[I believe you are correct, and I have never been accused of being too optimistic. Alexander Cockburn had a good column about this today:]
... Katrina the aftermath is payback time for decades of stupidity, greed, pillage, racism. My thought is that the tempo towards catastrophe really picked up in the Reagan era. That's when the notion of this society being in some deep sense a collective effort, pointed towards universal human betterment -- the core of the old Enlightenment -- went onto the trash heap.
Once you stop believing in universal betterment, you stop investing in social defenses, like health care, or flood control. You build your shining condo on the hill, put a fence round it, and cancel the local bus service so the poor can't get at you. What was the final answer to the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama? Cancel the busses!
So collective effort goes out the window, and soon the society forgets how collective effort works. Tens of thousands of poor people standing on roofs in the Delta and they haven't the slightest idea how to get them off. The ones they have brought to dry land they dump on the highway, where they stand as the Army trucks roll by.
There are all sorts of bargains the rich and the powerful in any society make with the poor. But one way or another through bread, circuses, the dole, the promise that Anyone Can Make It there's the offer of a deal: Don't make trouble: we'll take care of you. Empires collapse when the offer the "marginal rate of return" becomes empty: we won't take care of you. Or, we can't take care of you. We don't need you and we're not frightened of you.
We're at that point here. Malthus, a Christian, proposed locating the surplus poor next to unhealthy marshes, in the hope they would get sick and die. How much of a difference is there between that and the "emergency preparedness" and evacuation procedures before, during and after Katrina? How did Washington perceive New Orleans and most of the Gulf coast? Basically as a vast huddle of the mostly poor and the mostly black. So, year after year, they denied funds to shore up levees that all experts agree are bound to give way in more than a Force Three storm. They hollowed out every state economy so that in the end Mississippi's tax base was its cut of the gambling take, from floating casinos because the Christians said the Devil's Work couldn't take place on dry land.
Mainstream politics in America has ceased to deliver the goods in anything but the meanest terms. The bigger the hog, the bigger the bucket of slops. There's no worthwhile opposition at the established level. Generally I think people are looking at the scenes along the Gulf coast and in the Delta with horror, at the realization of what our society has come to.
<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
Carl