| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Black Elk" |
| Date: |
11 Sep 2005 11:28:53 AM |
| Object: |
New Orleans: the specter of military dictatorship |
New Orleans: the specter of military dictatorship
10 September 2005
The appalling incompetence and negligence that characterized the government's
response at the outset of the human tragedy unleashed by Hurricane Katrina
have now given way to ruthlessly efficient methods of military occupation
and repression in the ravaged city of New Orleans.
For four critical days, Washington proved incapable of mounting any credible
effort to rescue the tens of thousands of largely poor and working class New
Orleaneans who were left to their fate in the city's flooded streets, many
of them losing their lives not to the surging waters, but to the lack of
food, water or medicine.
Now the city has been inundated with troops, federal agents and cops of all
descriptions, turning it into one of the most heavily armed camps on the
face of the globe. Combat-equipped soldiers and police wearing helmets and
flak jackets are going door to door in the city to enforce a mandatory
evacuation at the point of a gun.
City authorities claimed Friday that they have yet to order forced removal
of residents and would do so only with "minimum force." In many cases,
demands by armed troops have proven sufficient to drive people from their
homes. "When you get 15 M16s pointed at you and they line you up against the
wall, it's kind of scary," one New Orleans resident told the Washington
Post, explaining why she was leaving.
In other cases, however, the official assertions are belied by televised
images of cops and troops kicking in the doors of homes and dragging people
away in plastic cuffs. The New Orleans Police Department acknowledged Friday
that it had arrested 200 people that day.
With an estimated 10,000 residents still in the city, far worse is yet to
come. Many justifiably fear that if they leave they will have no homes to
come back to. "They are trying to get this neighborhood for the rich
people," one man told the New Orleans Times-Picayune Thursday.
The first 11 days of the disaster have revealed two political truths about
present-day America. First, for all the talk about beefing up "homeland
security" against an alleged terrorist threat, the US government has
developed no serious civil defense plans to protect the American people from
mass disasters, either natural or man-made.
Second, in the wake of September 11, 2001, Washington has exploited the
terrorist attacks to concentrate ever-growing power in its military-police
apparatus, while elaborating extensive preparations for martial law
nationwide.
At its outset, the disaster exposed the Bush administration and the
government agencies responsible for emergency relief as totally unprepared.
Preventive measures that could have avoided the massive loss of life and
displacement of people were not taken. Money requested by the US Army Corps
of Engineers to reinforce the levees that are supposed to protect the city
from flooding was systematically cut over a period of years, with the funds
diverted to pay for the war in Iraq.
In the period immediately preceding the hurricane's landfall, no serious
efforts were made to evacuate the tens of thousands of residents who lacked
transportation or the means to get out of the city on their own. In its
aftermath, a general state of confusion and paralysis appeared to grip every
layer of government, delaying emergency relief efforts precisely at the
point when they could have saved the most lives.
The principal agency responsible, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), was clearly not up to the task, its capabilities having been
severely downgraded over the past several years. This degeneration
accelerated rapidly after FEMA was folded into the Department of Homeland
Security, with funding and resources diverted into the "global war on
terrorism." Meanwhile, under the Bush administration, the agency's top ranks
turned into a political patronage dumping ground.
The Washington Post revealed Friday that five of the eight top positions at
FEMA are occupied by former Bush presidential campaign workers and other
Republican political hacks. None of these five have any experience in
emergency operations or disaster relief.
On Friday, FEMA's director, Michael Brown, was relieved of his duties as the
nominal head of relief efforts in the Gulf Coast disaster zone. The move
represented an attempt at damage control following a firestorm of criticism
over Brown's incompetence and evidence that he falsified his resume. While
leading Democrats have demanded Brown's outright firing, the presence of
such an individual at the head of FEMA is merely symptomatic of the agency's
gutting.
Significantly, Brown's replacement as head of the Gulf Coast disaster
operation is Vice Admiral Thad Allen, the third-ranking officer in the US
Coast Guard. In announcing the shift, Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff said that having a senior officer take charge would facilitate
"inter-action with the military forces" that now effectively control New
Orleans. This shift at the top formalizes what had already become the
militarization of the response to the disaster.
Confronted with the inability of FEMA and other civilian agencies to
organize a relief effort, the government had no option but a military one.
Once it decided to use it, there were definite consequences.
While there was no adequate planning for disaster relief, the military and
the Homeland Security Department had well developed and rehearsed blueprints
for imposing martial law and the suppression of civil unrest. These have
been the key focus of planning at both the Pentagon and the Homeland
Security Department in the four years since the September 11 attacks.
Once these plans were taken off the shelf and the military was called in,
its own protocols and doctrines drove the intervention, with deadly
consequences.
First, the city was effectively sealed off, with residents seeking to flee
the disaster turned back at gunpoint and those trying to bring in relief
supplies turned back. The Red Cross, which has played the leading role in
countless previous disasters, was never allowed to enter the city. This took
place as a horrified world watched people dying in the hungry crowds that
waited outside the New Orleans Convention Center and amid the squalor of the
Superdome.
The order for the military to go in came only after the Pentagon was assured
that it could intervene with overwhelming force. Senior commanders spoke in
terms of a "combat operation" and "storming" the convention center, where
people were waiting to be evacuated.
Now the city is bristling with automatic weapons and is patrolled by troops
in armored vehicles fresh from Iraq. The obvious question is what is this
massive armed force doing in New Orleans, a city that is largely submerged
under water and nearly deserted? This level of military occupation is on its
face absurd, but it has been executed according to existing plans for
martial law that are the product of protracted secret deliberations.
The central focus of this military operation has been the establishment of
law and order, the protection of private property and, to those ends, the
forced evacuation of the remaining residents of the city.
The most chilling revelation coming out of New Orleans is that for America's
ruling elite and its state apparatus, the lives of ordinary Americans count
for nothing. This has found its most grotesque expression in the failure of
the authorities for a full 10 days to make any effort to recover the bodies
of the storm's victims, which lie rotting in the streets.
The storm's survivors complained bitterly about the media's referring to
them as "refugees," understandably bridling over a term that suggests that
the largely poor and black masses of newly homeless are foreigners in their
own land. Yet, the reality is that many of them have been treated more as
criminals than victims.
Those loaded onto trucks in the mandatory evacuation are not told where they
are going. As the Salt Lake Tribune reported, one planeload of evacuees was
informed that they were being shipped off to Utah only after their plane had
taken off from New Orleans International Airport. There also were multiple
reports that those being dispersed across the country are in many cases
subjected to restrictions on their movements and behavior that come close to
penal confinement.
Both the lack of preparation in terms of civil defense or humanitarian
relief and the turn towards martial law have deep roots in the social
structure and political system of the United States.
For more than a quarter century, both Democratic and Republican
administrations have pursued a policy designed to transfer wealth from the
vast majority of working people to the financial elite. They have
systematically slashed every program aimed at ameliorating conditions of
poverty in order to award ever fatter tax cuts to those at the top of the
economic pyramid. In the process, the ruling elite has created conditions of
profound social inequality and instability that have erupted to the surface
with the disaster in New Orleans.
The deepening of social inequality has been accompanied by an unprecedented
attack on basic democratic rights-conducted under the pretext of a "war on
terrorism" and "homeland security"-and an increasing reliance on military
force, both at home and abroad.
The events in New Orleans provide a sobering warning of the immense dangers
posed by these developments. The assumption of extraordinary and
unconstitutional powers by the president, the development of a secret shadow
government, revealed in the aftermath of September 11, the passage of the
Patriot Act, the establishment of the Homeland Security Department, and the
creation of a US Northern Command, the first such military command to
prepare and conduct nationwide operations on US soil, have together
established the framework for a police-military dictatorship. In New
Orleans, such a regime is being given a dry run.
The response of the Democrats to the momentous events in New Orleans is one
of impotence and duplicity. They themselves, of course, are implicated in
the failure to adequately prepare for or respond to the disaster, on the
national, state and local level. They have acted as full partners of the
Republicans in the buildup of the military, as well as in the imposition of
the Patriot Act and other attacks democratic rights.
Now the Democrats' principal demands have been for the sacking of the
hapless FEMA Director Brown-likely to be chosen as a scapegoat by the Bush
White House itself-and the convening of an "independent commission," along
the lines of the 9/11 panel, to probe the New Orleans disaster
and-inevitably-produce a similar whitewash. The party has advanced no
alternative program or proposals for the relief of the millions whose lives
have been devastated by the catastrophe, nor has it raised the slightest
objection to the handing over of control to the military.
The outrage felt by broad masses of American working people over the
appalling treatment of the hurricane disaster victims must be joined with a
political understanding of the stark dangers that are posed by these
developments.
These dangers cannot be countered within the framework of the existing
two-party system. They require an irrevocable break with the Democratic
Party and the emergence of a new, independent political movement of the
working class fighting for the socialist reorganization of society.
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hurr-s10.shtml
--
Virtually all of the specific economic policies advocated by the Italian and
German fascists of the 1930s have also been adopted in the United States in
some form, and continue to be adopted to this day. Sixty years ago, those
who adopted these interventionist policies in Italy and Germany did so
because they wanted to destroy economic liberty, free enterprise, and
individualism. Only if these institutions were abolished could they hope to
achieve the kind of totalitarian state they had in mind.
http://www.banned-books.com/truth-seeker/1994archive/121_3/ts213l.html
.
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| User: "Cmdr Buzz Corey" |
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| Title: Re: New Orleans: the specter of military dictatorship |
11 Sep 2005 06:39:43 PM |
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Black Elk wrote:
For four critical days, Washington proved incapable of mounting any credible
effort to rescue the tens of thousands of largely poor and working class New
Orleaneans who were left to their fate in the city's flooded streets, many
of them losing their lives not to the surging waters, but to the lack of
food, water or medicine.
And it should read thus: For days the National Weather Service had
warned that hurricane Katrina would hit the city of New Orleans with a
catagory 4 force that the levees could not withstand, and wide spread
flooding would occur with many deaths. However the Governor of Louisiana
and the Mayor of New Orleans refused to evacuate the city in a timely
manner, which would have saved hundreds or thousands of lives, even
though they had the resources to do so. Their refusal of Federal help in
a timely manner also contributed to the lose of many lives.
.
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| User: "John S." |
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| Title: Re: New Orleans: the specter of military dictatorship |
11 Sep 2005 06:33:12 PM |
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"Cmdr Buzz Corey" <me@that.moc> wrote in message
news:dvKdne-kE-jFLLneRVn-jw@gbronline.com...
Black Elk wrote:
For four critical days, Washington proved incapable of mounting any
credible effort to rescue the tens of thousands of largely poor and
working class New Orleaneans who were left to their fate in the city's
flooded streets, many of them losing their lives not to the surging
waters, but to the lack of food, water or medicine.
And it should read thus: For days the National Weather Service had warned
that hurricane Katrina would hit the city of New Orleans with a catagory 4
force that the levees could not withstand, and wide spread flooding would
occur with many deaths. However the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of
New Orleans refused to evacuate the city in a timely manner, which would
have saved hundreds or thousands of lives, even though they had the
resources to do so. Their refusal of Federal help in a timely manner also
contributed to the lose of many lives.
After the fact excuses for the bush administration's failure to act. The
state and city did NOT "refuse" federal help, it was never offered until
AFTER the disaster and was accepted. Sadly the inept bush administration
was on vacation and had no means to deliver the help. But, on the bright
side bush did cut short his 5-week vacation and he deigned to fly over NO in
his 747, viewing the carnage from his comfy couch. We should give bush the
nickname "Nero", except that bush strummed his gitar instead of a fiddle.
.
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| User: "Cmdr Buzz Corey" |
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| Title: Re: New Orleans: the specter of military dictatorship |
11 Sep 2005 10:41:37 PM |
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John S. wrote:
"Cmdr Buzz Corey" <me@that.moc> wrote in message
news:dvKdne-kE-jFLLneRVn-jw@gbronline.com...
Black Elk wrote:
For four critical days, Washington proved incapable of mounting any
credible effort to rescue the tens of thousands of largely poor and
working class New Orleaneans who were left to their fate in the city's
flooded streets, many of them losing their lives not to the surging
waters, but to the lack of food, water or medicine.
And it should read thus: For days the National Weather Service had warned
that hurricane Katrina would hit the city of New Orleans with a catagory 4
force that the levees could not withstand, and wide spread flooding would
occur with many deaths. However the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of
New Orleans refused to evacuate the city in a timely manner, which would
have saved hundreds or thousands of lives, even though they had the
resources to do so. Their refusal of Federal help in a timely manner also
contributed to the lose of many lives.
After the fact excuses for the bush administration's failure to act. The
state and city did NOT "refuse" federal help, it was never offered until
AFTER the disaster and was accepted. Sadly the inept bush administration
was on vacation and had no means to deliver the help. But, on the bright
side bush did cut short his 5-week vacation and he deigned to fly over NO in
his 747, viewing the carnage from his comfy couch. We should give bush the
nickname "Nero", except that bush strummed his gitar instead of a fiddle.
So why did the Governor and Mayor wait for help to be offered, they
should have asked immediately, it is their place to access the situation
and ask for Federal help asap. Let's put most of the blame where it
belongs, right on the Governor and Mayor.
.
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| User: "Cmdr Buzz Corey" |
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| Title: Re: New Orleans: the specter of military dictatorship |
11 Sep 2005 10:45:09 PM |
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John S. wrote:
"Cmdr Buzz Corey" <me@that.moc> wrote in message
news:dvKdne-kE-jFLLneRVn-jw@gbronline.com...
Black Elk wrote:
For four critical days, Washington proved incapable of mounting any
credible effort to rescue the tens of thousands of largely poor and
working class New Orleaneans who were left to their fate in the city's
flooded streets, many of them losing their lives not to the surging
waters, but to the lack of food, water or medicine.
And it should read thus: For days the National Weather Service had warned
that hurricane Katrina would hit the city of New Orleans with a catagory 4
force that the levees could not withstand, and wide spread flooding would
occur with many deaths. However the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of
New Orleans refused to evacuate the city in a timely manner, which would
have saved hundreds or thousands of lives, even though they had the
resources to do so. Their refusal of Federal help in a timely manner also
contributed to the lose of many lives.
After the fact excuses for the bush administration's failure to act. The
state and city did NOT "refuse" federal help, it was never offered until
AFTER the disaster and was accepted. Sadly the inept bush administration
was on vacation and had no means to deliver the help. But, on the bright
side bush did cut short his 5-week vacation and he deigned to fly over NO in
his 747, viewing the carnage from his comfy couch. We should give bush the
nickname "Nero", except that bush strummed his gitar instead of a fiddle.
So why didn't the Governor and Mayor evacuate the city before Katrina
hit like they were advised to do? Why wait until the hurricane hits, the
levees break and flood the city, then scream about the lack of Federal
help? Proper action by the Governor and Mayor in a timely manner would
have avoided much of the situation that occured.
.
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