Bush culture – precedes, of course, its namesake. But Bush, a garbage fly in human form, is as wonderfully implicative of the American governing class as the garbage fly is of a garbage can: if one is buzzing around a can, you can guess there is rotting meat in it. Similarly, the buzzing of the President’s men tells us a lot about the decaying assumptions that are embedded, over the last thirty years, in those circles that have money and power.

How to approach the thing we have all seen, and still can’t comprehend?

Here’s one small approach. The latest issue of Social Research is devoted to busyness. This is one aspect of that culture which we saw, in appalling living color, last week, fail at every juncture. An understanding of busyness is essential to understanding how “Brownie” did an outstanding job last week in helping to kill ten people in the Civic Center, one hundred in Chalmette, and so on.

We think that you should start with Robert Levine’s article, “A Geography of Busyness.” Levine, who teaches at California State University, Fresno, has been studying cultural differences in the perception of time – and his researchers have gone so far as to clock the speed of your average walker in cities in Brazil, Germany, the U.S., etc., to understand the use of time, under the sign of busyness, in two respects:

“I propose that the subjective experience of feeling busy has two main components: speed and activity.

Speed refers to the rate at which an activity is performed. It is the amount of activity per unit of time. The speed may be measured over brief and immediate periods of time, as when one experiences rapidly oncoming traffic or an upcoming deadline; or over longer, more sustained intervals, such as when we speak of the accelerating tempo of modem life.

The second component of busyness, activity, is the absence of unscheduled time. It is the amount of time that is consumed with activity; or, the ratio of doing things to doing nothing.”

Levine hypothesized that walking would be faster in European countries than in Brazil and the middle range of developing countries, and faster still in the U.S. He found that “pedestrians in Rio de Janeiro walk only two-thirds as fast as do pedestrians in Zurich, Switzerland,” for instance. This was important, insofar as walking is emblematic of speed as a measure of busyness. It is also exemplary of one variety of the emptiness entailed by busyness. The value of that walk is purely in its being completed with speed from the perspective of busyness. It is, in a sense, clipped out of life. It is dead time.

In another sense, nothing can be clipped out of life, which is made up of all of its parts. Of course.

Now, LI’s feeling is that the men around Bush are busy men. The Homeland Security Secretary, the director of FEMA, they are of that quality that no one could deny them busyness. It is also our feeling that their busyness is at the root of their incompetence. And that they reflect a kind of incompetence-in-busyness endemic to the managerial class.

Levine makes an interesting observation, contrasting event time with scheduled time:

“Keeping time by natural events has become increasingly less useful, or even impossible, in most contemporary urban cultures. There is, however, a variation on this type of timekeeping, what we might call "event time," that continues to be dominant in much of the world. In clock-time cultures, the hour on the timepiece governs the beginning and ending of activities. When event time predominates, scheduling is determined by activities. Events begin and end when, by mutual
consensus, participants "feel" the time is right. The distinction between clock and event time deeply divides cultures. Sociologist Robert Lauer (1981) conducted an intensive review ofthe literature concerning the meaning of time throughout history. The most fundamental difference,
he found, has been between people operating by the clock versus those who measure time by social events.”

In a previous post, we noted the interesting coincidence of two functions that give us the two faces of the “then:” the logical then, which moves from a possible condition to an entailment; and the narrative then, which sequences events. Busyness complicates this relationship, and might explain why planning has become a lost art, in the Bush culture. We will expand on this in a later post. Meanwhile, we recommend the issue of Social Research, if you can get ahold of it.

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Another account

Read this account of the escape from New Orleans, and the escape from the government’s idea of a refugee center (hint: they seem to have gotten their plans for it from Buchenwald)for the escapees from New Orleans, by Michael Homan. Let’s not let these histories go down the drain. Even if nothing changes, even if the monsters still rule us and the thugs in the press still ritually praise them and the whole mill grinds inevitably forward, making bonemeal of our bones, we can still preserve a record of how things really were in the U.S.A., circa 2005:


Here’s an excerpt:

“But then in the end I left. I learned that my father-in-law was flying to Jackson Saturday, and Friday those guys in the airboat showed up. I was very worried because I had heard that they were not letting people evacuate with their animals. But these guys said that had changed, and so I put my computer and a few papers in my backpack, loaded the dogs, let the birds go, and put Oot the sugar glider with food and water in Kalypso's room to await my return, much like Napoleon leaving for Elba I suppose. We drove in the boat all over the city looking for people. It was so surreal with the helicopters and all the boats up and down Canal Street amidst all the devastation. Towards dusk on Friday I arrived at I-10 and Banks Street, not far from my house. There they packed all of us pet owners from Mid City into a cargo truck and drove us away. They promised they would take us to Baton Rouge, and from there it would be relatively easy for me to get a cab or bus and meet the family in Jackson.

But then everything went to hell. They instead locked up the truck and drove us to the refugee camp on I-10 and Causeway and dropped us off. Many refused to get out of the van but they were forced. The van drove away as quickly as it could, as the drivers appeared to be terrified, and we were suddenly in the middle of 20,000 people. I would estimate that 98% of them were African Americans and the most impoverished people in the state. It was like something out of a Kafka novel. Nobody knew how to get out. People said they had been there 5 days, and that on that day only 3 buses had shown up. I saw murdered bodies, and elderly people who had died because they had been left in the sun with no water for such a long time. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and I have never seen the despair and tragedy that I saw at this refugee camp. It was the saddest think I have ever seen in my life. I am still so upset that there were not hundreds of buses immediately sent to get these people to shelters.”

Also, see this report from a Green Party member, Malik Rahim, who has remained in Algiers. The whole report is interesting, since it emphasizes one thing that should be made obvious:
1. the state not only abandoned New Orleans, but expended a lot of energy trying to keep a self-organizing population from rescuing each other, even as they allowed gangbangers and vigilantes to run wild.

"My son and his family -- his wife and kids, ages
1, 5 and 8 -- were flooded out of their home when
the levee broke. They had to swim out until they
found an abandoned building with two rooms above
water level.

There were 21 people in those two rooms for a day
and a half. A guy in a boat who just said "I'm
going to help regardless" rescued them and took
them to Highway I-10 and dropped them there.

They sat on the freeway for about three hours,
because someone said they'd be rescued and taken
to the Superdome. Finally they just started
walking, had to walk six and a half miles.

When they got to the Superdome, my son wasn't
allowed in -- I don't know why -- so his wife and
kids wouldn't go in. They kept walking, and they
happened to run across a guy with a tow truck
that they knew, and he gave them his own personal
truck.

When they got here, they had no gas, so I had to
punch a hole in my gas tank to give them some
gas, and now I'm trapped. I'm getting around by
bicycle.

People from Placquemine Parish were rescued on a
ferry and dropped off on a dock near here. All
day they were sitting on the dock in the hot sun
with no food, no water. Many were in a daze;
they've lost everything."

no comment

“I am glad the President has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA's mission to become Deputy Director. Mr. Brown is currently General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer of the agency, a position he has held since February of 2001. Before joining the Bush Administration, I note from his resume, he served as executive director of the Independent Electrical Contractors in Denver. In the early 1980s, Mr. Brown served as staff director of the Oklahoma Senate's Finance Committee, while serving on the Edmund, Oklahoma, City Council.

He ran for Congress in the sixth district, and, in what I think is
particularly useful experience, early in his career, was assistant city manager in Edmond, with responsibility for police, fire and emergency services.”

-- Senator Joe Lieberman (D), HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE,ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS ON THE NOMINATION OF MICHAEL D. BROWN TO BE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY

Via The Left Coaster.

Population of Edmond, Oklahoma: (year 2000): 68,315.

Being and the Wack

History is the superstition of intellectuals. They are always trawling among the time’s Rorschach blots for analogies, and for the determinants among the innumerable skirmishes of the night's ignorant armies, and for our particular future in the past, which contains all futures except one: the one where before and after are abolished. That future annihilates itself.

LI is as superstition as any of them. We do cling to the “then.” The then is where logic ( the possibilities encoded in the if/then) crosses temporality (the then that sequences the narrative). We do believe that we can create modest structures around the then, and imagine that history is coordinate with event, and that events are real. The then is my repository for what Santayana called animal faith. And so I am led down the path that led up to this week, and will lead from this week. Before we endorse any ideology whatsoever, we want to have a lucid sense of the then.

We have been thinking about this because we have been thinking about agency and structure. During the vacation, we read a lot of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This time, we did not read it with that undertone of Derridean derision we brought to our last reading of it. Sartre’s rewiring of the whole notion of transcendence, putting it in terms that resonate with the double face of the then, struck us as a pretty good project, even if the notion of liberty on which it is grounded is peculiar and unconvincing.

Which brings us by way of the backdoor to two comments about the drowning of New Orleans. Harry, in our comments section, objects to our instant personalization of the event in terms of Bush. Harry sees structure, here, as the overriding issue. My sense that Bush has made a difference – that there is a specific Bush signature to what we have seen happening – seems to him to be a bit naïve:

“Whoever comes after him [Bush] as the sockpuppet for his class and culture will fit that description too.”

The other comment is by Jim Henley at Unqualified offerings, who writes sarcastically that the drowning of New Orleans, like 9/11, has so far confirmed the liberal in his view, the conservative in his, and the libertarian in hers:

“From what I can tell in the last couple days’ reading, Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.)”

Henley’s point is that the structure of the ideologies so determines the response as to make ideology an unfalsifiable structure – a thing no test can dent. It thus removes liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism from any real situation.

I grant that both of these points are valid, insofar as agency is largely determined by the background of the sense one makes of the world through structures one has neither created nor had any choice in assimilating. You can’t pull yourself out of your culture by the hair on your head. But I also think that they over-rely on the imperviousness and determinateness of structures which, to my mind, are always slightly out of equilibrium due to acts and events. Acts and events are the wack dimension (I would substitute wack for liberty in Sartre).

For instance: the liberal belief in a robust federal government doesn’t automatically translate into a liberal belief that we needed Homeland Security. LI, a liberal if there ever was one, for instance, thought it was a stupid idea when the Dems came up with it, and a scary idea when the GOP adopted it. That the increase in Government spending on Homeland security has gone up something like 22 percent per year since the boondoggle was started showed simply that the conservative critique of the robust federal roll stopped at its traditional limits, which are, not coincidentally, the limits of the economic interests of the conservative constituency. Like the robust Federal War Department, the robust Homeland Security department served to siphon off government money to a multitude of very GOP-ish military industrial corporations. Which is another way of saying that ideological structures aren’t necessarily homogenous and don’t necessarily serve as predictors of social action.

Those discrepancies and breaks create the Wack, which is where agency comes into play. And this is where I would have to protest against the idea that Bush is a sock puppet. Of course, we can trace a certain learning curve in Bush’s career and see how it corresponds to the culture he grew up in, but it is a mistake to think that you could put any man or woman from Bush’s class in that curve and come out with the same result.

the counted and the uncounted

One expects that the clearance of the Convention Center, since it is administered by thieves and murderers, will probably encompass hiding a number of corpses. This is evidence, after all, and you want to burn or bury evidence. So LI hopes that all those who knew the victims – the parents, or children, or friends – will not give up when the victims turn up in the “missing” list – will point the finger and make as much noise as possible. That the murderers Chertoff and Brown are directing efforts in NOLA means that men who have the motive for covering up their crimes are directing efforts in NOLA. There is a new chapter in the black book of the African-American massacres, and it will be curious to see how the media ignores it, and how it is swept under the rug all the way around.

John Barry’s article in the NYT (I wrote about Barry in an earlier post) includes this graf:

“The scope of the 1927 devastation also resembled today's. No one knows the death toll. The official government figures said 500, but one disaster expert said more than 1,000 in Mississippi alone. The homes of roughly one million people, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of the country, were flooded. The Red Cross fed 667,000 people for months, some for a year; 325,000 lived in tents, some sharing an eight-foot-wide levee crown with cattle, hogs and mules, with the river on one side and the flood on the other.”

Here’s an editorial from the Times-Pic, which has been one of the most reactionary papers in the U.S. for years:

"OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud."

perhaps not

Ann Rice’s op ed in the NYT was an exercise in perfectly controlled anger and despair – which is not something we can reproduce at LI, where we are at the mercy of the portals of the senses and those rumors of the heart that we can’t quell with antacids.


“But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.”

I don’t know about the “Sin City” part – the worst people in the world, who are the great honchos of American politics and media, advocated shooting people who loot directly, while conniving at the great lynching of the city, and I don’t think it was Sin City they were thinking of as much as getting the Soweto massacre right this time. These people are the true descendents of the slave traders, in them runs the blood of everything treacherous and vile, they sweated through exotic fevers in jungle just to massacre Indians and strip them of their bangles, they scalphunted, union-busted, Red-scared and peculated because they are built that way, they are instinct with every trick that will produce a bogus product and a quick buck, and they keep weighing us down with their failures and they will until the country buckles. We are ruled by thugs, whose actions are then praised by other thugs, who call themselves journalists. That is how the system works – the bad Cesars are here.

But I do like the almost childish promise in the last graf. There is always life stirring among the catacombs. Because the more I read about it, the more I think that NOLA is not down for the count. The more I think that this disaster is as much about the government, all levels of it, operating to stifle the one thing that could have saved thousands this week – the self-organized population, the one that could have had boats and buses at the Civic Center five days ago, the one that almost managed an armada out of New Orleans for 45 dollars a seat from the Monteleone Hotel.

They will screw up pumping out the water. They will screw up getting clean water to drink. They will screw up re-building. They will screw up the levies again. They will screw up relief for the refugees. They will screw up the gas. They will screw up and screw up, but I am beginning to think that the belief that the city is gone is their belief, their triumph, and – like all of their triumphs – a lie.

in the front of the line

“At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line - much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome since last Sunday.

"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.

The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, next to the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome. The Hyatt was severely damaged by the storm. Every pane of glass on the riverside wall was blown out.” -- WWL
Hugo at Theophile Gautier’s Grave
--- Robert Lowell
“… and the great age with all its light departs.
The oaks cut for the pyre of Hercules,
what a harsh roar they make
in the night vaguely breaking into stars
Death’s horses toss their heads, neigh, roll their eyes;
they are joyful because the shining day now dies.
Our age that mastered the high winds and waves
expires…”
Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she walked toward a bus. "I never thought I'd make it. Oh, God, I thought I'd die in there. I've never been through anything this awful."
The arena's second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.
Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench from backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.
"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That's all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.
Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.
-- WWL

I think we are all surprised that they didn’t have the Superdome’s inhabitants, some of them, carry the Hilton Hotel guests bags. But you know how it is: that kind of thing makes people feel entitled. In this country, only those who do the real work – the planning, the investing, the consulting, and all of the things that make this a truly great nation and, mind you, a great investment opportunity –should feel entitled, because haven't they earned it? We owe them so much, so very much.

Now… let’s get back to repairing the front porch on Trent Lott’s summer place, shall we?

the current myth

There has been some discussion about various comments made by Bill O’Reilly and the like – including the head of FEMA – about the culpability of those who did not evacuate. Usually, LI could care less about any comments made by Bill O’Reilly – we don’t have to look around for talking heads to be outraged at, screw em - but this is an issue that is so clear cut that we are worried about the myth that is building before our eyes. The response of the liberal community has been has been that those who are poor and elderly, having no transportation, couldn’t get out.

No. Please, do not censor what happened. This is a half truth. The truth is that those who had no transportation but public transportation had no choice but to stay. They were left behind as an INTENTIONAL act of the government, which located shelters in the city and took the people it could to those shelters. Now, supposedly the traffic jam going out of the city was such that the complete bus system of New Orleans would have added an incalculable delay to the evacuation – but it should be emphasized again and again that the moral responsibility for those people lies with the government that directed them, forcibly, into those shelters and then abandoned them. We know they were abandoned by every proof, including statements from Brown and the head of Homeland Security that they did not know, until four days later, that there were thousands at the Civic Center – and this doesn’t even address the hospitals. We have every proof, in other words, of mass negligent homicide. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are as guilty of murder as Union Carbide was, when it killed 25,000 people in Bopal India. That is the long and short of it. I would actually have every sympathy with a person who shot and killed the armed gangbangers that ravaged parts of the city, and I would feel similarly for those who punished the state. But in both cases, sympathy should not be extended into advocacy. There should definitely be trials. Not impeachment, fuck that – trials for manslaughter.

Of course there won't be. Fantasy baseball, fantasy justice, fantasy all the way -- what else is the Web good for?

Love in the ruins

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? – Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins.

Have I lived through the Golden age?

This question has been rushing at me, like a savage with an upraised asagai posed to strike my very heart, as one of the major American cities dies and three levels of government murders (oh, but in the second degree, and with the best intentions) as many African-Americans as it can get away with.

America has definitely changed. That the country would screw its bottom 30 percent is dog bites man news. That it would screw the middle and the top should make us sit up, indeed.

The artist in me appreciates the fine aesthetic sensibility of the muse of history, anointing a man as trivial as George Bush as the symbol of the zeitgeist. George Bush is an empty man – he makes Warren G. Harding seem like J.P. Sartre. But LI, ever the liberal, estimated the evil of that vacuum. Evil in the secular sense – the power of destruction linked to the blindness of vanity. It never occurred to me that the Bush administration would treat his Red States as it has treated Baghdad.

Anyway, the headlines today bring some hope that this phase of the ‘accidental” lynching of the urban poor is seguing into a more comfortable next phase. Perhaps we will get to see some judicial lynching of a selected looting gangbanger – such exemplary punishments are always good for the gonads – followed by some patting on the back of those whose actions in the past couple of days have cost hundreds of lives. The media hasn’t yet picked its hero yet, for this urbicide, but we are all on edge – that’s merely a matter of time and photo ops at the White House.

Meanwhile, I am working on my own extinction. I am a relic of an earlier era, dead meat for the knacker shop, in which “this is America” wasn’t the equivalent of grinning plutocrats on Murdoch’s channel defending our right to loot globally and shoot looters locally. A Dylan line sums up my non-necessity in the New Era: “it’s a wonder that we still know how to breath.”

A link to one aspect of this collapse: Read about the plan for evacuating the poor. Then weep. Weep. Weep

from 2000

I wrote this article in 2000. On my computer, it looks like an edited draft from a mag or newspaper, but I don't remember publishing it anywhere. Here it is.

MISSISSIPPI CHURNING?
Deeper issues lurk behind the populist rhetoric.
Roger Gathman is a freelance writer based in Austin.


MISSISSIPPI CHURNING?
There are issues in this issue-less campaign, but who wants to talk about them?
Roger Gathman is a freelance writer based in Austin.

When Al Gore launched his official campaign on a Mississippi Steamboat, the media dutifully cited Mark Twain. But the locus classicus for the events that have shaped the Mississippi River valley, and by implication the place of the Federal Government in the national economy, might better be sought in William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, a novel set in ‘the great flood year, 1927.’

As John M. Barry showed in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood and How it Changed America, the consequences of the flood were manifold and national. For instance, by directing flood relief, Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, gained enough notice that was able to ride it to nomination at the Republican convention in 1928, even though Coolidge himself, appraising Hoover, said to friends, "That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad."

What did Hoover exactly do? It wasn’t simply the relief effort. It was Hoover’s organization of support for the Jadwin Plan, which legalized the largest extension of Federal authority into the sphere of what had previously been left to states and localities since the Civil War. The plan put the Federal Government in charge of maintaining control of the Mississippi. More crucially, the Federal Government also assumed responsibility for financing the levee system, while the states and localities supplied pitched in merely token matching funds. Thus began the great hyrdo-engineering projects which began with flood control and soon evolved into a whole system of river control projects to promote the agricultural and industrial use of the river. That initial assumption of responsibility, and the outlay of Federal revenues it entailed ("the greatest expenditure the government has undertaken except in the World War,’ the New York Times said) (1) soon operated as a precedent for other interventions, as Coolidge probably suspected it would.

All of which contravened, on the deepest level, the conservative principal enunciated by Walter Bagehot in the nineteenth century: "... nothing can be more surely established by a larger experience than that a Government which interferes with trade injures trade." The question, even then, was what counted as interference. Bagehot himself, skeptical of all varieties of utopian theory, knew he was dealing in ideal terms here; the very idea of a "natural economy," to which the classical economists referred, encompasses the whole system of exchanges, upon which the government, if it functions at all, must impinge to some degree. But Hoover’s advocacy of the Jadwin plan established a prototype for the scale and kind of economic interference sanctioned thereafter by twentieth century conservatives: if the state, of whatever level or branch, intervened, it should intervene to give some advantage to the owning class. Conservative economists Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt have labeled the interlocking structures which bound together businesses and the Federal Government the “Corporate Commonwealth”, seeing it as the specifically different mode of capitalism practiced in twentieth century America. The Mississippi flood plan is a perfect instance of the Corporate Commonwealth in action. The Jadwin plan, while extending Federal protection to the life and property of all who lived in the Mississippi flood plan, practically advanced the interests of the large scale farmers of Mississippi’s Delta country, who no longer had to depend on their own resources for flood control. Theoretically, this should also have advanced tenant farmers, and small scale farmer. Actually, the advantage gained by larger farmers ate up the small advantage reaped by the sharecropper, since advantage has an unequal effect on large and small enterprises, tending to give larger ones a competitive advantage. In addition, the change in the economic environment aggravated the rooted racism of the culture. The Federal government’s interventions, on the local level, gave a distinct preference to whites - so that it isn’t surprising that in the immediate period following the flood relief plan, black immigration from the Delta region increased.

In the thirties, the New Deal, while not negating the government’s tilt towards the owning class, balanced it with interventions that favored the working class, such as labor laws, minimum wage laws, social security, and the commencement of a vast regulatory structure which would, in the post-World War II period, grow ever more active in governing corporate behavior.

A default was thus set in place to which the two dominant factions in America responded. Liberals allowed a number of policies that favored the wealthiest, while Conservatives conceded the limited legitimacy of social security and other forms of redistributing wealth downward. Not that practical concession entailed rhetorical recognition - the two sides would unload, during elections, their obsolete battery of slogans and promises, without ever seriously intending to dismantle or radically change the infrastructure that both sides had, through compromise and self-interest, created. This is why, weirdly enough, the great engineering projects of this century - from the dams to the highway system - were rarely contraverted enough to be issues in elections. They were, instead, relegated to the status of the “non-partisan.”

Galambos and Pratt confine themselves to the dynamic between the Federal Government and the oligopolies. The essence of the system, however, was realized on the state and local level. It is on this level, in fact, that the system transmorgified as the New Deal and Great Society programs began to fall apart. Bill Adler, in his recent book, Mollie’s Job, gives a good account of the realization of this mechanism on a grassroots level. The state of Mississippi in the thirties began a program named BAWI, Balance Agriculture with Industry. Under BAWI, a local community can raise money from a bond issue to purchase plant for the private sector. In Adler’s book, Simpson County used this authority to build a plant for a Universal Industries, a ballast making company. Under the terms of the law, the county leased the corporation the building, on very reasonable terms. In this particular case, the lease eventually lead to sale, but in other cases Mississippi counties have retained the costs and duties of ownership for actually housing the plants of national and multi-national corporations, which is by far the most radical form of rent control in the country. Ironically, the State of Mississippi touted its program to industries in the North by pointing to conditions favorable to "free enterprise" in the state, code words to imply that union activity was impeded to the constitutional limit by state law. Mississippi’s example soon inspired other programs throughout the South. From the South, it spread nationwide, developing into an unorganized but distinct national market as localities try to lure private businesses with ‘incentives" which include tax exemptions or rebates, relaxation of environmental regulations, and other ‘sweeteners." If a private financial entity made the loans and deals that state and local governments make, they would no doubt condition them on terms which hedged the loaning institution's risk. This, however, is often not the case in the flea market of local and state incentives, where the immediate goal, couched in terms of employment, eclipses discussion of its future costs. It is a practice that is so common that when Honda, in a recent new release, bragged that, for locating a factory in Alabama, it negotiated with the Governor’s office to come up with “incentives worth more than $158 million ... [including] $102.7 million to get the site ready for construction and to train workers, and another $55.6 million in tax breaks,” no one even questioned the deal. After all, as is noted in the same release, Alabama is handing out even bigger plums: “Mercedes-Benz received commitments of $253 million for its plant, which employs about 1,700 following an expansion last year.” (a) The Alabama government essentially subsidized Honda and Mercedes Benz. The justification is that this will generate employment, which will generate income tax and other tax revenue, so that the state will more than make up for the money. But this justification tacitly concedes the State’s function in creating wealth inequality, by taking from the workers to pay for the owners. This is formally close to a protection racket - in a same way that a gang earns its money by protecting small businesses from the violence it would otherwise inflict, the corporation earns its tax deferments and subsidies by employing people who generate its profits. The company is subsidized, in other words, for being a company, just as the gang subsidizes itself for being a gang.

Originally, progressives saw, in this system, a cheap way to secure employment for areas that were often racked by poverty. The question of whether other infrastructural investments would be more profitable was, most of the time, not even bruited. After all, unemployment had a tangible cost to the taxpayer, as the unemployed depended on the state for a variety of sustaining services. Of course, by raising bonds, or putting together tax incentives, the corporations were still costing the taxpayer, but in theory there would be a net economic benefit to the community which would counterbalance that cost.

In the eighties, the bi-polar nature of government intervention gave way to interventions that increasingly favored one side: the side of ownership. While the socialization of business costs such as are effected under BAWI and like minded programs grew, the willingness of governments to continue social services came to an end. The end was not uniform, and especially with regard to environmental, health and safety regulatory structures, the cuts were never completely devastating. What should interest us, however, is how, within the mode of what continued to be acceptable government intervention, the price of plant, pollution control, training and a host of other costs were increasingly assumed by mostly middle income or low income taxpayers. This is a story which goes beyond talking about the formal advantages accrued to the wealthiest by tax cuts, the most often looked to cause of increasing income inequality, to the positive disbursement of government revenue - the cost, in tax dollars, going towards shore up the source of income for the wealthiest one percentile of Americans. Inequality of wealth is often regarded statically, as a fact about the American political economy, instead of as a dynamic property of that economy, one which sets up a positive feedback. In other words, it produces the conditions for ever greater income inequality. The most extreme and colorful example of this is the state that has been most effected by the changes upon the Mississippi wrought by that floodplan way back in 1928: Louisiana.


THE VANISHING STATE

If you look at the map of Louisiana’s coast published in the 1999 International Petroleum Encyclopedia, it is graphically obvious that Louisiana is one of the most important sources of petroleum and natural gas in the nation. The map is dense with pink lines radiating out all along the coast to offshore Gulf wells, as well as wells in the wetlands. The pink lines represent pipe, and the pipes radiate in to refining plants. 70 percent of the oil and 90 percent of the gas from U.S. coastal water comes from the Louisiana Coastal zone.

Resource extraction is not the only thing Louisiana has going for it. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Louisiana contains about 40 percent of the coastal marshes in the coterminous United States. The bayous contributed 28 percent to the total volume of U.S. fisheries in the eighties, although that percentage has been going down.

It is, then, a state peculiarly rich in natural resources, which makes the contrast with its human impoverishment all the more startling. Katherine Isaac, of the Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group, sums it up this way:

“The state ranks: last in the nation in workplace health and safety and in high school graduation rates; 49th for the gap between rich and poor; 49th in poverty (with 25 percent of residents considered poor); 47th in surface water discharges, heart disease and adult illiteracy; 46th in hazardous waste generation and teen pregnancy; and 45th in long-term unemployment, unemployment duration and health coverage.”

What is wrong with the human economy is tied up with what is increasingly wrong with the environment.

Take, for instance, the fish.

Lately, ominously, there is a “Kill Zone” which forms, every year, off the coast. It has doubled in size, to around 7,000 square miles, since the Midwest floods of 1993. Journalist Colin Woodard, in his book Ocean’s End, describes the process that makes for “hypoxia,” or an abnormal diminishment of oxygen content from the water. Nutrients, mainly nitrogen fertilizers, are drained into the Mississippi from farms in the Midwest. Download by the Mississippi into the Gulf, they cause an explosion of algae growth. That in itself doesn’t sap the oxygen. It is the decay of algae, produced by bacteria, which completes the cycle of strangulation. Woodard compares the process to wrapping Saran Wrap around a piece of the Gulf about the size of New Jersey - the animals in the affected area flee or die or both - Woodard reports that in 1996, for example, the zone drove as much as half a million fish into shore, where they could be scooped up by the residents in hand nets, or found, dead on the shore, by seagulls and eaten, or simply rot.

If the origins of the Kill Zone can be located a thousand miles up the Mississippi river, the massive dumping of toxic waste is becoming a Louisiana specialty. Last year, attention was focused on “Cancer Alley,” the stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is home to some 120 petro-chemical plants. The attention wasn’t focused so much on the effect of these plants on the local residents as on the feud between the Governor of the State, Mike Foster, and the Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University. As Oliver Houck, its founder, says, “we have a different attitude towards the environment down here and it's all bad. The environment is the enemy.” When ELC successfully discouraged the building of a PVC plant in Convent, Louisiana - claiming that the plans for the plant didn’t meet existing EPA standards - the Governor and the state’s Chamber of Commerce went to the State Supreme Court, which obligingly interpreted a state constitutional provision, Rule XX, as disallowing student practitioners from representing any individual, unless the income of the potential client is low enough to meet a rigid standard of indigency set by the Louisiana State Supreme Court and any organization which could not demonstrate that the incomes of 51 percent of its members meet the same standard of indigency.
.
Even Cancer Alley is eclipsed, however, by an even bigger problem. Louisiana is, quite simply, falling into the sea. Since 1930, it is conservatively estimated that the state has lost 1, 200,000 acres since 1930 - an area about the size of Rhode Island. And the loss is continuing, at a rate of about 25 square miles a year.

An natural occurrence of this magnitude has, of course, many causes, and all of the causes have adherents. A geologist, Sherwood "Woody" Gagliano, claims that the land sits on huge mud fault “blocks,” and that the faults are coming apart and sliding the land into the sea. A more common view is that the flood plan which has blocked the Mississippi with a system of levees has inadvertently ceased the flow of renewing sediment with which the Mississippi originally built the Delta. Ivor van Heerden from the Louisiana Geological Survey, claims that the birdfoot Delta is falling apart because the Corps of Engineers, in accordance with a Congressional Act passed in 1954, must rig the River so that it passes through Baton Rouge and New Orleans on its way to the Gulf. The Congressional mandate has been followed so far, but nobody has yet figured out how to do geology by fiat. The river doesn’t like being rigged. In particular, since the 1927 flood channeled out a deeper passage to the sea through one of the river’s tributaries, the Atchafalaya, the River, most geologists think, has been trying to shift its bed. That shift would leave Baton Rouge and New Orleans on a finger of the sea (which is what the River below the Atchafalaya would become), while the Mississippi would empty into the Gulf at Morgan City, about 140 miles west of New Orleans. In recent years, mysteriously, a Delta has been forming at the mouth of the Atchafalaya, evidence, perhaps, that the Mississippi won’t be forever tamed. So far, the Corps of Engineers has kept the Mississippi flowing on its way past New Orleans with the Old River Control Structure, which seals off the flow between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya. The dam, built in 1963, is officially designed to handle a maximum flow of 3,030,000 cubic feet per second. As Barry has pointed out, however, by some accounts that figure was equaled by the 1927 flood. If, as some climatologists claim, we are in currently in a regime of “extreme weather,” there’s a strong possibility that that much flow could happen in another flood.

'The system at its bleakest is at work in Louisiana. Here we can see how all three legs of the government work to distribute income upward by socializing corporate cost and shifting its burden to the working class. The executive and legislative powers exempt the petroleum and gas industries from regulations forcing them to dispose of waste, thus leaving dumps to be cleaned up, latter, at taxpayer expense. The taxpayer also pays for wetland restoration, which is needed partly because of channels that have been dredged to oil wells on the coast - channels which the oil well owners can deduce in an accounting maneuver known as 'expensing" before they figure their gross revenue. In this way, unprofitable wells and operations can be hedged in a portfolio against profitable ones, making the wetlands the passive victim of one more tasty tax scheme. When the oil and gas is carried in to refineries and plants, another group of state incentives kick in, making it the tax and regulatory situation advantageous for "dirty" industries to build their plants in obscure hamlets between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The inhabitants of these hamlets are the most disposable members of the Louisiana, and indeed, the American, commonwealth - poor rural blacks. The companies are entrusted with the real, practical power to regulate themselves, which they use to dispose of pollution as they see fit. At this point, we reach the furthest extend to which the executive and legislative branches intervene in the economy - an abdication of their responsibilities to protect in any way the well-being and liberties of their poorest citizens. Still, those citizens could have recourse to the courts. Now it is the turn of the judicial branch to kick in. Laws and rules hem in the ability of the effected residences and small business to sue by, for instance, forbidding agencies which commonly represent the poor to operate in environmental class action suits. And if, nevertheless, a suit is levied by some stubborn citizen, there are liability caps in the offing which would preserve the cost - benefit calculations of the corporations. Why, for instance, not dump the heavy metals and pay out $15,000 in a penalty? On the one side, the happy citizen can purchase a coffin and a fairly decent funeral service with that amount of money, and on the other side, the company can continue to diffuse its waste products, to the greater glory of its balance sheet. According to the EPA, this is exactly what is happening. In 1995 alone, some 57 million pounds of wastes were released in East Baton Rouge Parish. By stymying attempts, either legislatively or by judicial penalty, to stem the flow of waste, the incentive to pollute less, and to produce less wastefully, is deadened.

To trace all the lines and movements of the mechanism is to question the bounty government is so quick to shower upon corporations. But the necessary preliminary is, of course, to expose the mechanism, and this is where the two party system comes in. By battling on the high rhetorical plain of laissez faire vs. the welfare state, they divert attention from the realities of the system, and the tacit consensus which makes both parties collude at socializing business costs. This is the hope held out by Nader's campaign: that consumerism, with its accountant's ethic, and the Green's environmentalism, which coalesces around sustainable economics, might actually address the issues which traditionally invigorate populist movements: the abuse of power and the entrenchment of inequality."

Rule by the worst just got worse

Can these things be? Is this madness? Is there no way to rise up and break the neck of the monsters, the true monsters, of this administration that is crushing us into the ground? We are ruled by something fantastically biblical, some combination of brainless Behemoths. And they are murdering us. And we do nothing. This is Bush's Chernobyl moment. And we watch it, and people die and die and die.

“100 said dead in Chalmette
Thursday, 9:46 p.m.

About 100 people have died at the Chalmette Slip after
being pulled off their rooftops, waiting to be ferried
up the river to the West Bank and bused out of the
flood ravaged area, U.S. Rep. Charles Melancon,
D-Napoleonville, said Thursday.

About 1,500 people were at the slip on Thursday
afternoon, where critical supplies like food and water
are scarce, he said. Melancon expressed serious
frustration with the slow pace of getting these items
to the people waiting to finish their journey to
safety.

Many of those at the slip were evacuated from a shelter set up at Chalmette High School that suffered massive flooding as the waters rose during Hurricane Katrina.

Melancon said people are being plucked out of their water-surrounded
houses, but the effort to get them out of Chalmette
and provide them with sufficient sustenance is the
problem.

While he did not directly criticize the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, Melancon said they are
ultimately responsible for making sure that people are
taken care of. “That is where the buck stops,” said
Melancon at a briefing at the state Office of
Emergency Preparedness.

People at the slip indicated that 100 people had died
since they arrived, although Melancon said he did not
know how they perished.”

My brother, who has been in four major hurricane clean up operations (including Hugo) as a volunteer, thinks that the big mistake in NOLA is to rely on the military, instead of letting people back into the city to self organize and get their things. In some ways, he's right. It is unlikely that the Chalmette one hundred would have died if there were ... well, a lot of people around. The nightmare is that the government has cut off the region and shuttled people to points where they are abandoned. The looting occupies the press, and not the mass slaughter. But the mass slaughter is infinitely more dangerous. The Chertoffs of this world are killing off more than the gangbangers.

And this is our American civilization. Beautiful, ain't it?

ps -- 11 a.m, Friday: more evidence that my brother is right. The blood of how many hundreds is now on the hands of the state -- at every level. This is from a Nola account that, as is the fashion of the Times - Pic, weighs the life of the black human being at a four to one rate with the life of white human beings. Thus, more print and blame is bestowed on the wounding of one national guardsman than the deaths -- due directly to malign neglect by the Federal Government -- of those souls in the Civic Center:

"A cluster of refugees attempted to leave the city by way of the Crescent City Connection, only to be blocked on grounds that the crossing was unsafe for pedestrians. At the suggestion of officials, they retreated to the Superdome, where they learned that the bus convoy to Texas was closed to new arrivals."

Anarchy, we are told, can't work. The Bush culture is offering an alternative that is succeeding in devaluing any action by the state. Far better to abolish the thing than to have this.

I’ve heard and read disturbing things today. Here’s three:

- Touro hospital is without a/c, electricity, food, water. There are patients on the roof. Touro being attacked is a sign – the riot is moving Uptown. This doesn’t happen. This is happening.
- Kenner Hospital also suffered an attack.
- Finally, I heard perhaps the single worst interview I’ve ever heard a government official give. Michael Chertoff’s interview with NPR consisted of anchoring himself to a happy talking point – that the Superdome was being relieved – even as he was asked about the Civic Center. Unbelievably, when conditions were described there, he said that the reports were rumors, and that he had heard nothing of this.

Nobody, unfortunately, is going to fire Chertoff. That’s a fact of life. But if you want to know why people are firing on the helicopters, a good place to start is Chertoff’s remarks. People in New Orleans, or many people, think they are being abandoned to die. Doubtless with the state of the electricity, few people heard him – but the attitude spoke volumes. Chertoff might as well have put in skywriting: “we will let you die in the Civic Center.” Which makes going to a government designated transfer point a sucker’s game.

This is so simple. There is a need for a national leader – like Clinton – to set up in Baton Rouge and announce, we are not going to let you die in the Civic Center. Or at any transfer point. Now that we “know” that you are in there, we are going to make the trip from the superdome in three hours and put in safety officers, send in food, get you out. That Chertoff left the interview without bothering to get ‘informed’ by the reporter is so sickening I can’t really express my horror.

Clinton might be a buffoon, but he is a trusted man in New Orleans, or more trusted than most politicians. I could care less about the politics – disarming New Orleans is impossible, so it is time to THINK about what you are saying, if you are an official, and it is time to find some way to communicate with disparate groups of distrustful people. That means loud speakers, that means using media with generators to convey the simple message: “going to a transfer point will not mean being abandoned.” They can show the Rolling Stones forty foot high at a stadium show – they can’t show the rescue of refugees so that people downtown can see it? If I were there at the moment, knowing what I know, I’d do anything to avoid falling into the government’s hands at the moment. Why is this difficult to understand? If I were in New Orleans at the moment, I would not look at the helicopters with a very friendly eye myself. The question emerges: are they going to take those able to pay, and leave us to die? So far, it looks much like the latter. This is a city built on invisible levies of class. Get real.

Sometimes, I do wish writing this thing actually mattered.

11:30
ps -- just read some good news -- Touro patients have been largely evacuated.

Jericho

And it shall be, whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy house into the street, his blood shall be upon his head, and we will be guiltless: and whosoever shall be with thee in the house, his blood shall be on our head, if any hand be upon him. -- Joshua, chapter 2
--

The shotgun I lived in on Willow near the Carrollton Cemetery, which always seemed to have kids flying kites from it when I lived there, is probably flooded. The house on Prytania might actually be flooded up to the roof, hard as that is for me to even conceptualize. The house on Audubon is on higher ground. The Tulane Library, where I worked on a project in which a group processed the purchase of a couple million dollars worth of books, is no doubt flooded down in the basement. The Tulane site is down. Apparently, the students and faculty have been evacuated, many of the students to Jackson Mississippi.

I’ve seen one dead city on the Gulf: Galveston, Texas. Galveston gave up the ghost after a terrific storm in about 1911. The place still boasts 50 000 people, but its opportunities shriveled after that storm. Houston became Texas’ big port. Galveston became a fief of the Moody’s, the insurance clan. Walk down the streets of Galveston and marvel at the architecture, the like of which has no parallel in Texas. But it is like a royal robe on a shivering leper.

I’m in shock, awe, anger, disbelief. In the Cleveland airport, I drank beer and watched CNN with the subtitles rolling across it. I nearly sobbed, but didn’t – I’ve learned enough about the world to know that sobbing over disasters that are too big for you simply leaves you raw and confused. A new legend was born, I’ve noticed: Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Bush strummed a guitar while New Orleans sank. Bush is a lesson in the servile reflex: I instinctively expect him to operate like a leader. He instinctively operates like a class clown dumped on the island in the Lord of the Flies. He’s good for me, insofar as he has destroyed the remnant of my respect for leadership itself. America is not special; the stupid Caesars are definitely upon us.

I fell in love a dozen times in New Orleans; I learned politics there, and I learned to distrust the cops. I learned how to listen to opera, and how to snort coke. My first experience with acid was with my friend A. and her maniac Chilean boyfriend, who inhabited a shadowy room in a demi-whorehouse in the quarter. I can still feel the lack of vitamin C as I stumbled down Magazine street in the morning after, passing by a poster advertising a Kung Fu movie in Spanish. The poster sometimes still pops up in my dreams.

If I were living in NOLA – and six years ago, when I moved back South, that was my plan – I’d be in the Civic Center or the Superdome. Evacuation at a moment’s notice is not in my economic cards – I have no car, I have no cell phone, and I have no desire to leave my possessions (a computer, a tv, a stereo) to the winds, or to a passing looter. Although I very much understand taking bacon and beer (which, by the way, is a good thing to drink when the water becomes polluted – that is, after all, why beer was invented). I very much don’t understand evacuating New Orleans without any regard for the stuff left in the stores, especially the weapons. I don’t understand not impounding that stuff the first day. This is New Orleans, after all, where every native has a funny story about some naïf tourist venturing out to some area which is not to be visited without an armed escort. We toyed with these stories, when I was there, because there was a certain resentment of tourists, who were in search of easy vices but hadn’t earned the right to them – didn’t even understand that vices come in bundles, and some of them you might not like at one in the morning. New Orleans isn’t just like a banana republic, it is one. There is no real police force in New Orleans. There is a praetorian guard that protects the garden district, and Jefferson Parish middle class folk, and enforces the rule of the jungle on the Ninth ward. Over the decades, both sides of this equation were educated to believe in a very direct view of the regulation of social relations. When I hear calls to shoot to kill the looters, that is the Garden District expressing what it has always thought. I once saw a policeman beat the shit out of man in the French Quarter. I wasn’t stupid enough to interfere.

I know it’s gone, I know it’s gone, I know it’s gone…

I first saw New Orleans a long time ago. I was taken there by my Uncle Harry. And I resolved to go there after high school, which I endured in suburban Atlanta. I went to Tulane the year the Meters played for the incoming freshman party. Back in the day, it was really a party – the university sprang for the kegs. That has probably fallen victim to our current Puritanism. My first year there, I worked on the Figaro, which was run by James Glassman. Glassman went on to become a crackpot conservative (author of Dow 1 million two hundred and ten), but back then he was cool. One of my duties at the Figaro was to keep him from dealing with the assorted weirdos from the sex industry that would come in and bug us – pin striped escort service guys, weeping fat ticketsellers at various adult theaters, etc., etc. They advertised with us, they were hit by the cops, they came to us. My immediate boss was more interested in being a dance instructor. The writers (this was back when Bunny Matthews worked for the paper) lounged around in the back in their pyjamas. I’ve seen the bohos, or the last of em…

It’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone…

For a long time I’ve felt extinct myself. And it didn’t take a genius to know that New Orleans time was limited. I wrote a piece in 2000 about this, which I’ll publish in my next post. This post is just a puddle of piss and tears. And I don’t give a shit.

the respectable left

The new myth floating about is that the liberal hawks are in a self-questioning mood: how could they have been so wrong? The answer is that they trusted the Bush administration to do the right thing but the Bush administration let them down.

This is, of course, horseshit covered in catsup. Hitchens, Friedman, Berman, Packer, Ignatieff, Marc Cooper (post occ.) and the rest of them are well practiced in the art of emitting herbivorous platitudes about human rights to defend the infamies of American foreign policy. Their share of the war consisted of committing a double act of bad faith: demoralizing the liberal/secular side in Iraq by branding it with the name of various scoundrels (Chalabi, Allawi), while putting up a noxious smokescreen of righteousness on the home front to disguise the quite normal imperialist mechanisms by which Iraq was to be reduced to its proper place in the world system. The movement was from a tyranny run by a mass murderer to a colony run by corporate American shills. Hitchens is merely the most articulate and exemplary of the band of lefty poseurs: in the lead up to the war, his chief argument was that the antiwar side sickened and disgusted him, as though his very innards had been carved out of the Critique of Practical Reason. He now defends the war, as he does in the latest New York Observer, on grounds of honor -- a sort of mafia ethic:

Hitchens clarified what world he’s currently living in. “It’s a matter of solidarity with the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, and trying to turn American policy in their favor,” said Mr. Hitchens. “I’m on their side, win or lose …. I could never publish an article saying, ‘Come to think of it, we never should have done this,’ because I could never look them in the face …. So, no, I don’t have any second thoughts.”


The rest of them are going to remain with us as the unimpeachable voice of the reasonable left, of course. As with a position in the Bush cabinet, the advantage of being a public intellectual is that failure is no bar to success. That these people, none of whom could be trusted to organize a children's birthday party, could intrude into a nation about which they knew neither the language nor the culture and transform it from the top down is a subject for farce and tears. None of these people seem to have the least sense of how projects are done, how agency works in an organization, how producing a set of incompatible goals leads to failure, or even how to map the incompatibilities.

All of this matters not a jot. The Dissent eggheads have always had great success commoditizing their sensitivities in the op ed market. They will continue to do so. But I say, as a mild and moderate liberal:

Fuck em.