A Horrid Reality
By Sheila Samples
10 October, 2005
Countercurrents.org
In a sordid slime, harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom--and for others' goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich--
Our god is marching on. ~Mark Twain
While
recently watching George Bush's carefully orchestrated performance from
New Orleans' French Quarter a week late and a billion dollars short,
I was struck by the confused desperation in his eyes, and I was overcome
with sympathy. Not at the spectacle of an out-of-touch derelict engineer
racing to catch the presidential train as it careened crazily out of
the station, but for the vulnerable and abandoned Americans whose very
survival depends upon his empty platitudes and promises.
In Bush's multiple
photo-op visits to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf area -- including one
released of him with his nose pressed to the window on his initial "flyover"
visit -- he's been ludicrously stage-managed -- soaring nonsensical
speeches, floodlights, cathedrals shimmering in the background, hugging
female black victims brought to him for a camera shot, jouncing around
in the back of a truck, rigidly sandwiched between a mayor and a governor
and refusing to speak to either...This is Karl Rove's idea of a "hands-on"
kind of guy, sleeves rolled up, hard at work. Bush doing his job. Protecting
the American people. 'Cause that's, like, you know, his job. Protecting
the American people. Did I mention his sleeves were rolled up?
That does it. No
more flowery prose. No more screaming into the wind for Americans to
wake up before it's too late. No more succumbing to an attack of the
vapours while daubing my eyes with a scented handkerchief and plaintively
wailing, "when is enough -- enough?" The reality is the panting
war profiteers who control Bush will never have enough. Their greed
is ravenous, insatiable; it devours everything in its path. They have
no intention of giving up the power and profits for which they have
worked so hard -- waited so long -- to achieve. Not now. Not ever. They
plan to take it with them when they go. The war machine Dwight Eisenhower
warned us about is cranked up and running, but it is not freedom they're
spreading. It is fascism.
The reality is they
are well on their way to attaining a rigid, one-party international
dictatorship; a New World Order wherein the world and all its wealth
and resources belong to a chosen few -- them. If their plan works, the
vulgar lumpen, the underclass, the "people," will crumple
under a cruel nationalism, blatant racism and heartless militarism.
Like Thomas Jefferson warned -- if left unchecked, the greed of private
banks and corporations will ultimately "deprive the people of their
property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent
their fathers conquered."
The miserly response
to Katrina should serve as a wake-up call to those Americans who can
still think. Fascism is on the march and, when this administration threw
down the gauntlet in New Orleans, it declared open war on this nation's
poorer citizens, most of whom were Black.
White Americans
swallowed the spin that FEMA's disaster brigades, widely heralded for
their immediate response to even a spring shower blowing over the Florida
coast, suddenly became so incompetent when Katrina hit Louisiana, Mississippi
and Alabama, they couldn't even figure out how to use the telephone
or deliver a bag of ice.
Black Americans
know better.
The reality is that
FEMA worked perfectly -- a planned exercise of bureacratic incompetency
in order to expand Bush's powers to declare martial law in the next
disaster. It was a well-oiled machine that thwarted every attempt to
get help to those who were too old, too ill or too poor to leave. Looking
back at FEMA's success in orchestrating "Operation Ethnic Cleansing,"
I have to agree with Bush -- Brownie did, indeed, do a heckuva job...
For example:
FEMA refused the
addition of hundreds of assistance personnel and dozens of vehicles,
as well as food and water offered by Chicago's Mayor Daley. It also
refused to let the Red Cross deliver food; in fact told the agency to
leave and not come back. Renita Hosler, Red Cross spokesperson, said
they were "at the table every single day" asking for access,
but were kept out by the uniformed military.
FEMA refused to
use the facilities of the USS Bataan, a 600-bed hospital ship that just
happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina made landfall. The
USS Bataan is an 844-foot ship, complete with helicopters, doctors,
hospital beds, food and water. It has the capacity to make its own water
-- up to 100,000 gallons a day -- but this service was also refused.
Another state-of-the-art mobile hospital from the University of North
Carolina -- a convoy that included two 53-foot trailers, 100 surgeons
and paramedics, food, water and medicines -- was forced to park in a
gravel lot 70 miles north of New Orleans. They were marrooned there
for several days, frustrated by news that people were dying and that
disease was becoming more widespread because of contaminated water.
Vice President Dick
Cheney directed officials at the Southern Pines Electric Power Association,
not once but twice, to restore gasoline and diesel fuel pipelines before
restoring much needed power to rural hospitals. Amtrak's offer to help
evacuate the sick and elderly from hospitals and the detention center
was rebuffed, and three trailer trucks loaded with water from WalMart
were turned away. Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, south
of New Orleans, told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" that
FEMA officials also prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000
gallons of diesel fuel, and they cut the parish's emergency communications
line, which was restored, but Broussard said the Parish sheriff was
forced to post armed guards to protect it from FEMA.
On its own website,
FEMA ordered First Responders not to respond "unless dispatched"
because "self-dispatching volunteer assistance could significantly
complicate the response and recovery effort." To emphasize the
order, FEMA blocked a 500-boat citizen flotilla loaded with aid, and
slapped Germany in the face by turning back a German government plane
loaded with 15 tons of food.
All things considered,
it looks like FEMA's response to Katrina was a catastrophic success.
The only thing Bush and his racist cohorts didn't take into account
was the universal shock that met his unconcerned efforts to flush poverty
and crime down the toilet -- the outrage at remarks of Baton Rouge Republican
Richard Baker, who chortled that God had finally cleaned up public housing
in New Orleans, and of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who suggested we
could save money by just bulldozing the area and moving on...
The looting going
on in New Orleans is being done by Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root
and the Shaw Group, both clients of lobbyist and former FEMA head Joe
Allbaugh, and by Bechtel, whose CEO is on Bush's Export Council. Bush
immediately rescended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act which requires federal
contractors to pay workers at least the prevailing wages in the area.
The body snatching is being done by the same funeral-gate firm that
Bush was involved with in Texas -- Kenyon -- a subsidiary of Service
Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company
operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries
have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses.
Hurricane Katrina ripped the mask from the Bush administration and,
for a brief moment, exposed the sheer evil, and the bigotry, racism
and greed that lies just beneath the surface. Those who dared to look
upon the face of Bush's god cannot go home again. They know that the
reality these greedy monsters create for us is one of relentless, non-stop
chaos.
Being sucked up
into Bush's reality is like stepping out of the shower, soap in your
eyes and, as you fumble for a towel, the phone jangles. Someone rings
the front doorbell while simultaneously beating on the door -- someone
else is pounding on the back door, shouting incoherently. It is the
witching hour and you are home alone. The dog is barking wildly, the
cat is yowling while scratching frantically on the screen. In a panic,
you race to the window, and fall back in shock. The entire landscape
is exploding in a massive fireworks display. You can see shadowy figures
moving furtively across your lawn, and you wonder briefly what they
are doing, but they disappear into the flashing lights and noise.
Because of world
opinion and media coverage, we lucked out on this one, but the next
"national emergency" -- possibly a flu pandemic -- could be
democracy's last hurrah. Bush is already boasting of using the military
to "quarantine" those affected. And it won't be in our homes
-- this isn't the measles with the school nurse tacking a "quarantined"
sign on our front doors. Last year, Bush authorized preliminary studies
for the rapid construction of a National Detention Center Program, complete
with a series of detention centers, to be added to the existing 600
units now in place. Also, The Department of Homeland Security is consulting
with an Israeli company, Israeli Prison Systems, Ltd., for the expedited
construction of modular internment camps to be located in rural areas
throughout the continental US and Alaska. Sound like a conspiracy? I
would hope so, because to survive, we must come to grips with the fact
that we are victims of a vast, insidious conspiracy fueled by the vociferous
greed of those who have no intention of relinquishing their power. Political
author Frank Kent once said, "The evils of government are directly
proportional to the tolerance of the people." We must become a
bit more intolerant of those who would control us, or we will soon be
forced to fight for our very lives in the horrid reality of the New
World Order.
Sheila Samples
is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information
Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.
Contact her at: [email protected].
© 2005 Sheila
Samples