Military Occupation in America and the Prospects for Liberty by Anthony Gregory.
The government response to Katrina, aside from being riddled with error and incompetence, has been downright cruel – forcing people to leave their pets and property behind, keeping charity out of the city, turning away private volunteers and assistance, treating people who might only be scavenging for abandoned and rotting food like dangerous criminals, disrupting private transportation and burdening flights out of the city with ludicrous post-9/11 security measures, expropriating private property, separating families and forcefully corralling human beings onto buses and into buildings without adequate fresh air, water or plumbing. Reading the news reports, we see the government reacting with a mixture of ineptitude and martial law, appearing to do everything it can to prevent civilization from surviving and rebounding after the flood.
and:
America is indeed at a crossroads. We do not yet know whether this disaster will lead to a revival in collectivist thinking or a new widespread disillusionment with the state. Somewhat ironically, our chances of surviving as a nation with any freedoms intact now rely on converting much of the left to our suspicion of government power at home as well as abroad. For the moment, the partisan elements on the right appear far too preoccupied with covering up the federal crimes in New Orleans and Iraq and calling for new ones to be terribly bothered by the quaint notion of individual liberty.
and this:
Blackwater USA has been around for a while, founded in 1996 by an ex-Navy Seal. But most folks never heard of the company until the war in Iraq, when four of the company's employees were murdered in Fallujah in the horrific incident that put the city on the map for most Americans. The company has dramatized the way that America -- stretched for troops -- has increasingly called on these private soldiers, who serve in a murky world with the ability to shoot-to-kill.
We don't begrudge the existence of a private security company like Blackwater. But what does bother us is how quickly what was supposed to be a disaster relief effort turned so quickly into Gulf War III, the French Quarter now a Green Zone. At the very same time that Blackwater was offering its services in New Orleans, workers from the American Red Cross and other agencies carrying food supplies, not M-16s, were turned away.
Is the large Blackwater presence yet another sign that our National Guard and military -- who are supposed to perform the same functions, but under more clearcut marching orders -- are now stretched too thin? Or a dramatic symbol of something more sinister, a society that now views every problem as one to point semi-automatics first, ask questions later.
Either way, we don't like it.
[via Ken McLeod]
We've entered the blame-o-rama phase of Hurricane Katrina. I actually heard Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sparring with NPR's Robert Siegal on the air last Thursday, and a more weasily performance than Chertoff's would be hard to find in any bureaucratic circle of hell. FEMA chief Michael Brown gave new dimension to the word "clusterfuck" by blocking private charity shipments of food and water into New Orleans and making the armed forces "work around" his agency in order to get anything done. And it was revealed yesterday that a navy hospital ship idled with empty beds off the Louisiana coast without orders while old people died slow deaths on the sidewalks outside the Convention Center.
