The kids stood in a cold drizzle and to the tune of “Hey Look me Over,” shivering, and sang:
“Our country’s stood beside us
People have sent us aid.
Katrina could not stop us, our hopes will never fade.
Congress, Bush and FEMA
People across our land
Together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!”
After the song, Mrs. Bush posed for photos with the kids for the inevitable photo op.
The thrust of the rescue scenario did not belie the fact that the results of a category four or five hurricane would mean massive flooding. The planners knew exactly where the floodwaters would go in the event of levee breaches and there are maps and diagrams from 2004 that could be used as overlays on the maps of the real event.
The local New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayune, covered the FEMA exercise and reported that officials focused on six major issues, including “Removing floodwater from New Orleans, Metairie and other bowl-like areas where levees will capture and hold storm surge, possibly for days or weeks.”
These were the major population centers of New Orleans.
The famous French Quarter was in the flood zone, but so were the projects and poor areas like the lower ninth ward that had long been eyed by developers for the prime real estate development potential they offered. The wealthy Garden District was off limits, but it was historically high and dry anyway.
“I believe they will not stop at killing us all,” said a New Orleans Resident. [11]
Population can be a political problem.
The response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and southern Louisiana was not humanitarian, it was military. Blackwater M-16s ruled the mean streets of the tony Garden District, protecting property, while the helpless were still stranded on rooftops in Gentilly and Gretna.
In her essay, “Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps,” author Naomi Wolf presents a thesis that there are certain steps a would-be dictator takes to destroy constitutional freedoms. George Bush has taken them all.
Whether history presents us with accounts of Mussolini’s paramilitary Black shirts terrorizing the Italian countryside, or Hitler’s Brown shirts stalking the streets of Germany, or America’s Blackwater and an out of control New Orleans Police Department operating under “shoot to kill” orders, a collective fear of what Wolf terms “thug violence” was instilled in the American television audience during the aftermath of Katrina. Citizens numbed by the voyeuristic thrill of an unfolding disaster watched the same loop over and over again of looters at a local Wal-Mart.
A paramilitary force, thus, did not seem like such a bad idea. The challenge for government officials would be to ensure that hired mercenaries were free from prosecution. Governor Kathleen Blanco’s “shoot to kill order” would provide the same immunity under Bush’s “zero tolerance” policy for looting.
On September 2, the BBC reported Blanco’s statement that 300 “battle-tested” national guardsmen had “M-16’s locked and loaded.” [12] The American public was primed to accept this unprecedented response to a city under assault by floodwaters with little or no questions asked. Naomi Wolf’s theory of the “thug mentality” was tested and proven. Never mind the Constitution of the United States. The first brick was placed in the road to depopulation.
Meanwhile, as the Danziger bridge incident was unfolding, the Coast Guard was reporting that 60,000 citizens of New Orleans were possibly still stranded. The focus was on everything but the real victims. A stunning Getty wire service image shows a black family on a rooftop, with a scrawled message “Waters are rising. pls (sic) help.” These images, along with the bloodied body of Ronald Madison, have been forgotten and replaced with images of Brad Pitt’s pink virtual houses.
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