Books by Michael Parenti
The Culture Struggle /
Democracy for the Few /
The Assassination of Julius Caesar /
Against Empire /
To Kill a Nation /
History as Mystery /
Propaganda, Inc. /
Dirty Truths /
Inventing Reality
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How the Free Market Killed New
Orleans
By Michael Parenti
The free market played a crucial role in the
destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its
residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force
5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas,
what did officials do? They played the free market.
They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was
expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by
private means, just as the free market dictates, just like
people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.
It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every
individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby
effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. This is the
way the invisible hand works its wonders. There would be none
of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba.
When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island last
year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood
citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated
1.3 million people, more than 10 percent of the country's
population, with not a single life lost, a heartening
feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.
On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it
was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American
lives had been lost in New Orleans. Many people had
"refused" to evacuate, media reporters explained,
because they were just plain "stubborn" It was
not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters
began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to
flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting
there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to
call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In
the end, the free market did not work so well for them.
Many of these people were low-income African Americans,
along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered
that most of them had jobs before Katrina's lethal visit. That's
what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually
quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job
at a time. They are poor not because they're lazy but because
they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while
burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.
The free market played a role in other ways. Bush's agenda is
to cut government services to the bone and make people rely
on the private sector for the things they might need.
So he sliced $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans
Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New
Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had
to be shelved.
Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have
foreseen this disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips.
All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for New
Orleans, pointing to the need to strengthen the levees and the
pumps, and fortify the coastlands.
In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite
reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of
wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market
would take care of things. The developers, pursuing their own
private profit, would devise outcomes that would benefit us all.
But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier
between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the
sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing
at a frightening pace on the Gulf' coast. All this was of no
concern to the reactionaries in the White House.
As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like
to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be
left to private charity. It was a favorite preachment of
President Ronald Reagan that "charity can do the job."
And for the first few days that indeed seemed to be the policy
with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. The federal
government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into
action. Its message: "Don't send food or blankets; send
money." Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian
Broadcasting Network—taking a moment off from God's work of
pushing John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court—called
for donations and announced “Operation Blessing," which
consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment
of canned goods and bibles.
By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize
the immense failure of the rescue operation. People were dying
because relief had not arrived. The authorities seemed more
concerned with the looting than with rescuing people. It
was property before people, just like the free marketeers
always want.
But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable
of answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so
few helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers?
Why did it take helicopters five hours to get six people out of
one hospital?
When would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were
the feds? The state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the
buses and trucks? the shelters and portable toilets? The medical
supplies and water?
Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done
with the $33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even
ABC-TV evening news (September 1, 2005) quoted local officials
as saying that "the federal government's response has been
a national grace."
In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony,
offers of foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and
several other nations. Russia offered to send two plane loads of
food and other materials for the victims. Predictably, all these
proposals were quickly refused by the White House. America the
Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme Rescuer and World
Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity could not
accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating
and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another
punch in the nose?
Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to
admit the truth—that the Bushite reactionaries had neither
the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens,
not even those in the most extreme straits. Next thing you know,
people would start thinking that George W. Bush was really
nothing more than a fulltime agent of Corporate America.
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Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism
(City Lights) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar
(New Press), both available in paperback. His forthcoming The
Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press) will be published in
the fall. For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.
posted 5 September 2005* * *
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The Katrina
Papers is not your average memoir. It is a fusion of
many kinds of writing, including intellectual
autobiography, personal narrative,
political/cultural analysis, spiritual journal,
literary history, and poetry. Though it is the
record of one man's experience of Hurricane Katrina,
it is a record that is fully a part of his life and
work as a scholar, political activist, and
professor. The Katrina Papers provides space
not only for the traumatic events but also for
ruminations on authors such as Richard Wright and
theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of The Katrina Papers. It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
The Katrina Papers, by Jerry W.
Ward, Jr. $18.95
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update 20 April 2010
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