New Orleans and Depressingly Predictable Complaints

Blog coverage of the continuing disaster that is New Orleans has been excellent, and so I've not felt that I should say anything about it, especially since it's not my city or even a city in my country that's full of filthy water, starving people, predominantly of a certain skin pigmentation, bloated corpses and f*ck-all else. However, there are a couple of things worth having a look at, I think.

Firstly, Lenin's Tomb has been running a series of posts entitled 'the politics of weather', which detail the myriad ways in which human actions created the situation in which a natural disaster like Katrina could destroy a city. Unsurprisingly for an administration which it would appear went to war in Iraq just so that it could drop lots of bombs on lots of oil installations, both of which would have to be replaced, usually by Halliburton, the in question actions reach a level of grubbiness and venality which is simply disgusting.

Secondly, Billmon reminds his readers that this is not the first time that, as if by accident, it's black people who suffer the most when a natural disaster hits, and finds some reasons for thinking that not only is it not an accident that they suffer most, it's not an accident that they get the least help either. Relatedly, Juan Cole explores the reaction of the Bush administration to various outbreaks of looting, and points to a fact that it would have been useful if more Americans has realised earlier: Bush only cares about the property of rich white men, and if you're not a rich white man, he's going to shaft you so that rich white men can get richer at your expense. I mean, I realise that a significant core of conservativism in the belief in the importance of a shared heritage in and belonging to a particular community, it'd just slipped my mind for a while how exclusive those communities could be, how they could require that the interests of some simply slip out of any consideration. That may be worth bearing in mind when considering the next round of crack-brained idiocy from our One Nation Tory leaders.