Tuesday, August 30, 2005

The National Guard MIA

As the newspeople repeat, our hearts go out to the millions stranded in Louisiana and Mississippi. And we ponder the unimaginable environmental devastation. The Coast Guard, we are told, is on the job, but cannot satisfy the enormous demand for help. Interestingly, we hear little about the National Guard, the first and largest responder to natural disasters, on the news. For the past two years, the National Guard has been largely unavailable to fight forest fires as more than a third of the Guard has been dedicated to the war in Iraq. Now, they are unavailable for the REAL CRISIS IN THE GULF and the very LITERAL QUAGMIRE at home. The Southwest will burn, and the South will drown, with nary a peep about the MIA Guard in the wall-to-wall coverage.

Guard Stretched Thin
- Washington Post, June 6, 2004. Ah, and here's someone who knows what he is talking about. And please see Ken Rufo's intelligent breakdown of the politics of Katrina.

Addendum:
I am also wondering how the "question that has been on everyone's lips," the "elephant in the living room" - that is to say, the "race and class question" - is going to pan out. I'm not confident that anyone with any real power will take it seriously. But what all this talk does provide is a framework for understanding the spectacle as a kind of "third world chaos," as network newspeople everywhere are putting it. That is, it is a picture of black anarchy (surrounded by white noise) that feeds everything from Cops to the L.A. Riots to the MTV brand hip hop. If it can't be ignored wholesale like Rwanda or Darfur, what remains is racist spectacle of misery packaged for the consumption of those who live in the other America. As Geraldo Rivera barked tonight (the fifth day, when the Guard finally did show up), "When night falls this place [the convention center] is going to blow."

This is a one time when I have to give it up for Fox News' Shepard Smith. He has been camped out in the former city of New Orleans for five days. Tonight he was a via satellite guest of Bill O'Reilly's. I don't know if they were jousting for Fox territory or what, but they got into it a little. O'Reilly of course made the argument that it's not a race thing but rather bad planning and poor leadership. Smith, cutting O'Reilly off in a rare moment, brought up the fact that rich tourists at a waterfront hotel received transportation privileges and were ushered to the front of food lines at the dome. Smith literally sounded like he was undergoing some kind of crisis of conscience. He later tempered his remarks with an "I am not placing blame" comment, but his message clearly did fit into O'Reilly's scheme.

Pat Robertson

Like a lot of folks, I've been following the U.S. doctrine of assassination and torture (at least the public doctrine - we've had a long history of both in regard to covert, unacknowledged practices. I will recommend again perhaps the most stunning book on the topic, William Blum's Killing Hope.

As we all know by now, Pat Robertson recommended the assassination of Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chavez. I've been watching with interest the rhetoric surrounding Chavez. In 2002, the U.S. arranged a coup that took him out for two days. Since then he has received spotty attention - just enough to keep his name in the news in case we need to go in and take the fifth largest oil reserves in the world from his country. This is hard to do because Chavez is extremely popular in Venezuela and S. America in general. He was democratically elected by a strong majority with international oversight of the elections. Jimmy Carter, among other, will vouch for it. Chavez also feeds its oil wealth back into the people through numerous social works programs (which reminds me again to tell everyone to buy your gas at Citgo, which is owned by the Venezuelan government.) Chavez recently offered the Dominican Republic and Cuba cheap gas. Moreover, he says he would like to offer discounted gasoline to American poor if there was some way of doing it. Now that's a hot potato for the Bush administration.

Chavez, anticipating another coup, has armed his people in the manner of Switzerland so that they may again take back the country from international rule. The Bush cronies have tried to pin a bunch of stuff on him to cast him as an evil madman in the War on Terror: he harbors Islamic extremists; he is supporting the "communist" FARC rebels in Colombia. Regarding the latter, he probably is. But then again Colombia is fighting its own war to take back the country from the plundering transnationals.

So I was both shocked by Pat Robertson's candid comments and shocked by the media vilification of him as a screwball ... at first. Then the pieces began to fit, and damage control began to do its work. Robertson's comments got Chavez's name in the news again, and we saw dozens of stories on "Who is this guy, Chavez?" Robertson was also set up in contrast to the "real U.S. government policy," which, of course, would never think to assassinate a foreign leader - unless, of course, it was absolutely necessary.

But in the end, Pat Robertson's comments have made the job of taking Chavez out much more difficult for our crypto-fascist corporate leadership. See this wonderful piece by Richard Kim in The Nation.