JPBlog

The JP has already written about the new bankruptcy act, paid for by the credit card industry and delivered on a silver platter by Congress. The act, conceived in greed and born of corruption, will, when it takes effect next month, hang like an albatross around the victims of Hurricane Katrina as well as other Americans who face financial disasters. Even though it is undisputed that the majority of bankruptcies in America are the result of debts incurred from medical treatment, it is clear that the Congress has virtually repudiated the notion of bankruptcy as a fresh start for persons hopelessly over their heads through no fault of their own.

Wake up, Chumps!

With the exception of Bennie Thompson, our Mississippi senators and representatives voted for this corrupt legislation. As the poorest state in the nation, the irony of our elected representatives supporting this oppressive legislation--legislation immensely harmful to the citizens of this state--is simply overwhelming and a testimony to our penchant for shooting ourselves in the foot.

The bankruptcy law is only a symptom of what is going on in Washington, however. It is impossible to itemize all the actions, big and small, that occur daily in the halls of power that are designed to curtail our liberties, ravage our environment, endanger our health, make terrorism against us more likely, and shift the role of our government from serving and protecting the public to fattening the wallets of the wealthy and powerful few. The process grinds on from day to day, concealed from the public by its sheer volume, its obscure and often dishonest language, and the complicity of the mass media.

The evidence of this is overwhelming. Only the deliberately ignorant can dispute the existence of a vast and ever-widening disparity between the top 1% and the rest of us, both in income and wealth. Only the deliberately ignorant can ignore the sea change in governmental expenditures away from the general welfare to the industrial-military complex and the financial industry that facilitates it. Only the deliberately ignorant can close their eyes to the gutting of the nation's industrial strength to be replaced by a service industry that endows the few with fabulous wealth and the many with minimum-wage dead-end jobs.

We in Mississippi bear a special responsibility for this, having elected some of the most reactionary representatives to be found in Washington, D.C. The idea that the extreme, right-wing ideology that goes under the name of conservatism is good for Mississippi is a proposition so mean, so utterly idiotic, and so contrary to common sense and experience, that acceptance of it normally requires a level of hallucination sufficient to warrant commitment to a mental institution, a vivid illustration of Florence King's dictum that a wall erected along the Mason-Dixon line would enclose the world's largest asylum.

Building a wall around Mississippi would enclose a pretty big asylum, by itself.

There is one consolation, however: As the nation gradually but surely turns itself into a third-world country, we in Mississippi will hardly notice the difference, since we are already a third-world country. A national plantation system.

Chumps!

The Republicans have scored a conceptual victory by renaming the Federal Estate Tax the "Death" Tax and making it sound as though the IRS literally confiscates the inheritances of nearly everybody. Max Sawicky, long one of my favorite writers on economics, writes two short articles on the Economic Policy Institute web site with graphs on the estate tax, showing who is affected and by how much. Well worth reading.
Death and Taxes, Part I
Death and Taxes, Part II
Ironically, the Estate Tax was originally enacted by Republicans just like original anti-trust legislation. Things sure have changed.

A Poem about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

The Big Easy is not so easy, now
That water, being humble that it is,
As Lao Tsu said, talking of the Tao,
Seeks naturally lowest places,
Filling crevices, no matter how small.
There's not an empty space it does not go.
Though dams and levies thwart the water's fall,
Keep it back from where it wants to go,
Yet opportunity arrives one day,
Allows it to resume its natural
Pursuit, destroying all that's in its way,
Including what we arrogantly build,
Believing mortals can with clever plans
Avoid the sea god's pitiless commands.

Poet and farmer Wendell Berry writes a particularly relevant article in Orion Magazine on agriculture. Now that realization of the limitations inherent in dependency on oil is sinking into our collective consciousness, we are gradually realizing that agriculture, which depends upon heavy inputs of petroleum, both in the form of fertilizer and fuel, will change because it must. If it doesn't change it will collapse. Berry, whose book The Unsettling of America (1977) was a revelation to many of us who were not raised on a traditional farm, has not only examined the philosophy and consequences of modern industrial agriculture, but he has also explored the social and spiritual dimensions of living on the Earth as part of an ecosystem and a human society. He is like a prophet, that is, one who sees more clearly than the rest of us where our actions are leading. There is not a person alive today that cannot learn from his knowledge, wisdom and vision. In a sane society, The Unsettling of America would be taught in every school.

By way of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Left Turn magazine has published a series of on-the-site articles by Jordan Flaherty from the viewpoint of the folks who stayed, either because they had to or because they wanted to. They paint both a hopeful and a sobering picture of what happened and what is going on now, a picture very different from the one on TV. Instead of anarchy and widespread lawlessness, Flaherty reports that people, by and large, came together and supported one another, even in the Superdome.

According to a report that's been circulated, Denise Young, one of those trapped in the convention center told family members, "yes, there were young men with guns there, but they organized the crowd. They went to Canal Street and 'looted,' and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. When the police rolled down windows and yelled out 'the buses are coming,' the young men with guns organized the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back,just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first." But the buses never came. "Lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. Cops passing by, speeding off. We thought we were being left to die."

The role of law enforcement and other authorities is problematic. The despicable actions of the sheriff in threatening refugees trying to escape the waters by walking over the bridge into Gretna has been publicized to some degree, but the behavior of the local police and the military troops towards the persons remaining in the city has been blacked out.

I asked Okra, in his house off of Piety Street, what the biggest problem has been. He said, "It's been the police - they've lost the last restraints on their behavior they had, and gotten a license to go wild. They can do anything they want. I saw one cop beat a guy so hard that he almost took his ear off. And this was someone just trying to walk home." 



Walking through the streets, I witnessed hundreds of soldiers patrolling the streets. Everyone I spoke to said that soldiers were coming to their house at least once a day, trying to convince them to leave, bringing stories of disease and quarantine and violence. I didn't see or speak to any soldiers involved in any clean up or rebuilding.

The public's beliefs about what is happening in New Orleans create a context in which plans for the rebuilding of New Orleans--already agreed upon by the powers that be--will seem reasonable, necessary and, well, inevitable. Think about that as you read these articles and compare the observations of ordinary people on the ground with what you have been told by media personalities paid to tell you the official version of the facts. Then watch, over the next few months, and see what happens. Watch how the reconstruction of the city will be based upon the official version. Take note of who benefits.

Already, the usual forces of corporate restructuring are lining up. Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has begun work on a $500 million US Navy contract for emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and marine facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Blackwell Security - the folks that brought you Abu Ghraib - are patrolling the streets of our city. 



The Wall Street Journal reported that the rich white elite is already planning their vision of New Orleans' reconstruction, from the super-rich gated compounds of Audubon Place Uptown, where they have set up a heliport and brought in a heavily-armed Israeli security company. "The new city must be something very different," one of these city leaders was quoted as saying, "with better services and fewer poor people. Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically."

Let us imagine this "New" New Orleans, created in the corporate, white upper middle class image, a city purged of the very class of people that created the blues and the unique culture that has always made New Orleans the one city in the U.S. that, as Umberto Eco said, was truly itself and not a copy of something else. Who would have the slightest desire to visit an ethnically cleansed New Orleans?^* The thought of spending time in that hot, steaming place, bereft of the architecture, the music, the food and, most of all, that indefinable but infinitely alluring spirit of easy living and decadent civilization that can be found nowhere else, is enough to sadden the most stouthearted.

Here are the URLs of the articles in case they move from the front page of the magazine:

Back inside New Orleans (9/12/2005)
Mourning for New Orleans (9/9/2005)
Don't Let New Orleans Die (9/4/2005)
Notes from Inside New Orleans (9/2/2005)

* Yes, I used the term "ethnically cleansed" deliberately. The plans for New Orleans appear to include ethnic cleansing. We bombed the Serbs on the charge that they were engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Sometimes reality trumps fiction. I couldn't have possibly made this up. The Clarion-Ledger reported today that the Justice Department set out a memo to various U. S. Attorneys requesting information on any lawsuits filed by environmental groups:

SUBJECT: Have you had any cases involving the levees in New Orleans?
QUESTION: Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps' work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.
District: __________
Contact: _________
Telephone: ________

It seems that the entire Federal Government is becoming one big spin machine.

We just received a message from a large company in North Carolina looking for two civil engineers. If there are any civil engineers displaced by Katrina looking for a job, send a message with your email address and we will forward it.

Today Bush "took responsibility" for the delays and screwups in getting aid to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but he would not confess to having made any "mistakes."

I always thougt that to take responsibility meant to be willing to admit your mistakes and to suffer the consequences, but the message here is that there are no consequences to Bush. Taking responsibility in the real world means resigning or accepting a demotion for messing up. In these strange times, taking responsiblity means mouthing the words "I'm responsible" and expecting that to end the controversy.

The last time I recall someone taking responsiblity like this was when Richard Nixon, trying to put out the fires that would ultimately consume his presidency, accepted responsibility for crimes committed by persons in the Whitehouse. He calculated that once he accepted responsibility the investigators, Congress and the press would move on and that would be the end of it; no price to pay.

That didn't work for Nixon. We'll see how it works for Dubya.

I usually do not publish whole articles in the blog, but this one by Thom Hartmann hits the nail on the head perfectly.

Mississippi voted overwhelmingly for George Bush twice. Because our state is safely red it is now obvious why Florida did so much better in the Federal aid department after hurricanes.

Wake up, Mississippi. They are playing us for chumps.


"You Can't Govern if You Don't Believe in Government" 


by Thom Hartmann

In a May 25, 2001 Morning Edition interview, Grover Norquist told National Public Radio's Mara Liasson, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Norquist got his wish. Democracy - and at least several thousand people, most of them Democrats, black, and poor - drowned last week in the basin of New Orleans. Our nation failed in its response, because for most of the past 25 years conservatives who don't believe in governance have run our government.

As incompetent as George W. Bush has been in his response to the disaster in New Orleans, he wasn't the one who began the process that inevitably led to that disaster spiraling out of control.

That would be Ronald Reagan.

It was Reagan who began the deliberate and intentional destruction of the United States of America when he famously cracked (and then incessantly repeated): "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

Reagan, like George W. Bush after him, failed to understand that when people come together into community, and then into nationhood, that they organize themselves to protect themselves from predators, both human and corporate, both domestic and foreign. This form of organization is called government.

But the Reagan/Bush ideologues don't "believe" in government, in anything other than a military and police capacity. Government should punish, they agree, but it should never nurture, protect, or defend individuals. Nurturing and protecting, they suggest, is the more appropriate role of religious institutions, private charities, families, and - perhaps most important - corporations.

Let the corporations handle your old-age pension. Let the corporations decide how much protection we and our environment need from their toxics. Let the corporations decide what we're paid. Let the corporations decide what doctor we can see, when, and for what purpose.

This is the exact opposite of the vision for which the Founders of this nation fought and died. When Thomas Jefferson changed John Locke's "Life, liberty, and private property" to "Live, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it was the first time in the history of the world that a newly founded nation had written the word "happiness" into its founding document. The phrase "promote the general welfare" - another revolutionary concept - first appeared in the preamble to our Constitution in 1787.

Talk show cons and TV talking head cons and political cons - both Republican and DLC Democratic - repeat the mantra of "smaller government," and Americans nod their heads in agreement, not realizing the hidden agenda at work.

Reagan was the first American president to actually preach that his own job was a bad thing. He once said, "Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." One can only assume he was speaking of himself and his fellow Republicans, and certainly the current Congress's devotion to the interests of inherited wealth and large corporations displays how badly his philosophy has corrupted a role so noble it drew idealists like Jefferson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts.

But cons can't imagine anybody wanting to devote their lives to the service of their nation. The highest calling in their minds is to make profit.

As Reagan said: "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."

This mind-set - that the only purpose for service in government is to set up the interests of business - may account for why not a single military-eligible member of the Bush or Cheney families has enlisted in their parents' "Noble Cause," whereas all four sons of Franklin Roosevelt joined and each was decorated - on merit - for bravery in the deadly conflict of World War II.

There are, after all, no reasons in the conservative worldview for government service other than self-enrichment. As Ronald Reagan said: "Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book."

What they don't say is that the reason they want to remove government in its protective capacity is because they can then make an enormous amount of money, and have a lot of control over people's lives, when they privatize former governmental functions. They want a power vacuum, so corporations and the rich can step in. And with no limits on the inheritability of riches after the "death tax" is ended, wealth vast enough to take over the government can emerge.

Given this conservative world-view, it shouldn't surprise us that in 2001 George W. Bush appointed his 2000 presidential campaign manager (Joseph Albaugh) as head of FEMA, or that two years later Albaugh would have left FEMA to start a consulting firm to marry corporations with Iraq "reconstruction" federal dollars, and put in charge of FEMA his assistant (and old college roommate), an equally unqualified former failed executive with the International Arabian Horse Association.

It also shouldn't surprise us that although Dick Cheney has stayed on vacation in Wyoming through all of this, his company, Halliburton, has already obtained a multi-million-dollar contract to profit from Hurricane Katrina's cleanup.

It's not that these conservatives are incompetent or stupid. When their interests are at stake, they can be very efficient. Consider when Hurricane Charley hit Jeb Bush's state - a year earlier than Katrina - on the second weekend of August, 2004, just months before the elections. The White House website notes:

As of noon Monday [the day after the hurricane left], in response to Hurricane Frances, FEMA and other Federal response agencies have taken the following actions:

• About one hundred trucks of water and 280 trucks of ice are present or will arrive in the Jacksonville staging area today. 900,000 Meals-Ready-to-Eat are on site in Jacksonville, ready to be distributed.
• Over 7,000 cases of food (e.g., vegetables, fruits, cheese, ham, and turkey) are scheduled to arrive in Winter Haven today. Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMAT) are on the ground and setting up comfort stations. FEMA community relations personnel will coordinate with DMATs to assist victims.
• Urban Search and Rescue Teams are completing reconnaissance missions in coordination with state officials.
• FEMA is coordinating with the Department of Energy and the state to ensure that necessary fuel supplies can be distributed throughout the state, with a special focus on hospitals and other emergency facilities that are running on generators.
• The Army Corps of Engineers will soon begin its efforts to provide tarps to tens of thousands of owners of homes and buildings that have seen damage to their roofs.
• The National Guard has called up 4,100 troops in Florida, as well as thousands in other nearby states to assist in the distribution of supplies and in preparation for any flooding.
• The Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and Defense together have organized 300 medical personnel to be on standby. Medical personnel will begin deployment to Florida tomorrow.
• FEMA is coordinating public information messages with Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina so that evacuees from Florida can be informed when it is safe to return.
• In addition to federal personnel already in place to respond to Hurricane Charley, 1,000 additional community relations personnel are being deployed to Atlanta for training and further assignment in Florida.

All of this aid was vitally important to Bush family political fortunes in the upcoming election of 2004. Disaster relief checks were in the mail within a week. In just the first thirteen days after Hurricane Charley hit Florida, the White House web site notes that the Bush administration had succeeded in:

• Registering approximately 136,000 assistance applicants
• Approving over 13,500 applications for more than $59 million in housing assistance
• Establishing 12 disaster recovery centers, which have assisted nearly 19,000 disaster victims
• Deploying medical teams that have seen nearly 3,000 patients
• Disbursing 1.2 million liters of water, 8.1 million pounds of ice, and 2 million meals and snacks
• Delivering over 20,000 rolls of plastic sheeting and nearly 170 generators
• Treating more than 2,900 individuals through FEMA Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, supporting damaged hospitals

That, of course, was for a Republican State, with a Republican governor, the crony brother of the President. Republicans needed to act like they cared about governing, because they wanted people to vote for them three months later.

But now, with no election looming and with death stalking a Democratic State with a Democratic Governor unrelated to the President [Louisiana], we once again see the Reagan philosophy held ascendant.

Bush's call to action? "Send cash to the Red Cross." One of those "thousand points of light" non-governmental organizations his father told us about.

As Brian Gurney, a listener from California, noted: "You can't govern if you don't believe in government."

But you sure can make a buck, and take care of your brother, your campaign manager, and your vice president's company.

________________________________________

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, host of a daily progressive talk radio show syndicated nationally by Air America Radio, and host of a morning progressive talk show on KPOJ in Portland, Oregon. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?"

We came back on line several days ago but were too busy to post. A good source of information on Hurricane Katrina is the Wikipedia, which is being constantly updated by users.

I've lost Internet connectivity since last Tuesday and still haven't gotten it back. This post is from a friend's place that escaped the worse part of the hurricane. Fortunately, I and my family are safe and the house was not damaged. I'll be back on the web as soon as I'm connected. There's much to tell.