``...I'm having a hard time comprehending how anyone can react to all of this without the incandescent rage and hatred that this criminal spectacle ought to provoke...'' John Lacny
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Pretty much why I haven't posted a thing on New Orleans... Justin wrote a few supportive things about Chertoff that need to be addressed:
``...A cabinet member's files are filled with paper he can never read. The stuff he gets is fiosltered through his aides, who can never read all the struff in their files either...''
To which I answered but never posted this:
Come on Justin. It doesn't take a fastidious legal genius to discover that the Mississippi floods and the Gulf Coast is routinely hit with hurricanes.
Claiming `I didn't know' is like saying you never heard San Francisco had earthquakes. New Orleans is at the mouth of the Big Muddy... If that geographical hint eluded Chertoff, perhaps the sign on the map that says, `Port of New Orleans' might have given him or Brown a clue.
Active malice may not be involved. But I can virtually guaranty, its institutional equivalent, managerial class arrogance was involved. Since Chertoff was a judge, I guess he understood the law and order (lock down the poor) part of DHS and that is probably all the further he got in the Executive Summary.
You know the law and order types are very quick to remind us in their firm cop manner that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
``Anyway if he never saw the plans, how was he to know that someone had anticipated it?'' Justin
Well, as a concerned citizen may I remind his worship Jackoff that there is more to government service than giving orders... and ignorance of those other duties is no excuse...
(Imagine Chertoff's reaction if a defendant told him, gee judge, I didn't know selling crack was against the law...)
What other duties? In brief, this government and all its Bushit appointees in particular (utterly despicable jerks, one and all) don't have the slightest idea what a government is for---except to be cops and to line their own pockets and resumes. They literally don't understand the concept of public service to the public and public commons. (Public commons means public schools, public hospitals, public transportation, public buildings, public parks, roads, and public services and developments of all sorts...)
The most vulnerable of the public (poor, minorities, disabled, dis-enfranchised in the broadest terms) must rely on the public commons, because they hold nothing in private. If the public commons is starved to death and auctioned off to the highest bidder (via privatizing neoliberalism), then those who only possess that public commons are equally deprived... It's that butt simple.
Joanna wrote: ``From the standpoint of neoliberalism, govt exists [allow me to improvise] ... to loot the poor. It has found its perfect icon in New Orleans.''
Yes, the bloated corpses and haggard masses in Louisiana and Mississippi are the state of the US public commons...
Knowknot wonders: ``Any bets what portion of whatever is the final congressionally-appropriated sum will actually be (non-corruptly/non-wastefully) paid for the purposes (purportedly) intended?''
You mean after the Halliburton contracts, petro-chemical corp disaster relief rebates (EPA waivers, etc), insurance company bail outs, and the plutocrats get their private estates, golf courses, country clubs, and Gulf resorts rehabilitated?
Let's see... My most optimistic guess is 10 cents on the dollar. What actually ends up in a poor family's pocket to start over, probably zero. By definition they owned nothing, so what is there to reimburse?
CG