Copyright 2005 - Steal what you wantTue, Apr 10:12:17 1 GMTTue, Apr 10:12:17 1 GMTDaily Kos Daily Kos This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site, subject to copyright and fair use.
In her must-read-it-if-you-haven't-yet book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein points to New Orleans as an example of the Friedmanite "Chicago School" version of corporatism finally coming home after years of overseas experimentation in places such as Pinochet's Chile.
As SusanG wrote in her review of the book last October:
There is more than a whiff of sociopathology in the technocrats described in Klein’s sweeping account, as they advise, tinker, pillage and plunder their way first through Latin America, then expand to Indonesia and Poland and Russia and South Africa, and ultimately turn their eyes upon the American adventure in Iraq ... and then bring it home to New Orleans. The decade upon decade of fine-tuning how much death and how much misery a society can take and still be profitable is described in excruciating detail. The human lives are discarded, the indignities and suppressions that can’t be entered into a spreadsheet are discounted — unless they can be used as individual lessons to the populace that everyone better get in line, pronto...
Those technocrats do an excellent job of ensuring that each disaster benefits a certain segment of society. The devil take the hindmost. New Orleans is no exception. In today's The New York Times, we've got another story like scores of such stories over the past two-and-a-half years. In this story, the usual suspects, the bureaucrats in Washington and in Louisiana, and, particularly Mayor Ray Nagin, get the blame. But there is no reference to those in the shadows. Those who saw what happened to New Orleans as their chance to begin with a clean slate.
In March 2007, city officials finally unveiled their plan to redevelop New Orleans and begin to move out of the post-Hurricane Katrina morass. It was billed as the plan to end all plans, with Paris-like streetscape renderings and promises of parks, playgrounds and "cranes on the skyline" within months.
But a year after a celebratory City Hall kickoff, there have been no cranes and no Parisian boulevards. A modest paved walking path behind a derelict old market building is held up as a marquee accomplishment of the yet-to-be-realized plan.
There has been nothing to signal a transformation in the sea of blight and abandonment that still defines much of the city. Weary and bewildered residents, forced to bring back the hard-hit city on their own, have searched the plan’s 17 "target recovery zones" for any sign that the city’s promises should not be consigned to the municipal filing cabinet, along with their predecessors. On their one-year anniversary, the designated "zones" have hardly budged. ...
Meanwhile, the repopulation of the city after the storm that emptied it has slowed notably. The Census Bureau’s latest estimate, 239,000, represents barely over half the former population — and well under what local officials and New Orleans demographers have been claiming for months.
Days since Mission Accomplished: 1798
Number of American military personnel who have died in Iraq since the surge began 14 months ago: 924.
Meteor Blades Open Thread for Night Owls & Early BirdsHurricane KatrinaNew OrleansTue, 01 Apr 2008 05:59:51 GMT
This evening's Rescue Rangers are vcmvo2, jlms qkw, jennyjem, dadanation, YatPundit and noddem, with Patriot Daily and Avila as editors.
After attending an eco-conference, mem from somerville wonders will it take a disaster like The Triangle Shirtwaist Moment to motivate more people to address global warming. (jlms qkw)
RandomNonviolence offers up a very well-researched and well-laid out picture showing what military spending is doing to our economy in Our Money is Off to War. (noddem)
gjohnsit segues the movie Wag The Dog into an introduction to the Mexican Civil War-- by way of the events which catalyzed that bloody conflict -- in a incredibly rich and powerful diary Ten Tragic Days. (dadanation)
Stunning. And not in a good way, but the kind that makes you dizzy with anger and shame. For the list of the possible contenders for the President to let get away with their criminal behavior while serving this administration, check out abundibot"s diary The Pardon List. (dadanation)
An aide to President Bush has resigned in the midst of an investigation by the Justice Department over allegations he misused U.S. grant money intended to promote democracy in Cuba, the White House said Friday.
Felipe Sixto, a Cuban American from Miami, was the special assistant to the president on inter-governmental affairs, dealing with Cuba and other issues.
Sixto was until last summer the chief of staff of Frank Calzón, the head of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba. Sixto did not respond to e-mails and calls to his home Friday [...]
Neither Calzón nor the White House revealed how much money was misused but people familiar with the investigation say several hundreds of thousands of dollars could be involved -- an embarassing development coming just weeks ahead of the Bush administration's roll-out of its 2008 Cuba grant program. White House spokesman Blair Jones said the White House learned of the allegations from Sixto himself as he resigned from his post on March 20.
Blue Majority candidate Joe Garcia has been fighting this corrupt Cuban mafia for years. At a debate with Calzon almost a year ago, Garcia challenged Calzon on allegations that his organization was misusing federal funds. It's in Spanish, so most of you won't understand the language, but watch it and you'll still get the gist. Joe Garcia is the person calm and collected in his seat, while Calzon storms in and out of the studio accusing Garcia of all sorts of horrible things. Heck, the screen capture says it all:
The entire South Florida anti-Castro machine is a racket, so much so that even the Bush Administration is being forced to distance itself from it:
The Bush administration is undertaking a major do-over of the controversial Cuba democracy grants, restricting the funds available for anti-Castro groups in Miami and sending more resources to non-U.S. international advocacy organizations, officials and others familiar with the programs say.
The new orientation, which has sent tremors of uncertainty among many grant recipients in South Florida, comes as the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development prepare to award a record $45.7 million in Cuba democracy grants this year -- more than triple the 2007 levels.
This corrupt group is a major source of funding for the Florida Republican Party, and it flexes its political muscle via the three south Florida Cuban Republicans -- Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Mario Diaz-Balart, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen -- and Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
That's why Wasserman-Schultz is protecting those three Republicans, despite being a co-chair of the Red-To-Blue DCCC program that should be, by all rights, aggressively backing the three Democrats challenging those seats.
Wasserman-Schultz may think she's protecting those Republicans and their corrupt patrons. She's got her benefactors to please.
But we don't have to. Let's send a message and show that while the corrupt Florida Cuban mafia may have bought off a key Democrat, especially one that can protect their electoral prospects, we aren't. And we can support a candidate who has been demanding transparency and accountability for federal anti-Castro dollars long before it was popular to do so.
