MATTHEWGOODONLINE

Following Hurricane Katrina, the United States Congress approved $62 billion dollars in emergency spending. President Bush vowed to see the glory of New Orleans restored, to initiate a program to deal with the levees, and ensured that all those that were displaced and affected would be taken care of.

Three years later the affects of Katrina are still palpable.

In a testament to the Bush Administration’s stupidity, one of its first decisions was to immediately declined offers of assistance from Cuba and Venezuela – the first two nations on the planet to react to the crisis. Both countries were willing to pledge over $1 million dollars in immediate financial assistance (combined), provide mobile hospitals, water treatment plants, bottled water, canned foods, heating oil, 1,100 physicians, and almost 25 metric tons of medicine. Unfortunately, politics got in the way of human decency, and the aid was declined.

Politics have a great deal to do with how pieces are picked up after a disaster, be it natural or man made. Regarding the subject I would point you in the direction of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine as an in-depth primer. That said; it really should come as no surprise that the Bush Administration has pledged $1 billion dollars in assistance to the Georgian Government. In situations such as these, politics trump humanitarianism.

The Russians have pledged to help rebuild Tskhinvali, which sustained the most damage during the brief conflict, and continue to provide financial support to the South Ossetia. In fact, Russian construction workers have already begun work. Thus, Washington’s response is $1 billion dollars in assistance to Tbilisi. In the end, it’s not about helping people so much as it’s about the appearance of helping them to strengthen geopolitical interests or thwarting the interests of others. Because were that not the case, politics would be thrust aside in the name of the greater good. It wasn’t allowed to occur in Louisiana, it won’t happen in Georgia, nor in any other place where people are suffering but their plight is overshadowed by political ends. That’s simply an age old reality. People are used to bolster the positive, selfless appearance of governments whose exploitation of their grief is passed off as anything but.

To be honest, I could probably go on for days about the betrayal of those in New Orleans that have been entirely screwed over by the government, be it local or federal, and the way in which they have been treated while simply attempting to enact their most basic of rights. But the truth is that it so sickens me that every time I attempt to address it I revert to employing expletives every other word. Thus, I will just quote Bill Quigley’s piece on Truthout from last Friday…

“In a remarkable symbol of the injustices of post-Katrina reconstruction, hundreds of people were locked out of a public New Orleans City Council meeting addressing demolition of 4,500 public housing apartments. Some were tasered, many pepper sprayed and a dozen arrested.

Outside the chambers, iron gates were chained and padlocked even before the scheduled start.

The scene looked like one of those countries on TV that is undergoing a people’s revolution - and the similarities were only beginning.

Dozens of uniformed police secured the gates and other entrances. Only developers and those with special permission from council members were allowed in - the rest were kept locked outside the gates. Despite dozens of open seats in the council chambers, pleas to be allowed in were ignored.

Chants of “Housing is a human right!” and “Let us in!” thundered through the concrete breezeway.

Public housing residents came and spoke out despite an intense campaign of intimidation. Residents were warned by phone that if they publicly opposed the demolitions they would lose all housing assistance. Residents opposed to the demolition had simple demands. If the authorities insisted on spending hundreds of millions to tear down hundreds of structurally sound buildings containing 4,500 public housing subsidized apartments, there should be a guarantee that every resident could return to a similarly subsidized apartment. Alternatively, the government should use the hundreds of millions to repair the apartments so people could come home. Neither alternative was acceptable to HUD. A plan of residents to partner with the AFL-CIO Housing Trust to save their homes was also ignored.

Outside, SWAT team members and police in riot gear and on horses began to arrive as rain started falling. Those locked out included public housing residents, a professor from Southern University, graduate students, the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, ministers, lawyers, law students, homeless people who lived in tents across the street from City Hall, affordable housing allies from across the country and dozens of others.”

If that snippet wasn’t enough to enrage you, perhaps this will…

I don’t know about you, but the scenes in that video do not depict an event that one would attribute to a nation, or a portion thereof, that claims itself the foremost democracy on the planet. In fact, it looks more like the last ditch efforts of a few brave souls attempting to futilely counteract the beginnings of a neo-fascist trend that is becoming commonplace in the United States with regards to how the public is treated when it dares to represent itself in a dissenting fashion. And to think that the government of the United States feels it has the right to, by comparison to itself, condemn others.

I came across this on Facebook and thought that I would give it a go. Someone sent me a list of questions that I guess you’re supposed to answer, so here goes…

The perennial 80’s classic Better Off Dead in which a young John Cusack tackles the K12 and wins the heart of a French foreign exchange student.

The last full book I read was Robert Fisk’s The Great War For Civilization, but the most recent was a number of my favourite pages from The Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz.

Right now I would have to say it’s South Park. While I’m a fan of numerous animated shows, such as Family Guy, I don’t think anyone pushes the envelope anywhere near as much as Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In fact, Season 10 of the show probably contains some of their best work – the World Of Warcraft episode, for example, or the Season’s opener in which they confront the fact that Isaac Hayes left the show’s cast because he was offended by the now infamous Scientology episode.

The podcast that I did with Jeremy Taggart for Taggart’s Take. And man, when all three episodes air, are we in for it.

The World Of Warcraft episode in the 10th season of South Park.

There are, of course, a lot more questions, but I just became suddenly disinterested in doing this.

President Bush is set to request a further $50 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If granted, and using my trusty Dashboard calculator – that’s a $50bn supplemental on top of the original $460bn 2008 fiscal defense budget and the $147bn supplemental for the wars that is current pending – that’s a grand total $657 billion dollars for the fiscal year 2008.

Today the President marked the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, saying…

“Hurricane Katrina broke the levees, it broke a lot of hearts, it destroyed buildings, but it didn’t affect the spirit of this community”

He also claimed that ‘better days were ahead’. I would hope so, being that it’s been two years. The government has pledged $114bn to help in ongoing relief and reconstruction efforts. Using my trusty Dashboard calculator, that’s $543 billion dollars less than the fiscal defense budget for a single year – and $83 billion dollars less than the supplementals requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, there were those that weren’t too pleased that the President showed up to mark the somber occasion, being that two years after the fact federal efforts to help address the issue have taken a back seat to, for example, lucrative arms agreements with foreign nations.

Hmm, let’s see.

Israel has received a 25% increase in yearly military aid, numerous Middle Eastern nations, all of which are primarily Sunni, are due some $20 billion dollars over the next decade (most of which will be pumped back into the US defense industry – good for business), the US is now funding Sunni insurgent factions in Iraq, gifting them millions of dollars, the Pentagon paid almost a million dollars to ship two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas and has spent some $20.5 million over the last six years in fraudulent shipping costs (that’s what we like to refer to as the ‘reallocation of funds’ to programs that are off the books), the US Embassy in Baghdad will come in at a whopping $592 million dollars - and that’s just off the top of my head.

There is, of course, a lot more – aid to Latin American, African, Eastern European, and Asian countries, not to mention aid funneled through the USAID program to a variety of groups in different locales.

It’s a shame that New Orleans isn’t in Israel, in need of an embassy, or, for that matter, a few washers.