New Orleans ranting

New Orleans after the deluge ranting:

-- The black faces on the rooftops, on the streets, in the Superdome. Looks like race, but really it's the hard reality of class in America.

-- The totally inept response of city, state and federal government to the disaster. (a) why do I bother to pay taxes? (b) doesn't the Navy or the Marines have landing craft, boats, etc to pick up people from rooftops? Or to deliver food and water? (c) the U.S. seems to get its armed forces to places quickly with no trouble (d) why a "Federal Emergency Management Agency" if they can't manage an emergency? (e) remind me again what "homeland security" is?

-- Aaron Brown on CNN (and Kyra Phillips too) going on about "looting" in the wake of the disaster. With no food or water, and no prospect of food or water from the inept State, what would any sane person do? Worship the sanctity of private property and die in three or four days? Or...

-- The helicopters flying over the city should have been waving signs saying "Sorry, your relief effort is in Iraq". Some 35% of Louisiana national guard troops and 40% of Mississippi national guard troops are in Iraq.

-- How far the privatization of social caring has gone -- the president and governors and mayors telling people to not look to the government for help, instead go to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army. And send money to those organizations. Because your tax money went to Iraq; which leads to...

-- It's not like no one imagined this could happen. The New Orleans Times-Picayune had repeatedly run stories about the tenuous state of the aging levee system and what might happen if a major storm struck the city. See, e.g., Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?. Following 1995 flooding, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA, to address the problems. But, per the story just cited:

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps [Army Corps of Engineers - jd] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

-- The communist impulse among most people to help their neighbors, to pull together, to share and support, to violate property rights to ensure human rights; vs. the capitalist impulse to "stop looting", protect property, and either abandon the people-without-value outright, or shove the police state stick farther up the collective ass of those who survive.

-- And don't forget those who make money off of this: the credit card processors are scraping their 1 or 2 or 4 percent off of the top of every donation. Good news for the shareholders of donation processor Kintera: stock is up 17% since Monday!

-- So when do we start talking about the destruction of the environment? The loss of wetlands to mindless development? Global warming resulting in rising sea levels and extreme weather? Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

One could go on. And on. And on.

In network terms? New Orleans as transportation node. As energy production node. As cultural node. Seriously disrupted, the consequences will slosh through the economy.

Or 1.3 million human nodes in the greater New Orleans area disrupted, thousands lost. A disturbance in the Force.

jd

(Thanks Jon for additional bullets).