Eco-suicide

The Right is beside itself with joy as Kyoto was administered what could be a fatal blow the other day by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. In a recent speech in New York, Bush's dependable friend spoke with what he described as "brutal honesty" about Kyoto. No country, he declared, is going to cut its growth; other solutions for the problem of climate change and global warming need to be found. Kyoto expires in 2012, and, Blair strongly suggested, it's not likely to be renewed. His own thinking on the subject, he said, has changed.

The media have barely taken this up, which I find a little odd, but things are different in the blogging world. "Kyoto Treaty RIP," gloats one wingnit, his cries of pleasure echoing throughout the blogosphere."Kyoto," declares another, standing aloof in giant ignorance, "is a mix of bad science, runaway bureocracy [sic] and typical spineless euro-politics. If that's the best the enviro-nuts can come up with to save the planet, it's not worth saving." "Kyoto finished," exults Jay Currie. "Yessssss," Kathy Shaidle moans deliriously, and I don't think she’s faking it.

Meanwhile, Blair's hapless deputy, John Prescott, hadn't been let in on the dirty little secret--a week ago he took a good swipe at the Bush administration for not signing Kyoto. If there is indeed a major policy shift in the wind, no one, it seems, bothered to tell him.

Now, the extremists will not take perfect comfort from Blair's words. He did, in fact, acknowledge that there is a problem with climate change, something that the heads-in-dark-holes crowd, Bush among them, is not prepared to admit. He has, however, seemingly wilted under the combined pressure of the corporate lobby and Bush's obduracy.

A note of caution, though: we do need to look at this sans the rightist filter through which it comes to us. Misleadingly, for example, we are informed that China and India "weren’t covered by Kyoto," but both countries have ratified it; China, in fact, was able to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 17% in four years, pre-Kyoto (1997-2001).

The Right's position on the continuing destruction of our planet by corporate interests is a classic case of denial. Here it is, in a nutshell: the globe isn't warming, that's just junk science and leftist nonsense. Well, if it is warming, it's not because of human activity. Well, if it is caused by human activity, Kyoto won't be effective. Well, if it is effective, it will cost too much. Let's look for other solutions that are good for business. Or just learn to adapt to climate change, no sweat--the Alfred E. Newman school of environmental science.

I have never seen Kyoto as more than a wake-up call, myself, and so I don't agree that the treaty and environment-saving technological innovations are opposed to each other, the odd binary that seems to constrict right-wing thought on the matter. A mixed strategy is always best. Jay Currie is right that steep oil prices will drive innovation; I'm less inclined to see nuclear power as the answer to our prayers, unless we can progress with fusion. (Nuclear energy is far too dicey a technology to put into the hands of corner-cutting, profit-driven entrepreneurs.)

The basis of the opposition to Kyoto is simply reactionary politics and corporate greed, combined with an unstrategic worldview perhaps summed up best by Jim Morrison: "I'm going to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames." The basis of support for Kyoto is not that it alone will reverse global warming, but that it marks a good strategic beginning--not only with respect to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, but also as the harbinger of a profound shift in world environmental consciousness. Kyoto, in fact, signals a new seriousness, and the possibility of new paradigms, in which we understand ourselves as an integral part of the environment, rather than its overlords.

These profound changes in the global culture are slow-moving, the more so for being actively opposed by the powerful special interests that continue to call the shots. So one might be pessimistic: Bush's foreign adventures, his domestic incompetence, his crazed bull in the UN china shop, Blair’s pitiful acquiescence (his disagreements with Bush on the latter will be seen as illusory fairly shortly), all pose serious, perhaps catastrophic threats to the world we live in.

But perhaps the greatest strength (although admittedly at times the greatest weakness) of the Left is our optimism. Out of the tragedies of Iraq and New Orleans come new insights into the poverty of traditional, narrow approaches. Massive holes in the ozone layer led to the fairly speedy adoption of the Montreal Protocol. Crises provoke awareness, reflection and, eventually, the collapse of received wisdom and idées reçues. The shrinking global village is becoming more sensitive to danger of all kinds, and ordinary people are growing more and more dissatisfied with the placating noises uttered by leaders who have only their own class interests at heart. They smell eco-suicide in the air, and they're already demonstrating their opposition as a powerful thread in anti-globalist protest. At some point something has to give, and it will. One can only hope that it happens in time.

Moral idiocy

Yesterday a lawyer for the federal government, Barbara McIsaac, defended in open court the use of torture. She is the government’s chief counsel at the Maher Arar enquiry. We must therefore assume, with enormous regret, that she was speaking for our government in her official capacity.

She posed a hypothetical question: say we become aware of a plot to blow up the Canadian Embassy in Damascus. Passing that information along will result in many people being tortured. "Do we not do that?" she asked. She went on to speculate about another scenario: should the RCMP and CSIS refuse to consider information obtained under torture that would stop a bombing at a Toronto subway station? (Thankfully she doesn’t expand on this, so we don't have to consider the possibility that CSIS and/or the RCMP did the dirty work themselves.) "That's the moral debate," she said. "And that's a horribly difficult question, isn't it?"

Well, no, not really.

The moral question is actually rather simple: should the state officially countenance torture, or not?

Alan Dershowitz, a prominent American lawyer and Harvard law professor, says yes. He wants torture to be made legal through the issuing of "torture warrants." He argues that the practice actually requires legitimization, with all of the checks and balances and tests presently required for other types of warrant. He would prefer to see torture, in other words, within the legal framework rather than outside it, where it lies, in effect, unregulated.

A seductive argument? Not at all. What such legitimization would do, besides making torture far more prevalent, by virtue of legalizing it, would be to corrupt public morals: the notion of torture as a legitimate tool of the state undermines the very values that make us civilized.

What about the use of good information obtained through torture? That one is tricky: if the information had a positive human impact and its use is not likely to legitimize the means by which it was obtained, it may not be immoral to use it. As an example, some of the information gathered by the Nazis in their notorious medical experiments might have positive application at the present time. Should we refuse to utilize it? Its use hardly encourages a resurgence of Nazism, nor of the amoral code that allowed the Third Reich to perpetrate such atrocities. It's merely data at this point in history. To reject such information would be like refusing to use acetylsalicylic acid if it came to light that mediaeval physicians forced prisoners to imbibe infusions of willow bark to determine the proper dosage. But, on the other hand, if the potential usefulness of such data directly encourages or legitimizes the use of torture, it is clearly wrong. And that is what appears to be the case here.

Even leaving morals aside, the practical problem with torture, of course, is its sheer unreliability. Victims, like Maher Arar, tend to tell their torturers what they want to hear. Hence, we are told, "CSIS will attempt to corroborate the information with other independent sources." But if CSIS is actually responsible for driving the process of torture itself by furnishing information to the torturers, as the Arar inquiry and the fate that befell two other Canadians strongly indicate, then it is morally complicit, as are creatures such as our current Ambassador to Romania, Franco Pillarella, who outrageously claimed that he had no idea Syria tortured anyone.

The disease spreads rapidly. "Government witnesses at the inquiry have said they accepted summaries of Mr. Arar's 'confession' even as Ottawa was working to obtain his release from the Syrians," the Globe & Mail reports. McIsaac tries to reassure us: "Decisions were made in good faith and with no animus toward Mr. Arar." This might have been of some comfort to him as the Syrians were whipping him with cables, but it appears that this soothing message was never delivered.

But here's the bottom line, blithely delivered by McIsaac without a hint that she had the slightest idea of the import of her words: with respect to Arar, she said, "We now know nothing was going on."

Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20. But it doesn't help those who are selected for torture and are later found to a) be innocent of any crime, and/ or b) have no germane information to provide.

And this, of course, leads directly to a question of confidence, all other aspects of this unsavoury topic aside. Do we trust CSIS to select the "right" victims? Not likely, in my opinion: it was wrong about Arar, and, in the case of Bhupinder Liddar, a diplomat whose career it cut short, an oversight body, the Security and Intelligence Review Committee, has just found that CSIS has lied, covered up evidence, and in general behaved in a thoroughly dishonest and incompetent fashion. Do we trust the RCMP? Ask Ahmad El Maati and Ottawa businessman Abdullah Almalki, both tortured in Syria on the basis, it seems, of information fed to the Syrians by the Mounties. Do we trust Paul Martin and Anne McLellan, his Minister of Public Safety? (Has no one picked up, incidentally, on the irony of this title? Or is it indeed irony?) They don't want the Arar enquiry widened, goodness, no, and if these men have a complaint, tough noogies.

So, visiting Syria sometime? Want to put your bodily well-being in the hands of people like this? Be my guest, but I think I'll choose the Caribbean.

In the meantime, though, a far more serious question. Does Barbara McIsaac, in her defence of state-sanctioned torture, speak for the government of Canada? And, more important--does she speak for Canadians?

Adoption follies

Without a lot of fanfare, Bill 183 is inching towards the finish line in the Ontario legislature. If it becomes law, the Bill will allow adopted individuals who reach the age of eighteen to access their birth records, usually including the name of the birth mother, and, "at times," the birth father. Birth parents will have access to adoption records when the child is nineteen, including the names of the adopting parents.

Presently, a birth parent or an adopted child has the right to place his or her name on a register, allowing contact in the case of a match occurring. That affords full rights to privacy unless both parties agree to give it up. But no possibility of a disclosure veto is contained in the current Bill, other than persons who were abused by their birth parents, and other exceptions to be decided by a tribunal. Actual contact can be vetoed, but information about individuals will be made readily accessible, regardless of consent.

Unaccountably, the provisions of the current law that permit the disclosure of non-identifying medical information to adoptees--uncontroversial on any side of this debate--is being repealed. Vital medical history that could save the health or even the life of an adoptee, in other words, is to be traded away for intrusive personal information.

My declaration of interest: I'm adopted. And I strongly oppose this Bill. It's an abomination. Far from "moving adoption disclosure laws into the 21^st century," as a press release from Ontario's Ministry of Community and Social Services trumpets, it turns the clock back by several decades--almost eight in fact (it was 78 years ago that adoption records came to be sealed).

The "pro" arguments have been well canvassed by now within the legislature, as witness after witness has lined up to make presentations. To give the flavour of these, here are a few of the comments, and a few more, from Hansard:

We're very concerned that adult children of adoptees...should have the right to also know who their grandparents, their uncles and their aunts are for medical reasons, for psychological reasons, to fulfill a full sense of identity.

---

[I]n adulthood, many adoptees feel a deep-seated need to know of their roots, the circumstances of their birth and adoption and, in some cases, to connect with birth family. As adopted children wander in a sense of disorientation and genetic bewilderment, they can direct, on occasion, their confusion and pain toward their adoptive parents in hurt, anger, confusion and even rage.

---

My adopted mom spent many, many hours with me helping me in my search. She did that because she loves me and wants me to know everything possible about my history.

---

We look like you, we sound like you, we act like you; however, we're just a little bit different. We've grown up not knowing anything about who we are.

On the other side of this is Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, who makes a compelling case against retroactive application of the law unless a disclosure veto is included:

I keep thinking of the young girls who gave a baby up for adoption 20 years ago thinking they were safe, and never thinking that a government would reveal their secrets. Birth parents cannot simply be ignored--they have rights, too.

Other provinces have opened the adoption process, but have included the disclosure veto. Only in Ontario is the government poised to strip away the rights to privacy of birth parents and adoptees.

The quotes, above, with their references to "identity," "not knowing who we are," a "sense of disorientation," "history" and so on, illustrate what I can only regard as a pathology. This is, in fact, precisely Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of "bad faith": that is, pretending that one is not free. Indeed, that philosopher offers some crucial insights here.

Sartre gives a couple of famous examples of bad faith in his epic work, Being and Nothingness. One is a waiter in a café being just a little too "waiterly," revealing that he is playing at being a waiter, defining himself as an object rather than as a free human being, in this case as a role. Another is a woman who is on a date: her companion takes her hand, but she leaves it limply there, like a thing, refusing to choose to accept or reject the advance.

In the same way, the frantic individuals trying to track down their birth mothers, because mothers it usually is, are refusing to accept responsibility for who they are. They need someone else, in effect, to tell them. (Those looking for their lost children present a more complex set of issues, in my opinion, but the questions of privacy and consent remain.) Without making contact with their birth mothers, they are simply objects without an identity, a history, a sense of self. This seems to me akin to those who want to find out "who they are," their "purpose in life," by joining a cult, or (dare I say it) by becoming deeply involved in a mainstream religion. It's what Eric Fromm, describing the fascination of totalitarianism, rightly called an escape from freedom.

An article in the Globe & Mail yesterday sums up the problem in a nutshell, and does not bode well for those birth mothers who want to be left alone. Here's one Michelle Edmunds, after receiving photographs from her birth family: "I could actually look at those pictures and see myself." She continues, "It's my identity. How could anyone have the right to withhold that from me?" Her thirst for information, she says, "wasn't a choice. It was a physical craving....Telling an adopted child that you love them does not override the physical need [emphasis mine] to know your roots." She spent twenty years, we are told, feeling confused and thinking she could be related to everybody.

One can only be sympathetic to Ms. Edmunds and others like her. But do we want an army of such people loosed upon their birth mothers?

This is an issue that, for once, doesn't appear to fall neatly into the well-worn, dreary political polarities. I find myself, for the first time in my life, on the side of Norm Sterling, a veteran Conservative MPP who has called for the withdrawal of the Bill and its replacement with one that guarantees privacy rights. I find myself adamantly opposed to Marilyn Churley, NDP MPP who is pushing this Bill hard. Does she not see, for a start, the gendered nature of this--the fact that birth mothers (rarely the fathers) are now to be visited by ghosts from their past, after being guaranteed that their files would be sealed? Does she not shake her head in wonder that the government is proposing, at the same time, to cut off access to possibly vital medical information for adoptees?

I have less difficulty with having the new rules apply from now on: after all, births out of wedlock are hardly a stigma, and openness is to be preferred to shameful secretiveness as a matter of public policy. (Still, the "adoption, not abortion" folks are going to face a bit of a challenge if Bill 138 goes through in its present form.) But this is now, and that was then. Changing the rules of the game retroactively is not right, destroying people's lives to placate neurotics is not right, and people ought to let the Minister of Community and Social Services, Sandra Pupatello, know. Here’s her email: spupatello.mpp@liberal.ola.org. Why not drop her a line?

UPDATE: (September 19) I was contacted by a Ministry of Community and Social Services today, in response to a telephoned enquiry with respect to the issue of releasing non-identifying medical information. He noted that a section of the proposed Bill, Sn. 162, while vaguely-worded, provides regulatory authority to govern the release of such information.

Anniversary

To begin with, no, damn it, the world did not change after 9/11. If I hear that one again, I'm going to start throwing things. (Note to CSIS: no extraordinary rendition, please. I was being metaphorical.) Here's how things stayed the same.

The US declared war on "terrorism." But an indefinable enemy has been the stock-in-trade of that nation for as long as I can remember. It used to be "communism." (Remember the original 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers?" That was one of the prime epics of the Cold War. Now it's terrorists. Search the country for pods.) But whatever the enemy, we're under attack. Civil liberties? Hey, there's a war on. Never mind Ben Franklin, the likely author of the following, oft-misquoted apothegm: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Guess what? Americans aren't getting much of either. But it's never been about liberty or safety. It's been about class and race and privilege from the get-go: Bush going to Biloxi to do photo-op hugs, complete with fake "rescue" efforts, studiously avoiding New Orleans survivors for "security" reasons. On vacation, strumming his guitar while New Orleans drowns.

Do Americans feel safe? No. Are they free? Ask Jose Padilla: the Fourth Circuit federal court, led by a man on Bush's short-list for the Supreme Court, ruled that Bush could personally jail him on his own say-so, and habeus corpus be damned. Ask the inmates of Guantanamo, or those sent off to other countries to be tortured. Ask the citizens of New Orleans, contained in their hell-hole by police and the National Guard, not permitted to walk across bridges to safety, not permitted to leave the Superdome, denied life-saving supplies by FEMA, the federal agency supposedly deployed to help them. Kris Kristofferson nailed it: for too many in America, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

The US used 9/11 as an excuse to make war on two more countries. But the US has been invading other countries for decades, directly or by proxy, under one pretext or another. They can’t seem to go ten years without a war. Why? Besides being habit-forming and good for business, it's about geopolitical influence and resources. War is what imperial nations do. Nothing new there. Read Machiavelli:

A Prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states.

Some young men from Yemen and US ally Saudi Arabia committed an atrocity within the gated community that is the US. Result? The US went to war--in Afghanistan and Iraq. The somnambulists of whom too much of North America is composed think that makes great sense. They're still confident that those will-o'-the-wisp WMDs will be found. That democracy is coming to Iraq. They still think that Bush is Da Man.

The US military, indeed, has become expert in the art of war. It has supply chain issues down to a fare-thee-well. The administration can deploy troops anywhere in the world, and keep them well-fed and well-armed while mowing down the latest crop of barefooted peasants. But it can't seem to get help to New Orleans in time to save the lives of their own citizens. As the satirist Tom Lehrer sang, back in the days of desegregation (but his words apply more recently), "To the shores of Tripoli/ But not to Mississipoli." Or Louisiana.

Police and security agencies have been/are being given what some regard as unprecedented powers to snoop, hold without bail and so on. In Canada, the Liberals are bringing in legislation to allow the police and CSIS to monitor email and cell phone conversations. But unprecedented? Not at all. Extraordinary powers are nothing new. How quickly we forget the imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970, or, earlier on, the internment of Canadian citizens--Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian, you name it--not for being enemy sympathizers, but for "security" reasons. Again, there’s nothing new here, except the technology.

No, the world hasn’t changed. But perhaps some people have become more aware that there is a world out there. There is no Fourth World, Third World, Second World, First World--just one planet, and everything is connected. The US is not situated on the moon, above it all, but is very much a part of the world in which it throws its weight around. It took the tragedy of the Twin Towers to wake a lot of people up to that inescapable fact, to re-think, and to understand, finally, that all actions have counter-reactions, and all effects have causes. Whether it is Iraqi kids dying because of sanctions, Palestinians killed or displaced in that cage called the West Bank, Afghan and Iraqi civilians being slaughtered by the tens of thousands now, or ordinary Americans being massacred in an office building in New York in 2001, it’s all tied together in one bloody global package.

The trick is to figure out how, instead of reacting blindly. We need to be able to separate moralizing and sympathy from analysis. That was what Machiavelli did in 1505, and his very name, for that reason, has become synonymous with evil in the minds of many. But he was talking about the way things are, not what they should be; he was discussing power and its exercise while others talked of honour, faith and other values that had absolutely nothing to do with what was actually going on.

We run the same risk when we attempt to look analytically at 9/11. We are accused of being unfeeling (this from conservatives, whose empathy was so palpable during Katrina), or even in league with fundamentalist Islam. There is a blindness akin to macular degeneration that takes hold in a period of crisis: we are able to see only the vague outlines of things, heavily veiled by the metaphysical categories of Good and Evil; details cannot be made out. Those who sift among the wreckage for clues are suspect. We want to see things in black and white. Good guys versus bad guys. God versus the devil. Binary thinking is comforting, or, if not comforting, at least readily accessible to those desperately looking for meaning in such events.

Some accuse those whose sympathies lie with what is labelled "the Left" of merely reversing the polarity, and they’re not always wrong, but such accusations are a fairly broad brush and I don't find them generally very convincing. We don't, after all, support stoning women for adultery, public amputations, hanging gay teenagers, or any of the other delights imposed by fundamentalist Islamic regimes. Indeed, the targets here, if not the specific punishments, are far more redolent of conservatism. Being critical of US foreign policy is a very far cry indeed from embracing the mediaeval world-view of Osama bin Laden.

But be critical we must, and it does no dishonour to the innocent victims in the World Trade Center to be so. The distinction between civilian and soldier has effectively disappeared: somehow every human being has been drafted into a war that most do not believe in or begin to comprehend. It’s that old Left binary, perhaps, hideously perverted: "If you aren't part of the solution, you’re part of the problem." Or Bush's more biblical rendition: "If you’re not with us, you're against us." Yet most people would simply like to be left alone, to live in dignity and peace. Binary thinking has condemned them instead to lives of fear and deprivation.

If there is one lesson to be learned from 9/11, we need a new paradigm. We can't go on like this. We are all net losers in the current voguish war on terrorism. We lose our security, our liberty and too often our lives in the lose-lose scenario now being played out. While Halliburton snaps up the reconstruction contracts in Iraq (and New Orleans), and Bush practises his guitar licks, and a favoured few wax fat and happy amid the ruins of the world, and moral idiots like bin Laden and Abu Hamza al-Masri capitalize on prevalent misery and despair, running around pretending that their hatred is religious devotion, everybody else pays for it in one way or another.

The wretched of the earth find themselves imprisoned in something resembling, at least metaphorically, the New Orleans Superdome: contained by a perimeter of armed guards, too many without sustenance in an atmosphere of dread and violence, but where ordinary people rose to the occasion, remained civilized, stood up to the armed gangs, and demanded to be treated like human beings.

We need something like this to happen world-wide. No one can stop this game by raising the ante. There is no winner-take-all. Corporate globalism and instantaneous communications have bound us together inextricably, placing the rich and the poor, the privileged and the damned, side-by-side. Something has to give. Out of such necessity, will a new way of thinking emerge?

Katrina and the Right

This will probably be my last post on Katrina. More than enough has already been said on the subject, and I myself wasn't actually planning to post more than once. But two things kept me going. The first was the continuing flood of reports of the event itself, the horrifying images and descriptions of destruction, neglect, incompetence and violence on the one hand, and tragic dignity, compassion and outraged human concern on the other. The second was the parallel flood of commentary from the hard Right: an ugly, toxic mix of partisan excuse-making, stereotypes and contempt for the victims, all expressed in tones of insufferable smugness. The utter lack of empathy demonstrated by so many of the commentators was, for me, an excruciating reminder of the vacuum at the core of radical individualism, an absence of morality so profound that a million pretentious "philosophers" of the Ayn Rand variety couldn't begin to fill it with their specious substitutes.

The past few days have been emotional for me, and in some of my comments I have not been attentive to the fact that "the Right" is a category that should not be overly homogenized. There is decency to be found among some on that side of things, and the other positive qualities that make us human, too: empathy, compassion, caring. The Right, after all, is composed (for the most part) of ordinary human beings. But my attention was drawn and held by the sheer noise generated on that section of the political spectrum when and after Katrina hit: the kindly voices were simply drowned out.

Before getting to a few examples, let me dispose of the "charity" meme. A number of right-wing blogsites have been prompt to post links to various charitable organizations. For many, that seems to be the only way to express any fellow-feeling in this affair. Amidst the veritable forest of fingers wagging at the victims, here are some numbers to call, some sites where you can come and donate.

Let me put my cards on the table. I don't like charity. I give to charity, as I've given to Katrina relief recently, but always with a sinking feeling. It's like tipping waitstaff: I know I'm supplementing low wages, in fact I'm helping to keep them low by tipping, but stiffing servers isn't my style. Charity is an institutionalized perversion of the noblest of human instincts, the urge to share and reach out, to be social in the deepest sense. Charity establishes a hierarchy of donor and recipient. It encourages a kind of sanctimonious egoism, a sense of moral superiority. It's too often giving without really giving, even setting aside the tax deduction; it's cold and (for some) merely an obligation, like going to church.

I don't want to "give to the less fortunate." I want a society where there are no less fortunate, where social relations are authentic relations among equals, where we have so cooperatively arranged our relations that "charity" per se is no longer necessary. Until then, I'll keep on paying my taxes and giving to charity. A better world is something to work for, but too far off to wait for.

Now, to a sampling of the people who sum up, for me, what is wrong with the Right, with the caveats now securely in place above. Let's start with James Taranto. This moral imbecile is actually pleased that the disaster happened, because it increases the likelihood that Louisiana will go Republican. Here is his ill-concealed glee:

Katrina may change Louisiana politics for another reason: demographics. The storm forced a mass exodus from New Orleans and vicinity, and many residents surely will resettle out of state. The political effect will depend on whence the emigrants turn out to have come.

In the 2004 election, President Bush carried Louisiana by 281,870 votes, according to data from David Leip's election atlas. A breakdown by parish shows that the two candidates ran almost exactly even in the New Orleans area: John Kerry had a 109,763-vote margin within the city (Orleans Parish), while Bush beat Kerry by a combined 109,546 votes in the suburban parishes of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany.

Obviously if more New Orleans residents than suburbanites move out of state, Louisiana will become more Republican. Less obviously, the state will become more Republican even if flight from the suburbs equals that from New Orleans, since the evenly divided New Orleans region will account for a smaller part of the population than the heavily GOP-leaning rest of the state.

Moving hastily along, holding our noses in a tight grip, we come to Christopher Ruddy, who really nails that weepy liberal bastard Aaron Broussard:

Broussard, who was never identified by "Meet the Press" as a Democrat, spent much of his time attacking the Bush administration, as has Democratic New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

Broussard then ended his performance as he collapsed in tears with a demand: "For God's sake, just shut up and send us somebody!"

His tears didn't wash with me. My sympathies lie with the tens of thousands of people who have suffered or died because local officials like Broussard, Mayor Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco, also a Democrat, failed monumentally at their jobs.

As it turns out, of course, while FEMA was obstructing so much assistance that a clear pattern seems to have emerged, if not a clear motive, the Governor had already declared a state of emergency and requested federal assistance, in fact before Katrina had even made landfall. The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, has been hailed for leadership and courage. He was not a man for cursory flyovers and staged photo-ops like another American leader. Check out this video and tell me, or anyone recognizably human, that Broussard was faking it, as blogger Jay Currie (for whom I usually have some respect) unbelievably asserts (and he's not alone).

Then there's Rush Limbaugh, sounding like he's back on OxyContin:

What we've seen in New Orleans is first and foremost the utter failure of generation after generation after generation of the entitlement mentality.

No, Rush, what we've seen in New Orleans is levees breaking because of Bush's cutbacks, and people dying because of an utter failure of the federal government to respond, not to mention the criminal incompetence of FEMA. And what we've heard is a whole lot of bloated charlatans like yourself leaning down from on high to tell drowning people that they should have taken swimming lessons.

The self-same theme is continued by the grossly self-satisfied and shallow Mark Steyn:

Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the 'oppressed' guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness. New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up.

Nauseated yet? Check out the blogosphere. Here's just a small sampling:

Jay Currie (after claiming that the people should have predicted the levee break and stocked up on water):

The problem, of course, is that several generations of a nanny state saps the self-reliance of its clients. That infantile dependency gives us the pitiful spectacle of Aaron Broussard telling the story of a co-worker who kept reassuring his elderly mother that help was on its way right up until she drowned. There the poor woman is in a building with a phone asking him why he didn’t come and get her…So why didn't he? Or why didn't Mr. Broussard?

That "co-worker" happened to be the emergency situation manager for a large building. Had he deserted his post, the wingnits would have been all over him for "lacking a sense of responsibility," blah, blah. Besides, he had no way of knowing that the fifth cavalry were mounted on giant snails. As for the remark about Broussard, he is the President of Jefferson Parish,and in that role he's been struggling every waking moment with monumentally huge coordination and relief operations. At least the Left didn't fatuously wonder aloud why Bush wasn't there in person hauling people off roofs. (One right-wing blogger was critical of a Congressman who did pitch in. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.)

Here's Kate McMillan, at Small Dead Animals:

What is their [New Orleanians'] response to this consequence that has befallen them, a consequence largely of their own making?

"You owe us".

Well, cheer up, Kate. The feds sure gave a reality check to those lowlifes, didn't they? You've got thousands fewer people with a sense of entitlement now.

Meanwhile, Bill Whittle hasn't yet choked on his self-generated combination of smugness and priggishness:

Only a few minutes ago, I had the delightful opportunity to read the comment of a fellow who said he wished that white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself could have been herded into the Superdome Concentration Camp to see how much we like it. Absent, of course, was the fundamental truth of what he plainly does not have the eyes or the imagination to see, namely, that if the Superdome had been filled with white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself, it would not have been a refinery of horror, but rather a citadel of hope and order and restraint and compassion.

(This gutless wonder, incidentally, seems to have pre-emptively banned the entire Progressive Bloggers blogroll. Only positive comments appear to be welcome in his echo-chamber. Of course, the Right's tolerance for dissent is well-known, witness the Cindy Sheehan pile-on.)

So what is it about the Rightist sensibility that leads to what Christopher Hitchens, commenting in this instance on George W. Bush’s astounding failure of leadership, calls "fatal insouciance?" It is precisely this: a cult of exclusion and privilege, based upon race and class, alibied by a fetishizing of "the individual" that is central to the right-wing Weltanschauung. Exclusion from the winner’s circle requires that others be tagged as "not like/not as good as us," and demands the suppression or even the complete elimination of those feelings of empathy and compassion towards them that make us social beings.

An ideology is required to legitimize this. "There is no such thing as society," declared Margaret Thatcher, who counts as one of her close friends Augusto Pinochet, the Butcher of Santiago. The very notion of altruism is excoriated by Ayn Rand and her babbling horde of followers, who extoll selfishness as a virtue.

The natural human instinct to nurture and empathize is thus perverted into a preening self-love, so evident over the past few days in everything from hokey Presidential photo-ops to priggish comments about "entitlement mentality" to racism-tinged stereotyping of the victims, as those on the high and dry ground of moral superiority distance themselves, emotionally and morally, from the dead and dying in New Orleans.

The psychopathology I have been illustrating and describing is best summed up, admittedly in one of its more extreme manifestations, by someone of the right-wing persuasion. The last word is his or hers, then, in a fitting conclusion:

[M]y first reaction [at seeing Aaron Broussard on NBC] was disgust--crying and carrying on like that is no way for a leader of men to behave on national tv, I don’t care if it was his own mother who'd been drowned. Leaders have to help people bear up, not wallow with them in a pit of grief, especially when the crisis is by no means over yet.
…
I was wondering [at] my inability to be moved by the emotional displays of any spokesperson the news media chooses to pluck from the New Orleans wreckage, or the flotsam and jetsam of the government of that city and its state, other than to feel a sensation as if hot slugs were crawling on me.

Katrina -- memorable quotes

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody."
--Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana

"We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water. They (federal officials) wanted to negotiate an organizational chart." --Denise Bottcher, press secretary for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

"I have been all over the world. I've been in a lot of Third World countries where people were better off than the people here are right now. We've got 28 miles of coastline here that's absolutely destroyed, and the federal government, they're not here." --William Bissell, Air Force Captain (rtd.)

"I do think the nation would be responding differently if they were white elderly and white babies actually dying on the street and being covered with newspapers and shrouds and being left there." --David Billings, The People's Institute

"George Bush doesn't care about black people." --Kanye West, rapper

"No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!" --Michael Moore

"Last night these people were told by a Louisiana state trooper that in four hours, 300 buses would be here. Well, they put their elderly and their sick up front, all neat, and the babies. They cleaned up their own areas and then they stood in line until well after midnight. Not a single bus came. Don't you believe what you've been hearing. These people are great. They were brought here, as we were, by the authorities, lots of them rescued from rooftops, and they haven't received any medication attention, any water, or one word of encouragement." -- Donelle Deffina, from California, a rare white face at the New Orleans Morial Convention Center

"A lot of people are working hard to help those who have been affected, and I want to thank the people for their efforts. The results are not acceptable." --George W. Bush

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." --Barbara Bush

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn't work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE's once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell. --Steve Gilliard, blogger

"So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot." --Aaron Broussard

[Readers may wish to add to this list--Dr.D.]

UPDATE (September 14) There are some developments with respect to Aaron Broussard's comment about the woman in the nursing home. The man whose mother it was has been identified as Thomas Rodrigue; his mother, 92, drowned on Monday, August 29. Rodrigue had been on the telephone repeatedly on August 27 to get her out of there; the nursing home operators have now been charged with homicide. Broussard's timeline was off, as was his assessment of blame in this instance: his brain must have been overloaded with the numerous genuine instances of FEMA incompetence (links here and here) in a period of crisis. I, for one, do not accept the charges from the right half of the blogosphere that he was lying. There's too much of the "gotcha" in the commentary there, with a failure to recognize the obvious: an easily disproved lie very quickly reverses any political advantage such a lie might at first achieve. The man was not lying; but he was clearly mistaken in this instance.

Tonga strike update

[Follow-up to my earlier post]

After nearly six weeks, public employees in Tonga are going back to work. They have won a momentous victory: salary increases of 60-70-80% for the next two years, full salary for the time they were on strike, and a back-to-work agreement guaranteeing no discipline for any striker.

Their demands for democratic reforms have not dissipated with their wage settlement, however: "Though the strikers return today to work, the PSA will continue to pursue all peaceful and lawful moves towards a more democratic form of government."

Read about it here.

Katrina memes

The right half of the blogosphere is not alone in dissing the victims of Katrina over the past few days. The mainstream media have done their share of it too, feeding into frankly racist stereotypes about Blacks that never lie far below the surface in North America. Yet, reading vast amounts of media coverage, one can sometimes discern a different reality. Consider some of the memes that have infected thinking and interfered with observation recently, and some of the facts that have emerged in spite of them:

The Uppity Nigger. That would be Kanye West, rap artist, having the barefaced effrontery to mouth off on a telethon thus: "Bush doesn't care about Black people." He said that Blacks are described in the media as "looting" food while whites "find" it. He had a few other things to say as well, until NBC cut away and eventually censored the clip.The network fell all over itself apologizing: West's "opinions in no way represent the views of the networks." The Red Cross weighed in as well: "During the telecast, a controversial comment was made by one of the celebrities. We would like the American public to know that our support is unwavering, regardless of political circumstances."

"Kanye West Ruins Relief Show," shrieks one headline, the story continuing, "In a disgusting display, West strayed from his prepared script to offer an overflow of hatred from his mouth, taking the spotlight off of the matter at hand, turning the relief program into his own personal soapbox." Always ready to help out, Michelle Malkin is "tracking" the story of this "fiasco," of West's "meltdown." And West's swift-boating has just begun: he's apparently a "tin-foil hat conspiracist," and he was a "petulant sore loser" at the American Music Awards last year. Does he beat his dog? Did he steal chewing gum in seventh grade? Malkin and her buddies will get to the bottom of it, never fear.

But what did West actually say? Only what scores of others have already said, after all, and with some reason. Yet the emphasis has all been on West rather than his words.

Speaking truth to power? Haill, no. He "departed from the scripted comments that were prepared for him." Didn't this nigra know his place?

Anarchy. Confused mental images of New Orleans in crisis have been conjured up: a howling mob, criminals, the breakdown of law and order. "Nasty, brutish – society's net snaps," shrilled one headline, right by a picture in the print edition of frantic Black people trying to get at some scarce supplies.

But it wasn't entirely that way. Conditions in the New Orleans Convention Center were grim and getting grimmer, with false promises of evacuation: every time one of those promises came, the people inside lined up, put babies and old people at the head of the lines, and waited. And waited. That sounds, at least to me, that social cohesion and humane values remained in place throughout it all. Most of the people in the Superdome behaved with tragic dignity. "[A]uthorities were heaping praise on the very people they had come to rescue. Long before the soldiers restored order and the buses arrived for evacuation, hundreds of ordinary New Orleanians banded together to prevent sheer anarchy from breaking out." But most of the media preferred to track the criminals and crackheads, giving the impression that they and their behaviour were typical. Or, should I say, stereotypical.

Looting. It's by now well-known in the blogosphere (and obviously to Kanye West) that two photographs of food-bearing individuals were captioned differently: the Black man was "looting," the whites were "finding" their food. The Right has been doing back-flips trying to explain this all away. The pictures came from two different agencies who provided their own captions. Maybe different journalistic standards were applied. Maybe the Black really did loot his food, and the whites really did find theirs. But comments like this one from photographer Chris Graythen, who provided the "finding" caption, don't inspire confidence: "These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow."

Hmm…floating cokes, eh? Must be the new light version.

But in any case, food-scrounging is certainly not in the same category as running off with a plasma TV. The people in the shelters were virtual prisoners, not permitted to leave. (A Canadian reporter, Alan Freeman, found this out the hard way: having completed his interviews inside the Superdome, National Guardsmen would not allow him to depart--finally, after pleading with them, they did let him out: through an exit where water was at chest-level.) Groups of young Black men, whom the media called "looters," slipped out to scavenge for food. "They're Robin Hoods, those boys," one inmate commented--I would say accurately.

I wish I'd said that

Sometimes somebody comes along from the high-rant district, and all you can do is marvel and applaud:

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn't work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE's once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell.

Read the whole thing. It will change your life.

[with a tail-wag to POGGE]

New Orleans: a touch of class

This just in from YahooNews. (Thanks to Anonalogue for pointing it out.) I reproduce it without comment:

Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far from the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. As many as 5,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.
...

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line — much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.

"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.

Fear and loathing in New Orleans

Every now and then the Right demonstrates its true colours, its utter lack of compassion and human decency, its stunning absence of humanity. It took the New Orleans disaster to tear away its superficial rags of civility this time. The Right loathes the Black folks in New Orleans, stuck in the Superdome and elsewhere. It doesn't give a damn if they live or die, never mind the occasional sanctimonious exhortations to send relief donations.

Strong words? Want proof? Let's begin with the official Right, you know, the US administration that took days to move their sorry asses south.

• The Red Cross are absent from New Orleans.They had been ordered by Homeland Security to stay out. Why? Because, a spokesperson said, the people in the Superdome would be attracted to the food and not want to be evacuated. The fact that they were starving and that there was no evacuation in sight made no difference. Don't want to encourage laziness and an entitlement mentality, after all.
  
  
• This video reveals that people were not permitted to evacuate themselves, by crossing a bridge into safety. Officials at checkpoints sent them back to the living hell they were trying to escape. Watching Geraldo Rivera take no crap from the smug Sean Hannity is worth the price of admission.
  
  
• Bush himself has now admitted that things were handled badly. He had little choice. They were. Much more could have been done, but as noted in my last piece, image courtesy of Michael Moore, the New Orleans folks weren't white people in Kennebunkport. Bush later hedged his remark, and spent little or no time with the survivors as he waltzed around the area trying to look presidential. Officials cited "security concerns."
  

Now, to the blogosphere closer to home. I'll start by providing a few direct quotes with links to show what we've got here in terms of a Rightist response to human suffering:

• Do they find strength in human dignity and sanctity of life? Do the strong come to the aid of the weak? Do they summon patience and resolve in the knowledge that help is on the way, if only they can find the courage to help themselves a little longer?

  What is their response to this consequence that has befallen them, a consequence largely of their own making?

  "You owe us" .

  They take what others have failed to provide, those things required to sustain life - jewelry and television sets. And when taking isn't enough (it never is), they devolve into predation and anarchy, abandon the weak, turn upon the innocent and each other - and all in a matter of days. [Small Dead Animals]

• I'm just thankful that the majority of people (I hope), do not have this stunning sense of entitlement [emphasis mine] and are instead grateful [for being rescued at last]. [Celestial Junk]
  

• [T]he criminal freaks in New Orleans...should be eaten by alligators. [Least Loved Bedtime Stories]
  
  
• Broadcast after broadcast of whining...the constant references to the “anger” of the “hungry” people in New Orleans (whose fault is it they didn’t think to lay up a week’s worth of food? Did they think that their welfare checks entitled them to magical protection against any suffering from hurricanes?) [Comment at LLBS ]
  
  
• However: one of the reasons poor people are poor is because they can't or won't plan further ahead than tomorrow, next week, or next month (when the cheque comes in) at the most. Those stuck in New Orleans are, according to reports I've heard, most likely lifelong recipients of public assistance. The government is "supposed" to help them, and do so immediately and immaculately. Resourcefulness, self-restraint, a sense of their own and other people's inherent dignity -- these things have been eroded as surely as the coastline. [Relapsed Catholic]
  
  
• [A]ny area where blacks are the predominant race is going to revert to savagery when civilian control is cut off as it was this week in NO. It's just blacks being blacks; no other explanation is needed. [Comment on Stormfront.org]
  
  

Ah, the refreshing honesty of that last comment. What all the rest of them doubtless wanted to say at some level, but wouldn't dare admit it, possibly even to themselves. What do we see in these sick-making, racism-tinged attempts to blame the victim? An absolutely gut-wrenching lack of empathy. Utter contempt for the sufferers--it was their own fault. Asking for food after days without? Those lazy bums were just demonstrating a shocking sense of entitlement.

This is the Right, uncloaked in a crisis. Behind its pious talk of values, its endless excuse-making, its smug self-reassurance that the victims of Katrina had only themselves to blame, this is its true character: a grinning mask of pure hatred, with nothing recognizably human behind it.

UPDATE (September 14). It has been rightly pointed out that the Homeland Security officials who refused admittance of the Red Cross to New Orleans were from the state Homeland Security, not the federal one. Indeed, my link made that clear, but I failed to correct the context. The federal agency FEMA did more than enough to cause misery in that situation, but federal Homeland Security gets a pass. Mea culpa.

Bush league

Much has already been written--too much--about Hurricane Katrina and the on-going tragedy in its wake. I can't hope to offer any piercing new insights. But the totality of these events sums up, at least in my mind, the uglier side of America today. Let's recap:

• Hurricane warnings were put into effect well before the storm struck New Orleans. It was known last Thursday that it was heading right for the city. Residents were told to evacuate. Of course, a large percentage of the population was unable to comply. They had no cars, and Greyhound buses stopped running on Saturday, citing safety reasons.
  
  
• The brunt of the hurricane actually missed New Orleans. Then, Tuesday, the levees broke, and flooding ensued--New Orleans is below sea level. Even after five days, little help came until a few hours ago, when the National Guard finally arrived. "Hell no, I'm not glad to see them. They should have been here days ago. I ain't glad to see 'em. I'll be glad when 100 buses show up," said one frustrated storm victim.
  
  The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), now absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security, has been spectacularly inept. “FEMA has been here for three days yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans,” said the city's homeland security advisor, Terry Ebbert.
  

• Huge crowds of hungry and thirsty people in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Centre have had little or no food for days. Rioting, rape and beatings are reported, and much gunfire. The Army is off in Iraq, shoring up that country's democracy. The National Guard, as noted, has only just put in an appearance. Police themselves have been reduced to looting to get necessary supplies.
  

• Corpses are everywhere. On a grassy median, one reporter noted, an old man is stretched out on a chaise lounge, dead. Close by there’s an elderly woman in a wheelchair, dead. The wailing of babies can be heard. The heat is terrible, and unrelenting.
  

• All one hears from the Bushites is excuses, excuses, excuses. George W. joined former Presidents Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton in claiming that no one knew this was coming. Lies, all lies. In 2001, FEMA warned that this was one of the three major catastrophes likely to hit the US. The levees could withstand only a Category Three storm: money for strengthening them was cut by the Bush administration. A Canadian nitwit blamed the environmental movement for the cutbacks.
  
  
• Bush hasn't shown his vacuous, smirking face in New Orleans even yet, although as I write this he's finally made it to the general area. He's still on vacation, remember, give the poor guy a break. Oh, he did fly over the scene. He feels their pain. "We authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq, lickety split. After 9/11 we gave the president unauthorized powers, lickety split to help New York and other places," the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, said. "You mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through ... that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need?"
  

• As others have noticed, some of the media are growing a spine. Bush has shown a "diffident detachment unsuitable for a leader," thundered the conservative Manchester Union-Leader. Veteran right-wingers, CNN's Jack Cafferty and Fox News' Shep Smith, sent some pointed comments in the direction of the White House and the powers that be for sitting there mumbling "can't do" as the snail-like response to the crisis continued. No, that's unfair to them. They gave them an unprecedented tongue-lashing on prime time TV. This heart-rending video gives the flavour. It just about says it all.
  
  
• There is an obvious racial dimension to this whole thing. Where are the white faces of the disaster victims? Whites were able to evacuate. As for the people left, the stereotypes and the racism kicks in. One graphic report in the print edition of the Globe & Mail, with a picture of a crowd of blacks jostling to get onto one of the few buses made available, is headlined, "Nasty, brutish--society's net snaps." I've been around for a while, and I have never seen a white crowd, even a mob, described that way in the Globe. Here's a think-experiment: imagine a huge crowd of people, black, white, yellow, green, it matters not. Starve them for four days. Then show up with one sandwich truck.
  
  Michael Moore was right on the money when he asked rhetorically whether white people in Kennebunkport would be left on their roofs for five days. This is the richest country in the world, and it can't run a decent rescue operation for its own citizens. Or won't.

• Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela, offered cheap oil and relief workers. Another Canadian nitwit said the US would probably refuse courteously, which was more than Chavez deserved. Even in the midst of starvation and human devastation, we mustn't forget our partisan politics, now, must we? No patriotic American, even a starving one, would accept help from a commie, right? Say, let's go ask 'em.
  

• The churches have been gently reminding charitable donors that the US is the wealthiest country in the world, more than capable of providing its own relief effort. Meanwhile, Bush is proposing charitable fundraising. Congress finally reconvened to kick in some much-needed cash: there had been fears that FEMA was about to run out of money. Cash is a little tight when so much of it is going to "rebuild" Iraq, or Afghanistan, or whatever country is next on the hit list. And don't forget the tax cuts. We need 'em.
  

• I filled up my car today. $1.35 per litre. Someone's making a killing out of this, no pun intended. Katrina's been good for business: the TSE index has soared to its highest in five years. Give us free lumber, the American lumber barons say to the Canadians, and it'll be exempt from the countervail. Bravo for big-hearted business.

Am I angry? That would be a whopping understatement. The administration cut funding for the US Corps of Engineers, stopping work on the levees that would have ensured this unspeakable tragedy had never happened. Blacks have been left to drown or starve because Bush and his buddies just don't give a damn. The FEMA emergency measures organization, with days of warning, has fumbled and bumbled and flapped incompetently. Guns are everywhere, but there's still nowhere near enough food or water, even by Day Five. Business is reaping huge profits.

America, 2005. A sick sight to behold--on so many levels.