Response 'baffling'?"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." -- Joseph Mengele, camp doctor at Auschewitz, notorious for his experiments on inmates.
Heavily armed military police patrol Canal Street in New Orleans.
Photo: AP
[
Does this look like humanitarian relief for New Orleans?]
--
The South Side Democrat called FEMA's slow response "baffling."
"I don't understand how you could have a situation where you've got several days' notice of an enormous hurricane building in the Gulf Coast, you know that New Orleans is 6 feet below sea level. ... The notion that you don't have good plans in place just does not make sense," Obama said.
-- Chicago Sun-Times report
It's only "baffling" if you haven't caught up with reality yet. Remember, they are creating new realities, and they are hell for anyone on the wrong side of their guns. Hyperbole? Ask the Iraqis.
People forced to stay in the Superdome, in the city, without food or water or medical care. Forced. With guns. People trying to relay supplies out of a truck, instead of having them thrown at them from an overpass, met with guns.
Here's the reality: this whole exercise is just the beginning. The more they do things that are unacceptable to decent people, the more they will need an army (read: thugs) that will execute shoot to kill orders. Surely you don't think it was an accident that they could so easily round up a contingent of Iraq battle-hardened soldiers to patrol N.O., do you? Do you see incompetence in that?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, they are not incompetent. They accomplish what they want to do. Steal two elections? Done. Invade a country, rob it blind and set up army bases? Done. Allow a natural disaster to fester, whip up unsubstantiated horror stories so you can introduce police state features such as mandatory detention and shoot to kill military operations against fellow countrymen? Done.
It looks hideous to us. It's all incredibly crude. So we're baffled. We won't accept that they are evil, inhuman, predatory scum. And it’s not like they try to hide it. When Bush was asked about what went wrong and what didn’t go right, he responded, “What didn’t go right?”
They have tremendous resources. They have trillions in unaccounted for, black ops money. They can get things done. And the media, the big broadcasters that mesmerize the populace, is on THEIR side. The scumbags are unaccountable, and they know it. Hence the flagrant disregard for New Orleans in the days after the hurricane.
They've had years and years to move people into position, to groom, to purge, to get people to accept and go along. It's only going to get worse. New outrages will come.
They will roll out new products, and they will turn the screw a little more.
This has only just begun. The impact of hundreds of thousands of displaced people, who need jobs and homes and whose children need schooling, will slowly but surely begin to be felt. The psychological scars from the experience will begin to tell upon them. "We are more vulnerable now than before 9/11 because faith in the system is gone," reported Anne Gervasi from New Orleans. "No system can sustain itself as a viable entity when the citizenry are the walking wounded. Victims implode a system from within and expose its decay. This is the beginning of the end unless we can get a drastic change of philosophy and restore the government to a system 'by the people for the people.' Right now nobody down here believes we have that."
What have the dead taught the living? Responsible and effective government matters. At this moment, we have neither. We are, simply put, on our own.
-- William Rivers Pitt, Let the Dead Teach the Living
---
Yes, and if you are in the way of the Halliburton/Military profit-off-misery machine, there's also an army and detainment camps to deal with.
This is more of the same. Really, there is nothing shocking here. What they've done to Iraq is ten times worse. What they've done to countless countries through economic hitmen is much worse. This is just a little intro. A little hint of how bad it can and will get here, of how we the citizens of the U.S. will be treated, as in no different than the citizens have been treated elsewhere. The life of blind privilege is over, at least for those of us who can see.
---
Karen Johnson prefers to stay so she can take care of her parents, who are disabled. She walks around waving a white flag so that no one mistakes her for a looter. But she will not stand her water-laden ground when authorities arrive, she said.
"When they come with M16s to the house pointing, with their hands on the trigger, I'm not crazy," Johnson said. "I will go."
Johnson needn't worry about police firepower.
Police Chief Eddie Compass said his officers are "going to do this with sensitivity."
"We're going to use the minimal amount of force," he said.
CNN report
---
The human and compassionate response to a disaster is not a military force with shoot to kill orders, it is not, as I saw on Fox News last night, soldiers going through houses with guns at the ready as if they are at war in an occupied country.
More people need to catch up with reality. But I don't think I can wait anymore. This country is going down fast. There will be more emergencies, natural, man-made and economic. Catastrophic upheaval for millions, breakdown of civil order, and soldiers to quell the unrest and camps for survivors, as well as dissidents.
---
Regarding forming communities in order to survive. I heard a radio interview yesterday with a Chicago doctor who had been one of the infectious disease doctors in for a conference staying at the Ritz Carleton. We might laugh at the relative luxe with which such people suffered out five or six days, but still, things weren't so hot for these people either. It was a rather ordinary interview in many respects. He told about how they set up a triage unit and worked, with intermittent electricity, to treat people suffering from lack of their medications, cuts and bruises, dysentery, etc. They had several serious cases and tried to see if they could get them to Charity Hospital. That's when they found out what a nightmare was going on over there.
At any rate, the interview was about to wind up, and this doctor, sensing the immiment end of his fifteen minutes (5 actually) of fame, said "May I just say one thing?" The interviewer consented. Here's a paraphrase of what he said: "I just want to say that we were all kinds of people there. We were black people and white, hispanic, gay, and straight, And we formed a community in order to survive. And I'm just thinking that that is what has to happen all over America right now: we have to form these kinds of communities to take care of each other, because that will be the only way we can survive."
Holy shit, I thought. Was he saying we can no longer depend on government and must take it all into our own hands? And that we damn well better make sure those communities are inclusive, because these divisions and labels don't mean squat when you only have 1 bottle of Perrier left among you? I think he did.
samela | 09.08.05 - 8:04 pm | #
-- From a Hullabalo comment thread
--
This is the "homeland" equivalent of picking up a country and slamming it against the wall every now and then.
--
albertchampion - I have been posting on my blog [Nothing New Under the Sun, check it out] and anywhere that I could scream, that this is an act of war for days, and I think I have figured out the motivation, too.
Here is a question for researchers which I am not able to do the legwork right now: match up the timeline of the defunding of the levvees, which came when they were half finished and most vulnerable, unsealed repairs, - and see how it corresponds to the insurgency in Iraq rising in force.
If it starts as it becomes obvious that no flowers'n'barrels'o'oil were forthcoming, then we have the motive: Texas is annexing Louisiana for their oil; and the Mayflower Medicis are using the Maybury Machiavellis to secure one party rule and consolidate power for their collective aristocracy of blood and wealth.
If it started *before* - then this is LIHOP II, and the whole damn thing, from Saddam to Osama to Saddam, has been a Phantom Menace from the start.
I dont' know which possibility is more likely, or more horrible. But it's one of those two.
bellatrys | Homepage | 09.09.05 - 7:08 am | #
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The raison d'etre for this, Digby, is contained in your preceding post.
It is an excuse for dictatorship, the rule of the Strong Man over the stupid helpless peasants who could only fight amongst themselves when crisis hit.
They tried to set up a situation that would "prove" the Straussian paradigm, that the masses are incapable and must be ruled for own good by the innately-better elite; social engineering/experimentation of the nth degree, unprecedented scale. They expected race riots in response: there were none. That did not stop them: they just lied and said that the black savages were engaging in slaughter and rapine. People did not believe them: the hoi polloi came frmo around the country to rescue other peasants, caring nothing for color: so they had to keep them out and their victims in.
And now they are trying to hide the bodies, and say that their point is proven: one man one vote democracy is a foolish system that cannot be effective in the face of the harsh real-world challenges of the 21st century and so we must be Strong and give the Keys back to Daddy Landowner, who as always knows best.
The fact that Gov. Blanco is female and a democrat is part of their fascist meme. The fact that she in fact was not weak and did ask for help did not stop them from refusing her aid and then lying about her request. The fact that instead of surrendiering LA to the plutocrats at once she refused - which is why no aid allowed in, in part - is ignored by the SCLM. The fact that her actions have been, as soon as she could, to hire the competent former director of FEMA, Witt, and put him in charge of managing disaster recovery since they have been abandoned, and has been touring the front in military trucks to assess the damage and give orders, is ignored in favor of the meme of her fecklessness.
The fact that she was a prolife anti-affirmative-action conservative Democrat who ran as Repub-lite, explicitly - is also left out of the discourse.
As is the fact that disaster management for NOLA had been subcontracted to a private company named IEM, of shadowy origin and memoryholing habits, as exposed by China Mieville on his blog, Lenin's Tomb, who apparently did nothing at all for the years that they were getting paid to come up with a hurricane management plan.
Connect. The. Dots.
And then perhaps people will have a bit more sympathy for the America-hating of the communists, to whom we did all this, even if they weren't communists really or at least weren't totalitarians but people like Chavez, for the past hundred-odd years...
...America-hating that is so virulent that even Iran, to whom we also did this, with a CIA sponsored and stage-managed coup (complete with fake native leadres) against secular elected leader Mossadegh in 1953, is trying to help us...
bellatrys | Homepage | 09.09.05 - 7:23 am | #
-- From a Hullabalo thread here.
--
For more on FEMA and what the business world might call its core competencies, please see the indispensable Kurt Nimmo:
FEMA and Katrina: REX-84 Revisited.
UPDATE: Chris Floyd nails it, as usual...
No Direction Home
(excerpt)
Just as the media have always overhyped Bush's popularity, they are now overhyping the "political crisis" he is supposedly facing. There is no political crisis whatsoever, if by that phrase you mean something that will cause Bush to alter his policies. The war in Iraq will go on. The war against the poor will go on. The slow destruction of middle-class security and stability will go on. The long and ferocious right-wing campaign against the very idea of a "common good" will go on, unabated -- perhaps even strengthened -- as it faces a backlash from the half of the American public that does accept the reality of what they saw in New Orleans and all along the Gulf Coast.
This is what you must understand: Bush and his faction do not care if they have "the consent of the governed" or not. They are not interested in governing at all, in responding to the needs and desires and will of the people. They are only interested in ruling, in using the power of the state to force their radical agenda of elitist aggrandizement and ideological crankery on the nation, and on the world.
[more]
