Bootsie, Bushie, and Brownie

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." To paraphrase Santayana, if you put an idiot in charge you're doomed.

My favorite history professor, Richard Berthold of "Anyone who can bomb the Pentagon gets my vote" fame, taught my favorite history class on Rome at the University of New Mexico several years ago. Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was the grandson of Augustus and as a small boy he was dressed in a tiny soldier's outfit and paraded in front of the Roman troops. They nicknamed him Caligula, because of the miniature version of soldier's sandal-boots he wore. Roughly translated, Caligula means Bootsie.

I've been reminded of Caligula several times over the last five years. There are lots of parallels between Bootsie and our own Little Lord Candy-ass. Both were born into powerful families; both played dress-up and paraded in front of real military troops; both came to power through questionable means. But my personal favorite: Caligula appointed a horse to the Roman senate, Bush appointed a horse's ass to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so...

When Missing Class = Missing the Boat

Or when the lipstick of race is put on the class pig... Oh just go read the October 3, 2005 issue of The Nation. Adolph Reed Jr. cuts through the bullshit of Bush/FEMA/Katrina vs. NOLA like only Mr. Reed can.

What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity.
...

The abstract, moralizing patter about how and whether "race matters" or "the role of race" is appealing partly because it doesn't confront the roots of the bipartisan neoliberal policy regime. It's certainly true that George W. Bush and his minions are indifferent to, or contemptuous of, black Americans in general. They're contemptuous of anyone who is not part of the ruling class. Although Bush and his pals are no doubt small-minded bigots in many ways, the racial dimension stands out so strikingly in part because race is now the most familiar--and apparently for many progressives the most powerful--language of social justice. For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some remedial response from the federal government. But for quite some time race's force in national politics has been as a vehicle for reassuring whites that "public" equals some combination of "black," "poor" and "loser"; that cutting public spending is aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole or--in the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic version--teaching blacks "personal responsibility."
...
Class will almost certainly turn out to be a better predictor than race of who was able to evacuate, who drowned, who was left to fester in the Superdome or on overpasses, who is stuck in shelters in Houston or Baton Rouge, or who is randomly dispersed to the four winds. I'm certain that class is also a better predictor than race of whose emotional attachments to place will be factored into plans for reconstructing the city.
...

Race is too blunt an analytical tool even when inequality is expressed in glaring racial disparities. Its meanings are too vague. We can see already that the charges of racial insensitivity and neglect threaten to divert the focus of the Katrina outrage to a secondary debate about how Bush feels about blacks and whether the sources of the travesty visited upon poor New Orleanians were "color blind" or racist. Beyond that, a racial critique can lead nowhere except to demands for black participation in decision-making around reconstruction. But which black people? What plans? Reconstruction on what terms? I've seen too many black- and Latino-led municipal governments and housing authorities fuel real estate speculation with tax giveaways and zoning variances, rationalizing massive displacement of poor and other working-class people with sleight-of-hand about mixed-income occupancy and appeals to the sanctity of market forces.

The only hope we have for turning back the tide of this thuggish Administration's commitment to destroy every bit of social protection that's been won in the past century lies in finding ways to build a broad movement of the vast majority of us who are not part of the investor class. We have to be clear that what happened in New Orleans is an extreme and criminally tragic coming home to roost of the con that cutting public spending makes for a better society. It is a shocking foretaste of a future that many more of us will experience less dramatically, often quietly as individuals, as we lose pensions, union protection, access to healthcare and public education, Social Security, bankruptcy and tort protection, and as we are called upon to feed an endless war machine.

Leaving Houston

UPDATE: Ceds made it to Austin at 5am CST. It took 12 hours to travel approximately 150 miles. That's 12.5 miles per hour. For the poor souls who are just now getting on the road, because now evacuation is mandatory, traffic is literally not moving.

Houston

Sister Ceds is being evacuated to Austin. Houston most likely won't be hit hard but they're worried about power outtages. At any rate she's fine.

Maintenance Stuff

We are now whoring for Barnes & Noble. Please click on the link and buy something. Also I've broken down and started a second blog about life in the Big Apple, the bits and pieces of it that I don't spend hunched over my laptop. It's called Turtle Tales and it's still growing legs. So go read and shake your head over how cool I'm not. Who knows? I may be inspired to go out and get cool.

W's Plans

Bush's insistence that his plans for reconstructing the U.S. gulf coast won't entail rolling back any past or proposed tax cuts shows that nothing really has changed and that the real power in Washington remains Grover Norquist and his Americans For Tax Reform. Norquist group reports that in addition to W himself, 221 US Representatives and 46 Senators have signed the so-called "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," which "solemnly bind[s]" them "to oppos[ing] any and all tax increases." If you want to get an idea of how these sleazeballs operate check out Elizabeth Drew's Selling Washington. Drew observes:

Not only is legislation increasingly skewed to benefit the richest interests, but Congress itself has been changed. The head of a public policy strategy group told me, "It's not about governing anymore. The Congress is now a transactional institution. They don't take risks. So when a great moral issue comes up— like war—they can't deal with it." The theory that ours is a system of one-person-one-vote, or even that it's a representative democracy, is challenged by the reality of power and who really wields it. Barney Frank argues that "the political system was supposed to overcome the financial advantage of the capitalists, but as money becomes more and more influential, it doesn't work that way."

It's time for the Dem's to get out front and make it clear that responsible reconstruction of the gulf region cannot be achieved under this regime.

Of Course

Of Course

From Brian Williams via Daily Kos:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.

Incompetence or Complicity?

The Guardian is reporting that former members of the Sept. 11 commission are denying that the Pentagon knew that Mohamed Atta was a terrorist for two years before 9/11/01 and destroyed loads of documentation that would have been mighty difficult to explain after 9/11/01.

A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday.

The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.
...
Pentagon officials said this month they had found three more people who recall an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, have come forward to support Weldon's claims.

I think I'm going to need a bathroom break to throw up.

Sweet Home Chicago

After a wrenching debate that reopened 37-year-old wounds, Chicago on Wednesday became the nation's largest city to demand an "orderly and rapid withdrawal" of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Impeachable Offense #1899

How Michael Brown Helped Bush Win Florida

Michael Brown, the embattled head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, approved payments in excess of $31 million in taxpayer money to thousands of Florida residents who were unaffected by Hurricane Frances and three other hurricanes last year in an effort to help President Bush win a majority of votes in that state during his reelection campaign, according to published reports.
...
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel uncovered emails from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that confirmed those allegations and directly implicated Brown as playing politics at the expense of hurricane victims.
...
But the most interesting charge against Brown is that he helped speed up payments in Florida and purposely bypassed FEMA's lengthy reviews process for distributing funds in order to help Bush secure votes in the state during last year's presidential election.

Read it and weep.

Meanwhile

The Roberts Hearings continue. It ain't lookin' good.

The Blame Game (cont.)

With Brownie gone, it's time to move on up the ladder of responsibility. The Wall Street Journal reports that "internal documents and emails from FEMA and other government agencies dating back to Aug. 31 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the extent to which the federal government bungled its response to the hurricane. The documents highlight serious deficiencies in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11 playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events. Mr. Chertoff activated the National Response Plan last Tuesday by declaring the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina an 'Incident of National Significance'" AND . . .

"Some Homeland Security officials are already starting to acknowledge significant weaknesses in the national response plan, which was completely disregarded at times during the crisis.

'We at the department are not well prepared, and unfortunately, recent history has shown that that's the case,' Lee Holcomb, the department chief technology officer told a breakfast meeting of Information Technology executives on Wednesday in Washington."

Specific failures cited by WSJ include delays in activating health and safety workers, delays in coordinating with the NIH, ordering the wrong number of buses . . . Chertoff, Chertoff, bo bertoff . . .

It's For You

When the federal government can overlook entire cities, don't count on them to worry about the smallest citizens. Who is overseeing the childcare in the emergency shelters set up around the country to aide NOLA evacuees? I certainly hope it's not FEMA. Monica reminds us that someone needs to make sure the kids are alright.

Welcome to the blogosphere!

The Blame Game


The Administration doesn't want us to play "the blame game," but with such a catchy tune at the ready it's impossible to resist. So when they ask who's responsible for the Katrina Catastrophe be sure to sing out loudly:

Brownie, Brownie bo brownie
Bush’s crony, fo frownie
FEMA phony mo mownie
Brownie

Let’s do Chertoff:

Chertoff, Chertoff, bo berthoff
Banana fana fo fertoff
Bush appointed this Jerk-off
Chertoff

Let’s do Bush:

Bush, Bush bo bush
He’s to blame! fo fush
Let’s impeach him! mo mush
BUSH!

The Blame Game . . .

Yet More Houston

Kate's down in Houston and working hard.
Lot's to read over at Broken Windows. I was going to excerpt some but I think you should go ahead and read everything. It sounds like the nitty gritty stuff is being done by volunteers and there are a ton of those.

Meanwhile one interesting side effect of the belated dispatch of troops in New Orleans is that journalists are now being denied entry into the area.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

It's a shocking scene to contemplate and very emblematic of how the administration sees this crisis. The media is their pet gone rabid and they must put it down somehow. Which isn't to say that media coverage has been flawless, but it has been postively breathtaking to watch Paula Zahn, Ted Koppel, hell even Joe Scarbourough call out Bush, Cheney, Brown, and Chertoff for gross incompetence. One would think that if the prospect of tens of thousands of people dying couldn't stir Bush to action, the prospect of those tens of thousands of people dying on television could. The fact that Rove could not anticipate this kind of thing happening is illustrative of how dangerously superficial the business of governance is to these people. Some of us knew that already.

Above all, spend no money

It strikes me that one possible explanation for the feeble FEMA response is that the directive from within Homeland Security was for FEMA to sit on the sidelines showing itself ever at the ready (so many mre's shipped, blah, blah, blah) until local and state resources were exhausted. The FEMA guys would come in only for targeted events when the cameras were rolling. That's one way to understand "Brownie's" injunction in his memo to his staff before Katrina hit to ``convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public.''

While all the rest of us were thinking that Homeland Security was funded to direct and coordinate first responders in the case of an attack or catastrophe, Chertoff and Brownie saw themselves as backups whose first job was to keep federal expenditures as low as possible (how else are you going to justify further tax cuts?) even as FEMA patches and t-shirts were prominently displayed. Now the people in the Mississippi & Louisiana gulf have paid dearly--and so will we all.

Update from Houston

Ceds called back. Some medical staff were attacked a convenience store near the Astrodome. Baylor has requested that the first-years not return to volunteer until there's a bit more oversight. At least the volunteers can leave. There's still not enough security for the refugees.

Are You Fucking Kidding Me?!

No.

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Amidst anarchy, negligence, and carnage Halliburton manages to pull a profit. I can't believe these people. By now I should know better but I can't believe it.

The View from Houston

Sometime blogger, full-time sister, and first-year med student Ceds is in Houston and spent the day volunteering at the Astrodome. She says that it's pretty grim. A lot of people are going to get sick from wading in raw sewage with open wounds. It's crowded and dirty. Security is scarce. There are reports of theft. People are restless and fights are breaking out. She says she's never seen anything like it. Today she washed out the cuts of a four-year-old boy who was trapped in an attic for two days. He doesn't know where his parents are. Another man had a broken collarbone, and received painkillers but nothing else. He also has no idea where his family is. That's what she heard over and over again. Everybody there is searching for family. The one thing they have is medical attention due to the promixity of Baylor Medical Center. But the sense of disorder is pervasive. Nobody know's who's in charge. People wander around aimlessly.

Things that they need ASAP are:

Toothbrushes
Tampons and pads
Hand sanitizer and baby wipes
Batteries (AA and AAA)
Socks
Underwear (kids and adults)
Toys

Here's a link for where to drop stuff off in Houston. Meanwhile Ceds is going back tomorrow. She's tired, she's shocked, she's a little frightened, but she's going back. Everybody hope that she stays safe.

Unbelievable

Can we for a moment stop talking about the looting and talk about something truly criminal?

Hundreds of Katrina evacuees who fled to Tallahassee seeking refuge from the storm have been politely told by their hotels and motels to leave this weekend to make room for a football game: FSU vs. Miami.

Hotel space is traditionally scarce any time the Florida State Seminoles take on the University of Miami Hurricanes, one of the choicest tickets on the college football schedule.

But with hotels packed with families from Louisiana and Mississippi, and room space booked for Monday's game for months, hotel operators say they are trying to accommodate the evacuees but have no choice but to nudge them out.


''We have to let them know what's going on in town and they're going to have to leave,'' said Angie Rayman, manager at the Howard Johnson. ``Many of them are trying to get closer to home anyway.''