Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

UN rights of internally displaced peoples

discussed here. -- Benj Hellie

The highly centralized, politics-driven federal bureaucracy under Rove

Described here. -- Benj Hellie

America doesn't care about black people, part 2

If you're looking for evidence beyond Katrina of the racism present in the U.S., Jonathon Kozol's article "Still Separate, Still Unequal" is required reading (in this month's Harper's).  It's a harrowing tale of the return to gross educational segregation and inequality that has occurred since the mandates of the Brown v. Board of Education decision were dismantled by federal courts in the early 1990s.  It's no surprise to urban blacks (and also hispanics) that institutionalized America doesn't care about them, doesn't care about even their most basic necessities:

"Can we talk about the bathrooms?" asked a soft-spoken student named Mireya.

In almost any classroom there are certain students who, by the force of their directness or the unusual sophistication of their way of speaking, tend to capture your attention from the start. Mireya later spoke insightfully about some of the serious academic problems that were common in the school, but her observations on the physical and personal embarrassments she and her schoolmates had to under go cut to the heart of questions of essential dignity that kids in squalid schools like this one have to deal with all over the nation.

Fremont High School, as court papers filed in a lawsuit against the state of California document, has fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law requires. Of the limited number of bathrooms that are working in the school, "only one or two . . . are open and unlocked for girls to use." Long lines of girls are "waiting to use the bathrooms," which are generally "unclean" and "lack basic supplies," including toilet paper. Some of the classrooms, as court papers also document, "do not have air conditioning," so that students, who attend school on a three-track schedule that runs year-round, "become red-faced and unable to concentrate" during "the extreme heat of summer." The school's maintenance records report that rats were found in eleven classrooms. Rat droppings were found "in the bins and drawers" of the high school's kitchen, and school records note that "hamburger buns" were being "eaten off [the] bread-delivery rack."

No matter how many tawdry details like these I've read in legal briefs or depositions through the years, I'm always shocked again to learn how often these unsanitary physical conditions are permitted to continue in the schools that serve our poorest students—even after they have been vividly described in the media. But hearing of these conditions in Mireya's words was even more unsettling, in part because this student seemed so fragile and because the need even to speak of these indignities in front of me and all the other students was an additional indignity.

Without even basic services like adequate bathroom facilities and safe food, one can imagine (see Kozol for the gruesome details) how impoverished or non-existent the means of appropriate education are.  And why do our urban black children get so much less than our white children?

^"If you close your eyes to the changing racial composition of the schools and look only at budget actions and political events," says Noreen Connell, the director of the nonprofit Educational Priorities Panel in New York, "you're missing the assumptions that are underlying these decisions." When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, "the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who just don't count—children we don't value."

America doesn't care about black children.  America doesn't have any place for black children.  And black children know it:

"It's more like being hidden," said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools.  "It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."

But let's not overexaggerate.   One segment of institutionalized (overwhelmingly, white) America does have a place for black (and hispanic) children:

Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-dressing as well. When I asked her teacher why Mireya could not skip these subjects and enroll in classes that would help her to pursue her college aspirations, she replied, "It isn't a question of what students want. It's what the school may have available. If all the other elective classes that a student wants to take are full, she has to take one of these classes if she wants to graduate."

A very small girl named Obie, who had big blue-tinted glasses tilted up across her hair, interrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gusto that she'd taken hairdressing twice! When I expressed surprise that this was possible, she said there were two levels of hairdressing offered here at Fremont High. "One is in hairstyling," she said. "The other is in braiding."

Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment and then suddenly began to cry. "I don't want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I'm trying to go to college. I don't need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else."

"What would you rather take?" I asked.

"I wanted to take an AP class," she answered.

Mireya's sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys who had been silent up till now: a thin, dark-eyed student named Fortino, who had long hair down to his shoulders. He suddenly turned directly to Mireya and spoke into the silence that followed her last words.

"Listen to me," he said. "The owners of the sewing factories need laborers. Correct?"

"I guess they do," Mireya said.

"It's not going to be their own kids. Right?" "Why not?" another student said.

"So they can grow beyond themselves," Mireya answered quietly. "But we remain the same."

"You're ghetto," said Fortino, "so we send you to the factory." He sat low in his desk chair, leaning on one elbow, his voice and dark eyes loaded with a cynical intelligence. "You're ghetto—so you sew!^"

"There are higher positions than these," said a student named Samantha. 

"You're ghetto," said Fortino unrelentingly. "So sew!"

-- Jessica Wilson

The leader of the free world

Bush's cutting short his five week vacation by five days to attend to Katrina business must have interfered with the stated purpose of that vacation, namely his being able to make "good, crisp decisions". Here he seems to be relying on his secretary of state (who once referred to Bush as "my husband") to make a decision on a fairly, shall we say, fundamental issue:

U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005. World leaders are exploring ways to revitalize the United Nations at a summit on Wednesday but their blueprint falls short of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's vision of freedom from want, persecution and war. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Link from atrios. If you can't believe your eyes, the original source is here.
-- Benj Hellie

Canadian anecdotes

As regular readers of this blog may recall, Professor Wilson and I have recently moved to Toronto, Canada. This post reports a few "person on the street" observations I've made in the past few weeks -- those allergic to diaristic blogging may wish to skip this post! (I hesitate to draw explicit morals about similarities and differences between attitudes of "typical" Canadians and Americans, since my time in the US during the Bush presidency has been largely spent in Ithaca, NY, an eccentric place as American cities go; and, of course, Toronto is the largest city in Canada, and has a 48% immigrant population.)

• The beginning of the academic year on Monday was under cloud over the weekend due to a stall in negotiations between the University and the Steelworkers local (representing most of the University's support staff). Discussions of this matter with locals attending our (semi-suburban) neighborhood fair on Saturday were overwhelmingly and adamantly supportive of our decision not to cross the picket line had it come to that (though it must be said that a mortgage broker and recent evangelical convert in attendance was outspoken on behalf of US-style right wing craziness). (We won hockey tickets at the street fair raffle -- our acculturation begins -- and will be taking our ultra-leftist protest song singing labor unionist commonlaw marriage across the street neighbors (no we didn't plan this!).)
• US citizens are not in the top ten immigrant groups in Toronto, so Professor Wilson and I are a bit of a curiosity. Canadians we meet in casual contexts are often a bit surprised that we've moved here. My typical response when asked why is "to get away from the Republicans". Roughly half of people get it; the other half seem to think of Canada as somehow dreary and the US as more thrilling, and can't understand why anyone would make our move.
• Katrina was on the front page of many local papers for about a week, but has since dropped off. In the week after the hurricane, gas prices climbed 44% (to USD 4.36/g!!!), but have since dropped back to pre-hurricane prices. Newspapers blamed profiteering and endorsed making national the system of Prince Edward Island, in which gas prices are set centrally for the entire month.
• Overheard on the University radio station was a news broadcast detailing the horrible extent of today's violence in Iraq. This was followed by a comment to the effect that the media like to focus on deaths caused by the insurgency, but that one can learn from www.iraqbodycount.net that the vast majority of civilian deaths in Iraq were caused by the US military. The reporters then segued into news to the effect that Germany, France, and Spain had refused to participate in Rumsfeld's plan to militarize the NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, but bemoaned Canada's going along with the US. Bush's "taking responsibility" for the failure to protect NOLA and the Gulf Coast from Katrina was derided: to truly take responsibility would be to resign. One announcer wanted to go down to the US, slap people around and say "you voted for that idiot!" The other announcer pointed out that there was probably massive election fraud, so this response would be inappropriate.
• The undergrad population at the campus at which Professor Wilson and I teach is amazingly diverse in terms of ethnicity -- roughly a quarter of the students in my course are of evident European descent, as compared to roughly four-fifths in a typical undergrad course in the Ivy League schools I inhabited for the last decade. More generally, relations between people of varying ethnicity in Toronto strike me as being considerably less fraught with anxiety than those in the US.

Jealous? -- Benj Hellie

America doesn't care about black people, part 1

Among the brutal facts that Katrina has laid bare is U.S. racism, manifested many times over in the astonishing saga of blacks trapped in New Orleans. 

To start, no provision was made for evacuating residents—overwhelmingly, black—without transportation.   In a DVD targeted primarily for release to the most vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods (again, overwhelmingly, black), the blunt message was that in the event of a major hurricane, residents were on their own.

Then there was the murderous lethargy of the federal response to the dire conditions experienced by those (overwhelmingly, black) people left behind.  What explains the fact that the effective commencement of federal rescue operations took, unthinkably, 5 days?  The typical explanations are three.  First is the Bush bubble:

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him.  [...] When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

Evidently Brown was also inhabiting a bubble, which prevented transmission of the information that thousands of (overwhelmingly, black) people were stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center.

Second is the dire lack of experience of Brown and other top FEMA officials:

Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

[...]

[I]n experience in FEMA's top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

Third is all-purpose bureaucratic incompetence: failure to coordinate between the various aid branches, at the local and federal levels.

But information bubbles, incompetence and lack of coordination ultimately fail to explain why New Orleans' blacks were so long abandoned.  As regards the bubbles, the further question remains: given that so many lives were at stake, why didn't the bubbles get punctured?  We're talking about what might be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, and an ensuing situation where thousands of blacks were without food, water, safety, or sanitary or medical facilities.  And people are worried about avoiding telling Bush the truth—when "the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority"—because he might yell at them?  Come on!  And why wasn't Brown informed---by somebody, anybody---about the situation in the convention center?  How could it be that these facts about the suffering of (overwhelmingly, black) Americans were not considered salient enough to report to those with the power to do something about them?

And notwithstanding the fact that Brown, in particular, had no disaster management experience, he presided over FEMA when it responded with great speed and effectiveness  as multiple hurricanes hit Florida in 2003:

In 2004, George W. Bush and FEMA left little room for error. Not long after Hurricane Charley first made landfall on Aug. 13, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.

Bush later made a handful of other Florida visits to review storm-related damage, but the story on the ground was not Bush's hand-holding. Rather, it was FEMA's performance.

Charley hit on a Friday. With emergency supply trucks pre-positioned at depots for rapid, post-storm deployment, the agency was able to deliver seven truckloads of ice, water, cots, blankets, baby food and building supplies by Sunday. On Monday, hundreds of federal housing inspectors were on the ground, and FEMA already had opened its first one-stop disaster relief center.

Inexperienced as he was, Brownie was up to the task of initiating appropriately timely and comprehensive on-the-ground responses to the Florida hurricanes.  Why wasn't he in the case of Katrina?   UPDATE: it turns out that Chertoff, another Bush appointee with no on-the-ground disaster management experience, was initially holding the reins.  OK, so in that case I still want to know, what took Chertoff so long to get things going?  It's not like there's an in-principle problem here.

Similarly, aid agencies at both local and federal levels were able to efficiently coordinate in Florida.  Why didn't they get off their asses and so so in response to Katrina?  Governor Blanco declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 27, and requested that Bush declare a national state of emergency on August 28 (which he did).  All this was before the 17th-street levee breached.  So where were the emergency supply trucks, the truckloads of ice, water, cots, blankets, baby food and building supplies in New Orleans 2, 3, 4, 5, and more days after the event, as blacks trapped in nursing homes and attics drowned, as blacks in the Superdome and Convention Center withered and died from lack of water, as black babies cried with hunger, then went feverish and finally stilled and died in their mother's arms, as old blacks collapsed and died in the stifling heat?:

TONY ZUMBADO: I've gotta tell you, I thought I'd seen it all, but just when you think you've seen it all, you go into another situation and you see something horrific. I've never seen anything in my life like this. ... I can't put it into words the amount of destruction that is in this city and how these people are coping. They are just left behind. There is nothing offered to them. No water, no ice, no C-rations, nothing, for the last four days.

They were told to go to the convention center. They did, they've been behaving. It's unbelievable how organized they are, how supportive they are of each other. They have not started any mêlées, any riots ... they just want food and support. And what I saw there I've never seen in this country.

We need to really look at this situation at the convention center. It's getting very very crazy in there and very dangerous. Somebody needs to come down with a lot of food and a lot of water. There's no hostility there ... they need support. These people are very desperate. I saw two gentlemen die in front of me because of dehydration. I saw a baby near death.

It would be argumentatively nice at this point to be able to rule out their being poor as the ultimate explanation of why New Orleans' blacks were abandoned.  Unfortunately, I can't get my hands on the demographics of the 2003 FEMA response, which I imagine would evince plenty of timely response to poor whites.  But there is at least this:

The state of Florida has opened distribution centers in Homestead and Miami for commodities of ice, water and food. Power outages continue to be addressed and shelters are open for those in need.

Homestead is a predominately poor, white city, and guess what?  Those distribution centers with ice, water and food were set up in Homestead before Katrina hit land.  (Of course, as a reader noted, the Jeb factor may well be at work here.)

But no need to quibble. America doesn't care about poor people, either; and of course the poverty of the left behind was also a factor.  What we're looking for here, however, is some explanation of a failure of concern that is horrific and unknown in the U.S. since, well, slavery.  And my guts tell me, like the guts of the majority of blacks surveyed after Katrina tell them, that the extremity of the neglect is indication that the deeper explanation of why help was so long in coming, no matter how "well-behaved" the stranded blacks were, or how many riots they didn't start (pathetic that Zumbado feels the need to specify this, as if to ward off the "those blacks must have brought it on themselves" trope), has to do with race.  Being left behind, ignored, neglected, expected to fend off disaster on their own is nothing new to many black Americans.  The response to Katrina is just the latest case in point:

(AP) To African-Americans, Hurricane Katrina has become a generation-defining catastrophe — a disaster with a predominantly black toll, tinged with racism.

[...]

"You'd have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way," said Darnell M. Hunt, a sociologist and head of the African American studies department at UCLA.

[...]

"Something about this is making people remember their own personal injustices," said author damali ayo, whose book "How to Rent a Negro" takes a satirical look at race relations.

"You don't look at Rodney King and say, 'I remember when I got beat up.' But people remember being neglected, unimportant, overlooked, thought of as 'less than.' That's a very common experience for black people."

Some 71 percent of blacks say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in America, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 6-7 among 1,000 Americans; 56 percent of whites feel this was not a particularly important lesson.

And while 66 percent of blacks think the government's response would have been faster if most of the victims had been white, 77 percent of whites disagreed.

Absent more compelling explanations of why New Orleans' blacks were abandoned, it's hard not to conclude that the 71% of surveyed blacks are right that racial factors played a significant role in the delayed federal response to Katrina's non-evacuated survivors. More bluntly: the sad truth is that America—more specifically, institutional (overwhelmingly, white) America—doesn't care about black people. Black people suffering and dying isn't note-worthy enough to call to the president's or the head of FEMA's attention; black people suffering and dying isn't compelling enough to initiate immediate disaster relief operations.

Speaking of non-existent riots, get a load of the Red Cross explanation of why they failed to distribute desperately needed food and water supplies:

Beyond FEMA's lack of response id reports that thousands were trapped in the Superdome and the Convention Center, the Red Cross did not distribute or drop supplies to either location. The group's explanation that its presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city mirrors a National Guard decision not to drop food supplies, saying they did not want to spark riots.

What the hell?  I don't know about you, but it sounds to me as if the racist "blacks are just a bunch of uncivilized animals" trope is at work here—consciously or not, no matter.  (No doubt this trope is also at work in photo captions depicting blacks as "looters" and whites as "finders".) How about this, Red Cross and friends: if you are worried that starvation and thirst have temporarily caused people, of whatever color, to step a bit out of line, drop enough food and water early enough that people won't go insane trying to get their hands on it. That's not rocket science, is it?  Oh, and while we're at it: National Guard, it's not OK to cut white people to the front of the evacuation line.

Next on the racist agenda: blacks attempting to get out of  New Orleans were prevented from crossing the bridge into Gretna by armed Gretna police, under orders of the sheriff.  From Billmon, discussing the report of two paramedics stranded in New Orleans:

But the most vivid episode is what happened when the stranded paramedics (accompanied by a thousand or so desperate human beings from the New Orleans Convention Center) tried to walk across the Mississippi River bridge to the predominately white, largely intact community of Gretna -- where they had been told buses were waiting to evacuate them:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

You have to wonder: If the "mob" had kept on coming, how many seconds would it have taken for the shoot-to-kill order to be given? Ten? Twenty?

Yes, you do have to wonder.  In any case, there was no room at the inn for poor blacks trying to escape the hell of New Orleans:

Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., Police Department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.

"There was no place for them to come on our side," Mr. Lawson said.

Really, there you have it.  Institutional (overwhelmingly, white) America has no place for blacks—especially poor blacks.  Katrina is the most recent and blatant manifestation of this pervasive and heartless racism, but once you start paying attention, it's everywhere you look.

-- Jessica Wilson

Nuclear preemption

From the American Conservative's Deep Background (Philip Geraldi, former CIA officer):

In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Ah, humans.  Such a noble species.

Indeed, deep background isn't needed to see the mushroom cloud on the wall:

WASHINGTON - Amid increasing tension between the United States and Iran over Tehran's nuclear program, and growing concern about overstretched US ground forces, the George W Bush administration is moving steadily toward adopting the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states as an integral part of its global military strategy.

According to a March document by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was recently posted to the Pentagon's website, Washington will not necessarily wait for potential adversaries to use what it calls "weapons of mass destruction" before resorting to a nuclear strike against them. The document, entitled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations", has yet to be approved by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, according to an account published in Sunday's Washington Post. However, it is largely consistent with the administration's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was widely assailed by arms control advocates for lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by the US.

"What we see as significant is that they are considering using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers in preemptive first strikes," Ivan Oelrich, of the Federation for American Scientists (FAS), said about the NPR and the new doctrine. The doctrine would also appear to contradict the administration's oft-stated claim that it is significantly reducing the role of nuclear weapons in its global military strategy.

"The new doctrine reaffirms an aggressive nuclear posture of modernized nuclear weapons maintained on high alert," Hans Kristensen, of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), wrote last week in Arms Control Today magazine. "The new doctrine's approach grants regional nuclear-strike planning an increasingly expeditionary aura that threatens to make nuclear weapons just another tool in the toolbox.

"The result is nuclear preemption, which the new doctrine enshrines into official US joint nuclear doctrine for the first time, where the objective no longer is deterrence through threatened retaliation but battlefield destruction of targets."

Confirmation: the spin has already begun.

-- Jessica Wilson

Fruits of capitalism: "a culture of fear of retaliation"

In the past years we have seen countless indications of the destructive consequences of running the U.S. for the exclusive benefit of corporations and those who profit from them.  Yet more disturbing are the many indications that corporate capitalists and their political henchpersons have fully woken up to their power to influence the course of U.S. policy and events, by any means necessary, and get away with it. So, for example, the 2003 Waxman Report on Politics and Science in the Bush administration (pdf) found that the Bush administration was associated with an unprecedented level of intimidation of scientists, and suppression or manipulation of scientific results:

It finds numerous instances where the Administration has manipulated the scientific process and distorted or suppressed scientific findings. These actions go far beyond the typical shifts in policy that occur with a change in the political party occupying the White House. Thirteen years ago, former President George H.W. Bush stated that “[n]ow more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research . . . government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance.” Today, President George W. Bush’s Administration has skewed this impartial perspective, generating unprecedented criticism from the scientific community and even from prominent Republicans who once led federal agencies. The Administration’s political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists. The subjects involved span a broad range, but they share a common attribute: the beneficiaries of the scientific distortions are important supporters of the President, including social conservatives and powerful industry groups.

The report is filled with concrete, exhaustively documented case studies, each of which is a scandal in its own right.  But of course the corporate-owned media barely mentioned the report, and meanwhile the pervasive manipulation of science and scientists has if anything become more blatant.  Consider this recent survey of Fish and Wildlife Services scientists (pdf), summarized by Waxman in this letter (pdf) to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton (who, by the way,  suppressed and lied about accidentally inverted FWS findings  in reporting to Congress on the impact of oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge):

[The Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility]  surveyed more than 1,400 field scientists in all of the FWS's regions.  Based on over 400 responses to the survey, they conclude that "political intervention to alter scientific results has become pervasive within the Fish and Wildlife Service."

The survey results are striking.  Of the respondents whose work is related to technical analysis, nearly a quarter "have been directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from a USFWS scientific document."  Similarly, of the respondents whose work centers on endangered species, 44% "have been directed, for non-scientific reasons, to refrain from making ... findings that are protective of species."

Written comments from FWS scientists are also telling.  One scientist wrote, "FWS regional HQ, DOI and White House leadership are so hostile to our mission that they will subvert, spin or even illegitimize our findings."  Another scientist wrote about never before having seen "so many findings and recommendations by the field be turned around at the regional and Washington level."

The political influence has had a clear impact on moral at the FWS. One scientist writes that "biologists on the bottom just try to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble;" another writs, "all we can do at the field level is ensure that our administration record is complete and hope we get sued by an environmental or conservation organization."

Wonderful -- the only way for the FWS to fulfill its mission to "conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people" is to get sued and forced into doing so.  There was even interference with scientists responding to the survey, who were instructed not to do so even after hours.  Some other of the written comments:

"Get us real whistleblower protection through Congress"

"FOIA, FOIA, FOIA!  Keep our agency honest through whatever means available."

"We need to get back to being advocates for the fish and wildlife resources, not advocates of development and big industry."

"Reducing retaliatory reprisals from management for doing complete assessments."

"I am discouraged that no matter what the project, somehow we will ok it.  We have to.  We cannot stop a project."

"It is the unwillingness of decisions makers to do the right thing for the resource.  At the field level, my supervisor is faithful to the resources but is frequently told to back off from the regional office and D.C."

"In region 2, the regional director is more attuned with the Cattle Growers Association than his own ES biologists."

"After 4 years they have selected managers who will parrot their beliefs.  As a result with few exceptions the entire echelon of FWS are not advocates for the fish and wildlife."

"I believe that the real problem with the agency lies with upper level management.  Most of the time the fundamental science used to formulate biological opinions is sound and the lead biologist submits a quality product to the supervisor.  Upper level management then buckles under political pressure and the recommendations/biological opinion initially submitted is revised and watered down to allow the permit to be granted."

"There is a culture of fear of retaliation in mid-level management. If the manager were to speak out for the resources, they fear loss of jobs or funding for their programs.  (So they go into duck&cover" mode and wait for the politics to change.)"

I predict they will be waiting a long time.

-- Jessica Wilson

Rumsfeld's propaganda march fails, reduces "freedom"

Here:

Notice once again the lack of an aerial photo from the event? Of the 15,000 who registered, the Times only said "thousands" actually participated. Sounds like a massive turnout for freedom, Bush style. And what freedom parade is complete without a few arrests for peaceful protests and freedom of speech? Freedom and democracy in action.

One man who registered for the walk was detained by a Pentagon police officer after he slipped a black hood over his head and produced a sign that read, "Freedom?" The man was removed from the Pentagon registration area, handcuffed and taken away in a police car. It was not clear whether he was charged or simply detained and the police did not respond to messages requesting more information. Ann Grossman, 56, from Silver Spring, Md., also carried a homemade sign, which read "Honor Our Troops, Respect Their Lives," that was confiscated by police at the Pentagon.

-- Benj Hellie

"Dusting off the manual"

Telling analysis of how the republicans intend to "gin up" their base, post-Katrina, here:

Kevin reports that Time magazine says the Republicans have a three point plan for a comeback after Katrina:

By late last week, Administration aides were describing a three-part comeback plan. The first: Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later....The second tactic could be summed up as, Don't look back. The White House has sent delegates to meetings in Washington of outside Republican groups who have plans to blame the Democrats and state and local officials.

....The third move:...Advisers are proceeding with plans to gin up base-conservative voters...focused around tax reform....no plans to delay tax cuts...veto anticipated congressional approval of increased federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research.

There's one other little way to gin up base conservative voters that we can already see developing on the shout fest and gasbags shows. But this is one that the leakers know very well mustn’t be mentioned to writers for Time magazine. They are already dusting off their old tried and true southern strategy manual and after more than 40 years it's like a favorite old song --- they just started regurgitating their coded talking points without missing a beat. They'll need to. This happened deep in Red territory.

On This Weak, George Will basically said that the problem in New Orleans is that blacks fuck too much. Or rather, the problem of the "underclass" can be traced to so many "out of wedlock births." I think it's pretty clear he wasn't suggesting that abortions be made available to poor women. (If Bill Clinton thought he neutralized that line with welfare reform, he was sadly mistaken.) As far as the right is concerned, it's all about that old racist boogeyman "dependency." Last night on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan was foaming at the mouth about "the welfare state." He was in his element, getting his "we're gonna take our cities block by block" Pitchfork Pat mojo back. These are code words. They aren't about class --- although they will certainly claim that's what they're talking about. These are code words for blacks. (And if you want to understand how it's affected our ability to create a decent liberal government, read this.) 

Immigration had already reared its ugly head out of nowhere, and now this. I believe the Republicans already see the elections of 06 and 08 as an opportunity to revert to a tried and true code saturated "law 'n order" strategy. The War on Terrorism has been losing its juice for sometime --- and Iraq is nothing but an embarrassment now. It's time to go back to what works.

For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he's racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don't kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.

I know that people are uncomfortable with this, but that doesn't make it any less true or relevant. Remember that famous electoral map of 2004:

Here again is that famous map of the slave and free states. 

Whether or not you believe that Ohio was overtly stolen, there can be little doubt after reading the Conyers report that African American disenfranchisement likely resulted in that close election going to the Republicans. The same was true in Florida in 2000. Nobody wants to talk about that or deal with it. It interferes with our liberal insistence that all problems must be seen through the prism of class. But white voters have not been systematically disenfranchised, regardless of class, that's just a fact. And that speaks to the larger issue.

There are strong forces at work that rival economics in people's minds --- tribalism, religion, culture, and tradition all have strong pulls on the human psyche. We are complicated creatures. And the complicated creatures who call ourselves Americans have an issue with race. It's been there from the beginning of this republic and it affects our political system in profound ways.

In the modern era, the Republicans party has developed a patented technique for exploiting it. It's been in disuse for the last few years --- war superseded their need for it. But, they only have to pull it out of the package, wipe off the filth from the last time they used it and put it back in action.

The good news is that each time they use it; it is less effective than before. Things are improving. Racism is not as immediate for younger people as it once was and the virulent strain is much less potent than it was when I was a kid. On race, this country takes two steps forward one and a half steps back. I'm hopeful that we can eradicate the systemic nature of this illness from our culture over time.

But we aren't there yet. It was only forty years ago that this country was still living under apartheid. Since then, overt public racism became socially unacceptable. That's huge and is the reason why, in my opinion,you see so much less of it among the young. But we've also seen the Republican Party very deftly develop an alternate language to appeal to those for whom this issue is still very salient --- and who talk about it among themselves. That language has helped to remake the map we see above. It's not a coincidence that the lines that divided the slave, free and "open to slavery" states are the lines that form the political divide today.

In the right wing litany of family values, small government, low taxes, god and guns the missing word is racism. They don't have to say it. It's part of all those things.

These last two weeks I've heard the old school racists dragging out the "n" word, but they are dying out. We aren't going to see a lot of that anymore, thank god. But the code words were being slung around more freely than I've seen in ages. The first thing I heard out of people's mouths was that these people had been "irresponsible" for not following the directions they were given. The next thing I heard was that "looters" were taking over the city and they should be shot. Then there was the "why do they have so many kids" and "why can't they clean up after themselves" and "defecating where they stood."

I've heard all of this before. Just as racist code language sounds sweet and familiar to the true believers, it sets off alarm bells for people like me; when you grow up in a racist household, (just as when you grow up in a black household, I would assume) you know it when you hear it.

And throughout I've heard many good people insist that race is not a factor. They seem to think that racism is only defined as an irrational hatred of black people. It's not. It also manifests itself as an irrational fear of black people.

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about.  This slide show of the destruction of the city from the beginning of the hurricane until the photographer managed to finally get out on day four is spectacular. Look all the way through it. It's great. When he finally realized that he would have to evacuate from the city he went to the convention center with a friend as authorities told him to do. And when he got there he saw long lines of people. This is the caption to his picture:

My jaw dropped and a sudden state of fear grasped my body. However, I maintained utter calmness. It was obvious that they were NOT going to help these people evacuate any time soon. They had been forgotten and obviously and shamelessly ignored. And it was evident that Andy and I were merely two specs of salt in a sea of pepper. Not only would we have to wait forever, but more than anything, we would probably suffer dire conditions after it would be obvious that we wouldn't "fit in". It was clear to me that we would have to find another way out. We left the Convention Center and my first intuition is to walk around the city. I wanted to clear my head, but I also had a weird and crazy plan in mind.

This was number 193 out of 197 pictures with captions. In earlier pictures he was pretty judgmental about looters but I thought that he was maybe just a law and order type. He is also Nicaraguan, so I didn't chalk up his vague condemnation of looters to racism although I've known many non-whites who actively dislike black people. And I don't chalk the above to overt racism. It is, as I've pounded the last few days, a sub-conscious fear of the black mob. If you look at that picture (#193) you don't see a rampaging mob. You see a bunch of black people standing around. He sees their plight. But he also assumes that he is personally in danger because he doesn't "fit in." He had been walking around lawless New Orleans taking pictures throughout the crisis and the only time he expressed fear for his personal safety was when something exploded nearby. But when faced with a large group of African Americans he immediately feels terribly threatened. He is proud that he "maintained utter calmness" in the face of it.

That's subconscious racism. And many white people succumb to it without even knowing what they are doing. The New York Times reported that the Louisiana authorities were "terrified" --- just as this guy was frozen with fear. He is not a bad person. Neither are most of the cops or the others who succumbed to this fear. They just do not know themselves. And that lack of self-knowledge ends up coloring their decisions, both political and social, in ways they don't understand.

The fact is that at this point, white people don't appear to have been the primary victims of crime during that time. As far as I am able to ascertain, the deaths at the evacuation centers were all black people.

(Incidentally, the weird and crazy plan that this gentleman had was to hotwire a car and drive it out of New Orleans. That is an action that Peggy Noonan and others considered worthy of being shot on the spot. Do you think she would have thought this guy should have been shot?)

If Karl Rove is going back to basics and shoring up the base you'll hear a lot of talk about Jesus as always. But after Katrina when they rail about traditional values, they will also be talking up the traditional value of southern racism again. The Republican base is that sea of red in the deep south and Karl and his boys are going to have to reassure those people that all this talk about rebuilding and federal money isn't going to benefit black people at the expense of whites. That's always been the sticking point.

We can hope that this has a galvanizing effect on the country and that there will be a reckoning for the Republicans. But prepare for the fact that there will also be a reaction. That's how these things work in Murika.

Cutting through the clutter on Katrina response

Here:

Indeed, what's most shocking is not any particular mistake that was made but how often federal officials were left to brainstorm or hash out on-the-fly just what the federal government's responsibilities were, how to coordinate federal, state and local relief efforts, or even simply who was in charge.

Reading those passages of the article, there's one conclusion I think any fair-minded person would have to come to. And that is that in the four years to the day since 9/11, the administration appears to have done little if any effective planning for how to mobilize a national response to a catastrophic event on American soil. 

And given all the history that has passed before us over these last four years, that verdict is devastating.

-- Benj Hellie

 

What will happen to the New Orleans diaspora?

A psychologist provides a nice attempt to empathize with the horrible dislocation provided by evaporating a community of several hundred thousand into culturally very different terrain:

Imagine sending people who have been assimilated into the most stable demographic population in America into cities and towns all over the US who are as unprepared as the victims to understand their sense of dislocation and their support needs. The lower  Gulf States have a language, a history, a social dynamic, a faith, a societal structure, and a ritual system unlike any other in America. These people have lived in and been acculturated to this system for generations. When the dust settles and the mud dries, we are going to see all over America, a nation that will lose patience with the needs of a foreign refugee population. Abandoned once again, the fury and the trauma that have been momentarily quieted by the outpouring of empathy and support post-crisis, will  rise larger and more terrible than we have been equipped as a nation to handle. I hear  it now, over and over, in the survivor stories, in the loss of self, and the need to reclaim dignity and power.

Right now, numbness is being replaced by magical thinking. "People want me here--here is better. I think I'll stay here." What is going to happen when reality sets in? The bulk of people who are planning to stay don't understand the system here. Even though we abut borders, we are a vastly different nation. At least we are southerners. What is going to happen to the thousands being sent to Connecticut or Illinois or New Jersey? They are being offered free apartments, furniture etc, by generous and well meaning people who haven't thought the long term consequences through very well. A lot of the apartments are in areas where they won't have transportation or jobs. What is going to happen six months down the road when the magic wears off and the help slowly fades? How about the holidays for a people who thrive on ritual, tradition, and celebration?

The trauma they are experiencing is so profound that we have no cultural term or machinery set up for it. The dead and nameless bodies by the thousands rotting in the water, arriving dead on the buses with them, or dying next to them in the shelters are a huge festering wound that no one dares mention. This is a true Diaspora the likes of  which we haven't seen since Reconstruction. The immediate needs that are being addressed ignore the greater traumas yet to be spoken. No governmental system can  survive the number of wounded and disillusioned people that we are going to see sprouting up all over America. Something far greater and more organized has to be done.

Some will move to Utah, others will spend five months in a FEMA concentration camp:

EMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the "host" goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won't allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs - and...

it could cause a riot. [...]

He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and "a sum of money" and *they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months. [...]

My mother then asked if the churches would be allowed to come to their cabin and conduct services if the occupants wanted to attend. The response was "No ma'am. You don't understand. Your church no longer owns this building. This building is now  owned by FEMA and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. They have it for the next 5 months." This scares my mother who asks "Do you mean they have leased it?" The man replies,  Yes, ma'am...lock, stock and barrel. They have taken over everything that pertains to  this facility for the next 5 months." [...]

 

Mom appeared to have cornered the market in five counties on pop-tarts and apparently that was an acceptable snack so the guy started shoving them under the counter. He said these would be good to tied people over in between their two meals a day. But he tells my mother she must take all the breakfast cereal back. My mother protests that cereal requires no cooking. "There will be no milk, ma'am." My mother points to the huge industrial double-wide refrigerator the church had just purchased in the past year. "Ma'am, you don't understand...

It could cause a riot."

He then points to the vegetables and fruit. "You'll have to take that back as well. It looks like you've got about 10 apples there. I'm about to bring in 40 men. What would we do then?"

My mother, in her sweet, soft voice says, "Quarter them?"

"No ma'am. FEMA said no...

It could cause a riot. You don't understand the type of people that are about to come here...."

Others will wind up in jail:
 

A man who fled Louisiana with his family to escape Hurricane Katrina has been jailed in Atlanta for asking motorists for handouts. James Scott said he had slept in a car for days with his brother, sister and her two young children before they decided to ask for help. Nearly broke, the family drove to Buckhead, an affluent north Atlanta neighborhood Thursday and got out near a shopping mall, hoping for the charity of others. Scott said he showed the arresting officer his Louisiana driver's license, car tag and registration and asked him if he could feel his pain. Scott said another officer gave him $7 as he was taken to jail.

In any event, there will be hundreds of thousands fewer Democratic voters to worry about:

Ernest Johnson, head of the Louisiana NAACP, called Friday for Congress to pass emergency legislation to extend special protections of the Voting Rights Act that expire in 2007. The law is meant to ensure access to the polls for black voters.

Johnson says the hurricane has potentially disenfranchised 1.5 million voters, many of them black.

"A lot of voters have been displaced, and they could be out of their voting jurisdiction, with toxins in the water, for a year or more," Johnson said. The expiring provision of the law requires jurisdictions in 15 states to clear changes in election laws with the Justice Department to ensure the changes do not disadvantage minority groups.

"We were going to fight for the extension anyway. Now, we want to move up the debate, to talk about this in 2005 instead of 2007, so we do not have to worry," Johnson said. The provision, he said, would protect voters as precincts are moved and absentee ballots are mailed.

But don't expect the poor and black to return anytime soon. The "demographic tampering" solves a long-recognized problem for City Hall:

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population -- blamed for the city's high crime rates -- across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans -- one big Garden District -- with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

-- Benj Hellie

Brownie's heck of a job

Michael Brown's role in Bushworld? Bagman to Florida in the 2004 Election:

How FEMA delivered Florida for Bush

By Charles Mahtesian

Now that President Bush has won Florida in his 2004 re-election bid, he may want to draft a letter of appreciation to Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Seldom has any federal agency had the opportunity to so directly and uniquely alter the course of a presidential election, and seldom has any agency delivered for a president as FEMA did in Florida this fall.

It is almost impossible to overstate the political importance of Florida, the fourth biggest election prize, with 27 electoral votes. In 2000, when Bush and Democratic nominee Al Gore battled to a 49 percent draw in the state, the official recount that gave Bush a 537-vote win also gave him the presidency. In 2004, both presidential campaigns targeted Florida with an intensity that assumed the state would be just as competitive as four years before.

Neither party, however, could have foreseen the role that Mother Nature would play. Beginning in August, Florida was flattened by four successive hurricanes that ripped up broad swaths of the state. Between hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, the storm damage was estimated to run as high as $26 billion.

In 1992, the last time a major hurricane pummeled Florida in the homestretch of a presidential election, FEMA was caught with its pants down. Its response to Hurricane Andrew was disorganized and chaotic, leaving thousands without shelter and water. Cleanup and resupply efforts were snarled in red tape. After watching the messy relief efforts unfold, lawmakers questioned whether FEMA was a Cold War relic that ought to be abolished.

For then-President George H.W. Bush, the scene proved to be a public relations nightmare. He managed to regain his footing and win Florida three months later, but his winning margin was dramatically reduced from 1988.

In 2004, George W. Bush and FEMA left little room for error. Not long after Hurricane Charley first made landfall on Aug. 13, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.

Bush later made a handful of other Florida visits to review storm-related damage, but the story on the ground was not Bush's hand-holding. Rather, it was FEMA's performance.

Charley hit on a Friday. With emergency supply trucks pre-positioned at depots for rapid, post-storm deployment, the agency was able to deliver seven truckloads of ice, water, cots, blankets, baby food and building supplies by Sunday. On Monday, hundreds of federal housing inspectors were on the ground, and FEMA already had opened its first one-stop disaster relief center.

By the end of September, three hurricanes later, the agency had processed 646,984 registrations for assistance with the help of phone lines operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty-five shelters, 31 disaster recovery centers and six medical teams were in operation across the state. Federal and state assistance to households reached more than $361 million, nearly 300,000 housing inspections were completed, and roughly 150,000 waterproof tarps were provided for homeowners, according to FEMA figures.

It's impossible to know just how much of an effect FEMA had on the Florida vote. Many of the citizens the agency served there presumably had more important things to worry about. It's also hard to imagine that, even with its shock-and-awe hurricane response, a bureaucracy like FEMA pleased all its customers. Even so, in a closely contested state where hundreds of thousands of voters suffered storm-related losses, it's equally hard to imagine that they didn't notice the agency's outreach.

-- Benj Hellie

Reminder: Leiter on Hiatus, Hellie and Wilson Taking Over Sept. 12-16

I'll be taking a break from the blog this coming week, but happily Professors Hellie and Wilson from the University of Toronto will be posting here, starting tomorrow, Monday, September 12, and continuing through the remainder of the week.  Enjoy!

Ad hominem vs. Insults

We've visited this topic previously, but here's another fine effort to explain the difference for the benefit of those easily confused.

The "Other" 9/11 Anniversary

A good reminder here.  And on the 4th anniversary of the horrors visited on the U.S., I recommend, yet again, the excellent memorial statement by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Aghanistan.  And see also today's comments from Juan Cole (History, Michigan).

The Late Chief Justice Rehnquist: Enemy of Free Speech

Striking short analysis by Geoffrey Stone (Law, Chicago).

"Detainees," not "Refugees" or "Evacuees"

An interesting and disturbing account here of what the author calls a "FEMA Detainment Camp."

"Pre-Katrina Mindset"

Robin Kar (Law, Loyola-LA) writes with a nice idea:

Has anyone started using the term 'Pre-Katrina Mindset' to refer to the line of argument that (i) assumes the legitimacy of minimizing the government's capacity and responsibility to act for the common good and (ii) places all responsibility on private individuals to take care of themselves?  As we all know, these are two choices (in terms of allocations of responsibility) that a narrow group of people in this country have increasingly pushed on the whole, and with great tenacity, over the last several decades.  They have succeeded in large part because they have been able to keep most people less than cognizant of the full consequences of these choices, and even of the fact that these are choices.

In the afterwake of Katrina, I have seen some people trying to refer to these two propositions to *justify* what has happened (or what failed to happen).  In doing so, they seem to me to be implicitly recognizing that these two propositions at least partly *explain* what has happened.  But the effects themselves will--I think--refute the justificatory force of the assumptions more viscerally and more vividly, and in a way that will be more accessible to more people, than any philosophical or moral or political argumentation could ever do on matters like this.

Still, when well motivated people face an onslaught from the kinds of political forces that are sure to come very soon, they sometimes need something to hold onto in public discussion to preserve their native sense of what is right.  People need a firm catch phrase to name their
knowledge, and to maintain their convictions in what they are starting to realize.  They need--I think--a trump card, which allows them to just dismiss (i) and (ii), by saying "but that just reveals a pre-Katrina mindset," without more.  I wonder if you could use your website to get people talking this way, to arm them for the oncoming spin in the public debate.

Another Television Journalist Finds Some Courage Post-Katrina

Here.

Welcome Texas Bar Journal Readers

And thanks to Nivine Zakhari for the kind write-up in the September issue.  Since this blog is largely about a wide array of current political and cultural topics, I think "the next best thing" for law readers will actually be (1) my blog on law schools and legal education; and (2) my articles on jurisprudential topics (those of you who had the privilege of studying with my late great colleague Charles Alan Wright may particularly enjoy my essay on "American Legal Realism," a subject on which I learned a good bit from Professor Wright).   Some of you may also enjoy the guest "blogging" stint here last December of Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Thanks for visiting.

Friday Poem: "Man's Hand"

Man’s Hand

Before turning away
                                 sometimes I stare
at limbless beggars
with their crayoned cardboard signs

Down on my Luck

Luck                   or
dread design of
a world made by men

Follow this life
back to its beginnings
whom shall we find
what beast disclose
who ravages the crib

Man’s work
man’s hand in all things

7/31/94-2/24/95, 6/29/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Reprinted with permission

Philosophy Faculty and Students Affected by the Hurricane

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 3

I've heard from Graeme Forbes, a professor at Tulane, and Derek Bowman, a graduate student there, both of whom are safe and away from the city.  I'm opening comments, and invite others in the philosophical communities affected by this catastrophe to post whatever might be relevant--that they're safe, where they are, whom they've also seen, what their plans are, etc.  Now that Tulane has officially cancelled the fall semester (I assume Loyola and the University of New Orleans are doing the same), I also invite Departments that might be able to host displaced faculty and students for the term to post that information, or links to the general policies of their universities, where relevant (UT Austin's is here).  I'll keep this thread at the top of the blog site for awhile. 

UPDATE (6:40 pm, Saturday, CST):  I am pleased to see many members of the Tulane philosophical community already taking advantage of this forum, and would like to encourage those from other New Orleans and Southern Mississippi Departments (or others affected about which I do not know) to do the same.  I'll keep this thread at the top of the page throughout the week, by which time, hopefully, folks will have made necessary connections, begun establishing routines and plans for the term, and have found more conventional means of communication back in place.   (I'll leave the thread on-line after that too, of course, but perhaps not at the top of the page, depending on where things stand at that point.)

Yet Another Reason to Hope Bush Doesn't Choose Luttig for the Supreme Court

Here.  Having not seen text of the opinion yet, I can only imagine what tortured reasoning allowed them to reach this conclusion after Hamdi.  Judge Luttig thus appears to join Justice Thomas in upholding the prequisites for dictatorial power by the executive.  What a disgrace.

UPDATE:  More critical commentary here.

Philosphical Work on Tolerance: Advice Sought

I'd be grateful to get recommendations from knowledgeable readers about good philosophical literature on problems of tolerance, in particular:  (1)  religious tolerance; (2) tolerating the intolerant; and (3) tolerating the false.  I am less interested in the "tolerance as a personal virtue" literature, and more interested in questions about the duties of tolerance, and their limits, of the state.  No need to mention the "classics" (Locke's Essay, Rawls's treatment in A Theory of Justice, Scanlon's essays, Marcuse's critique, etc.). 

Relatedly, I'm interested in whether there is any good literature on the justification of religious liberty that isn't really just a general case for liberty of conscience.  Is there good literature that makes the case for liberty specifically of religious conscience.

Many thanks.

Is the U.S. a "Functioning Democracy" Any Longer?

Not obviously, in my opinion.  Philosopher Rachel Barney, now at the University of Toronto, writes:

I've been following your post-Katrina blogging with interest, though I'm trying not to spend too much time thinking about it all -- shaking with rage does tend to get in the way of other activities.  And I have a simple question: is there any organization out there I can donate to for a TV ad campaign to get Bush impeached over this, or at least force resignations of a few of his spectacularly incompetent cronies?  (Move On has fallen strangely silent, which dampens my hopes that it would be the obvious vehicle for this.)

It shouldn't be necessary, of course; but I no longer believe that the normal mechanisms of reporting and public reaction and political debate will have any effect.  The feedback loops all seem to be broken in the US -- in any normal democracy a lot of politicians (at all levels) would have resigned by now, various administrative heads would have rolled, and the parties seen to have fucked up so spectacularly would be toast in the next election.  Putting national emergency planning in the hands of a lawyer fired by the show horse federation, because he was somebody's college roommate -- that's really special even by Bush administration standards, and you'd think it would be the kind of thing tv viewers would notice and voters would remember.  But in the US nothing seems to matter politically in the long run unless the right decides to allow it to -- everything else just goes down the memory hole.  (I'm starting to wonder, actually, whether the US fits the conception of a 'functioning democracy' in terms of [Amartya] Sen's theorem about famine -- if the complete abandonment of a major city to floods and the state of nature for a full week is thinkable, why not famine in some other poor black part of the country?  And of course if famine came, the right-wingers would just blog on about how we should all  make donations to the Red Cross and not engage in ugly political point-scoring.)

I'm not sure what the solution to this syndrome is.  But I'm betting it will involve television and a lot of money, and a readiness to get angry and stay angry.

Comments are open, and are being pre-screened for relevance and content.

Hurricane Katrina Timeline of Federal and Local Action (and Inaction)

This is very useful, and makes clear the extent of federal dereliction of duties.

Hiatus and Guest-Bloggers

I'll be visiting Florida State University on Thursday, giving a talk on "Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant to Law," a paper I'm working on with Michael Weisberg (Philosophy, Penn) (I hope we'll get it on SSRN before too much longer).  As a result, don't expect a lot new before Friday.  I'm especially happy to report that, next week, philosophers Benjamin Hellie and Jessica Wilson, now at the University of Toronto, have agreed to a return visit as guest bloggers during the period Monday, September 12 through Friday, September 16.  They'll be writing about matters political, philosophical, and cultural, along the lines of topics they presently address at For the Record. 

Useful Site Dissecting Attempts to Shift Blame Away from Bush to Local Officials

Here.

The Permanent U.S. Military Occupation of Iraq

Once again, all the news that's fit to print outside the United States:

The U.S. Air Force's senior officer, Gen. John Jumper, stated U.S. warplanes would remain in Iraq to fight resistance forces and protect the American-installed regime "more or less indefinitely." Jumper's bombshell went largely unnoticed due to Hurricane Katrina.

Gen. Jumper let the cat out of the bag. While President George Bush hints at eventual troop withdrawals, the Pentagon is busy building four major, permanent air bases in Iraq that will require heavy infantry protection....

It seems this is what Jumper has in mind. Mobile U.S. ground intervention forces will remain at the four major "Fort Apache" bases guarding Iraq's major oil fields. These bases will be "ceded" to the U.S. by a compliant Iraqi regime. The U.S. Air Force will police the Pax Americana with its precision-guided munitions and armed drones.

The USAF has developed an extremely effective new technique of wide area control. Small numbers of strike aircraft are kept in the air around the clock. When U.S. ground forces come under attack or foes are sighted, these aircraft deliver precision-guided bombs. This tactic has led Iraqi resistance fighters to favour roadside bombs over ambushes against U.S. convoys.

The USAF uses the same combat air patrol tactic in Afghanistan, with even more success. The U.S. is also developing three major air bases in Pakistan, and others across Central Asia, to support its plans to dominate the region's oil and gas reserves.

While the USAF is settling into West Asia, the mess in Iraq continues to worsen. Last week's so-called "constitutional deal" was the long-predicted, U.S.-crafted pact between Shias and Kurds, essentially giving them Iraq's oil and virtual independence. The proposed constitution assures American big business access to Iraq's oil riches and markets....

The U.S. reportedly offered the 15 Sunni delegates $5 million each to vote for the constitution -- but was turned down. No mention was made that a U.S.-guided constitution for Iraq would violate the Geneva Conventions....

Venezuelan President Chavez Accepts Apology from Mullah Pat

Details here; an excerpt:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said that he accepted a letter of apology from US televangelist Pat Robertson, who called two weeks ago for Chavez's assassination....

Chavez said on Sunday that Robertson had apologised to him in a letter and that he accepted the apology "wholeheartedly, as the good Christian that I am".

Truthful Words Spoken about Public Education in The New York Times!

The editors who usually edit this stuff out must have been distracted by the hurricane...from an interview with Jonathan Kozol:

Seriously, why would Republicans, who have traditionally opposed big government, encumber schools with the testing requirements attached to No Child Left Behind?

The kind of testing we are doing today is sociopathic in its repetitive and punitive nature. Its driving motive is to highlight failure in inner-city schools as dramatically as possible in order to create a ground swell of support for private vouchers or other privatizing schemes.

Do you not approve of private schools?

They starve the public school system of the presence of well-educated, politically effective parents to fight for equity for all kids.

America 2005: Deserted Children Roam the Streets Trying to Survive

Here:

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow.

Or here:   

MATTHEWS:  Carl, when your family asks you about this week and your friends ask you for the war stories, what are you going to come to your mind with? 
CARL QUINTANILLA, NBC CORRESPONDENT:  It is going to come down to one kid.  He‘s about 7 years old.  He was sweating in 95-degree heat.  He was walking on the interstate.  He had walked about, I would say two or three miles to a bus that he did not know whether it would be there or not.  And he was carrying his baby brother.  We saw that and we realized that this—I think that was the turning point where we realized, this was no longer a hurricane aftermath story.  This was no longer a weather story, a devastation story.  It was a human, almost a civil rights violation story. 

In Defense of "Bush Haters"

This guy sure is pissed, not without reason.  The Bush shills and loyalists have coined a phrase as a defense mechanism against this kind of increasingly common reaction:  they refer to "Bush haters," as though this kind of response is irrational and inexplicable.  It doesn't occur to them that there are reasons people hate Bush, that people are responding to events, to facts, to stupid things the man and his Administration have done. 

Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world didn't hate George W. Bush when he was Governor of Texas; even in Texas, people who opposed him generally didn't hate him.  He was a bad Governor, but more pathetic than venal.  Hating Bush isn't some weird affliction that strikes for no discernible reason; it is a rational response to actual decisions and policies adopted by a pathetic, undeveloped, inadequate man named George W. Bush, who has been one of the worst, most dangerous, and most incompetent Presidents in the history of the country.  (Reading Mencken, it strikes me that Harding and Coolidge may given Bush a run for the money...but, as I like to say, when you're down in the gutter, why worry about who is closest to the edge of the curb?)

Imagine, for a moment, if you will, if (as may well have happened) folks sat around Baghdad in 1993 making jokes about "Saddam haters":  "Oh those Saddam haters, they always find fault" [Update:  almost!]  Or Berlin in 1943: "Oh those Adolf haters, they just can't get over it."  Moscow, 1951:  "Poor comrade Joseph, how the bourgeois traitors hate him."  Madrid, 1973, "Those Franco haters, why can't they just grow up."  We would rightly regard this as pathetic apologetics, the last ditch gasps of partisan and delusional party hacks.  And we would rightly regard it that way because of the concrete record of misdeeds by the leaders in question.

So what Bush supporters really mean to say is that there is not a concrete record of misdeeds that warrants hatred of this President.  Alas, they never engage the record or the misdeeds, and for obvious reasons:  because there is no rational or informed person in the world who does not view the behavior of this man and his Administration as a disaster for his country and for humanity. 

In order to snap these mindless Bushies out of their trance, I propose that everytime you meet someone who makes a passing reference to "Bush haters," you reply:  "Love the sinner, hate the sin."

In case you were wondering why George W. Bush seems to be a sociopath...

...in his lack of empathetic capacity and human engagement, meet his Mom.

NBC Anchor Reveals Telling Facts about the Hurricane and the Rescue Effort

Here; an excerpt:

In a strange way, the most outrageous news pictures of this day [Sept. 5] may be those of progress: The palettes of food and water that have just been dropped at selected landing zones in the downtown area of New Orleans. It's an outrage because all of those elements existed before people died for lack of them: There was water, there was food, and there were choppers to drop both. Why no one was able to combine them in an air drop is a cruel and criminal mystery of this dark chapter in our recent history. The words "failure of imagination" come to mind. The concept of an air drop of supplies was one we apparently introduced to the director of FEMA during a live interview on Nightly News on Thursday evening. He responded by saying that he'd been unaware of the thousands gathered at the Convention Center.  Later that evening an incredulous Ted Koppel on ABC was left with no choice but to ask if the FEMA director was watching the same television coverage as the rest of the nation.

Complaints are still rampant in New Orleans about a lack of information. It's one of many running themes of the past week: There were no announcements in the Superdome during the storm, none to direct people after the storm, no official word (via bullhorn, leaflets or any other means) during the week-long, on-foot migration (and eventual stagnation) that defined life in the downtown section of the city for those first few days. One can't help but think that a single-engine plane towing a banner over the city would have been immeasurably helpful in both crowd and rumor control.

There are a few details from a week ago that are strikingly telling in the light of day a week later. Our team arrived in Baton Rouge Sunday afternoon, Aug. 28. After renting cars, we headed to top off our gas tanks before one last stop at a Wal-Mart for provisions. The air was already frantic, the snack aisles empty and the last of the bottled water were selling out as we watched. I will never forget one particular moment: I was on the phone with my wife while at the checkout area when a weather bulletin arrived on my Blackberry, along with a strong caveat from our New York producers. The wording and contents were so incendiary that our folks were concerned that it wasn't real... either a bogus dispatch or a rogue piece of text. I filed a live report by phone for Nightly News (after an exchange with New York about the contents of the bulletin) and very cautiously couched the information. Later, we learned it was real, every word of it. Below are actual excerpts, in the urgent, all-capital-letters style of the medium. Note the time on the message... but more importantly... note the content.

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

...DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED...

HURRICANE KATRINA...A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER.

AT LEAST HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED...ALL WINDOWS WILL BE BLOWN OUT.

THE VAST MAJORITY...OF TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

The last sentence in that statement is as concise a summation of conditions in New Orleans as is possible....

Our team arrived at the Superdome an hour later, as the first rain bands came ashore in New Orleans on Sunday night. I filed three special reports for primetime on both coasts, and chatted with some of those seeking shelter. They had been kept in tightly-controlled lines in the pouring rain... they were later allowed to wait under an overhang after protesting.  Security was very tight and very physical. A National Guard sergeant told me it was because they didn't want any weapons or alcohol inside. The Guard soldiers were also told to enforce a smoking ban in the Superdome, so they confiscated all cigarette lighters (I should also quickly note that the military meal pouches handed out the next day all contained a pack of matches). Tempers ran high, and many folks in line complained of rough verbal treatment by the Guard, some of which we certainly witnessed. I remember calling the Superdome "the shelter of last resort" on the air that night. That would turn out to be a colossal understatement. I remember a distinctly bad feeling in the air as people stood in long lines that night. It, too, would turn out to be an accurate predictor of what was to come.

James Taranto: Can He Sink Any Lower? And other hurricane news...

The right has not been coping, as we remarked, with Bush's spectacular failure in the most basic responsibilities of government and leadership.  Now James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal--whose reputation as "a slimeball" (to use the term of art) is well-known--may have outdone himself:  responding to critics who have called attention to how Bush policies and Bush incompetence have contributed to the man-made disaster, he writes:  "Some people respond to a horrific natural disaster by taking cheap shots at their political opponents. Others respond by stealing TV sets. The underlying impulse knows no boundaries of social class."  As with his non-response to Ms. Sheehan, there is no response to the merits of the claims made by the critics:  this is apparently a key part of Taranto's modus operandi, namely, smear the critics, but never discuss the merits of the criticism.  Seriously, if this craven villain is invited to your campus (pity your campus!), please let everyone know about the kind of rubbish that emanates from his empty head.  

We have noted, already, that the Bush shills, like Glenn "no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath me" Reynolds, are trying to shift the blame for the horrendous failure of a proper rescue and recovery effort, to the local officials; here's a good discussion of why that won't fly.

And the New Orleans local paper isn't buying it either:

Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job."

That's unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn't be reached.

Meanwhile, the BBC is noticing that the U.S. media is not as spineless as usual in the wake of this catastrophe.  (Thanks to James Wilberding for the pointer.)  (Notice, of course, that the right-wing bloggers are even more spineless, and dishonest, than usual!)

Krugman continues to draw apt morals from this whole fiasco.

Finally, Michael Froomkin (Law, Miami) has a good set of links to news sources and commentary about the Gulf Coast disaster.

Progressive Blog Digest on Bush Post-Katrina

This is apt and does get to a central aspect of the problem that recent events have thrown into relief:  Bush is just a bad human being, not just morally bad, but deficient in character, judgment, skill, relevant experience, empathetic capacity, and maturity:

Like the moment when the curtain is pulled back to reveal the levers and machinery that make a puny man appear to be a Great Wizard, the events unfolding around Hurricane Katrina have revealed to people the true George Bush – and even many of his strongest supporters are disillusioned and angry....

[A]fter 9/11 Bush enjoyed an extraordinary level of support, even by many who did not vote for him, because in the wake of that horrible event people wanted a Man in Charge -- plain-spoken, humble, but strong and decisive.

But what they have seen for the past several months, on issue after issue (Iraq, Plame, Sheehan, Katrina) is a weasly, cowardly, defensive hair-splitter who continually ducks responsibility for his own actions and blames others....

Even worse, the timing of his unbelievably self-indulgent five week vacation and his dodging of the Wicked Witch Cindy Sheehan, followed up now by his belated and indifferent reaction to the suffering caused by the hurricane, have made people see him as the lazy, self-centered, smug, privileged, uncaring, and deeply unreflective man many of us have been calling him from the start.

Now, as the staged photo ops are revealed as just that, as his own words get redefined for him by Rove and the Communications Team, and as he continually, constantly hits false notes in trying to show and express the simulacrum of caring (for dead troops, for suffering Gulf Coast victims, for the opinions of anyone who doesn’t agree with him), he has reached his worst moment – a moment that Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton all reached – the moment when your one deepest character flaw is exposed, the one flaw that people will not forgive you for. The smug little rich boy who was plucked from a life of uneven accomplishment by his Daddy’s advisors, who saw him as an ambitious and malleable instrument for their plan to remake the government and transform the Middle East, now stands before us, manifestly unprepared for the moment. He doesn’t “get it,” but more damningly doesn’t think he has to.

Only one quibble:  a life of uneven accomplishment?  To the contrary, his is a very even life:  it is nothing but failures and foul-ups, despite having every opportunity.  Bush has fouled up every grown-up undertaking in his life.  Leave it to the plain-spoken Cindy Sheehan to hit this nail on the head:

George Bush has been an incompetent failure his entire life. Fortunately for humanity, he was just partying his way through school, running companies into the ground, and being an alcoholic and cocaine abuser for most of that time - and his incompetence was limited to hurting the people who worked for him and his own family. The people in his life who were hurt by his incompetence probably have been able to "get on" with their lives. Now, though, his incompetence affects the world and is responsible for so many deaths and so much destruction. How many of us did not foresee the mess he would make of the world when he was selected the first time? We saw what he had done to Texas. How many of us marveled and were so discouraged and amazed when he was "re-elected" the second time? We saw what he had done to the world. Dangerous incompetence should never be rewarded, let alone be rewarded so handsomely as in George's case.

A Few Thoughts on the Death of Chief Justice Rehnquist

Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court died yesterday evening.  The Times obituary is here.  A few misc. thoughts:

(1)  He deserves credit for defending the independence of the judiciary in the face of attacks and smears largely orchestrated by his own political party.

(2)  He was out-flanked on the right on most issues by Antonin Scalia and, of course, the lunatic Clarence Thomas.  This is quite remarkable when one remembers how far to the right he was, though, to some extent, long service on the Court tempered some of his right-wing radicalism.  But several candidates whose names are mentioned would certainly be to the late Chief Justice's right on a host of issues, for example, Michael Luttig of the Fourth Circuit and Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit.

(3)  He always struck me as a political, not legal, conservative:  he had a set of conservative political views which he wrote into the law when he could, with opinions that are not generally notable for the quality of their reasoning and argument, but for how result-oriented they are.

(4)  Bush & co., still reeling from their man-made humanitarian disaster on the Gulf Coast, may not  have the political capital and clout to force through the ideological zealot the theocrats and crypto-fascists at the base of the party would like.  This may be an unintended good consequence of the recent horrors.

UPDATE:  Here's a nice personal remembrance of the late Chief Justice by a former clerk.  Remarks on Rehnquist's legacy, and how he will be remembered, by Jack Balkin (Law, Yale) are also of interest.

ANOTHER:  A harsh, but not unfair, assessment here.

More on the Man-Made Disaster

This lengthy Washington Post story documents how the Bush Administration destroyed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the governmental entity that has performed so ineptly throughout this crisis:

[A]fter 9/11, FEMA lost out in the massive bureaucratic shuffle [that resulted in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)].

Not only did its Cabinet status disappear, but it became one of 22 government agencies to be consolidated into Homeland Security....

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from hurricane-prone states fought a rear-guard action against FEMA's absorption. "What we were afraid of, and what is coming to pass, is that FEMA has basically been destroyed as a coherent, fast-on-its-feet, independent agency," said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.)....

DHS in reality emphasized terrorism at the expense of other threats, said several current and former senior department officials and experts who have closely monitored its creation, cutting funding for natural disaster programs and downgrading the responsibilities and capabilities of the previously well-regarded FEMA....

"The federal system that was perfected in the '90s has been deconstructed," said Bullock. Citing a study that found that the United States now spends $180 million a year to fend off natural hazards vs. $20 billion annually against terrorism, Bullock said, "FEMA has been marginalized. . . . There is one focus and the focus is on terrorism."

The White House's Homeland Security Council developed 15 scenarios for the department to concern itself about -- everything from a terrorist dirty-bomb attack to a Baghdad-style improvised explosive device. Only three were not terrorism scenarios: a pandemic flu, a major earthquake and a major hurricane.

By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on terrorism, the Government Accountability Office noted in a July report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6 billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for the current fiscal year, funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664 million.

New leaders such as Allbaugh [a Bush flunky from Texas, with no pertinent experience] were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."

"I'm guilty of saying, 'you don't get it,' " Allbaugh said. "Absolutely." The former FEMA chief said he had encountered bureaucratic resistance to thinking about a "monumental" disaster, such as Katrina or 9/11, rather than the more standard diet of "tornadoes and rising waters."

But experts in emergency response inside and outside the government sounded warnings about the changes at FEMA. Peacock said FEMA's traditional emphasis on emergency response "all went up in smoke" after 9/11, creating a "blind spot" as a result of a "police-action, militaristic view" of homeland security. When it came to natural disasters, "It was not only forgetting about it, it was not funding it...."

On the Friday before Katrina hit, when it was already a Category 2 hurricane rapidly gathering force in the Gulf, a veteran FEMA employee arrived at the newly activated Washington headquarters for the storm. Inside, there was surprisingly little action. "It was like nobody's turning the key to start the engine," the official recalled.

Brown, the agency's director, told reporters Saturday in Louisiana that he did not have a sense of what was coming last weekend.

"I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I'm trying to think of a better word than typical -- that minimizes, any hurricane is bad -- but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort," he said. "Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you've seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex."

But other officials said they warned well before Monday about what could happen. For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan? Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there is water around it? They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.

In the run-up to the current crisis, Allbaugh said he knew "for a fact" that officials at FEMA and other federal agencies had requested that New Orleans issue a mandatory evacuation order earlier than Sunday morning.

But DHS did not ask the U.S. military to assist in pre-hurricane evacuation efforts, despite well-known estimates that a major hurricane would cause levees in New Orleans to fail. In an interview, the general charged with operations for the military's Northern Command said such a request to help with the evacuation "did not come our way."

"At the point that we were all watching the evacuation and the clogged Interstate 10 going to the west on Sunday, we were watching the storm very carefully," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said. "At that time, it was a Category 5 storm and we knew that it would be among the worst storms to ever hit the United States. . . . I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding."

Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said. Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they weren't sent...."

[M]any outraged politicians in both parties have concluded that the federal government failed to meet the commitments it made after Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said DHS had failed. "We've been told time and time again that we are prepared for any emergency that comes, that we're ready," he said. "We're obviously not."

Apparently, the Bush shills succeeded in getting one of their lies about the failure of local officials inserted into the Post story:  details here.

Responding to Hurricanes: Cuba vs. the United States

A propos our discussion of man-made disasters, this is rather striking:

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret?   According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."

"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."

"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."

They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.

After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."

Our federal and local governments had more than ample warning that hurricanes, which are growing in intensity thanks to global warming, could destroy New Orleans. Yet, instead of heeding those warnings, Bush set about to prevent states from controlling global warming, weaken FEMA, and cut the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee construction in New Orleans by $71.2 million, a 44 percent reduction....

Unlike in Cuba, where homeland security means keeping the country secure from deadly natural disasters as well as foreign invasions, Bush has failed to keep our people safe. "On a fundamental level," Paul Krugman wrote in yesterday's New York Times, "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 prevention measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice."

An Insider's Report on the Evacuation of New Orleans

A striking account here; an excerpt:

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge.

You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me "as someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don't want to be here at night."

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world....

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.

There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.

The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence.  Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.

Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.

While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply....

Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city.

While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders....

In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be "rebuilt and revitalized" to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.

Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions to repair.

The Right is not Coping with Bush's Failure on the Hurricane Disaster...and Why Now is the Perfect Time to Assign Blame and Responsibility

Many on the right are owning up to the obvious:  the Bush Administration failed spectacularly in responding to an urgent human crisis on its own soil.  (Most of the focus has been on New Orleans, but bear in mind that the situation in Southern Mississippi is also quite terrible.)  But the diehard Bush shills (no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath them, it is said) are busy blaming the local officials.  (Ask yourself:  supposing there really were, say, 200 school buses available, how would that have made possible the evacuation of 100,000 people from New Orleans?)  Some of this is no doubt in response to the scathing statements by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin yesterday that have been getting much attention (and which I thank several readers for passing on):

Robinette asked the mayor about his conversation with President Bush:

NAGIN: I told him we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice. And that I have been all around this city, and I am very frustrated because we are not able to marshal resources and we're outmanned in just about every respect.

You know the reason why the looters got out of control? Because we had most of our resources saving people, thousands of people that were stuck in attics, man, old ladies. ... You pull off the doggone ventilator vent and you look down there and they're standing in there in water up to their freaking necks.

And they don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn -- excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed.

WWL: Did you say to the president of the United States, "I need the military in here"?

NAGIN: I said, "I need everything."

Now, I will tell you this -- and I give the president some credit on this -- he sent one John Wayne dude down here that can get some stuff done, and his name is [Lt.] Gen. [Russel] Honore.

And he came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving. And he's getting some stuff done.

They ought to give that guy -- if they don't want to give it to me, give him full authority to get the job done, and we can save some people.

WWL: What do you need right now to get control of this situation?

NAGIN: I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.

I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."

That's -- they're thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy.

I've got 15,000 to 20,000 people over at the convention center. It's bursting at the seams. The poor people in Plaquemines Parish. ... We don't have anything, and we're sharing with our brothers in Plaquemines Parish.

It's awful down here, man.

WWL: Do you believe that the president is seeing this, holding a news conference on it but can't do anything until [Louisiana Gov.] Kathleen Blanco requested him to do it? And do you know whether or not she has made that request?

NAGIN: I have no idea what they're doing. But I will tell you this: You know, God is looking down on all this, and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying and they're dying by the hundreds, I'm willing to bet you.

We're getting reports and calls that are breaking my heart, from people saying, "I've been in my attic. I can't take it anymore. The water is up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out." And that's happening as we speak.

You know what really upsets me, Garland? We told everybody the importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, "Please, please take care of this. We don't care what you do. Figure it out."

WWL: Who'd you say that to?

NAGIN: Everybody: the governor, Homeland Security, FEMA. You name it, we said it.

And they allowed that pumping station next to Pumping Station 6 to go under water. Our sewage and water board people ... stayed there and endangered their lives.

And what happened when that pumping station went down, the water started flowing again in the city, and it starting getting to levels that probably killed more people.

In addition to that, we had water flowing through the pipes in the city. That's a power station over there.

So there's no water flowing anywhere on the east bank of Orleans Parish. So our critical water supply was destroyed because of lack of action....

NAGIN: [W]e authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick. After 9/11, we gave the president unprecedented powers lickety-quick to take care of New York and other places.

Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up -- you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man....

And I don't know whose problem it is. I don't know whether it's the governor's problem. I don't know whether it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now....

I don't want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can't even count.

Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.

Meanwhile, some mainstream journalists have finally started acting like journalists, and treating deserving politicians like the two-faced, self-congratulatory, self-serving liars they actually are.  Here is a bit of transcript between Anderson Cooper and Senator Landrieu of Louisiana:

COOPER: Joining me from Baton Rouge is Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. Senator, appreciate you joining us tonight. Does the federal government bear responsibility for what is happening now? Should they apologize for what is happening now?

SEN. MARY LANDRIEU (D), LOUISIANA: Anderson, there will be plenty of time to discuss all of those issues, about why, and how, and what, and if. But, Anderson, as you understand, and all of the producers and directors of CNN, and the news networks, this situation is very serious and it's going to demand all of our full attention through the hours, through the nights, through the days.

Let me just say a few things. Thank President Clinton and former President Bush for their strong statements of support and comfort today. I thank all the leaders that are coming to Louisiana, and Mississippi, and Alabama to our help and rescue.

We are grateful for the military assets that are being brought to bear. I want to thank Senator Frist and Senator Reid for their extraordinary efforts.

Anderson, tonight, I don't know if you've heard -- maybe you all have announced it -- but Congress is going to an unprecedented session to pass a $10 billion supplemental bill tonight to keep FEMA and the Red Cross up and operating.

COOPER: Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap -- you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's not enough facilities to take her up.

Do you get the anger that is out here?

LANDRIEU: Anderson, I have the anger inside of me. Most of the homes in my family have been destroyed. Our homes have been destroyed. I understand what you're saying, and I know all of those details. And the president of the United States knows those details.

COOPER: Well, who are you angry at?

LANDRIEU: I'm not angry at anyone. I'm just expressing that it is so important for everyone in this nation to pull together, for all military assets and all assets to be brought to bare in this situation.

And I have every confidence that this country is as great and as strong as we can be do to that. And that effort is under way.

COOPER: Well, I mean, there are a lot of people here who are kind of ashamed of what is happening in this country right now, what is -- ashamed of what is happening in your state, certainly.

And that's not to blame the people who are there. It's a desperate situation. But I guess, you know, who can -- I mean, no one seems to be taking responsibility.

I mean, I know you say there's a time and a place for, kind of, you know, looking back, but this seems to be the time and the place. I mean, there are people who want answers, and there are people who want someone to stand up and say, "You know what? We should have done more. Are all the assets being brought to bare?"

LANDRIEU: Anderson, Anderson...

COOPER: I mean, today, for the first time, I'm seeing National Guard troops in this town.

Even some to my right who I think of as fairly reasonable in their appraisals of many matters of public concern are sounding this theme about not casting blame:

I have absolutely no interest in assigning blame. My sense is that the crisis is sufficiently great that we need to be forward thinking right now. Assigning blame looks back; it's something you do when the emergency is over, and you have time to reconstruct what happened and see how you could do better next time.

This strikes me as false and misleading on multiple levels.  First, assigning blame now often gets negligent public officials to act; that's the main reason for assigning blame, and lots of it!  (We all know why the alleged President cancelled the last few days of his vacation, and then finally travelled to the Gulf Coast, with troops in tow, and it had everything to do with the blame being correctly heaped on his Administration.)  Second, while we might agree that National Guardsmen and doctors in New Orleans shouldn't be spending time blogging and writing op-eds about who is to blame, it is ludicrous to suggest that those of us who can make no concrete contribution to relief efforts--which includes just about every law and philosophy professor in the United States--shouldn't do what we can do, which is collect information, analyze, and evaluate.  Third, the proper assignment of blame and responsibility is both vital for future planning and for justice:  those who fail in their public duties must be held accountable, both for the familiar retributive reasons and so as so deter future officials from failing so badly.  When there are no consequences for gross dereliction of public responsibilities, we are likely to see such dereliction again and again.  So now is the time for all those many millions of people who are not occupied with providing immediate relief to the vicitims of this natural and man-made disaster to assign blame and demand justice.

Chronicle of Higher Ed Website for News on Schools Affected by Hurricane

Here.   Tulane has officially cancelled the fall term is one of the lead news items.

Religious Zealots Think Alike

As we approach the anniversary of the 9/11 horrors in the U.S., it is good to know that the homegrown fundamentalist sociopaths are keeping pace with the ones that attacked the country four years ago:

Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, also sees God's mercy in the aftermath of Katrina....Shanks says the hurricane has wiped out much of the rampant sin common to the city.

The pastor explains that for years he has warned people that unless Christians in New Orleans took a strong stand against such things as local abortion clinics, the yearly Mardi Gras celebrations, and the annual event known as "Southern Decadence" -- an annual six-day "gay pride" event scheduled to be hosted by the city this week -- God's judgment would be felt.

“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now," Shanks says. "God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again."

The New Orleans pastor is adamant. Christians, he says, need to confront sin. "It's time for us to stand up against wickedness so that God won't have to deal with that wickedness," he says.

This country provides quite extraordinary protections for religious liberty and expression.  We give a free pass--morally and often legally--to all kinds of advocacy of depravity and cruelty as long as it has a religious basis.  Is this really a good thing?  Have we gone too far?  The British have begun to have their own doubts.  And one really must begin to wonder when listening to the vindictive, homicidal malice emanating from the ordained men of God.

As a sidenote, it is a truly interesting, and deep, question why the religious zealots of all stripes have such visceral hatred of all things sexual.  As far as I know, only Nietzsche had a developed explanation in the Genealogy--see esp. Ch. 8 of my Nietzsche on Morality (London:  Routledge, 2002) for a discussion.  Cultural and political developments in many parts of the world, including the U.S., make this an increasingly pressing matter.

Friday Poem: "Cars"

Cars

I, in my poor Beetle—80,000 miles run—
Wait at the East Flatbush red light
In drizzle and dusk.
Before me
Black limousine of Cadillac renown
License plate—a lucid “State Assembly 3.”

It is the most shiny car
Much importantly smooth.
It gleams upon me, upon the street—
Very opulent aura its—

Sir, you are the public servant,
I, the public.
How be it thus
That you embrace
The grace of riches,
I the austere wheels?

Ride we a riddle?

Copyright 2001 by Maurice Leiter (originally written in the 1970s)

Reprinted with permission.

Charity and Government Failure

The blogosphere is abuzz with campaigns for charitable contributions; anyone interested can find multiple links almost anywhere, and I have no useful information to add.  (I would observe that many employers are matching charitable contributions, which ought to be factored in for anyone inclined to donate money.)  I must confess that the spectacle of assorted right-wingers leading many of the most vigorous "give to charity" campaigns is tinged with ironies:  these are, after all, folks who have devoted their careers to destroying the capacity of government to meet the needs of human beings.  Because they have been so successful, the need for a massive charitable response is real enough.  But can one fail to notice that after, say, 9/11, no one suggested we needed charitable donations to equip the military? It was taken for granted that national defense would be provided by the state through compulsory taxes.  It is one of the reigning pathologies of American society that most of the real human needs of society are viewed as matters for private discretion, such as charitable giving.   I should be more impressed with the public-spiritedness of these right-wingers if they were to join their calls for charitable aid with calls for new, compulsory taxes so that charity would be less important, and government could do its job properly in response to calamities (and in preparation for them).  No charity can accomplish what the organized might of the state can, as we have seen in past disasters, and the fundamentals of human welfare should not be hostage to private discretion.

We have already noted how political choices and funding decisions by the forces of reaction have made a causal contribution to the severe consequences of this disaster.  Predictably, the Bush shills are making excuses for the almost complete failure of an adequate federal response to the New Orleans disaster.  But officials on the ground tell a different story:

Despair, privation and violent lawlessness grew so extreme in New Orleans on Thursday that the flooded city's mayor issued a "desperate S O S" and other local officials, describing the security situation as horrific, lambasted the federal government as responding too slowly to the disaster.

Thousands of refugees from Hurricane Katrina boarded buses for Houston, but others quickly took their places at the filthy, teeming Superdome, which has been serving as the primary shelter. At the increasingly unsanitary convention center, crowds swelled to about 25,000 and desperate refugees clamored for food, water and attention while dead bodies, slumped in wheelchairs or wrapped in sheets, lay in their midst.

"Some people there have not eaten or drunk water for three or four days, which is inexcusable," acknowledged Joseph W. Matthews, the director of the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness.

"We need additional troops, food, water," Mr. Matthews begged, "and we need personnel, law enforcement. This has turned into a situation where the city is being run by thugs...."

"We're just a bunch of rats," said Earle Young, 31, a cook who stood waiting in a throng of perhaps 10,000 outside the Superdome, waiting in the blazing sun for buses to take them away from the city. "That's how they've been treating us."

Chaos and gunfire hampered efforts to evacuate the Superdome, and, Superintendent P. Edward Compass III of the New Orleans Police Department said, armed thugs have taken control of the secondary makeshift shelter at the convention center. Superintendent Compass said that the thugs repelled eight squads of 11 officers each he had sent to secure the place and that rapes and assaults were occurring unimpeded in the neighboring streets as criminals "preyed upon" passers-by, including stranded tourists.

Mr. Compass said the federal government had taken too long to send in the thousands of troops - as well as the supplies, fuel, vehicles, water and food - needed to stabilize his now "very, very tenuous" city.

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, concurred and he was particularly pungent in his criticism. Asserting that the whole recovery operation had been "carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn days," he said "the rest of the goddamn nation can't get us any resources for security."

"We are like little birds with our mouths open and you don't have to be very smart to know where to drop the worm," Colonel Ebbert said. "It's criminal within the confines of the United States that within one hour of the hurricane they weren't force-feeding us. It's like FEMA has never been to a hurricane." FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency....

Meanwhile, Bush has his priorities straight:  get those photo-ops!

UPDATE:  This from a reader in Washington:

Untold thousands are starving and sick, the entire region is in a state of violent anarchy, and the dead are being consumed by rats and alligators.  Yet our president chooses to focus on  the kick-ass porch his redneck buddy Trent Lott is gonna have when this is all over?!  I've long felt that Bush is a sociopath, but this suggests a different breed of mental illness altogether.

A Warm Appreciation of New Orleans...

...and an appropriately scathing critique of Bush.

The horror, the horror

Look at CNN or this blog site (and scroll down).  At this very moment (around 2 pm Central Time here in the US), unspeakable misery and suffering are being visited upon tens of thousands of people in one of America's major cities, and nothing is being done.  Meanwhile, brainless idiots on the right prattle away about how "compared to every other nation on the planet, we’re moving at warp speed to address a natural disaster of extraordinary magnitude."  10,000 or more human beings are stranded, in one place, without food, sanitation, or basic health care.  Their situation has clearly been progressing towards its present dire condition for at least 48 hours.  Warp speed? 

How can this be happening?  Forget private charities; where is the government?  Kieran Healy (Sociology, Arizona) expresses related thoughts.  (Update: This comment is particularly apt.)

UPDATE:  This may be part of the explanation for why this is happening.  And this item, referenced before, is also relevant.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  From CNN, try this story and watch some of the video clips.

AND MORE:  A reader in Washington, D.C. writes:

Hurricane Katrina has certainly given me an unobstructed view into the true meaning of moral depravity. I'd think that some people could display a tiny modicum of decency in the face of immeasurable human suffering.  But, on that account, I'd be wrong.

You've already noted the moral monstrosity of Jonah Golberg (who's kept up his classy act, as you'll see here).  Meanwhile, some freedom-loving libertarians are virtually salivating at the prospect of gunning people down for the petty property crime of looting.  Then, of course, there are the countless theocratic fanatics who say that this just evens things up God's great sin ledger.  What to say?

In fairness, we should note that the ever-calm Orin Kerr (Law, George Washington)--the only one of the regular Volokh Conspiracy posters still admissable to polite society (poor Eugene checked out some time ago)--did note some of the, ahem, problems with the "shoot 'em dead" enthusiasm of some of his compatriots.

Meanwhile, a reader in Houston reports:

This afternoon my redneck plumber gave me a rundown on his views on Iraq (bomb it out of existence) and the devastation in New Orleans while working on a blocked sink.  Of New Orleans he said that it should not be rebuilt because it will always be a disaster waiting to happen due to its location below sea level.  When I mentioned the protective levees, he asked, "Why should we spend so much money to protect that disgusting city?"

Speaker Dennis Hastert has just expressed similar views but he did not say
anything about "disgusting".

So that's the way it is in America on September 1, 2005:   one of the nation's major urban centers is plunged into the dark ages, tens of thousands are suffering, the government is paralyzed, and some large portion of the country (who knows how large?) is bonkers, vindictive, delusional, or gloating.   God Bless America...since He hasn't blessed the victims.

24 HOURS LATER (Sept. 2, Friday, early afternoon) there is some sign of actual relief efforts.  Now here is a simple question:  why didn't this happen on, say, Wednesday?

AND ANOTHER SEPT. 2 UPDATE:  The stories and pleas for help recorded here suggest that some of the horrors continue unabated.

UT Austin Offering Help to Students and Faculty in Areas Affected by Hurricane

Details here.