September 2005 (II): Cui Bono NOLA

No matter how much horror the regime has unleashed there, Iraq is far away—and easily ignored by most Americans, who can't even pronounce the name.

A disaster at home, compounded by the regime's lack of interest—that got more attention, at least early on.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

But with the residents most affected being poor and the wrong color, it was easy for New Orleans to end up treated as Baghdad.

The Wall Street Journal on no-bid contracts, subhead: "White House uses practices criticized in Iraq rebuilding for hurricane-related jobs."

Mike Davis' The Predators of New Orleans is all too familiar—

...The speed with which Washington suspended the prevailing wage standards of the Davis-Bacon Act and swung open the doors of New Orleans to corporate looters such as Halliburton, the Shaw Group, and Blackwater Security, already fat from the spoils of the Tigris, contrasted obscenely with FEMA's deadly procrastination over sending water, food and buses to the multitudes trapped in the stinking hell of the Louisiana Superdome.

Also familiar: U.S. agency blocks photos of New Orleans dead.

As are grim predictions of a poisoned environment—Cover-up: toxic waters 'will make New Orleans unsafe for a decade'

And on the subject of the environment, David Helvarg's text and photos are a must.

Mike Davis: "The death of New Orleans had been forewarned; indeed no disaster in American history had been so accurately predicted in advance." The regime's deafness to warnings, too, is just like Iraq. As it is just like 9-11.

Davis reviews the scientific research preceding Katrina—work that had been stepped up ever since "a close call with Hurricane Georges" in 1998.

Of course, just as in Iraq—and the post-9-11 security biz—disaster is of use to the same players. In the Washington Post on September 8: Former FEMA Chief Is at Work on Gulf Coast.

Mike Davis—

When Republicans took over [FEMA]...in 2001, it was treated as enemy terrain: the new director, former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh [my bold], decried disaster assistance as "an oversized entitlement program" and urged Americans to rely more upon the Salvation Army and other faith-based groups. Allbaugh cut back many key flood and storm mitigation programs, before resigning in 2003 to become a highly-paid consultant to firms seeking contracts in Iraq.

"An inveterate ambulance-chaser," Davis says of Allbaugh and his present activities in Louisiana. Timothy Noah calls him a "disaster pimp".

The scenes from New Orleans are so shocking, that parts of the media are closer than usual to doing their job.

But the skin color of so many of the victims will not be overlooked for long.

Side-by-side AP photo captions: white people "find" supplies; black people "loot" them.

Congressman Richard Baker (R, Confederacy): "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

By mid-month—Karl Rove is "in charge of the reconstruction effort." Dan Froomkin—

Rove's leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush's image.

Along with the political operation's work, hate radio and the rest of the right-wing media are there to demonize the victims in the minds of the credulous millions they reach.

This story does come out: Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report.

More to the point, even if a quote, the UK Independent says, 'Racist' police blocked bridge and forced evacuees back at gunpoint.

And the entire account is here. Written by emergency service workers who happened to be attending a conference and "spent most of the next week trapped by the flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city." They observe—

...What you will not see [in media accounts], but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.

The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.

Since "A Thousand Points of Light" don't fill Republican off-shore accounts, FEMA interferes with volunteer relief efforts. As in, Doctor says FEMA ordered him to stop treating hurricane victims.

Services of volunteer morticians are spurned, as a contract is given to a Bush- (and Funeralgate-) connected company.

Late in the month, there are some press efforts at debunking the previous scare stories about flood victims as criminals. Seattle Times: Reports of anarchy at Superdome overstated. The article is much stronger than the headline—

The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees — mass murders, rapes and beatings — have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong — bad things happened. But... 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

The LA Times: Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy—

Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

..."I don't think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. "But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster.

...[Major Ed] Bush, of the National Guard, said that reports of corpses at the Superdome filtered back to the facility via AM radio, undermining his struggle to keep morale up and maintain order.

But, Bush said, those stories received scant attention in newspapers or on television.

"We had to convince people this was still the best place to be," Bush said. "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people."

And of reported attacks on journalists—committed almost entirely by police, as seen in the National Press Photographers Association's account.

Digby looks at history's repeating itself in the fear of supposed black mobs hampering rescue work—and the right-wing media's exploitation of the fear.

And Atrios runs a Rick Perlstein piece, rejected as an op-ed by outlets that normally publish him. Perlstein tells how a friend, doing volunteer work at a Gulf Coast shelter, reports the comments heard from local whites: that "local" women should be kept away from the shelter; that "gangs of blacks" are "harassing" business owners; that the shelter was "where they put all the criminals." Perlstein's reaction—

I immediately got that uncanny feeling: where had I heard things like this before?

The answer is: in my historical research about racial tensions forty years ago. I'm writing a book against the backlash against liberalism and civil rights in the 1960s. One of the things I've studied is race riots. John Schmidhauser, a former congressman from rural Iowa, told me about the time, in the summer of 1966, he held a question and answer session with constituents. Violence had broken out in the Chicago ghetto, and one of the farmers asked his congressman about an insistent rumor:

"Are they going to come out here on motorcycles?"

It's a funny image, a farmer quaking at the vision of black looters invading the cornfields of Iowa. But it's also awfully serious. The key word here is "they." It's a fact of life: in times of social stress when solid information is scarce, rumors fill the vacuum. Rumors are evidence of panic. The rumors only fuel further panic. The result, especially when the rumors involved are racial, can be a deadly stew of paranoia.

...One of the most riveting early accounts of conditions in New Orleans was an email sent around by Dr. Greg Henderson. "We hear gunshots frequently," he wrote. It wasn't long before that got transformed, in the dissemination, into: doctors get shot at frequently. An Army Times article reported that desperate evacuees at the Superdome, terrified that losing their place in line might mean losing their life, "defecated where they stood." Now, it's easy, if you take a moment to think about it, to understand that happening to people, perhaps elderly and sick, under unendurable conditions of duress. As circulated on the Internet, however, another interpretation takes shape: these people are not like us. Them. Savages that, if they come to your town, might just be capable of anything. Even if they are just lost, confused people, in desperate need of help.

Meanwhile, Bush orders over a week of flags flown at half-staff for Rehnquist.

Photo: Alan Chin, from a gallery of NOLA images here.