Abject poverty, criminal infrastructural neglect, opportunistic defunding of minimal preventive planning, disaster relief resources otherwise engaged abroad in protecting the interests of oligarchs, industrial poisons erupting at a mere shrug of nature from their thin disguise just beneath the urban surface of triumphant financial capitalism—a river of murderous toxins running free, running free in the streets of the city of sweetness, the city of food, the city of jazz like a Frankenstein's monster shaking loose his chains and going after its creator:

"Free markets, free markets, free markets," he's calling, laughing madly, "here I am, your creature, your bastard, your long-suppressed experiment in planned anarchy for profit, your pig-ethics child. Your beloved; your nightmare."

Gasoline prices rising.

New Orleans—welcome to Baghdad!

As it shall be abroad, so it will be at home. Poor people ain't got no home, no electricity, no water. No hospitals, no schools, no city. New Orleans, welcome to Fallujah, to Gaza, to Haiti, to El Salvador, to Nicaragua.

Bechtel, Kellogg Root & Brown, Carlyle, Halliburton welcome you to "globalization": the pain is yours; the gain is theirs.

Welcome to a civilization that ridicules science as an entity beneath treason. Welcome to the freedom and democracy of a state that knows no social contract, where you are born with a gun in your hand but no concept of the common good; a state that owes you nothing but owns you body and soul—in the unemployment lines, in the soup kitchens, in the army recruitment centers, in the prisons, on death row, in the schools that teach you nothing, in front of your television screens that lie and string you along with cynical contempt. To your doom, to your doom, for what is freedom without resources?

The courts have evicted you: there is no bankruptcy for you, no socialism for you. Debtor prison is good enough for you. Government handouts, in the form of corporate socialism, are strictly bookmarked for corporations. No one cares about you. Yours is not to reason why; yours is but to pray and die.

Welcome to the Plan for the New American Century. Welcome to the New World Order. Welcome. It stands exposed. Right there in New Orleans.

America, welcome to your planned future as a domestic, internal third world. Welcome to personal and public chronic indebtedness. Welcome to a bloated "defense" budget that cannot assist you, let alone "defend" you from a hurricane in the age of science. Welcome to the offensive budget that makes your country dependent on China for daily loans. Welcome to the multicolored ribbons in support of a war that kills your troops—your children, who are not here, not at home to help with their strength, their youth, their bravery, their idealism in pulling you out of the toxic flood waters.

Welcome. Dr. Frankenstein's monster's vengeance is at our door.