Posts filed under ‘Reposts’
The "city" of Louisiana
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, see the video at http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002353.html
SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…”
Well there’s your problem right there.
If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government’s response to a crisis, this was it.
The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.
But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”
Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the “I-Me” switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet’s meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural… and government-made.
But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, “we are not satisfied,” with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which “we” he thinks he’s speaking for on this point. Perhaps it’s the administration, although we still don’t know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, ‘I’ll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die’?
I don’t know which ‘we’ Mr. Bush meant.
For many of this country’s citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to ’08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — “New Orleans.”
For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick “I’m not satisfied with my government’s response.” Instead of hiding behind phrases like “no one could have foreseen,” had he only remembered Winston Churchill’s quote from the 1930’s. “The responsibility,” of government, Churchill told the British Parliament “for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence.”
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.
As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government’s credibility.
Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.
Disaster chief’s bio overstated record
From Time Magazine
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top U.S. disaster official Michael Brown, under fire over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, cited prior emergency-management experience in an official biography but his duties were “more like an intern,” Time magazine reported.
Brown’s biography on the Federal Emergency Management Agency Web site says he had once served as an “assistant city manager with emergency services oversight,” and a White House news release in 2001 said Brown had worked for the city of Edmond, Oklahoma in the 1970s “overseeing the emergency-services division.”
However, a city spokeswoman told the magazine Brown had actually worked as “an assistant to the city manager.”
“The assistant is more like an intern,” Claudia Deakins told the magazine. “Department heads did not report to him.” Time posted the article on its Web site late on Thursday.
Brown, a lawyer, was appointed as FEMA’s general counsel in 2001 and became head of the agency in 2003. The work in Edmond is the only previous disaster-related experience cited in the biographies. Brown served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association before taking the FEMA job.
U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, had cited Brown’s Edmond experience as “particularly useful” for FEMA during a hearing in 2002.
Critics, including some Republicans, have blasted Brown for delays and missteps in the federal government’s response to Katrina’s deadly and devastating assault on New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf Coast last week. Some have demanded his ouster.
Bush last week gave Brown a word of support, saying “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
This week, Bush put the U.S. Coast Guard’s chief of staff in charge of the federal recovery effort in New Orleans and gave Vice President Dick Cheney the job of cutting through bureaucratic delays.
BUSH TIES
The Washington Post reported on Friday that five of eight top FEMA officials had come to their jobs with virtually no experience in handling disasters. The agency’s top three leaders, including Brown, had ties to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign or the White House advance operation.
Former Edmond city manager Bill Dashner recalled for Time that Brown had worked for him as an administrative assistant while attending Central State University.
“Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I’d ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt,” Dashner told Time.
Edmond’s population is about 70,000.
In response to the Time report, FEMA issued a statement that took issue with elements related to an unofficial biography, and described his job in Edmond as “assistant to the city manager.”
Brown “remains focused on helping Americans through the worst natural disaster in history,” FEMA said.
United States of Shame
By Maureen Dowd, From New York Times September 3, 2005
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it’s happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn’t dry. Bye, bye, American lives. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,” he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in “the great city” of N’Awlins. He was clearly moved. “You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute,” he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, “but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen.” Out of the cameras’ range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled “can do” president always lapse into such lame “who could have known?” excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.’s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans’s sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy’s uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”
Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA’s response to Katrina if they had not prepared.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA – a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended “Spamalot” before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans – most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first – they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can’t take care of our own?
“The Rest of the Goddamn Nation”
“The Rest of the Goddamn Nation”
Those aren’t the words of a starving prisoner of the New Orleans Superdome, radicalized by the realization that he or she may well die for lack of a school bus. They’re the words of Col. Terry Ebert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans. FEMA’s response — or lack thereof — he told The New York Times, has been “criminal.”
Also notably lacking in the response to this disaster are suggestions that Katrina is a punishment sent by God. When the tsunami struck Asia, such notions came from across the spectrum, but most pungently from Christian conservatives who noted that Aceh, an “exporter of radical Islam,” as National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard put it, had been hardest hit. Such neanderthal theology apparently does not apply to the U.S.
Rather, the God invoked most often now is the distant, inscrutable deity responsible for other no-fault acts such as earthquakes and tornadoes. The “acts” of this God are not willful so much as “natural” — hence the rise of the term “natural disaster” in the late 19th century. “The concept of an act of God implied that something was wrong,” writes scholar Ted Steinberg in an important book called Acts of God: An Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, “that people had sinned and must now pay for their errors. But the idea of natural disaster may have implicitly suggested the reverse, that something was right, that the prevailing system of social and economic relations was functioning just fine.”
Indeed. The cavalry — or, in this case, the shock troops — are on their way to protect those economic relations. Three hundred troops directly from Iraq have landed in the city, and “they have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded,” blusters Louisiana Governor Blanco. “These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”
In addition to bullets, the rescuers are bringing Bibles. Crates of them reportedly await refugees in Houston, and FEMA has listed Pat Robertson’s “Operation Blessing” as a suitable destination for donations.
But if this is a religion story, it’s not about an act of God or the banal use and abuse of the Bible as substitute aid for people dying of literal thirst; it’s about sin. And no vague, blustery “pride of man” stories about ill-preparedness or mistakes by the Army Corps of Engineers will address the original sin of this event. We need theologically-charged, morally outraged, investigative historical reporting to tell us why and how the dead of New Orleans died, and when their killers — not Katrina, but the developers and politicians and patricians who are now far from the city — began the killing. It wasn’t Monday, and it wasn’t last week. We need journalists, not just historians, to look deeper into the American mythologies of race and money, “personal responsibility” and real responsibility. This isn’t a religion story because God acted, but because people acted. It’s not about what they didn’t do, it’s about what they did do, under the cover of civic development and urban renewal and faith-based initiatives that systematically eradicate the possibility of real, systemic response to a crisis that is more than a matter of individual souls.
The root of the word “religion,” “religare,” tells us what kind of religion story can be reported from the Superdome. Religare means “ties that bind.” Those should be bonds of community. But in New Orleans — and in every other poverty-stricken city in America — they’re chains.
–Jeff Sharlet
"The Rest of the Goddamn Nation"
“The Rest of the Goddamn Nation”
Those aren’t the words of a starving prisoner of the New Orleans Superdome, radicalized by the realization that he or she may well die for lack of a school bus. They’re the words of Col. Terry Ebert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans. FEMA’s response — or lack thereof — he told The New York Times, has been “criminal.”
Also notably lacking in the response to this disaster are suggestions that Katrina is a punishment sent by God. When the tsunami struck Asia, such notions came from across the spectrum, but most pungently from Christian conservatives who noted that Aceh, an “exporter of radical Islam,” as National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard put it, had been hardest hit. Such neanderthal theology apparently does not apply to the U.S.
Rather, the God invoked most often now is the distant, inscrutable deity responsible for other no-fault acts such as earthquakes and tornadoes. The “acts” of this God are not willful so much as “natural” — hence the rise of the term “natural disaster” in the late 19th century. “The concept of an act of God implied that something was wrong,” writes scholar Ted Steinberg in an important book called Acts of God: An Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, “that people had sinned and must now pay for their errors. But the idea of natural disaster may have implicitly suggested the reverse, that something was right, that the prevailing system of social and economic relations was functioning just fine.”
Indeed. The cavalry — or, in this case, the shock troops — are on their way to protect those economic relations. Three hundred troops directly from Iraq have landed in the city, and “they have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded,” blusters Louisiana Governor Blanco. “These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”
In addition to bullets, the rescuers are bringing Bibles. Crates of them reportedly await refugees in Houston, and FEMA has listed Pat Robertson’s “Operation Blessing” as a suitable destination for donations.
But if this is a religion story, it’s not about an act of God or the banal use and abuse of the Bible as substitute aid for people dying of literal thirst; it’s about sin. And no vague, blustery “pride of man” stories about ill-preparedness or mistakes by the Army Corps of Engineers will address the original sin of this event. We need theologically-charged, morally outraged, investigative historical reporting to tell us why and how the dead of New Orleans died, and when their killers — not Katrina, but the developers and politicians and patricians who are now far from the city — began the killing. It wasn’t Monday, and it wasn’t last week. We need journalists, not just historians, to look deeper into the American mythologies of race and money, “personal responsibility” and real responsibility. This isn’t a religion story because God acted, but because people acted. It’s not about what they didn’t do, it’s about what they did do, under the cover of civic development and urban renewal and faith-based initiatives that systematically eradicate the possibility of real, systemic response to a crisis that is more than a matter of individual souls.
The root of the word “religion,” “religare,” tells us what kind of religion story can be reported from the Superdome. Religare means “ties that bind.” Those should be bonds of community. But in New Orleans — and in every other poverty-stricken city in America — they’re chains.
–Jeff Sharlet
Vacation Is Over
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It’s Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren’t there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn’t want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don’t like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don’t let people criticize you for this — after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
And don’t listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn’t cut the money to fix those levees, there weren’t going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them — BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn’t stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It’s not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C’mon, they’re black! I mean, it’s not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don’t make me laugh! Race has nothing — NOTHING — to do with this!
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael MooreMMFlint@aol.com, www.MichaelMoore.com
P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.
Why The Levee Broke
By Will Bunch, Attytood.
Washington knew exactly what needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans from disasters like Katrina. Yet federal funding for Louisiana flood control projects was diverted to pay for the war in Iraq.
Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters continued to rise in New Orleans on Wednesday. That’s because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city’s 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it’s level with the massive lake.
There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: “No one can say they didn’t see it coming. … Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation.”
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:
The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.
The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president’s 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.
“The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink,” he said. “I’ve got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we’re going to have to pay them interest.”
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”
That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps’ Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
“The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement,” he said. “The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them.”
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project — $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million — was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:
The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it’s enough to pay salaries but little else.
“We’ll do some design work. We’ll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don’t have the money to put the work in the field, and that’s the problem,” Naomi said.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.
But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it’s too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions: “We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater,” Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, “The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana’s coast, only to be opposed by the White House. … In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana’s chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need.”
Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool’s errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich. Now Bush has lost that gamble, big time.
The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home. Yet — after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf — there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?
Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the blog Attytood.
This President Does Not Know What Death Is
An essay by E. L Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. He is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially conferred National Humanities Medal.
Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army. Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Irvine.
I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.
On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for
him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life…. They come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it.
So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
This president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a
wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children.
He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills — it is amazing for how many people in
this country this President does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is actually a
way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic
trouble.
Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
E. L. Doctorow
A New Paradigm for Israel Advocacy
by Larry Weinberg
Israel’s image around the world will not improve until we change the way we present Israel to the world.
After decades of using the same strategies and tactics, the same words and ploys and the same litany of “look-what-they did to us/look-what-they’re-doing-to-us-now” language to try to improve Israel’s image and more effectively advocate for Israel’s interests, it is now essential that we look to a new paradigm for our efforts.
We seem stuck in a pattern some would call an alternative definition of insanity: We don’t like the way Israel is perceived in the world, but we keep doing the same things over and over again expecting, somehow, that the outcome will be different. Israel’s image around the world will not improve until we change the way we present Israel to the world.
Israel isn’t a case and it isn’t a cause. Yes, it’s a sovereign state, yet it is a culture, an economy and a way of life as well. The totality of Israel is more than what is generally seen around the world through the media; usually what they cover is the result of policies created and actions taken by the government in a given period of time. Those of us who know the real Israel that exists today in the 21st century know that Israel is so much more, and so very different from what it seems to be when seen through the lenses and eyes of the cameras and reporters that deliver the news from Israel during these days of conflict.
If you “get” what I’ve just said, that the reality of Israel is different from the Israel as portrayed by a media that, quite expectedly and routinely, focuses more intensely on what blows up and dies as opposed to what adds value and saves, then you are on your way to understanding what I call The New Paradigm.
Paradigms are simple structures, and paradigm shifts are simple too, once the presumptions and prejudices that lock in the old paradigms are invalidated. So let’s look at the current paradigm, the one that doesn’t work and needs replacing.
Using the American perspective, we can say the following:
• 98% of what Americans see, read and hear about Israel is focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;
• and 98% of what passionate, well-meaning pro-Israel interests do about this situation is either proactively or reactively related to the conflict;
• therefore, Israel becomes more and more defined by the conflict, and the conflict only.
This is disastrous for Israel, and The New Paradigm changes it. This is what it says:
• there is more to Israel than conflict and war;
• that “more” is a society that does things every day that add value to the world;
• therefore, we need to show the world what Israel is beyond the conflict; we need to show people how Israel innovates and creates.
Think of it this way, if we were to take every possible topic you can discuss about Israel — the good and the bad — and pile them one on top of another and they created a pile 50 stories high. The topics that are about the conflict would be two, maybe three stories high (and other problems of Israeli society another two or three stories). That leaves a pile of positive stories towering over the landscape that our present advocates — with their myopic focus on the conflict and trying to prove Israel is always right — can’t even seem to see. Many of these stories are reasons for Americans to care about Israel — all of them say something that Americans desperately need to know: that there is something other than war going on in Israel.
Last year the results of a major piece of research — an in-depth study of Israel’s “brand” in America — were shown to officials of the Israeli government and selected interested parties. They showed that while Americans think Israel is unique, they don’t think it’s relevant to their lives. They found that while Americans think they know a lot about Israel, they don’t very much like what they know. So Israel has some problems because of the way it is seen, but these problems don’t conform to the critics’ usual carping about the accents of Israel’s spokespeople or the cacophony of the opinions raised in its vibrant democracy. The problems can be overcome, said the strategists from the major marketing conglomerate that conducted the study and shared its finding, and they said how to do it.
Israel needs to increase knowledge of Israel that also increases respect and esteem for Israel. Israel needs to make Americans think Israel is relevant to their lives. How? It’s not more material about the history of the conflict and who’s doing what to whom; people are clearly showing conflict-fatigue. It’s information on how Israel’s technological and biomedical innovations are saving lives and changing the world. It’s information about the hundreds of millions of people who aren’t hungry because of Israel’s advances in agriculture and the hundreds of millions of computers and cellphones and other devices made possible or made better by Israeli ingenuity.
This is not to suggest that Israel not defend itself nor take appropriate defensive measures in the communications war. Rather it is the suggestion that Israel open another major front — one that Israel has plenty of credible, effective ammunition with which to fight. It is not a suggestion that we ignore the issues of the conflict, it is the suggestion that we reallocate our effort and spend more time focusing attention on the Israel that exists beyond the conflict so that Israel’s image won’t be a prisoner of the conflict.
ISRAEL21c is a soldier in that battle. Our Web site has identified and distributed more than 800 stories that give Americans reasons to care about Israel and give Jews new reasons to be proud of Israel. Millions of people have seen our Web products. Our proactive PR program has placed more than 2,000 stories with positive images of Israel and Israelis in mainstream American media — including The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, CNN, NPR and hundreds of dailies across the nation — that wouldn’t have been there without our effort to put them there. In June, we’ll bring more than a dozen reporters from youth market media to Israel and show them the Israel beyond the conflict that young Israelis are creating through fashion, music, lifestyle, cinema, environmentalism and extreme sports.
For non-Jewish young Americans who have known nothing of Israel except the conflict, these reporters may show them their first-ever images of Israel that are not related to war. They’ll see just how much life in Israel looks and feels like life in America. We’re not alone. We work with the government of Israel, UJC, AIPAC, Hillel, federations and many other agencies. We’re collaborating with like-minded groups in Canada, France and hopefully soon in the United Kingdom.
It’s absolutely time for a new paradigm in Israel advocacy. We need to stop trying to prove Israel is always right – something that most moderate Americans are just not inclined to believe – and start showing that Israel has value and adds value to the world everyday. A very prominent businessman once said, “When cancer is cured in Israel, the world will think better of the Jews.”
It may not be quite that simple, but the great things Israel does for the world do count for something. We just have to be sure the rest of the world knows about that Israel too.
The writer is executive vice president of ISRAEL21c, a California-based non-profit helping to rebrand Israel by focusing media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. www.israel21c.org
Academic Freedom As A Shield for Anti-Semitism
by Mitchell Bard (from The Journal of the James Madison Institute)
The one place in America where anti-Semitism is still considered acceptable is in the university. The mantra of academic freedom has become a license for the sanctioning of teachings and forums that are anti-Israel and often cross the line to anti-Semitic.
For the last several years, for example, an anti-Semitic forum has been held by the Palestine Solidarity Movement. In 2004, the conference was held at Duke University. Organizers were asked to sign an innocuous statement before the event calling for a civil debate that would “condemn the murder of innocent civilians,” “support a two-state solution,” and “recognize the difference between disagreement and hate speech,” but refused to do so. By hosting a group that could not bring itself to object to the murder of Jews, Duke gave their views legitimacy.
For the most part, the Jewish community accepts that this is a matter of free speech and is afraid to do anything that might suggest an effort to stifle what is actually hate speech. If the conference were attacking African-Americans, however, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would undoubtedly protest, students would take over the administration building, and no one would suggest that it was inappropriate to bar a racist conference. The administration of the university would cave in like a house of cards. You would not hear pious invocations of academic freedom. This is why you rarely see attacks on other minorities on college campuses, and when you do, the response is usually swift and severe. But Jews are considered fair game.
Anti-Semitism on the campus is more subtle than swastikas painted on Hillels. The attacks on the Jewish people most commonly are manifested in discussions about Israel.
Some would argue that I’m objecting to legitimate criticism of Israel. But that is not what I’m talking about. There is a clear distinction between criticism of Israeli policy, which you can read every day in any Israeli newspaper, and anti-Semitism in which the attacks against Israel challenge its right to exist, or attacks that target Israel among all other nations for special criticism, as in the case of the current divestment movement being mounted on various campuses across the country.
Divestment proponents try to equate Israel with apartheid South Africa, which was the target of a divestment campaign aimed at ending racial segregation there. This is an offensive comparison that ignores the fact that all Israeli citizens are equal under the law. Moreover, the divestment campaign against South Africa was specifically directed at companies that were using that country’s racist laws to their advantage. In Israel, no such racist laws exist; moreover, companies doing business there adhere to the same standards of equal working rights that are applied in the United States.
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers observed that the divestment efforts are anti-Semitic. “Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities,” Summers warned. “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.” Part of the problem is the failure of the university to teach critical thinking skills.
Students, especially self-described liberals, want to look at the issues in a seemingly neutral fashion — on the one hand, Palestinians do bad things, but, on the other, so do the Israelis — even if the facts are not symmetrical. And it is unlikely that students are going to find faculty who can teach them to make moral or factual distinctions because most colleges have no one who can teach the history of Israel. In fact, most of the faculty teaching about the Middle East today are openly hostile toward Israel — and it is these professors who shape the campus environment and the minds of students.
In an address on the subject of academic freedom, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger spoke about the need for faculty to “resist the allure of certitude, the temptation to use the podium as an ideological platform, to indoctrinate a captive audience, to play favorites with the like-minded, and silence the others.”
Many faculty, however, do not resist temptation; rather, they embrace their position as an ideological platform. One unique aspect of the bias related to Israel is the tendency for faculty in courses and disciplines completely unrelated to the history and politics of the conflict to inject their anti-Israel views into their classes. For instance, an anthropology professor at American University used as a text a comic book that was in the vein of the anti-Semitic Nazi publication Der Sturmer. Indeed, to get a sense of the academic environment nowadays, consider these
examples:
- Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 1,500 academics signed a petition warning of a possible impending “crime against humanity” — that Israel would expel large numbers of Palestinians during the fog of the Iraq war.
- A Columbia University professor argued that Zionism is a European colonial system based on racist principles with the goal of eradicating Palestine, and that Zionists are the new Nazis.
- At American University, a professor crossed out the word “Israel” on a student’s exam and wrote in the margin, “Zionist entity.”
Columbia’s President Bollinger wants to retain the myth of the purity of the ivory tower, but he left out what has become a far greater influence on the university than scholarship, and that is money. Columbia, for instance, happily (some might say greedily) took money from the United Arab Emirates, among others, to endow a chair in Middle East studies named after the virulently anti-Israel Palestinian professor Edward Said (whose field was literature, not Middle East studies), thereby institutionalizing an anti-Israel faculty position on the campus. Predictably, the chair was filled by an outspoken critic of Israel, Rashid Khalidi.
Legality is not the issue in evaluating the anti-Israel, sometimes anti-Semitic speeches and teachings of faculty and speakers on campus. No one questions that freedom of speech allows these people to stand up in the center of campus and howl at the moon if they want. The issue is whether this type of speech should be given the cover of “academic freedom” and granted legitimacy by the university through funding, publicity, or use of facilities.
A related question is whether the presentations are in any way academic or scholarly. Few people would claim that a conference in which anti-black sentiments were expressed would be protected by academic freedom. The same is true for criticism of women, as we’re seeing at Harvard where some faculty want to run President Summers out of town for suggesting there might be a genetic difference between men and women that explains differences in performance in hard sciences.
One of the other ironies of the free speech debate on campus is that those who abuse it argue they have the right to say whatever pops into their heads, but no one should be permitted to criticize them. To suggest that a professor’s views are wrong or their scholarship is faulty is to engage in McCarthyism. You don’t even need to criticize these professors’ views to drive them to apoplexy; just try to tape their lectures so that their views are documented. Better yet, test their commitment to freedom of the press by asking them to allow reporters to film or tape their lectures.
The campus demagogues and pseudo scholars have no problem imposing their views on students over whom they have almost complete power, but they are terrified of what might happen if the media or real scholars — people who are not their subordinates — have the opportunity to scrutinize their teachings.
I don’t believe that we can or should silence everyone whose views we object to, but it is perfectly reasonable to question the scholarly credentials of the people expressing them, and the basis for their arguments. No science faculty would hire a professor from the Flat Earth Society to teach courses suggesting the earth is flat, but social science departments allow professors to teach the equivalent, at least as it pertains to Israel.
To change the culture that currently fosters the abuse of academic freedom will not be easy. Universities oppose any outside monitoring, but their internal methods of accountability have proven inadequate. The only strategy that is likely to have success in forcing change is to focus on the economic interests of the university.
Although universities’ mission statements include eloquent expressions of their dedication to the advancement of higher learning through teaching, research, and service, there is no doubt that our nation’s universities respond to economic incentives. Therefore, those economic incentives could be used to encourage the nation’s universities to return to a definition of academic freedom that protects legitimate scholarly inquiry but does not shield ideological agendas.
Furthermore, if major donors withhold funds and make clear that support will be contingent on the university adhering to standards that do not allow for academic abuses or the tolerance of bigotry of any kind, progress can be made toward accomplishing the goal set out by the American Association of University Professors in 1915, namely, to train students to think for themselves.
Mitchell Bard is the Executive Director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative
Enterprise (AICE) and a foreign policy analyst who lectures frequently on U.S.-Middle East policy. Dr. Bard is also the director of the Jewish Virtual Library (www.JewishVirtualLibrary.org). Dr.Bard is the author of 17 books.
Ma Hamatzav? (Was' Up?) 