Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, “This is working very well for them.”

“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

I’m speechless.

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From the Times of London, hardly a rabble-rousing newspaper.

Gerard Scott arrived back in Merseyside today from a holiday in New Orleans with his wife, Sandra, and their young son. He criticised the US authorities for their “horrendous” handling of the crisis, saying he and other guests trapped in a hotel were offered no help for days.

He said American police took photographs of stranded people begging for help, and on one occasion urged women to bare their breasts in return for being rescued.

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From Kirsten in Santa Cruz 

The whole thing is horrifying–they’re treating people worse than most of us would treat animals. And so clearly, it seems a race thing, that the poor of New Orleans are black and they have been treated like hell. I’ve heard so many people talk about “ethnic cleansing.”

A friend of mine has a daughter who lives in Baton Rouge. As of yesterday, they still have no electricity or ability to buy gas. The population has gone from 400,000 to 800,000 practically overnight. She says it is like a war zone–people all over, no way to get food from the places that are open–people stealing. She says the outlying towns are just as bad .And none of it is covered by the media–it’s being whitewashed.

I think this mess has uncovered the “dirty little secret” that is all over America. It also shows how threadbare all the high and mighty talk of our power and might is, and it REALLY shows the hypocrisy of us as a fine, upstanding, Christian nation. What empty, meaningless crap. What I appreciate is wonderful people like your area’s Maxine Waters and my area’s Barbara Lee going down there and raising hell. Where are Boxer and Feinstein? Isn’t it fascinating how many so-called liberals are silent?

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The 1927 Mississippi flood

In 1927, the great Mississippi flood rumbled down upon New Orleans. As Barry writes in his account, “Rising Tide,” the disaster ripped the veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, and revealed the festering iniquities. Blacks were rounded up into work camps and held by armed guards. They were prevented from leaving as the waters rose. A steamer, the Capitol, played “Bye Bye Blackbird” as it sailed away. The racist violence that followed the floods helped persuade many blacks to move north.

Civic leaders intentionally flooded poor and middle-class areas to ease the water’s pressure on the city, and then reneged on promises to compensate those whose homes were destroyed. That helped fuel the populist anger that led to Huey Long’s success. Across the country people demanded that the federal government get involved in disaster relief, helping to set the stage for the New Deal. The local civic elite turned insular and reactionary, and New Orleans never really recovered its preflood vibrancy.

What’s happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

Deliberate rupturing of levees.

1) Ms Lavy echoed the thoughts and words of many black Americans we spoke to over the weekend who, while often heroic or stoic in the face of the death and depravity around them, were deeply bitter and angry at the rich white people who run their country.

“They opened the levees to save the whole neighbourhood to protect their investments,” declared Larry Crawford, 34, believing as many sincerely do that some districts were deliberately flooded to relieve the pressure on the dykes protecting others.

2) Corp officials were saying that they’d need to intentionally rupture levees elsewhere in the New Orleans area to drain water behind them that is standing higher than lake level.

Water that will drain from where to where?

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International Herald Tribune

Disaster exposes city’s racial fault line

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed.
 
“This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society - in a literal way,” said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised images from his office at Harvard University.

New York Times

A Can’t-Do Government

I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

The Scotsman

Beleagued Bush forced to admit US is unable to cope

The United States has asked the European Union and NATO for emergency assistance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina as salvage efforts in New Orleans and other cities begin to move from rescuing the living to recovering the dead.

Irish Times

New Orleans nearly empty as blame game begins

New Orleans looked all but empty on Sunday after the final evacuation of battered survivors of Hurricane Katrina, while top Bush administration officials, stung by anger at their relief efforts, were fanning out across the afflicted region.

Wall Street Journal

The Katrina Crisis. A hurricane produces an integrated energy disaster.

What makes it an integrated crisis is that the entire energy supply system in the region has been disabled, and that the parts all depend upon each other for recovery. If the next weeks reveal that the losses are as large as some fear, this would constitute one of the biggest energy shocks since the 1970s, perhaps even the biggest. Unlike the crises of the ’70s or the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990-91, this does not involve just crude oil: It includes natural gas, refineries and electricity.

Boston Globe

Katrina’s truths

It all adds up to what we saw last week — government not as the enemy, but as the incompetent, impotent bystander. The bystander-in-chief, of course, is George W. Bush, whose whining self-obsession perfectly embodies what America has done to itself.

One cannot see the devastated cities or that river of refugees or those harried National Guard soldiers without seeing something even more disturbing — Katrina’s third epiphany. This is what war looks like, and the harsh reality is that the United States has been the source of exactly such devastation elsewhere. Obliterated cities, populations pushed into refugee camps, young American soldiers overwhelmed by the impossibility of their mission — this is Iraq today. Oil is part of the Gulf Coast story and part of Iraq’s story, too. We are at war for oil, a war we cannot win. Four dollar gasoline. The truth is crashing over us, a tsunami of it.

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