SOME NOTES ON NEW ORLEANS

http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=2822

SEPTEMBER 7, 2005. As a number of people have pointed out for years, when you "solve" a tragedy by giving the government more power and money to do better the next time, you are usually whistling in the dark. The entire collaboration between government and big medicine speaks of such madness. Every human behavior and "symptom" is chopped up into a new disease name, and toxic drugs inevitably follow. Whereas, on a level playing field, without government welfare for NIH and other major med institutions, America would be in far better health. Mike Ruppert (From the Wildnerness) has an article about the dangers of feeding more $$ and power into the FEMA machine to handle "the next Katrina." That way lies: further corruption, less freedom, and no solution. If FEMA is geared to do anything that verges on sanity, it's about forming contingency plans to deal with disasters. We can see how well that's been working in New Orleans. I have a number of eye-witness reports that state looting and crime exist at a far lower level than has been suggested in the press. If so, then of course these press articles serve to explain/justify why rescue efforts have been too little and too late. "We couldn't get in there. People would shoot at us." I just got back from a trip. I observed that most people are in a semi-dazed shock at the destruction of a major American city. They can't really believe that something like this could happen in this day and age. We're supposed to be, with all our vaunted technology/communication/organization, beyond it. People of every political stripe assume "the government will take care of us." But the government isn't saving New Orleans. In fact, as everyone now knows, federal funds for the improvement of those now-famous levees were cut. For the last several decades, it's been an open secret that a number of factors have been conspiring to set New Orleans up for exactly what has just happened: the destruction of all-important tree cover to protect the city against a direct hurricane hit; the mangling and shredding of the surrounding wetlands by thousands of miles of dug channels laid in by oil companies; New Orleans' position below sea level; the inability of the levees to deal with massive rains and wind; the strategic bottling up of the Mississippi River. A Katrina has been predicted by scores of people. It appears that there is at least one decent model for averting this horrendous tragedy: Holland. In the 1950s, that nation was flooded in many sectors. Its position vis-a-vis the level of the surrounding seas was a key. So Holland successfully instituted a plan to keep a disaster from reoccurring. The bland and impotent and leaderless position of the White House has driven home the fact that this administration lives its sealed-off life at a different level from what the rest of us would call human. Statements from federal officials have taken a vile tone: "We knew there could be some flooding, but the failure of the levees was a total shock." Serenely delivered bullshit. I often make pharmaceutical analogies, and here is yet another occasion for doing it. When you stop and add up the overall toxic effects of thousands of medical drugs, you are faced with a choice. You can say the millions of deaths and maimings caused by these drugs is the result of serial blundering by well-intentioned people, or you can go to another place and view, at the very least, a crime of depraved indifference---negligent homicide. You can go beyond that, because who benefits when a population is rendered unable to think or function or react in a normal fashion, as more and more people are poisoned? New Orleans, in all respects, has been sitting there without protection, a perfect target for a storm like Katrina. It's too easy to call this serial blundering. And images of armed troops now moving through the city add up to the idea that help is really all about restoring order, not saving lives. Conditioning the American population to martial law is a goal of the government and those men who, in the shadows, stand behind the known government. All the lunatic hoopla, for example, about the coming "pandemic flu" has the same purpose. Ditto for the so-called war on terrorism. To save democracy, we must destroy it. What better way to drive this point home than to allow a whole city to disappear? George Bush is the perfect puppet for this current "quickening." In all respects, he is a man who has been foreshortened in perspective by a desperate effort to assert his position as a legitimate member of a royal American family. The approaching end-times, the mission of saving the world from evil forces ranged against the messiah, the sword-wielding crusader against the heathens, the closed-out consciousness that builds walls against admitting mistakes, the sloganeering posing as intelligence...it all feeds into the maw of reducing the kind of freedom in which he, Bush, would sink like a stone. Unrecognized, unappreciated, unsung. And a very large part of the American population, bent on claiming "true values" as its territory, has bought into the premise that those values are quick phrases engraved on blood-soaked pieces of cloth framed behind glass, hanging on walls in living rooms and kitchens. The so-called liberals are no better. They have their own slogans and shallow banners. They, in fact, are the standard bearers for setting up the nation as a virtual hospital, in which every citizen will be treated with kindness by doctors who know that every move we make, every breath we take, is a symptom of a disease that must be alleviated. Both sides of the aisle are fronting for a vicious cartoon, Mickey Mouse bleeding out of both ears. This is what happens when the thread of a real life and its dimensions are lost, when the wellsprings of the soul are replaced by a desert of pure nothing. As one tragedy after another is engineered, we can postpone, under the rubric of emergency, this need for regeneration at the core of what we truly are. We can do that, but the returns will diminish, the price will escalate.