Bury the Backlash

by Laura Flanders

Unimaginable, our President called the disaster that hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast this week. And on his back-slapping tour through the least troubled neighborhoods of the region, he said it was as if "the entire coast had been obliterated by the worst kind of weapon."

Sure enough - a deadly weapon hit this nation - this Presidency, and I'm only repeating what I'm hearing when I say Americans can't afford it one more minute.

The disaster in the Gulf Coast was only unimaginable, Mr. President if you don't read the warnings about sinking levees and rising waters. Only unimaginable if you didn't read the requests from the New Orleans flood control people this June, before you recommended to Congress that they slash their budgets by 44 percent. The Gulf Coast disaster was unimaginable like a terror attack on New York City - only if you disregard the CIA reports titled Osama Plans Attacks within the United States.

What's unimaginable is that we'll let this administration continue for one more moment. Katrina hit the Gulf Coast but it's this administration's policies that have wrecked the place.

A whole lot of people died this week that had no need to die: grandmothers in attic crawl-spaces, babies in pools of urine at the stadium, old men in lawn chairs in the street. A whole lot of people died this week who should be living and breathing.

One thing that should also have died this week is American apathy about government like this.

Seventy - eight years ago, it was another flood in New Orleans that sounded an alarm-bell. The Mississippi river rose over New Orleans and another Republican President made a photo-op stop, promised to rebuild, and then didn't. Out of that disaster came a plan. Huey Long laid it out when he was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928: progressive income taxes, real money for education, public works an end to imperial wars and the untrammeled power of Wall Street. Government should be for the we the people, not a cookie jar for private profiteers. The US military should defend the US, not bankrupt it the nation in the service of imperial chicken hawks.

Did I mention that Exxon’s last quarter profits stand at $7.6 billion – before gas prices rose to $3.50 a gallon. Did you hear who received the Navy’s contract to build their ships in New Orleans? Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown and Root.

Huey Long was shot dead before he could run for the White House (and I thank Greg Palast for reminding us of this history.) But prodded awake by Long and his supporters, Democrats cobbled together what they called a New Deal inherent in which was the idea that the mission of government is to help those who can not help themselves.

For half a century since, conservatives have been lashing back, serving up shrink-the-government snake oil, hogwash about how you can help the people by slashing safety nets. And they've set us at each other's throats.

Talking about “combat operations” underway in the streets of New Orleans, Army Times called Americans there “insurgents.” At least one commander in the ravaged city had to tell his men not to aim their rifles at the flood victims "You're not in Iraq."

But it’s a century of scapegoat and slash that has made New Orleans a war-zone. What we’re seeing across the Gulf Coast is a society that has sunk.

Amid the bodies that should not be dead in the putrid New Orleans water, I can only hope the conservatives backlash is buried there in that toxic pit.

Just as Mayor Ray Nagin, who let rip last week about his people’s abandonment on WWL radio, is now a mayor without a city. We Americans are a people without a government.

We are not Refugees vs. Americans, National Guard vs. Insurgents. We are one people in search of a government. A government that would serve us, not the reverse; a government that prioritizes us.

As my favorite t-shirt of the moment reads: “Make levees not war.”

Give us poverty relief not tax relief for the rich. Impose a windfall profit tax to pay for the gulf’s recovery – don’t ask private givers to pay not only for what government’s failed to do – like plan for disaster – as well as what this government’s done – like create a disaster in Iraq. Let the looting of Mother Nature and the people’s treasure stop. We’ve got a society to rebuild. Let’s rebuild it different.