People Are Mad As Hell and Unwilling To Take It Anymore

A seismic rift developed between the classes in America this past week, the results of which may be unclear at this juncture but are sure to be as devastating to the body politic of the United States — and perhaps beyond their shores — as the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the American South.
This past week, as tens of thousands of New Orleans’ citizens awaited rescue from the cataclysmic effects of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. government — woefully miscalculating the level of destruction they would face — failed to respond in a timely, humane, responsible and competent manner to one of the most devastating domestic crises in American history.
As conservative columnist David Brooks writes in his incisive New York Times essay …

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged. Last week in New Orleans, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed. The first rule of the social fabric — that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable — was trampled.

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are. Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970s. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence … All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

To point out just how incompetent and staggeringly ineffectual the Bush administration was in its response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in New Orleans, CNN’s Tom Foreman set about to examine what is being said about Katrina today by Department of Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff compared to what was said in the past. Chertoff Fact Check consists of video clips of the various positions taken by DHS Secretary Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown before and after Katrina struck.
The response by the Bush administration to the needs of its citizens can be characterized as cruel and heartless and assuredly nothing less than incomprehensible and unforgivable. In words that haunt the soul, Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, appearing Sunday on Meet the Press, said, “the cavalry never came.” You can read the transcript, but the video is so much more powerful. The video is accessible by clicking on the permalink here, and then clicking on one of the video links.
As a coda to tonight’s post, VanRamblings offers another video, one of the harrowing pieces of television reportage as you’re ever likely to see watch. The video is accessible by clicking on the permalink here, and then click on either one of the video links. While Aaron Brown on CNN stated, “We have turned the corner,” Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith reported on the thousands of people trapped in what Geraldo called “this Hell on Earth” at the convention center. No one had been bused out. Shepard was on the I-10 and is devastating in his description of the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of people denied exit, all of whom were left without food, water or medicine, for days.

Two gay Iranian teenagers — one 18, the other believed to be 16 or 17, were executed last week for the “crime” of homosexuality. The two youths — identified only by their initials as M.A. and A.M., were hanged on Tuesday, July 19th in Edalat (Justice) Square in the city of Mashhad in north-eastern Iran, on the orders of Court No. 19. The hanging of the teens was also reported by the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
According to OutRage magazine …

(The two boys) admitted to having gay sex (probably under torture) but claimed in their defence that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death. Prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes.

Ruhollah Rezazadeh, the lawyer of the youngest boy, had appealed that he was too young to be executed and that the court should take into account his tender age. But the Supreme Court in Tehran ordered him to be hanged. Under the Iranian penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be hanged.

WikiNews reports that Iran in Focus “claimed that the two were hanged not for gay sex, but for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy at knife point. Neither the Iranian Student’s News Agency nor another report from the National Council of Resistance of Iran made this allegation.” Direland Press notes that the accusation of rape in reports came days after international outrage and detailed reports by other Iranian news agencies. They suggest the report is a ploy of the Iranian government to justify its actions.

“The allegation of sexual assault may either be a trumped-up charge to undermine public sympathy for the youths — a frequent tactic by the Islamist regime in Iran — or it may be that the 13-year-old was a willing participant but that Iranian law … deems that no person of that age is capable of sexual consent and that therefore any sexual contact is automatically deemed in law to be a sex assault,” said OutRage!’s Peter Tatchell.

“This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran,” Tatchell remarked. “The entire country is a gigantic prison, with Islamic rule sustained by detention without trial, torture and state-sanctioned murder.”

Tatchell told reporters that according to Iranian human rights activists, more than 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed in Iran since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979.

In an article published in The Nation this past week, author and social commentarian Naomi Klein eviscerates the U.S. government in respect of its response to the peoples devastated by the December 26th tsunami, calling U.S. foreign policy “stunningly inept,” corrupt and incompetent.
In the body of the article, Klein defines “the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”

As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was — dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.

In January, Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” Many were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”

Disaster, it seems, is the new terra nullius.

Click on the picture above for a visual and auditory representation of the 14 tenets of facism, as outlined in an article titled Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles — available in the latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine, a publication of the independent Council for Secular Humanism.