BUSH STRAFES NEW ORLEANS

by Greg Palast

Friday, September 2, 2005
The National Public Radio news anchor was so excited I thought she'd piss on
herself: the President of the United had flown his plane down to 1700 feet to
get a better look at the flood damage! And there was a photo of our
Commander-in-Chief taken looking out the window. He looked very serious and
concerned.

That was yesterday. Today he played golf. No kidding.

I'm sure the people of New Orleans would have liked to show their appreciation
for the official Presidential photo-strafing, but their surface-to-air missiles
were wet.

There is nothing new under the sun. In 1927, a Republican President had his
photo taken as the Mississippi rolled over New Orleans. Calvin Coolidge, "a
little fat man with a notebook in his hand," promised to rebuild the state. He
didn't. Instead, he left to play golf with Ken Lay or the Ken Lay railroad
baron equivalent of his day.

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial. As depression
approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for balancing the
budget.

Then, as the waters rose, one politician finally said, roughly, "Screw this!
They're lying! The President's lying! The rich fat cats that are drowning you
will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for
profit, they take away your schools and your hope and when you complain, they
blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they push your kids under. I say,
Kick'm in the ass and take your rightful share!"

Huey Long laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education,
public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, an end to wars for empire, and an
end to financial oligarchy. The waters receded, the anger did not, and Huey
"Kingfish" Long was elected Governor of Louisiana in 1928.

At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. Governor Long
taxed Big Oil to pay for the books. Rockefeller's oil companies refused pay the
textbook tax, so Long ordered the National Guard to seize Standard Oil's fields
in the Delta.

Huey Long was called a "demagogue" and a "dictator." Of course. Because it was
Huey Long who established the concept that a government of the people must
protect the people, school, house, and feed them and give every man or woman a
job who needs one.

Government, he said, "We The People," not plutocrats nor Halliburtons, must
build bridges and levies to keep the waters from rising over our heads. All we
had to do was share the nation's wealth we created as a nation. But that meant
facing down what he called the "concentrations of monopoly power" to finance the
needs of the public.

In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party. Franklin
Roosevelt and the party establishment, scared senseless of Long's ineluctable
march to the White House, adopted his program, called it the New Deal, and later
The New Frontier and the Great Society.

America and the party prospered.

America could use a Democratic Party again and there's a rumor it's alive --
somewhere.

And now is the moment, as it was in '27. As the bodies float in the streets of
New Orleans, now is not the time for the Democrats to shirk and slink away,
bleating they can't "politicize" this avoidable disaster.

Seventy-six years ago this week, Huey Long was shot down, assassinated at the
age of 43. But the legacy of his combat remains, from Social Security to
veterans' mortgage loans.

There is no such thing as a "natural" disaster. Hurricanes happen, but death
comes from official neglect, from tax cuts for the rich that cut the heart out
of public protection. The corpses in the street are victims of a class war in
which only one side has a general.

Where is our Huey Long? America needs just one Kingfish to stand up and say
that our nation must rid itself of the scarecrow with the idiot chuckle, who has
left America broken and in danger while he plays tinker-toy Napoleon on other
continents.

I realize that the middle of rising flood is a hell of a bad time to give
Democrats swimming lessons; but it's act up now or we all go under.