MOSCOW, September 11, 2005 -- If you thought the deliberate slaughter of a nation’s own people was the unique perquisite of communist despots like Stalin and Pol Pot, you need to take Ann Landers’ advice: Wake up and smell the coffee.
Dubya’s been studyin’ up on his history lately, and he’s seen how the proper application of selective mass murder can really boost a ruler’s effectiveness, so he decided to try it out in southern Louisiana, where the vast majority of the population are black “useless eaters” whose crime was compounded by voting against him in 2004.
So when the levees – aided by Bush’s hijacking the money allocated to strengthen them so he could spend more on his Iraqi disaster -- broke and flooded the city, the compassionate conservatives saw their chance:
Not only did they let the 25,000 mostly poor, mostly black swelter for five days in heat, hunger, thirst, dead bodies, and shit without sending supplies, hoping they would all starve, but the word is now leaking out that they also at gunpoint forcefully turned back hundreds of volunteers with boats to search and rescue the thousands still trapped in their homes and to bring food and water to try to keep the abandoned poor black democrats alive till the feds could get around to doing the job they were supposed to have done in the first place.
They also at gunpoint turned back thousands who were escaping the superdome on foot across a bridge to the nearby town of Gretna where there was at least water and dry land
It wasn’t just a matter of confusion or mere bureaucratic incompetence, we now discover. It was a matter of calculated vengeance: Neighboring southern Mississippi, whose governor Haley Barbour is not only a Republican, but an old pal of Dubya’s, began receiving immediate aid – food, water, rescue missions.
Meantime, in the five-six day deliberate delay in southern Louisiana, an additional as-yet unknown thousands drowned or died of hunger or neglect in the flood-ravaged cities and towns. Some people would call that pre-meditated murder.
So the fascist Bush has done Adolf one better: At least der Fuehrer never slaughtered his own people – except, of course, the Jews who, everybody knew by then -- weren’t really people anyway. Dubya has quietly (he thought) set about to simply annihilate the poor blacks who do nothing but loot, rape, murder, soak up welfare, and perversely vote against him. In the chaos and confusion of natural disaster, nobody would notice, right?
But even the muddle-headed Democratic leadership has finally gotten around to piercing this deception.
But there’s another lesson to be learned from the New Orleans massacre.
I hope you vidotaped the scenes of the thousands of Americans dying of hunger, thirst, and deliberate neglect in and around the superdome during the Iraqization of New Orleans, because you’ll want to replay it every time you want to get a preview of your own future: when crude oil has hit $ 200 a barrel, you’ve been fired because you can no longer afford to drive to work – if your car hasn’t been repo’ed -- or your business has shut down because nobody can afford your products or services anymore, you’ve been evicted from your home because you couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments from the last re-financing, and the American economy has collapsed because China’s quit buying T-bonds.
New Orleans sans flooding is what America’s major cities will look like when United Fruit Company can no longer fly bananas to your local supermarket from 5,000 miles away; the local farmers can’t grow crops in their impoverished soil without fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, and trucks couldn’t get the diesel fuel to bring them to the city anyway.
Inner city highrise offices and apartments will be abandoned because the elevators will be working only sporadically if at all as a result of brownouts and blackouts. The infrastructure – sewer, water, roads, bridges -- will be in the process of collapse from lack of maintenance. Potable water will be non-existent and disease rampant.
As we saw in New Orleans, when this starts happening, all but the poorest and the most disabled will see the handwriting on the wall, hop in their cars and drive someplace better. This will only stop when there is no “someplace better” left and we’re all on the same playing field.
But as in New Orleans, the very poor without cars or bus-, train-, or plane fare -- whose ranks have been steadily growing under Bush’s compassion -- will remain to be the first to die of hunger, murder, or disease. There will be no civil order. It will be every man for himself.
If you’ve been blithely assuming that under such circumstances, your government will take care of you, the coverage of Katrina should have jolted your eyes open. New Orleans raised the curtain on what we’ve all been told by the pesky, wacky, sky-is-falling conspiracy theorists, but could never bring ourselves to believe could be true in our own country:
Your elected government is there to serve and perpetuate itself, not you. You are simply the robot that by your vote hands one or the other of the tweedle-dummers the keys to the treasury. But the treasury is for them, not for you.
Most Americans want out of Iraq. Most would like to reduce global warming and become less dependent on fossil fuels to ease the transition to the post-oil society; most would like medical care to be available to everyone.
The fact is that, according to Naom Chomsky, on almost every major topic, the American public is far to the left of both Bush and the Democratic leadership.
Just before last November's presidential election, Chomsky reported, two of America's most prestigious public attitude monitoring institutions - the Program on International Policy Attitudes and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - published studies which showed that both political parties, the media and what he calls "the decent left" are far to the right of the American public on most major issues. "And, of course, it wasn't reported.
"The major facts were just suppressed," Chomsky says. "Actually, these two reports were reported in two local papers in the country and a couple of op-eds. That's it. In the entire country. The most important information possible right before an election."
What the reports showed, Chomsky explains, was that the American public is strongly opposed to the use of force, except in terms of the UN charter, and in the face of imminent attack. "The public wants the UN, not the US, to take the lead in an international crisis," says Chomsky. "That includes reconstruction, security and so on in Iraq.
“A majority of the public is actually in favor of giving up the veto at the UN so the US would go along with the majority. An overwhelming
majority supports the Kyoto protocol….
"The same huge majority is in favor of joining the International Criminal Court. A large majority of the population takes it to be a moral issue for the government to provide health care for everybody. It goes on and on like this. The public is far to the left of anything in the establishment."
So it’s pretty obvious: Your representative government is not representing you – or the majority of your friends and family.
Nothing you can do about it, right? You’re absolutely helpless to influence your own future or the future of your country or of mankind. . Nothing left to do now but fume and swear and get depressed and scream at your boyfriend when he comes home without topping off the gas tank because of the long line at the gas station.
Wrong!
Some savvy social activist named Dale Allen Pfeiffer, writing in “Online Journal” -- http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/090205Pfeiffer/090205pfeiffer.html: -- has come up with a way for ordinary people to regain control of their government, the now undisputed “tool of the privileged class….”
And we’d damned well better get at it before the full impact of the post-oil era hits, or it will be New Orleans déjà vu all over again in every city in the country:
“When the panic comes, “ Pfeiffer says, “it will be managed by the elite. They will extract their profits from it, and then they will liquidate their assets and move them offshore before the market crashes. They will fold up their tents and leave town, perhaps for the Cayman Islands, perhaps for safe havens in Asia and elsewhere. There they will convert their dollars to gold, or possibly to Chinese yuan, sparking a bottomless devaluation of the US dollar. And they will sit back in safety and comfort to watch the crash. Once the dust has settled, they will move back in -- along with all the other vultures -- to pick up what is left at pennies on the dollar.
”Meanwhile, the working class will be hit by the brunt of this catastrophe. The jobless rate will soar as corporations shut their doors and declare bankruptcy. Whether wages rise or drop, the value of the currency they are paid in will render them worthless. There will be simultaneous crises in transportation, agriculture and public sanitation. There will be a steep rise in suffering, misery, starvation and death.
”While businesses will be filing bankruptcy by the armload, the public will not be able to lighten its burden of private debt thanks to the new bankruptcy laws that Bush pushed through Congress.
”All of the measures necessary for the final looting of the U.S., the pauperization of the US public, and the institution of debt servitude are already in place or are being prepared even as you read these words. All it awaits is a cue from the wings.”
There is only one thing that could stop it, Pfeiffer says, and it’s so amazing simple to pull off and so amazingly effective, but so amazingly impossible because everybody’s going to sit on their ass and wait for everybody else.
The tool? The general strike!
The general strike gives the ordinary American “the power to bring everything to a screeching halt….”
But you need organization, a movement, a united voice. Well, we just happen to have one already in place, Pfeiffer says. Remember the “Wobblies” of the early 20th century? The labor movement led by socialist Eugene Debs that was crushed by the powers that be?
I thought they had been crushed out of existence, but apparently they’re still alive and kicking butt and ready to pull off a general strike if they had the public support to do it.
A general strike where everybody simply says, “we don’t work till you get out of Iran, join the Kyoto treaty, launch a meaningful energy conservation and alternative program, implement universal health care, mandate gas mileage restrictions, end globalization,” what have you. You paralyze the government! And if everybody participates, they can’t kill or jail us all!
Yeah, the Wobblies are left of center, but they couldn’t possibly contrive more harm than the right-of-center Bush whackers have done, and you’d at least be on the side calling the shots.
You can join the IWW through their website: www.iww.org, Maximum dues are $ 18/month for those making $ 2,000/month or more. You also have to swear that you are not a boss and do not have the capacity to hire and fire in your job.
So you can immobilize the neocon juggernaut in its tracks. Do you care? Do you dare?
Naah, that would take a little effort and a few bucks! Let’s all get back to the chat room.
Hey, this is supposed to be about the evil empire, right? So why am I on a rant about America? I’ve been saying for nearly eight years now that I’m living in your future, and it’s just getting harder and harder to tell the two evil empires apart.
Not to mention the growing difficulty of ignoring the elephant in your living room.
But I promise to go back to bitching about my own evil empire and let you do the bitching about yours from now on.
But will my promise be any more effective than the one I made to keep my hands off Zhorik ’s dick?
Probably not.
Since he came back from St. Peterburg last Sunday, he’s been much less accommodating. I’ve only felt his stiff and erecting cock one time, and even then he woke up and rolled over, snorting “Dane!” And last night he slept with his pants on! What do you think he’s trying to tell me?
So given my dearth of sex due to his growing inaccessibility and Sergei’s herpes-active chlen, and given my new non-stop 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. teaching regime, and my bouncing blood pressure, it hasn’t been the most up-beat week of my life.
But there’s hope! Slava asked if he could come spend the night with me!
He’s horny too.
Chapt. 164 - 2114 words
Columns :: New Orleans -- a peak into your future
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