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Why is everyone so surprised that the government didn’t move fast enough to help people? Since when has government been out to help people in need? It’s too preoccupied with its prime pursuits, which involve money and oil and war and vast military budgets and cutting edge technology and thought control and propaganda.

Look at the response to the tsunami last year. It was bureaucratic, slow, and profitted upon. It had nothing to do with helping people. With these people, you have to frame it in terms of dollars or it won’t make sense. And helping people is very expensive, we have to tighten our belt, we’re at war.

Can you imagine what the thousands of Louisiana National Guard troops in Iraq must be feeling? Their function is to guard the nation, and when they are desperately needed, in their own state, for their own families, to guard their actual homeland they are off protecting oil for profit?

Who is surprised?

This account was written from someone with a similar political outlook as my own:

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.

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.

The author, Jordan Flaherty, is a union organizer and journalist.

There are two stories that caught my eye tonight.

First, and we should all feel better about this, Halliburton has already been hired by the Navy to clean up hurricane wreckage. Glad to see the US asserting its strength.

Secondly, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu goes off on Bush:

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.”

Bush looks remarkably like Ronald McDonald to me these days….

Michael Parenti’s newest article is up at Znet. It makes several very interesting points about how the Neocon reliance on “private charity” and the mythical “invisible hand” of capitalist theorists is a farce. Go read it.

Rumor has it that my laptop will be re-delivered on tuesday. We’ll see. When it does arrive, I want to install the new version of Ubuntu, specifically so I can install Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop (normal Ubuntu defaults to GNOME).

Here are some Ubuntu links I wanted to document here, for my future reference (or indeed for anyone interested in Ubuntu:

• Ubuntu Starter Guide
• Ubuntu Forums
• Kubuntu
• Restricted formats for Ubuntu

I’ve waited for something like this for years. When I first getting into Linux, the Linux magazines out were aimed more toward system administrators and programmers. I’ve said that Linux deserves a full-featured magazine aimed at end-users, and new users at that.

Enter Tux Magazine. Very cool, published by the same people who publish Linux Journal, but aimed for the new user. The magazine is published in PDF format, and distributed for free (with registration). Useful stuff here. Reading the latest issue now.

For those who don’t know, I work part-time taking road service calls at AAA. I just now got a call from a panicked person saying he heard that there was no more gas left in Florida, and he wanted me to confirm that rumor.

I have more half-baked thoughts swimming around my head in the wake of the response to Katrina. I can’t help but think, what happens when breakdown of society is nationwide, or even global? How will we survive when there is no one to bring us aid?

When it comes to survival under duress, when infrastructure has been destroyed, capitalism is an abstraction that gets in the way. When society breaks down, no one will care about $100 bills, credit cards, expense accounts, fancy cars with no gas to operate them, or cavernous mansions with no food or running water. What will matter is not marketing degrees, but rather real ability to survive, to find and procure food and water, to build shelter, and to defend yourself and your loved ones.

This pacifist is in a quandary about whether or not violence is justified to defend oneself, one’s loved ones, one’s community, in the chaos of a disaster. Normally I will eschew violence. But I cannot say what I would do if someone threatened my family, my child, in the course of a disaster (or in any other context for that matter). Given this, can I truly call myself a pacifist? Even Buddhist monks learn to defend themselves. The larger question: Is violence and taking advantage of the weak part of human nature? Or is it an artifict of oppression and/or capitalist slavery? My first thought is that there are more powerful tools, in the long run, than firearms. It seems to me that my best bet for survival is to shine my light bright and not fight, unless absolutely necessary. And even if I do find a need to fight, it should be from a place of compassion, as the person picking a fight with me would clearly be doing so because of suffering.

Is the US response to Katrina informing The Terrorists(tm) about our weaknesses in the event of a catastrophic attack? Let’s take the BuShites at face value, and assume that there are thousands of Evil Terrorists(tm) conspiring to bring down America. Well, I’m sure they are watching and chuckling at our pathetic and scatterbrained attempts to help our own people in their time of need. If their goal truly is to kill as many Americans as possible, I’m sure the US government’s response to Katrina is most edifying to them.

What happened to Donald Rumsfeld’s vision of an agile military able to deploy quickly anywhere on the globe? Well, not if actual Americans are in need… our troops are too busy asserting control over global oil production. In addition, what about the federal funding diverted from reinforcing the New Orleans levees due to high costs of Iraq war?

Like so many people, my mind is reeling from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I have several thoughts bubbling. In no particular order:

The US Government does not now have, and arguably never has had, helping people in need as its primary focus. As if there were any doubt (not in my head), the response to this disaster should make that point clear. Helping people is just simply not it’s job. After all this talk about “protecting the homeland” and all the government machinations of the past 4 years, the attempt to bring help is slow, muddled, delayed, confused when people actually need it.

Simplified categorization of people has got to go. In this case, I’m referring specifically to Bush’s zero tolerance for looters policy. Of course, the BuShites have historically had trouble categorizing people, as “looters,” “terrorists,” “enemy combatants,” “detainees,” etc etc. But in the wake of such a horrid tragedy, to include people taking food to feed their families in such a draconian plan, is just silly and uncompassionate. But it’s even more evidence that the government is in place to protect corporate interests more than anything.

Racism is at work in the aftermath of Katrina. Look at the pictures coming out of New Orleans. Most of the photos I’ve seen are black “refugees”; there are very few white refugees in most of the photos I’ve seen. Of course, it’s not so much a racial divide as it is an economic one; though that particular issue is clouded because black people tend to be poorer than white people. But for a distressingly vivid illustration of how racism is working, I direct you to how the AP describes white people “finding” things and black people “looting” things.

This gas price spike is just the beginning. Oil prices are just going to keep rising until there is no more oil. Deal with it. Accept it. You can’t deny it’s true. We are past the point of peak oil; it’s all downhill from here. The only question is how badly society crashes and burns until we work out new means of transporting goods and people that don’t involve dead dinosaurs.

Links and multimedia potpourri. There is a good collection of photographs on the NOLA site. Wikipedia (what an amazing resource that is…I can’t imagine what it will look like in a decade) already has a Katrina page. This is the most interesting blog from New Orleans that I’ve seen; run by a guy who has an ISP at the top of a New Orleans high rise. Though he doesn’t appear to be directly involved, there are some exquisite rants from Bob Harris.

…it’s highly significant that Massachussetts is thinking of switching all its computers to Free software, including Linux desktops and OpenOffice (or more specifically, to programs that use the OASIS OpenDocument format). Very cool, a small candle in a sea of darkness.