I was working on a major piece about Katrina but have decided to pitch it to a magazine instead of publishing it here. Does this attempt at commodification make for a worse blog? Yes. So, this means there will be no sweeping socialist, environmentalist, civil libertarian broadsides this week; instead we have some odds and ends, and, perhaps for the first time, <b>actual casual asides</b> (dry your pants):
<b>Roberts for O'Connor for Rehnquist</b>
Lefties freaking out about Rehnquist's death should be comforted to know that instead of replacing O'Connor with Roberts, we now get Roberts for Rhenquist, a deal I would have taken anytime from a Republican president.
Now, in terms of O'Connor, she was a fine conservative justice, and I expect there to be an actual fight over her replacement by Democrats who will either use the filibuster or lose their seats in the next election. Interesting thought: will Bush's Gonzalez nomination get a pass because he's pro-choice, making him the perfect "middle-of-the-road" appointment for Bush? Will those whose only understanding of SCOTUS hinges on Roe v. Wade sacrifice their single-issue concerns about the appointment? Do we still get the chance to grill Gonzalez about torture on live TV?
<b>Katrina washes out the Red from Louisiana</b>
Katrina has flipped the number one concern to domestic policy instead of security for the first time since 9/11 in new polls. Hello, Democratic president! I hope to goodness it's not Hilary Clinton, I really do. And no more fucking Senators! They don't win, almost never do. Send us a governor, don't be crazy. I predict Louisiana will go blue again in 2006 and 2008, not only because of the protest vote, but because all the rich people have fled to other metropolitan areas (where they're diluted among overwhelming ly blue urban counties). There's nobody left in LA but Democrats, and they're pissed the fuck off.
<b>Media coverage n.b.</b>
<i>Arguing for a Congressional review in addition to an independent review on live television</i>—because you'd rather federal funds go to an admittedly partisan, superfluous investigation than actual hurricane disaster victims. There's a big fuck you to poor people <i>and</i> government inefficiency rolled into one.
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<b>Assorted Hurricane fallout:</b>
Individualists' dogmas runs over their karmas in praising individual efforts at the expense of admitting that the anti-government attitude of our "pro-business" president is to blame for the levee breaches, not to mention the temporarily jail/pariah state which existed for days at the Superbowl. Thank goodness we <i>now</i> have shitloads of National Guardsmen protecting property rights at machine-gun-point! There's where our government's priorities should lie—first response against people making the best of a bad situation by scoring some DVD players Katrina would have otherwise ruined. Nobody wants to blame Nature for ruining their businesses, thank goodness for poor people so we can have some human scapegoats. As many have noted, Bush is well on his way to drowning the government in Grover Norquist's bathtub.
Let's be crystal clear about this: There is no individual with the means and the incentive to take on a project as broad as hurricane prevention.
There is no possible way the market could have prevented the loss of life in New Orleans—the market can only react, when coroporate donations are good PR, where money can be made by future monopolists and rebuilding contractors. We know this because the market didn't react, there was no civic association plan to strengthen the levees where Bush critically and fatally underfunded SELA's attempts to do so. The Times-Picayune wrote a big article on it and everybody read it, the information was there for all businesses and individuals, and the news of underfunding was also there.
No matter how valiant or courageous or generous or caring the heroes of the rescue effort are (and I certainly count those who offer either money, time, or both to the relief effort), their efforts pale against what the government could have done much simpler and less tragically before the storm. Eric writes about this in his post about the Broken Window fallacy. As I've said before, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—the greatest heroes in my utilitarian calculus, are those who save the most number of lives, whose contributions have the greatest value.
No individual can achieve what a government can, and that's why we have governments—they're the only ones with the means and sufficient incentive to fix the levees. Don't get me wrong, it's great that corporations across the country are sending in donations and matching employee contributions, but was Office Max going to donate a million dollars to fund the levee-maintenance budget of the Army Corps of Engineers? And wouldn't the money have been much better spent that way?
Some of you may also be asking, "what the hell is the Army Corps of Engineers doing instead of fixing and/or strengthening the levees?" (to say nothing of making Lake Pontchartrain safe to swim in again?) Why, they've been building a pointless and environmentally racist canal, ostensibly as a favor to businesses on the Mississippi; except that the use of the canal hasn't been anywhere near the official estimates. Our government can't be trusted to helpt he people, but it sure as fuck will send the Army to dig canals in the name of some federal crony! That's service, the kind of services we all pay for. As for the injurious incompetence of officials who knew what was coming but didn't do enough to stop the levee breach, etc., more about this at another date.
I mean, look at FEMA. Go to their website, or their store. This whole FEMA thing has been turned into a farm-league government subdivision to stick your otherwise unemployable buddies. Taking their anti-government/pro-business attitude to the Federal government is simply criminal; it's one thing to decry bad government at the hands of your ideological and political enemies, quite another to intentionally disregard your civic duties because you don't think government can help people. I'm not a soldier because I'm a pacifist—if you hate the government, don't get a government job.
The way these 'pro-business' types run government, it's just another way for them to make money—the true consequence of the libertarian style of government. Which is why I'll suffer their platitudes about how they trust business over government as long as they're not putting their rhetoric about how awful the government is into action as our governors.
<i>Other notes:</i>
Three timelines illustrate my theory of the onotological chain, watch it in action:
Katrina timeline by "Nobody Knows Anything
"Rightwing Nut House" timeline
Don't ask me why I was watching the 700 Club, but Pat Robertson just said, "to the best of my knowledge, FEMA hasn't contributed anything" with regard to "Operation Blessing." But interestingly enough, this came after his description of how OB works with the Salvation Army (along with the Assembly of God and Catholic Charities, etc.). They showed footage of a chuck wagon they funded, except that the people making meals on camera were wearing Salvation Army get-ups. So, FEMA's listing is also redundant (forget about the whole church-and-state thing). Oh! Almost forgot—Robertson said that "we're absorbing most of the overhead" for this operation, then said that most of the money was in block grants to churches (which, of course have their own overhead into individual programs). It's looking an awful lot like Operation Blessing is a scam compared to other charities who actually have resources, programs and strategies for helping people, as opposed to OB, who take the maximal amount of money off the top for tax-exempt clergy. Not that I'm a huge fan of the Salvation Army, either—they discriminate against gays and proselytize, but in a crisis like this one, I'd rather they get my money with a minimum of overhead.
<b>Donate to relief efforts here (links are to secure donation pages:</b>
People's Hurricane Fund
<br>(info about the group here)
<br><i>(thanks to Liliana, and the Nation)</i>
