Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Newsvine
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiThe Shock Doctrine in Action in New Orleans
Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.
The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.
First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.
Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city's public services and spaces, most notably it's homes, schools and hospitals.
Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.
Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here.
And footage from yesterday's police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.
That last segment contains a terrific interview with Kali Akuno, executive director of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. Akuno puts the demolitions in the big picture, telling Amy Goodman:
This is just one particular piece of this whole program. Public hospitals are also being shut down and set to be demolished and destroyed in New Orleans. And they've systematically dismantled the public education system and beginning demolition on many of the schools in New Orleans--that's on the agenda right now--and trying to totally turn that system over to a charter and a voucher system, to privatize and just really go forward with a major experiment, which was initially laid out by the Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative think tanks shortly after the storm. So this is just really the fulfillment of this program.
Akuno is referring to the Heritage Foundation's infamous post-Katrina meeting with the Republican Study Group in which participants laid out their plans to turn New Orleans into a Petri dish for every policy they can't ram through without a disaster. Read the minutes on my website.
For more context, here are couple of related excerpts from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:
The news racing around the shelter [in Baton Rouge] that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city"--which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets," you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.
Over at the shelter, Jamar Perry, a young resident of New Orleans, could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died." He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us in the food line overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?"
A mother with two kids chimed in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."
...
At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.
It happened in New Orleans. After the flood, an already divided city turned into a battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones--the result not of water damage but of the "free-market solutions" embraced by the president. The Bush administration refused to allow emergency funds to pay public sector salaries, and the City of New Orleans, which lost its tax base, had to fire three thousand workers in the months after Katrina. Among them were sixteen of the city's planning staff--with shades of "de Baathification," laid off at the precise moment when New Orleans was in desperate need of planners. Instead, millions of public dollars went to outside consultants, many of whom were powerful real estate developers. And of course thousands of teachers were also fired, paving the way for the conversion of dozens of public schools into charter schools, just as Friedman had called for.
Almost two years after the storm, Charity Hospital was still closed. The court system was barely functioning, and the privatized electricity company, Entergy, had failed to get the whole city back online. After threatening to raise rates dramatically, the company managed to extract a controversial $200 million bailout from the federal government. The public transit system was gutted and lost almost half its workers. The vast majority of publicly owned housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for demolition by the federal housing authority. Much as the tourism lobby in Asia had longed to be rid of the beachfront fishing villages, New Orleans' powerful tourism lobby had been eyeing the housing projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter, the city's tourism magnet.
Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside one of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining that "they've had an agenda for St. Bernard a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn't do it. So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighbourhood when the neighbourhood is weakest. ... This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!"
Amid the schools, the homes, the hospitals, the transit system and the lack of clean water in many parts of town, New Orleans' public sphere was not being rebuilt, it was being erased, with the storm used as the excuse. At an earlier stage of capitalist "creative destruction," large swaths of the United States lost their manufacturing bases and degenerated into rust belts of shuttered factories and neglected neighbourhoods. Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Western-world image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mould belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure and extreme weather.
Since the publication of The Shock Doctrine, my research team has been putting dozens of original source documents online for readers to explore subjects in greater depth. The resource page on New Orleans has some real gems.
Naomi Klein is the author of many books, including her most recent, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which will be published in September.Visit Naomi's website at www.naomiklein.org, or to learn more about her new book, visit www.shockdoctrine.com .
© 2007 Huffington Post
52 Comments so far
Show AllAlanfrom Big Easy -
Perhaps the Iberville Housing area may look good to you from your point of view and favorite areas of the city. But the C.J. Peete is down the street from St. Charles Street and Magazine and LA street which is becomming a pretty hip area, with its easy access to the SuperDome it makes an ideal property for privatization. And by the by, Home Depot is just opening up a new Home Depot by a soon to be demolished housing area (where people are living in the units) at the end of Claiborne by the recycling yard by the Super Dome.
Then there is the Lafitte - not a far driving distance from the Quarter at all. It's amazing the Lafitte buildings are in the best conditon of all of the housing units and they are still determined to raze them. I have watched people struggle in this area as their medical buildings were not re-opened, the local stores, the grocery market - etc. That is what the pattern seems to be down here - monied areas get more money to pretty things up - get the trolley running and the tourist activities going - and the poor? What about Charity hospital?
The more I drive around various parts of the New Orleans and photograph and meet people, the more I see how these buildings respresent $$$$ - it is shocking how whole neighborhoods - still look shell shocked. Many of them are around public housing. The stores around them, not opened, the schools boarded up. No hardware stores. Often no drug stores in walking distance.
I had driven a woman I know who had always lived in the 8th Ward and didn't venture much out of it - around the city. As we were driving around and we enetered areas that were clearly not as affluent she suddenly exclaimed - "How did it get so black around here?" And she is a black woman. It is that clear too often in this city.
"Black" areas in New Orleans? Where people have been for the most part, except for the help of awesome volunteers, left to rot with their houses and empty buildings and streets around them.
It reminds me of what was done to the Black man and woman in the past - how society would them they couldn't go into certain places or do certain things - they would be blocked out - locked out.
Well I see a similar thing happening on the streets of New Orleans and the selective re-building process - the working poor and poor, the elderly, are being locked out of their lives, their neighborhoods and then blamed for not coming back to rebuild. The housing units that have been rebuilt - well Bill Quigley has been writing on this, (he has been involved as a lawyer with public housing since 1971 in New Orleans)then you would know that there is a crazy process that HUD/HANO has set up that makes it pretty darn hard to even get in to those "hundreds" of empty apartments. Then there is coming up with the money for the extraordinarily high Entergy gas and electric bills and the deposits. You as well as I know that there are really, really, poor working people who are struggling to survive living in New Orleans - many are still living in devastated conditions. Go through the "black" neighborhoods - and measure it to the living standars in your neighborhood.
And on using the argument about former housing residents - what about the 8ooo on the Section 8 waiting list? I believe there are another 6000 (I may be off on the number 5-6-7-thousand)who are waiting on Katrina lists to get into Public Housing. (These stats from Bill Quigleys testimoney at the city council meeting December 20, 2007 - televised for us locals)
Then we have 11,500 (let's say this week Unity was able to get 500 people off the streets from tent city, etc) there is still another estimated 11 thousand who are homeless. The public housing units could have been used for transitioning the homeless and help the people whose lives were already marginalized before the storm recover.
Your idea about using the units to house the fire and police was an excellent idea also. These buildings could be used for transitioning until more afforable housing is made available. Then each area could be evaluated and then decisons made for razing - which some of the buildings need to be razed.
Here's another thing - there are NO plans for redevelopment. NONE! Contracts have not been awarded. What's the rush to demolish so many buildings all at once? One police officer stated the reason he belived they city council and the government were set on doing so to me succintly - "if you destroy the homes of the people who once lived there you take away their hope of returning."
No, Naomi's assertions that the goverment was waiting in the wings for just such an opportunity that manifested in New Orleans, is in my opinion right on the $$$. Just like the sudden manifestation of the Patriot Act. The government seems to want to downsize and privatize. And we have already seen the first fruits of the governments idea of privatizing - just ask our soldiers. Or the Iraqi citizens and those who are at the mercy of our "private" mercenary army.
The people who need the support of the public system the most right now are many of the people who suffered to worst effects of the flooding, who lost everything - especially in public housing where their unprotected belongings were left to rot and be vandalized. Many of the people who suffered the most sat for days on roof tops, in trees with their families, listening to people die and scream out. I have spoken with them, and inevitably, these are the population who are still living in areas that are devastated.
I was at a family's house today in Violet, LA down the road a bit from the city - the family I was with lived together on the same street all their lives - they had 11 family residences on the street. They all lost their homes. They are still living in cramped FEMA trailers. Some told the stories of black people who saw the planes and helicopters fly over them and their neighbors days upon days, so many times and days that people in their desperation and frustration of being ignored whilst they went and picked up people (they believed) from wealthier affluent neighborhoods. They told me of a neighboring area where people began to shoot as they passed them. These families, elderly, children, teens, the sick, spent days on on their roof tops waiting for help without food, without sanitation, without water except for the Katrina water laping up at their roofs, without hope, watching the planes and helicopters fly by them, ignoring them.
We all saw it on tv it was a majority of Black New Orleanians who suffered the greatest. And it is the same population now who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, truama, who are going untreated because we can't open Tulane/DePaul psychiatric hospital even though it suffered minimal damage and the building is in good enough condition to "film a movie about someone with a mental illness getting treatment at the closed facility".
New Orleans doen't have the public service systems we need because those in power don't want certain New Orleanians back. It is a way to lock certain portions of the pre-Katrina population out of their city. Brand New Orlean$ is inclusive but only to some - those who can now afford it.
As far as affordable housing? I am putting together a series of photo's on affordable housing - it usually has a very high percentage of empty housing in a neighborhood that has been abandoned by businesses and city leaders. There are so many abandoned buildings in New Orleans and so little being done to utilize them for those in need.
I disagree with your premise of a falsehood on the land not being interesting to developers - brand New Orlean$ is in full throttle - I don't think you are going to recognize this city in 10 years. The housing projects sit inside the city limits and they are juicy tidbits that can be developed like the Saulet apartment complex on Tchuopotoulis by the convention center(sorry about my spelling) where 1 bedrooms start at the $1000 mark. They are building these box apartment complexes faster than they are building affordable housing. New Orleans is going to be a shell of itself - a Disneyland-LasVegas-MallofAmerica - tourist trap. $$$ for developers. Whilst there is a standstill in the rest of the country when it comes to building - Brand New Orlean$ offers up the spoils of the public housing lots and the surrounding areas to private industry for "redevelopment". Which wouldn't be so bad but we all know when it comes to making a buck or an ethical business decision based on the common good and benefit for all - privatized companies are obligated to their stockholders to make them money. They are not obligated to serve the needs of the public sector. That is why we have a government remember? "By the People, for the People". "We" the "People"???
I invite you to go out with me as a fellow (transplanted albeit), New Orleanian when I photograph... Or perhaps under the Claiborne bridge to speak with some of the homeless? Perhaps a drive on St. Claude in the Lower 9th?
Wow. I guess I had a lot to say.
It is so hard to be around social and encomomic injustices and stay centered.
Sorry if my reply came across personal AlanfromBigEasy. This was not a personal attack on you by any means, it was what and how you said what you did that seemed to trigger my intense and somewhat prolific response.
Especially your last sentence, "quite frankly, we do not have the... or much else to support "them" in any case.
Them?
Why aren't we "supporting them"? Isn't that what we are supposed to do? Support each other in times of suffering and tribulation?
If one persons suffering is over before another's suffering does it make the second person blameworthy for not healing as fast as the first? Especially when the first person most likely has more opportunities for faster healing than the second?
A well meaning out-of-town friend referred me to this article. I stopped reading when I came to this obvious falsehood.
but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels
This is only remotely true for Iberville, which is not slated for demolition.
An article based upon an obvious untruth is not worth my time to read.
There are a number of Dick Cheney inspired actions to destroy New Orleans (one subtle one is that the Postal Workers are picketing because Washington will not give them the resources to properly deliver the mail, a Federal responsibility under the US Constitution. An ingenious means of destroying a city, do not deliver the mail properly). Proceeding with this demolition is not one of them.
Several hundred units are available and empty because no one on public assistance has applied. Two years ago many units should have been quickly renovated and given to police, fire fighters, health care workers, etc. instead of forcing them into tiny trailers, but that has almost passed.
There are not former public housing residents lining up to return, (hundreds of units are empty and ready to rent) and quite frankly we do not have the health care system, social workers and much else to support them in any case.
I just got Shock Doctrine today as a Christmas gift. I can't wait to dig in.
I have been documenting through the use of photograghs, personal stories and news articles correlations - what I believe to be proof - of what Naomi has written on in Shock Doctrine.
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has helped to give me a context for what I was seeing in Post-Katrina New Orleans through the lens of my camera and though being a volunteer.
http://www.PostKatrina2007.blogspot.com
… not to worry, that was her lighter side, consider what the (very likely) Aleister Crowley part, dark side of her DNA wanted to say:
"Oh, swell, these people should have all have died, when we blew out the levies - and we'd better get with the folks at weather control as they were off by 20 miles for the storm center's path, and how the hell did that storm get demoted to just a category 3.
Next time I want a cat 6 storm going exactly where we say we want it, or you and your families are all going to be boiled in oil - I do so like french fried critters"
....does anyone remember Mamma Barbara Bush's comments when she saw the conditions in which people were forced to live during the flood? The rapes, and molestations,the deaths, the children begging for food and water...the complete devastation that was taking place?
Barbara said, "Oh, well, these people are used to living like that..."
Accept it.
It is undeniably true that the project housing in New Orleans is terrible. However, the projects should not be torn down until decent replacement housing is provided for those displaced. Kudos to Brad Pitt for trying to do something to help the suffering residents of New Orleans by building affordable shelter...he's using $5 million of his own dollars. The political and business "leaders" who are taking advantage of the suffering of the people should be removed and where appropriate prosecuted for corruption.
During the 1997 flood of the Red River in Grand Forks North Dakota/Minnesota, Winnipeg stayed dry. Winnipeg would have flooded also if it had not been for Duff's Ditch.
Humans cannot stop a flood but they can limit the amount of damage that it causes.
REBEL FARMER -- de nada.
I wish your timeline was inaccurate, but I also wished for the smirker_in_chief's smirk to keep on cracking bigger, like Pinocchio's nose.
I am so unqualified to really know what is going on, but at least I have a good imagination, and have read John Burner's Shockwave Rider, which predicted much of this era (~ 30 yr ago)
Yeah, I'm guessing that it's a sculpted multilayer thing orchestrated into n-dimensional lies that loop around on themselves, spawning new generations of lies to get twisted around more people, moving along opposite polarities to engender more conflict and fear. It's resonance of dissonance (this phrase is copyrighted 2007©)
Almost everyone is impacted, some more than others, depending on their belief structures, exposure levels, and people around them (support system).
Forgiveness will be divinely useful, but I hazard any guesses of future outcomes, given so many unquantifiable variables intersecting together.
Individual survival may eventually be likened to avoiding rain drops in a typhoon.
nspire: Thanks! I'm going to have to think about all that you have said. Somewhere in it I see a key. I just can't figure out which lock it might open. I think Solution C is inevitable and coming very soon.
One thing I have noticed in the comments are blanket statements about Repugs and Dimms. This doesn't make much sense to me. I think all of us, no matter what our political persuasion, are suffering from the same tyrant. I also believe that we seem to be stuck in trying to somehow deflect "blame" for how we have all been duped. I think we all need to all wake up and realize that we all face the same enemy. And we had better forgive each other for past mistakes in judgement and start working together for our own survival and the survival of our nation.
John Freeman says: There is not a Republican who ever lived who can resist the call of a pile of money.
What about Louis Riel? He was a Republican during his stay in the United States. It seems as if he was motivated by things other than money.
Ok, bit of a shitdisturber, but blanket statements usually have exceptions to them.
"Can people break out of their cognitve dissonance and reclaim their true self image? If so, how?"
Sometimes a bit of cognitive dissonance is good for a person or a society. I would like to see Torture, the tearing down of affordable house, and the Patriot Act as being inconsistent with American values.
I'm Canadian, I don't think I am the right one to comment on American superiority.
The talk of the European Unions and applying it to the North American situation tends to be associated with the idea of the harmonizing of Canadian and American laws. There seems to be a bit of cognitive dissonance between such harmonization and Canadian political sovereignty - the two concepts are deemed inconsistent with each other - though not to Stephen Harper.
REBEL FARMER -- You're correct that Cognitive Dissonance (CogDis) "requires the accepted "reality" of a large group of people to make the rationalizations "stick" or acceptable", but the rationalizations are automatic and have individual differences.
Remember, this is a manipulative web of various levels of deceit and illusions about terror and terrorists, carefully packaged alongside of plausible 'GOODLY home spun apple pie and motherhood' stuff. SOLUTION_A. If the vast majority of Americans traveled outside of the USA, they'd eventually loose the ingrained belief of moral superiority and our collective righteousness, once their bubbles burst and those "other" peoples' point of view insinuated itself (ugly American comes out). The European Union has benefited from collective purging of nationalistic flag (gag) wrapping, which leaves them inoculated from the worst of this, as it is no longer plausible (them all being "right"). Neither is likely, so
SOLUTION_B. Convince the massively programmed immoral majority that the USA policies and they are immoral, undeserving of the world's respect, and they're all going to hell. This wont work very well (didn't for Catholics), and may actually backfire if those sending the message are re-framed as terrorists wanting to destroy America. As we've now created the reason for the gov't to lock up those progressives and torture them to ease the pain the rest of America feels.
SOLUTION_C. Wait until the big Greater Depression hits, and most people are dumpster diving for diner. At this point most wont feel morally superior to a rat, and they'll no longer be sold on CogDis programming. At this point the lessons are not expected to hold, and barbed wire and brut force will be substituted.
SOLUTION_D. Program everyone's web browser to startup with Common Dreams (and force them to read it like in Clock Work Orange), convince MSM to break the conditioning, or hope for a really big natural disaster, like a big asteroid to hit Earth.
We're really talking about the problem stemming from American's no longer leading a self-examined life, nor interested in outside (independent) people's views to validate one's own perceptual context. You're correct that they need their twisted "programming affirmed as "normal" or "acceptable" by others", as this context relies upon a consensus view propagated onto an essentially 'weak minded adherence to group think' (like the idea of what happens to the pink monkey amongst all of the brown ones). You're also correct that "if enough of us challenged those that have turned their backs on their true self image (or the groups that promote it), would that in of itself break the cycle". The trouble there is that the true self image is linked to finding out how evil Geo II's policies and illusions are - which PHARMCOM will love for all the extra cases of depression needing to be treated.
Let me provide an illustrative example, that I observed (Hi School psych class) when one of the anointed ones was spoofed by our teacher and her best buddies (the in-group of lettered athletic elitist and matching cheerleaders). The scene is set by a panel of her peers moving their desks into the front of the room, while she is temporarily absent from knowing about the "con". The teacher then has the panel promise to unanimously agree to and talk about something everyone would normally disagree with, to this target girl, to create dissonance within her.The subject matter was someone is being severely punished for being a victim of crime or poverty, and the panel agrees to respond in a really be draconian, heartless, and mean-spirited manner. But first the unknowing girl comes back into the room, and is asked of her opinion about the appropriate punishment, which of course was compassionate and caring. Until … the panel was asked about what should happen, and she then heard her fav crowd go way overboard in punishment (with made up reasons). After just a few minutes of this, she was asked by the teacher what she now thought should happen - and she quickly reversed herself to align with her buddy's (apparent) beliefs. At this point the teacher disclosed the con job, explained what the rest of the class already knew (that this was a practical demonstration of Cognitive Dissonance), and the girl turned beet red, gasped, and then ran from the room in shame for having been so easily manipulated.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed »
Congressman Richard Baker says that God did what they couldn't, that is, clean up public housing in New Orleans.
George Bush says he does what God tells him to do.
The pilots monitoring Katrina said that it was a 200 mile wide tornado. Nothing like it before.
I wonder if God told Bush to use H.A.A.R.P (The U.S. facility in Alaska that can enhance and guide weather systems for destructive purposes) to use this technology to wipe out New Orleans for reconstuctive purposes.
There is not a Republican who ever lived who can resist the call of a pile of money. Money and the opportunity to tell others how they must live is what drives these people.
kloro: They aren't deparate for cash. The Fed is just printing up as much as they need. Greed and power IS what drives them. They already have the transfer of cash from your wallet to their pocket down to a science. And they don't give a damn about the self-destructing financial system. They aren't going to pay for it. You and I are.
nspire: Cognitve dissonance seems to require the accepted "reality" of a large group of people to make the rationalizations "stick" or acceptable. In other words, cognitive dissonance won't stand up for long in an individual if it isn't affirmed as "normal" or "acceptable" by others. Does that make any sense? (Birds of a feather flock together?)If it does, if enough of us challenged those that have turned their backs on their true self image (or the groups that promote it), would that in of itself break the cycle? Getting mass therapy in a safe environment is probably not going to happen. How else to force people to face themselves?
it's not their greed that drives them, but their desperation for cash to shore up their self-destructing financial system.
AndyUK - I guess that those whose house insurance has not paid up will now have to live in their cars.
Is your car insurance private or publicly run?
REBEL FARMER -- Great questions: "Can people break out of their cognitve dissonance and reclaim their true self image? If so, how?"
My sense of this quandary is that we must "heal thyself', through focused honesty and openness and almost ruthless self-inspection. The insidious portion is the unexamined absurdity, which is hidden within layers of denial and self-justification and rationalizations.
We are each other's best mirrors, to see those hidden aspects, but only in secure healing settings of mutually supported vulnerability and openness can one affect these changes. How can one's eye look at itself, other than through another's?
Other than that, we could ask the shrub to spend another few billion$ programing the proper responses back into America. I'd vote for new taxes for that, if I trusted the source.
Any other ideas out there in cyber-synchronicity that might possibly precipitate a solution? (I know, a really bad pun, but I did it with such fluidity.)
We had floods in the UK in the Summer (not on the scale of New Orleans though), and thousands of people are still homeless. The insurance didn't pay up, because the companies do not pay for people who live in a possible flood plain (they are only to eager to let you keep paying for your policy though).
Our government in the UK has recently helped to bail out a large building society Northern Rock, who went bankrupt because of their lending activities - they were heavily into what you in the States call "subprime".
So, our government has paid millions to a business who made billions out of poor, desperate people, but cannot give a penny to people who have been made homeles, because of a so called "act of God"
What a sick World we live in, and what a sick minority are in charge of us!
Rick says: Alot more may need low income housing once the problem in subprime plays it self out.
True enough.
There will be some cutting back on groceries just to pay the rent - which the landlords won't mind.
I don't think you heard of Peter Kaufmann, who wanted to close down food banks because he saw them as unfair competition for his chain of grocery stores.
The same thing is going on here.
The Wikipedia version: He also said that he would move to shut down the Winnipeg's food banks, describing them as an unfair drain on local groceries and suggesting that his pro-business platform would eliminate the need for such outlets.
liberty says: I've heard that the African Americans of New Orlenans are being ethnically cleansed
Is it really a Black versus white issue or does it serve the interests of those who wish to tear down the low rent-housing to present it as such? The racists seem to think that it is about getting rid of the blacks. Others seem to think that it is about getting rid of crime. Really it is about making money (even if doing so causes considerable further collateral damage).
Those who are going to be homeless after the homes are torn down (and FEMA empty their trailers) tend to be both poor and Black (though not exclusively). One doesn't make money off the poor if they cannot pay for your services. It is the callousness of those who tend to profit towards those who cannot afford necessary services which is the issue. Maybe the majority of the victims of one's profiteering being Black makes it easier to be callous, probably. But there is a necessary link between profiteering and callousness one misses by focusing solely on race.
Cognitive dissonance requires the belief that two beliefs are contradictory rather than complimentary. This is a conversation I overheard between my mom and dad one day as I was walking down the stairs:
MOM: How can you believe this if you believe that?
DAD: Believing this MEANS that you believe that!
Do you think that we are manipulated in seeing some beliefs as contradictory and others as complimentary?
Sorry, everyone else, I don't really have anything to add. Thank you in advance for your forgiveness and Merry Christmas.
I've heard that the African Americans of New Orlenans are being ethnically cleansed to make way for the rich and their casinos as their plan is to turn New Orleans into the new Las Vegas. The whole thing makes me sick. Naomi Klein's shock doctrine at work that's for sure. There's a chapter in her book about the tsunami in Sri Lanka and how all the poor were forced off the beach and fishing areas with permits post tsunami to make way for resorts and casinos. YUP sounds like New Orleans to me.
nspire: Thanks for the insight to cognitive dissonance and how it fits our current dilemma. It now makes sense to me how some Americans can turn a blind eye to the evils done our name. It's all so very sad. One question though. Can people break out of their cognitve dissonance and reclaim their true self image? If so, how?
re lucky lefty 11:29am
to further illustrate your point, we should recall the deafening white silence that followed the police firebombing of a black neighborhood in philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love," in which military-grade explosives burned 61 homes on osage avenue and cost 11 people their lives. we should also recall that the federal assaults at ruby ridge and waco, which whites definitely DID notice, followed shortly thereafter.
any injustices you don't protest today will fall on you tomorrow.
2 years ago in Laguna Beach a landslide took down 12 houses and the families all escaped uninjured.
Immediately the mayor of the city along with all of the staff and councilmembers swung into action to prove to the world that when you live in Laguna Beach, i.e. when you have plenty of money, and a natural disaster occurs you will not only be taken care of but you can expect to have things come out better than before.
And indeed, last Saturday was the self congratulatory ribbon cutting. All of the infrastructure has been replaced, the building pads were all reconstructed and everything is indeed better than before. (One lucky family moved from the area and now gets to sell their parcel no doubt for a huge profit.) This happened because the money in town donated, because Diane Feinstein intervened and FEMA kicked in a huge chunk and a tax was levied on the residents who really didn't pay much attention to what was happening since they didn't expect it would have much of an impact on their lives, and for the most part it hasn't.
So many times I have thought to write a letter to the editor comparing the outcomes of the two disasters, New Orleans and Laguna Beach, California, and then have always come to the conclusion that I would only be saying what everyone already knows and but doesn't want to have pointed (another inconvenient truth).
I pray that the people of New Orleans will prevail against this evil.
THADDEUSSTEPHENS -- I agree completely, when you state "The idea that there is any sense in which the American public could be said not to know what we do is finally not credible."
You make excellent points of the gradual (but accelerating) warping of the American psyche (New Censorship), where we cannot even believes ourselves what is occuring - with so much information out there.
It makes POGO's prophetic "We've met the enemy and he is us", even more powerful, as we do this to oursleves now.
_ W H Y _ ? _
My idea is that this is all about gaming the people to voluntarily give up their rights ("Freedoms") and meekly permit illegal gov't actions, for example with respect to TORTURE:
_ T O R T U R E _ M U S T _ B E _ K N O W N _ O F _
TORTURE isn't (wasn't) a secret because that knowledge of torture is part of the gov't PSYOPS plan to manipulate us, because we continue to think of ourselves as "good" people (which is continually reinforced through propaganda).
Cognitive dissonance is a familiar PSYOPS technique, produced by putting a person in a position of doing (or allowing to happen) something that is clearly opposed to his self image. The contradictory pressure builds up and must be resolved, which is done individually through various explanations (rationalizations). The explanation will seem absurd to anyone who doesn't share the dissonance. In this case the model that produced it was …
1. Good American people are not terrorists.
2. Terrorists break laws that will kill more Americans because they 'hate our freedoms'.
3. The USA must break with the Geneva Convention and laws that prevent torture to save lives.
4. But since I know I am a good person, my reason why it's okay to violate anti-torture laws is (insert something absurd).
The fascinating thing about cognitive dissonance is that it's immune to intelligence. No matter how smart you are, you can't think your way out of it. Once your actions and your self image get out of sync, the result is an absurd rationalization.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed »
A Voice Apart, you wrote, "This is only the beginning of the ousting of the poor (who are mostly of colour, Brown and Black). It is time for people to wake up because poor Whites aren't going to get treated any better."
Thru effective propaganda use of MSM we have given poverty, crime, and drug use a Black face. Like always in America, "facts" are race based. In reality 80% of the people Master has made poor in America are White, just like 80% of the crime and drug use is also White - as it has always been.
That said, White Americans, in their ongoing 500 year Colonial WAR against people of color in the US and around the globe (5bn humans) were in a large bind after being embarrassed into providing Civil Rights and Voting Rights for people color in '64-'65. We hate letting people of color participate as equals with a snarling psychotic hate that is only matched by White People in South Africa or Israeli's for Palestinians.
PEOPLE OF COLOR WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE AS EQUALS IN OUR WHITE MALE ARYAN SLAVE EMPIRE.
So starting when the ink was dry in '65, we used selective enforcement of the Law, targeted incarceration, and disproportionate sentencing for 40 years to reverse the demographics of our Penal System and quadruple our prison population. Shortly after '65 White America also started COINTELPRO. In this program Master used all the "tricks" he learned from the Nazi Gestapo and Waffen SS officers that he covertly brought to America to work in Washington after '45.
Simple operation: Destroy every movement for economic and social justice in America by hounding the leaders into silence or suicide (see: Ritual Defamation), by falsely imprisoning them with cooked evidence, planted evidence, or by withholding exculpatory evidence, or they just broke in some morning at 3am with automatic weapons and hosed down the room and everyone in it. You can have the list chrono or alphabetic.
AMERICA TURNED ITS FACE TO THE WALL AND SAID NOTHING.
Now, once again, we have put "those Black people in THEIR PLACE." As a result we are the preeminent Prison State on the ENTIRE Planet. And of course, White people are now going to cook in the same pot that White Master built for the people of color.
And if you're worried about 400,000 beds recently built under an MCA (no-bid) contract by Halliburton, don't. Those West Texas death camps are only a 16% increase over our current "prison stock". Might provide a small uptick on the qrtrly P&L for those Corporate Prison stocks in your retirement portfolio, definitely Blue Chip.
Inasmuch as we are so irony deficient, I wonder if they'll put in railway lines to the death camps. That way they can ship the victims and their children in cattle cars, very efficient. It will probably provide a "shot in the arm" for our declining rail stock. Overall, we should witness about 20-30 million Americans up in smoke. Just like our Heroes did in the Thousand Year Reich. They just didn't mention that Reich HQ was going to be in Washington DC. Of course we'll do it better than even Hitler or Stalin, We're Americans. Always #1.
Like Leonard Cohen wrote in his lovely song, "Everybody knows...."
Pieces of 8.
The idea that there is any sense in which the American public could be said not to know what we do is finally not credible. Are we dupes of propaganda? It's not as if the network news folks are eager to help us put together a diagnosis of our imperial objectives and methods. But the weightier answer is that we operate under a New Censorship which functions by making everything known and naked to a paralyzing degree. Is there anyone who doesn't understand that the Sudanese pharmaceutical lab that Clinton blew up with eighty cruise missiles was producing . . . pharmaceuticals?
Is there anyone who doesn't understand that this was an act of state terrorism and a violation of every principle of international law? . . Clinton emerged unscathed from
this crime against the people of the Sudan because of a) racism (the unspoken assumption being that it's okay to bomb little brown people-it happens so often they ought to be use to it by now; it's rather like the weather for them), b) the unacknowledged understanding that American military activities really do support our privileges stateside, such as those privileges are, and c) the stupefying effects of the New Censorship.
The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals: is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there's hardly a soul on these shores who doesn't know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and Exxon-Mobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms like Arthur Andersen buying even "watchdog" liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb's connivance in Florida. All of these details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts, and books, yet it's perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn't a secret. The real secret is that it wasn't a secret, and certainly wasn't a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of "scandal," when in fact it's all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it.
The media makes pornography of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly
passively, because it is indistinguishable from our 'entertainment' and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as sellable commodity! I mean,
you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!
~ from "The Middle Mind, Why Americans don't Think for Themselves" by Curtis White
------------------------------------------------------------
"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures. ...
They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities." ~ George Gerbner ~ Annenberg School for Communication
|--------------------------------------|
Alot more may need low income housing once the problem in subprime plays it self out.
Since late 2006 209 major U.S. lending operations have "imploded" and the number is raising on a weekly basis.
After the first of the year the problems are really going to start,what we have seen up to now, is just the tip of the iceberg.We are quite possibly headed into the biggest enonomic downturn since the crash of 1929.
Morgan Stanley's Asia Chairman, Stephen Roach, made this observation in a New York Times op-ed last Sunday:
"This recession will be deeper than the shallow contraction earlier in this decade. The dot-com-led downturn was set off by a collapse in business capital spending, which at its peak in 2000 accounted for only 13 percent of the country's gross domestic product. The current recession is all about the coming capitulation of the American consumer — whose spending now accounts for a record 72 percent of G.D.P."
Most people have no idea how grave the present situation is or the disaster the country will face if trillions of dollars of over-leveraged bonds and equities begin to unwind.
One of Britain's leading economists, Peter Spencer, issued a warning last Saturday:
"The Government must suspend a set of key banking regulations at the heart of the current financial crisis or risk seeing the economy spiral towards a future that could make 1929 look like a walk in the park".
Pimco's Bill Gross put it like this:
"What we are witnessing is essentially the breakdown of our modern day banking system."
Economist Ludwig von Mises:
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought on by credit expansion. The question is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
So, what they are attempting to do in New Orleans they may attempt everywhere in U.S, if the bottom falls out.
It makes me wonder if this so-called subprime problem, is not part of much bigger plan. "The Shock Doctrine for all of us".
That is just sick!
Since, so far, neocon policies have brought this nation nothing but disaster, death and failure, why on Earth would anyone try to embrace them now? Idiots.
There actually is a conspiracy theory out there that the levees were breached intentionally. Not sure I buy that one, but my mind is now open to anything. The more you think about it, FEMA's response to Katrina raised incompetence to a new level, and I know we have a lot of very competent people in government, so it makes you wonder.
Bush said
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"
Kind of reminded me about Condi
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center........."
Then there was Dick
"I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered (in Iraq)"
Used to be a normal critter once, those were the good old days when I believed we were a democracy that defended other countries and were concerned about human rights and environment. Seems like a long time ago.
When you see just what is happening to the poor in New Orleans, you may wonder if Bush didn't cause the disaster in the first place. It's common knowledge that he was warned about the levies, but he knew that there was prize land that developers wanted. Now watch every disaster and question the govenment because America is for sale to the highest bidder. No longer is this the land where people are free from oppression unless they are millionaires. What's especially disconcerting is the right-wing think tanks and Republicans who are gearing for "charter schools". Before long, if you want your children to get an education, you will have to pay and you wont' be able to afford it. Our whole Nation needs an overhaul.
These are the men and women who murdered 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan in cold blood.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Teen-Liver-Transplant.html
The following individuals are CIGNA Corporation's Board of Directors as of April 25, 2007:
Robert H. Campbell
Bob Campbell, 69, has been a Director of CIGNA since 1992. He served as Chairman of Sunoco, Inc. (a domestic refiner and marketer of petroleum products) from 1992 until 2000, and as Chief Executive Officer from 1991 until 2000. Mr. Campbell is a Director of Hershey Foods Corporation and Vical, Inc. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2007.
H. Edward Hanway
Ed Hanway, 55, has been a Director of CIGNA since 1999. He has served as the Chairman of the Board of CIGNA Corporation since December 2000, the Chief Executive Officer since January 2000, and President since 1999. He has been associated with CIGNA since 1978. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2009.
Isaiah Harris, Jr.
Ike Harris, 54, has been a Director of CIGNA since 2005. Mr. Harris served as the President of AT&T Advertising & Publishing – East (a communications services company) from 2005 until February 2007, as President, BellSouth Enterprises, Inc. from 2004 until 2005, and as President, BellSouth Consumer Services and Customer Markets Group from 2000 until 2004. Mr. Harris is a Director of Deluxe Corporation. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2007.
Jane E. Henney, M.D.
Jane Henney, 59, has been a Director of CIGNA since 2004. Dr. Henney has served as Senior Vice President and Provost, Health Affairs at University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center (an educational institution) since July 2003, was a Senior Scholar at the Association of Academic Health Centers from 2001 until 2003 and Commissioner of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration from 1998 until 2001. Dr. Henney is a Director of AmerisourceBergen Corporation and AstraZeneca PLC. Her term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2007.
Peter N. Larson
Peter Larson, 67, has been a Director of CIGNA since 1997. He served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Brunswick Corporation (a producer of recreational consumer products) from 1995 until 2000. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2008.
Roman Martinez IV
Roman Martinez IV, 59, has been a Director of CIGNA since 2005. He has been a private investor since 2003. Mr. Martinez served as Managing Director of Lehman Brothers Inc. (an investment banking firm), where he was employed, including by its predecessor firm, from 1971 until 2003. Mr. Martinez is a Director of Alliant Techsystems, Inc. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2008.
James E. Rogers
James E. Rogers, 59, has been a Director of CIGNA since February 2007. He has served as the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Duke Energy Corporation (an electric power company) since 2006 and was formerly the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of CINERGY Corp., (which merged with Duke Energy Corporation in 2006) from 1994 until 2006. Mr. Rogers is a director of Fifth Third Bancorp. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2009.
Harold A. Wagner
H. A. Wagner, 71, has been a Director of CIGNA since 1997. He has served as the Non-Executive Chairman of Agere Systems Inc. (a provider of communications components) since 2001. Mr. Wagner is a Director of PACCAR Inc., United Technologies Corporation and Maersk Inc., a subsidiary of A.P. Moller. Although his term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2009, he will retire from the Board at the 2008 annual meeting.
Carol Cox Wait
Carol Cox Wait, 64, has been a Director of CIGNA since 1995. She has been the President of Boggs, Atkinson, Inc. (a real estate company) since 2003 and is also the General Manager for Artesia, Bellflower and Ramona Senior Centers, a Managing Member of Lakewood Towers LLC and Manager of VCB Bluebird LLC and VCB Palm LLC. Ms. Wait also served as a Director, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (a bi-partisan, educational, non-profit organization) from 1981 until 2003 and was the President of Carol Cox and Associates (a consulting firm) from 1984 until 2003. Her term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2008.
Eric C. Wiseman
Eric Wiseman, 51, has been a Director of CIGNA Corporation since April 2007. He has been President and Chief Operating Officer of VF Corporation (an apparel manufacturer) since 2006. Prior to that he served as Executive Vice President, Global Brands from 2005 to 2006, Vice President & Chair, Sportswear and Outdoor Coalitions from 2004 until 2005, and Chairman, Global Intimate Apparel & Swimwear from 2000 until 2004. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2009.
Donna F. Zarcone
Donna Zarcone, 49, has been a Director of CIGNA since 2005. Ms. Zarcone is President and Chief Executive Officer of D. F. Zarcone & Associates, LLC, a strategic advisory consulting firm founded in January 2007. She served as the President and Chief Operating Officer of Harley-Davidson Financial Services, Inc. (a provider of wholesale and retail financing, insurance and credit card programs), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Harley-Davidson, Inc., from 1998 until 2006. Ms. Zarcone is a member of the Board of Managers of Wrightwood Capital, a privately held company and is a Certified Public Accountant. Her term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2007.
William D. Zollars
William Zollars, 59, has been a Director of CIGNA since 2005. Mr. Zollars has served as the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of YRC Worldwide, Inc. (formerly Yellow Roadway Corporation) (a holding company whose subsidiaries provide regional, national and international transportation and related services) since 1999. Mr. Zollars is a Director of ProLogis Trust and Cerner Corporation. His term as a Director of CIGNA expires in 2008.
It'll be amusing when the rich in norlins discover that there is nobody to mow the lawns and do the laundry anymore.
Developers in New Orleans are worse than lawyers. Lawyers chase after the ambulance and take advantage of the victims.
New Orleans developers plan for a disaster, block the ambulance, close the hospital, demolish the remaining standing housing, and remove the homeless to toxic trailers temporarily until they can have them all incarcerated for protesting at public meetings.
Well, I see the Chicago Boys are working their craft here in the US as they did in Russia a few years ago. Maybe we can get George Bush's good friend, V. Putin over here to bomb our white house.
HOPING TO REFORM CAPITALISM MAKES YOU COMPLICIT IN ITS INIQUITIES/4 Books
by Jay Janson, published December 2, 2007
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jay_jans_071201_hoping_to_reform_cap.htm
Whatever one wants to call whatever takes its place, it is the inhumanity, even murderous criminal insanity of the totally materialist and mindless capitalist system that we are living through right now. Those of us who merely try to make it a bit less monstrous, are more acquiescent to its continuance, than its being replaced with something more intelligently human.
Recommend for clear and simple analysis of the basics of capital function and its dire need to be all-engulfing and all-overwhelming:
"THE ENEMY OF NATURE - THE END OF CAPITALISM OR THE END OF THE WORLD", by JOEL KOVEL, 2002.
For capitalism's post-WWII human destruction techniques:
"CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN - HOW THE U.S. USES GLOBALIZATION TO CHEAT POOR COUNTRIES OUT OF TRILLIONS", by JOHN PERKINS, 2004
For recent perfidy in the world of mega (Capitalist) finance taking homicidal advantage of defenseless small nations even during natural disasters:
"THE SHOCK DOCTRINE – THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM" by NAOMI KLEIN, 2007
For understanding what is fomenting within impoverished "majority society" and not just as we in the affluent "minority society" perceive the masses of our trashed brothers and sisters: "GRASSROOTS POSTMODERNISM - REMAKING THE SOIL OF CULTURES" by GUSTAVO ESTEVA and MADHU SURI PRAKASH, though published in 1998 - largely unnoticed in our 'minority society'.
(Don't be but off by the academic sounding titles of these four works - they are each poignantly penetrating and heartfelt in tone and text relating to real human experience.)
This is then your journalist-historian's offering:
A Four Book Course For Extricating Oneself From Complicity In Capitalist Crimes.
A particular tacking of the sails within today's oceans of despair?
The United States, already controlling half the resources of the planet, is compelled to continuing machinations and murderous violence to increase that present ownership under the mindless drive of accumulated capital growth for immediate highest
returns on 'investment', and as an sociopolitical entity out of any sane control, is quite simply unable to reflect accountable consideration of human cost and ecological consequences.
There is however hope!
Read John Maynard Keynes describing our coming era in
"The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren":
"In this millennium, wealth will no longer be of social import, morals will change, and we shall be able to rid ourselves of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We will be able to dare to assess the money motive at its true value.
The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities, which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in MENTAL DISEASE."
Demand sanity! Ask that private ownership of the globe be recognized as a delusion.
Your reader appreciative,
Jay Janson, servidor
P.S. When this writer was a child, the word 'capitalist' was used exclusively in a pejoritive, selfish and advantage taking, sense. Today our capitlaist owned media has cleaned up the term to mean someone enterprizing in very helpful and very necessary ways. But during WWII, the cold war and even today media commentators when rarely dare to that 'capitalism' is the better alternative 'communism' and 'socialism' with the term 'capitalism', but instead with 'freedom' and 'democracy.
This is the same thing that the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. And it deserves the same label: ethnic cleansing.
The only difference is that the Israelis typically demolish Palestinian homes with the occupants still in them.
Greaseman: NOW you're on the list!
AndyUK December 21st, 2007 6:01 pm
I was in the States just after the New Orleans floods , and when I questioned the role of the Administration in not acting quickly enough, or not providing resources after the event, nearly everyone blamed it on the local Louisiana state.
That is because the Louisiana and New Orleans governments (Democratically controlled both) have elevated corruption and theft to an art form. Which might explain why Bobby Jindal is the new Republican Governor of LA.
At last, some sobriety on this website. The fact of the matter is that what has happened to New Orleans- as practically everyone says here- is a little foretaste of what is to come. Out here in Washington State, the town of Chehalis, Washington, found itself caught up in a deluge that shut everything down, including the section of freeway that cuts across the town. When Katrina hit, the ruling elite of this country were given permission to triage those sections of the population they see as expendable. Most people in this country sat for it because they thought it would never be them. But, as the residents of Chehalis saw a few weeks back, and as people in the midwest are finding out now, if you ain't in a wealthy gated community, you ain't shit.
Rationalizers of this moment will tell us it's only nature paying a call. Do tell. Well,as a teenager, I lived in the interior of Alaska (Fairbanks) during the days of copper cable thirty years ago, and I can't think of a single power outage even in that part of the country- which has far from mild weather in November and December- that went on for days, and days, and DAYS. In an era of much higher technology, these fuckers can't even keep the power on. No, this is deliberate neglect of public infrastructure, so that the private sector can come in and buy everything off in the name of "efficiency". Klein is right. The lady who called the speculators of New Orleans "evil" is right. We are dealing with a section of the population which has chosen to exalt the basest parts of human nature, and which works to have us all energetically reject those parts of human nature in which we learn to nurture each other. The reverse spelling of evil is the word "live", and all evil is, despite the metaphysical connotation, is a desire to see humankind be less than who we are in our more giving moments. We are dealing with people who exult in our tendency to be far less than who we can be. And the only suitable word for that mindstate IS "evil".
I was in the States just after the New Orleans floods , and when I questioned the role of the Administration in not acting quickly enough, or not providing resources after the event, nearly everyone blamed it on the local Louisiana state. There seems to be an unwillingness to criticise the White House, and a closing of ranks, together with blind patriotism thrown in.
I do not include the people who read and contribute to this site, but unfortunately we are in a minority.
Rebel Farmer: you wrote my thoughts in your comments. This is only the beginning of the ousting of the poor (who are mostly of colour, Brown and Black). It is time for people to wake up because poor Whites aren't going to get treated any better. The poor are anathema to the Calvinist based capitalist (ie: poor people don't work hard, they are inherently lazy, they deserve to be poor, its all their own fault, etc...). The "American Dream" has always been just that; a dream.
If you think this is hard, just wait for the final stage of NAFTA to be enforced, as due, at the beginning of 2008. If many of your small farms are losing the battle now, just wait until next year and the year after. Agribusiness will just eat up those honest farmers and their family lands, leaving nothing but more poor people looking for jobs and housing that no one can afford any more.
If most of your manufacturing concerns have shut down, there will be more to come. Your schools will become more degraded and your health care will cost more. Don't blame it on immigrants and immigration, put the blame directly where it belongs...the neo-liberal economics that created the first set of Robber Barons. Most immigrants are only in your (and my) country because their resources have already been plundered and their livelihoods have been disappeared.
I agree with Mrs. Klein's analysis, but the situation here regarding public housing was always terrible. I don't think we should lose sight that this system, certainly as implemented in New Orleans, was racist itself, along with the entire public school system, especially post "white-flight" (1960s) New Orleans. The housing projects (not all of them, but most of them) were absolutely dreadful. I don't agree with tearing down CJ Peete or Iberville (CJ Peete was the object of a fairly successful experiment in tenant management), but the rest of them ... I can't believe I have to pick sides. I did participate in some actions since I could never side with developers on anything. But the housing projects here are absolutely horrible. One must also not forget the racial dynamics in this city, which are on full display here, and have been since the storm. What's left out is that the Creoles (such as Nagin, Morial, et.al.) have always sided with the white power structure, and have NEVER done anything about the city's immense and dire issues with poverty.
Ultimately it is wrong to simply throw everyone out. On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of words about how wonderful the projects here were. They weren't.
If one wishes to take a society to the mind cleaning room of democratic capitalism,as I have been writing about since Naomi was a little girl, the first target is the educational establishment.
As Hitler commented: "Give me your children and i will give you the world!"
Your reference to Pol Pot sent shivers up my spine. Among the first people who were eliminated were the intellectual and teachers. Have any of you noticed the war on public schools and teachers' unions by "think tanks" like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Even progressives are spouting the notion that our public schools are failing. The neocons are turning public education into one of Klein's disasters.
I thank Naomi Klein for her hard work on Shock and Awe Capitalism. What has happened in New Orleans is out of the Khmer Rouge Pol Pot Year Zero program. And I will keep repetaing it whether people think it's politically correct to say that or not.
Yes, but they never had it so good. - B. Bush
closing public hospitals and schools in new orleans is an echo of what adolph giuliani did as mayor of nyc---in the name of budget austerity, he began closing down fire houses in certain neighborhoods (guess what the surrounding population's pigmentation was?). funny thing though, the budget crisis was due in part to his repeal of a penny-per-share tax on stock trades that had been in place since the administration of john lindsay. on any given day, hundreds of millions of shares are traded, so we're talking a sizeable chunk o'change taken from the city's coffers and handed to the wizards of wall street. that's how you get to be a serious politician.
A lot of people talk about how scummy lawyers are--but developers are just as despicable. Whether its a disaster or the last forest--they just want to go in and exploit.
There needed to be celebrities in new Orleans fighting to save the housing.
Where's Jesse and Al?
So, when is the revolution starting?
Something to think about: Is it the color of their skin that makes them victims or that they are poor? I would suggest that the disaster that is happening in New Orleans right now is just a preview of what is going to happen across the entire U.S. as a result of the coming depression. Who do you think is going to be buying up all those foreclosed houses? There will not be affordable houseing for any of us poor slobs. And who do you think is going to be golly on the spot to put down the food riots? It ain't going to be the National Guard. They are a little busy right now. Nope. I see that bear claw on their arm. And those mutants aren't going to be using tasers.
What Naomi has shown us here in this article is not just what is going on in New Orleans. She has given us a glimpse of the future for all of America's cities. And that future is almost here. I'm thinking that 2008 is going to be remembered as more than just an election year. That, of course, assumes that there will be an election......