Do you see the family resemblance? Hurricane Katrina was not some strange alien event on some other planet, like planet Hollywood, planet rock, or like planet Iraq, for instance. No. She rampaged in your country, on your shores, and those were our fellow U.S. citizens, Black, White, Cajun, Latin, AMERICANS ALL. Those were our own people, all of them promised protection. They were made that promise by the civil compact that is a democracy, and by a billion dollar, payed-for-by-tax-money government apparatus called FEMA and HOMELAND SECURITY. They were citizens just like you and I, who were told they would be protected by the government they dammit paid for, but who were instead (because of a storm, mind you, not because of a multi jumbo jet terror attack but a storm), traumatized, humiliated, abandoned and killed dead not by Osama but by Katrina.
Of course, Katrina had a lot of help, didn't She? From an idiot Prince/President who kept on playing golf as the reports came in of Black men, Black women, and Black babies dying first from a storm surge and then later dying of shock, thirst, and hunger, as the reports came in of old Cajun men drowning to death in their cars and in their stifling attics, of doctors and nurses stranded on hospital rooftops with their dying patients, of old white women in wheelchairs dying from lack of heart medication, and working class children contracting dysentery from dirty water and tetanus from sitting and lying for a week in foul sewage water, and of old people who developed gangrene from cuts and wounds that filled with pus, and became contaminated by the feces that caked on their bodies-- the president who took another swing, nine iron on the fairway, looking for that elusive bogie, who paused only long enough to pose for a photo op and to chuck his criminal FEMA director Michael Brown under the chin and praise him, like a fellow frat boy done good, "Brownie, yer doin' a heck of a job!".
Yet she does not save. Katrina's victims were the colored, the aged, the children, and the poor--everybody America despises and abuses daily. As Lou Reed says in his song, "New York," in his laconic, Charles Bukowski voice, "Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, I'll piss on 'em. That's what the statue of bigotry says.”
I will send to know for whom the bell tolls. The word will come back: it tolls for me. And for you. But the message comes back to us garbled and distorted, through a media that does not pass on the message faithfully but wants to sell us things. Our corporate media is loath to tell us anything that's actually happening around us other than who wants to be a millionaire, and who the latest American idol is as we stumble with the stars and dance on our own graves. Our schools and our universities don't teach us how to read and write anymore or teach us how to do research that would alert us to the fact that the same corporations that are now moving in to take over the land in New Orleans and to take over the formerly public institutions in Louisiana in order to privatize and corporatize them, to seize the real estate that was evacuated by Katrina victims, are the corporations that lobbied our elected representatives in Washington to siphon our tax dollars away from strengthening levies in America so that shrink wrapped blocks of cash could be passed out off army transports in Baghdad and distributed to Haliburton, Blackwater, and Brown and Root contractors without any record of payoffs, and meanwhile the levies crumbled back home.
Katrina was for the ruling class an excuse to take off the gloves and let Nature takes its course--genocide by water and wind, and it'll happen again, and again, and again, and there is an earthquake/hurricane/flood/fire coming to your town, and you too, will find yourself standing on your roof waving a bedsheet at passing news-copters that don't lower you a rope, don't call for the national guared for you and don't give a shit about you as they film your terror, your thirst, your hunger and your death and your family's death for broadcast--details at 11. "You don't want to miss this one!" the anorexic actor and ex model idiot news reader babbles as you die for the sake of Pepsi commercials.
You drink Pepsi, don't you?
We wouldn't know reality by now if it rained down on us and flooded us out of our houses. We wouldn't get the picture is we saw it on CNN:
So I will say it. Katrina is Yo Mama gone bad and you were not aware she would do this to you--and even now you are reluctant to claim her, so I will remind you. Yo Mama, Katrina, is Lady Liberty, whose statue stands with her torch of Freedom looming over Ellis Island; she's Mother Justice, whose statue stands blindfolded at the top of the courthouse stairs holding a terrible swift sword, the sword she should use to defend you and she holds the scales of judgement, for she stands in glorious sunlight and you go to her seeking justice and receive the tip of her sword instead, and she sticks it where the sun don't shine; she's the American Goddess, Columbia, whose image is stamped on movie studio frontispieces, on U.S. coins, and on U.S. savings bonds.
Yet she does not save. Katrina's victims were the colored, the aged, the children, and the poor--everybody America despises and abuses daily. As Lou Reed says in his song, "New York," in his laconic, Charles Bukowski voice, "Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, I'll piss on 'em. That's what the statue of bigotry says.”
I will send to know for whom the bell tolls. The word will come back: it tolls for me. And for you. But the message comes back to us garbled and distorted, through a media that does not pass on the message faithfully but wants to sell us things. Our corporate media is loath to tell us anything that's actually happening around us other than who wants to be a millionaire, and who the latest American idol is as we stumble with the stars and dance on our own graves. Our schools and our universities don't teach us how to read and write anymore or teach us how to do research that would alert us to the fact that the same corporations that are now moving in to take over the land in New Orleans and to take over the formerly public institutions in Louisiana in order to privatize and corporatize them, to seize the real estate that was evacuated by Katrina victims, are the corporations that lobbied our elected representatives in Washington to siphon our tax dollars away from strengthening levies in America so that shrink wrapped blocks of cash could be passed out off army transports in Baghdad and distributed to Haliburton, Blackwater, and Brown and Root contractors without any record of payoffs, and meanwhile the levies crumbled back home.
Those schools and those universities of ours are not teaching us anything other than how to 'dress for suck-sess, which in this post manufacturing and post union economy means a dead end service industry job with no benefits and no future. Instead of a future, what we have in store is cueing up for a long line to await our meager FEMA rations of bread, dirty water, and McDonalds french fries as the earth shakes, the skies rain down on us, and the suicide bombers here and there in line explode in plumes of dark greasy smoke, killing themselves, the person in front of them and the person one behind them without ever disturbing the line itself, because Americans cannot be dissuaded in exercising 'our freedoms' these are the freedoms we will cue up for: freedom of water, freedom of rations, and freedom of waiting for the next disaster to reduce our rations.
Katrina was for the ruling class an excuse to take off the gloves and let Nature takes its course--genocide by water and wind, and it'll happen again, and again, and again, and there is an earthquake/hurricane/flood/fire coming to your town, and you too, will find yourself standing on your roof waving a bedsheet at passing news-copters that don't lower you a rope, don't call for the national guared for you and don't give a shit about you as they film your terror, your thirst, your hunger and your death and your family's death for broadcast--details at 11. "You don't want to miss this one!" the anorexic actor and ex model idiot news reader babbles as you die for the sake of Pepsi commercials.
You drink Pepsi, don't you?
We wouldn't know reality by now if it rained down on us and flooded us out of our houses. We wouldn't get the picture is we saw it on CNN:
No, we wouldn't, because that's somewhere else. Somebody else. That's not my Mama dead and bloated and floating in the flooded streets, that's...somebody else's Mama, isn't it?
Not your mother. No, because Yo mama is Hurricane Katrina itself, and Yo Mama did this, but it was yo daddy -- corporate government (also known as corpomerica, alias Papa fascism--check the encyclopedia definition) who turned whay Yo Mama did into an industry long before 911, Katrina, or the earthquake that killed thousands of Haitians ever even happened. As a reporter at Rense,com says:
- The mainstream media was quick to focus the public's attention on the "LOOTERS." Perception control at it's worst. According to various eyewitness accounts, most looting was done for survival purposes.
- (9-1-5) --"This is a dispatch from New Orleans from Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist who recently moved from Wilmington...."
- "The city now has no clean water, no sewerage system, no electricity, and no real communications. Bodies are still being recovered floating in the floods. We are worried about a cholera epidemic. Even the police are without effective communications. We have a group of armed police here with us at the hotel that is admirably trying to exert some local law enforcement. This is tough because looting is now rampant. Most of it is not malicious looting. These are poor and desperate people with no housing and no medical care and no food or water trying to take care of themselves and their families."
- -http://www.rense.com/general67/email.htm
- He goes on to argue that disaster management, managed chaos, and controlled mass death is exactly what our corporate masters have in store for us for the foreseeable future. Why? to insanely wipe out the human race? Naaaaw, you can think better than that even half asleep as you are. Our master doesn't want to depopulate the Earth, but rather simply TRAIN us with suffering, fear, lack, tragedy, and disaster. Sure, millions will go on dying, but the YOUTUBE conspiracy seeds and nuts who argue that genocide is the point are thinking far too small. It would be too easy if that were the answer. Our master has something more sinister in mind: obedience training.
- Is that really so hard to believe? These are the same corporate masters who transported us by the millions across the oceans in wooden ships shackled to the bottom of the holds puking, bleeding, dying, screaming and moaning in our own filth (hey! sounds like the New Orleans masses trapped inside the Superdome during the storm, doesn't it? Gee, what a coincidence), and then sold us on the block into three centuries of brutality, illiteracy, and chattel slavery--to kill us? No. to use us to build the infrastructure and the economy of two continents. These are the exact same people who built death camps for profit and transported millions of Jews by steel rails to those camps to be methodically put to death and have their skins stripped from their corpses before burning and the skins made into lampshades. Did they hate Jews? Probably not, not those in charge of the entire thing, because as Himmler was reported to have said, to 'hate' the Jews would be foolish, self indulgent; the message of 'hate' was for mass consumption, not to be believed. Nazi Top Guy Reinhard Heydrich, at the Wansee Conference in Berlin in 1942 where the "Final Solution" was hammered out (with Loki's hammer, no doubt) opined that the 'Jewish question' was one of logistics and technological efficiency, not of emotion. In other words, after the scapegoat was wiped out, the Nazi's would surely have not shut down all that nice, modern, efficient mass death machinery--they would have fed new victims into the ovens: anybody who resisted them, in other words; in other words, New Yorkers and Parisians, and Canadian Canucks. Our Master has been thinking rationally about controlling us since at least The Crusades, dontcha know.
- And what is the mass extermination of the citizens of Falujah but another battle in the never ending Crusades? It ain't personal--it's management keeping things running like they should be for the good of all. These are the same corporations that castrated, impaled, and disemboweled millions of Africans in the Belgian Congo for the sake of rubber and oil profits. They built Guantanamo and tortured Arab citizens there not because they love human agony (well, they do, but that's not why they did it). Because they need to set an example for Muslims and Arabs everywhere. You know who they are, don't you? Exxon, BP, Dupont, Ford, and ITT and United Rubber, and United Fruit company, the companies that once ruled Cuba and ran Batista, who killed Nkrumah, and murdered Che Guevara and assassinated Bobby Kennedy, and shot Martin King in the neck. The same people who murdered Moctezuma, and stretched Toussaint L'Overture out to die. "A Company called TRW". AA company, the same company that created and maintained four hundred years of lucrative colonialism and genocide and the diamond industry and the oil industry (remember, before the Gulf of Mexico was fouled by their oil and their chemicals and their 'dispersants' they did the same thing to Nigeria--half of Southern Nigeria is under oil because of the exact same sorts of accidents, remember.
- Oh, that's right. You don't remember, do you? Well, they're the descendants of The British East India Corporation and the other Triangle Slave Trade jam master MC's of the 16th century, big pimpin', BIG pimpin and bangin' and slangin' Cocain in Afghanistan again with the help of Barak Obama (he sure looks handsome in a suit, don't he, Barak, I mean, huh? Makes you feel sort of proud to see him, President and all, represent-in us). You don't recall?
- No, you don't, do you? See, but it really doesn't matter if you recall all this. Yo Mama and Yo Daddy both recall what you did when you rose up just 10 to 20 years ago on a global scale with mass marches, riots, demonstrations and a flood of socialist governments you elected all across Latin America. Those mass organizations you founded using semi-autonomous cells and technology like cell phones to avoid the old school mistake of offering up 'leaders' to be killed, that was some brilliant shite you came up with, there. Yeah, you. You created a brand new political structure as a means to coordinate political action that carried out huge demonstrations whose numbers dwarfed the size of the anti war movement and civil rights movement (those old style movements whose leaders were all murdered, intimidated, or bought off, that the history books still yammer on and on about). You made King's march on Washington look like kindergarteners on a picnic, and you did all this with global organization and global implication.
- It was called the "Anti-Globalist Movement" and it was historic, and you were the one who did it. But you really don't remember, do you? Hmmmm. Maybe it's something in the water. Maybe its something that is no longer in the educational system--like education, you know what I mean? Here's what you used to look like:
- That's right: you planned, organized, and fought "The Battle of Seattle," and "The Battle of Pittsburgh," and "The Battle of Los Angeles," and "The Battle of New York," and a hundred other mass rebellions against our master that rocked Capitalism back on its heels. You really frightened them, Bucko, I wanna tell you. I was there. I saw it. You shut down the great White City of Manhattan for a day with a human wave of a million people. I saw it. It was a thing to behold. But they punished us for that. 911 was out punishment. It made us stupid. It made you forget who you are. Susan Sontag was among the first to raise an objection and they came down hard on her for it, remember? It was in The New Yorker that she shouted the truth, just a week after the attacks:
- Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality...Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.
- -http://www.wingo.com/opinion/sontag.html
- Still fuzzy to you, all this? Well, how about the aforementioned Rense reporter's sharing of a quote from Liberty Forum.org:
- "The media is concentrating on the looting racial angle and ignoring the fact that Bush and Co. cut 70 million dollars of funds intended to improve New Orleans flood control. Once again the anger of uninformed Americans gets directed AWAY from where it rightfully should be. And where did these funds go? That's right . . . straight to Bush's Iraq war chest and all that entails (no-bid contracts to his cronies). So on one side of the world American dollars are angering people and endangering American lives while here at home the lack of funding is leading to the death and destruction of a great city!" -- by Webtripperdude
- Does that ring any bells? Do you see then the significance of the deaths in New Orleans five years ago, and do you see yet that Katrina is Yo Mama? Memory starting to return yet? Still not sure you understand what's going on here in America where the poor, the powerless, the aged, the weak, and the colored people are concerned? Can't manage to remember how this all got started and what the connection is to the 16th century and the Triangle Slave Trade?
- Ask your mother.
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