Freedom

One has to be impressed with the Bush regime's discipline in dedication to the main message. Despite the anger filling teevee news,the gasping bewilderment of high earning anchors at the frank and even swaggering display of callous disregard for American life - already trained to see the President's conduct as an unaimiable exhibition of withheld mercy and personal lack of decency rather than shirked duty and legal obligation which the citizenry has a right to punish with more than falling approval ratings and infurated television watching - they have not caved under the pressure to pretend concern or responsibility for the citizenry appropriate to the executive branch of a democracy. They are performing their newly assumed role of mystical embodiment of the Nation. Despite immense public desire to be lied to as usual, to be soothed with expressions of concerns, anguish, promises of aid - the whole theatre of the democratic leadership admitting freely that it is the people's servant and employee - the Bush junta are holding the new line very firmly, staying on holiday, going to the theatre, issuing orders to the wicked public in need of harsh control, demanding obedience from the citizenry on pain of death: the central and essential message drones on without a quiver, without a hint of ambivalence or debate: government has no duty to the people, only power over it; it is a celestially annointed leader whom the people must serve with every breath, sacrifice life and limb to, or suffer the contrary at their peril.

The last act of the drama is triumphal entry as Saviour and Provider, granter of life and source of all wealth and prosperity. The creator, to be propitiated. Prince Sutasoma, the enlightened one, subduing the monster Lutahudlum and bringing alms to the beggars he was preying on.

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works its wonders.

There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million people, more than 10 percent of the country's population, with not a single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost in New Orleans. Many people had "refused" to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain "stubborn."

It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.

- Parenti, ZNET

Halliburton must be stunned to discover all this unforseen additional work to do under its current arrangements with the US taxpayers, with the unforseen level of destruction so extreme resulting from 'neglect' of the city's levees and very poor disaster-mitigation preparation. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root will be undertaking billions instead of the tens of millions of dollars of work that would have been required had New Orleans been adequately prepared to withstand the bad weather.

Bunny Greenhouse having been made an example of, they can probably expect little scrutiny of the execution.