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Tuesday night, as water rose to 20 feet through most of New Orleans, CNN
relayed an advisory that food in refrigerators would last only four hours, would
have to be thrown out. The next news item from CNN was an indignant bellow about
"looters" of 7/11s and a Walmart.
The reverence for property is now the underlying theme of many newscasts, with
defense of The Gap being almost the first order of duty for the forces of law
and order. But the citizens looking for clothes to wear and food to eat are
made of tougher fiber and are more desperate than the polite demonstrators who
guarded The Gap and kindred chains in Seattle in 1999. The police in New Orleans
are only patrolling in large armed groups. One spoke of "meeting some resistance,"
as if the desperate citizens of New Orleans were Iraqi insurgents.
Also on Tuesday night the newscasts were reporting that in a city whose desperate
state is akin the Dacca in Bangladesh a few years ago, there were precisely
seven Coast Guard helicopters in operation. Where are the National Guard helicopters?
Presumably strafing Iraqi citizens on the roads outside Baghdad and Fallujah.
As the war's unpopularity soars, there will be millions asking, Why is the
National Guard in Iraq, instead of helping the afflicted along the Gulf in the
first crucial hours, before New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile turn into toxic
toilet bowls with thousands marooned on the tops of houses.
As thousands of trapped residents face the real prospect of perishing for lack
of a way out of the flooding city, Bush's first response was to order the EPA
to eliminate Clean Air standards at power plants and oil referiners across the
nation, supposedly to increase fuel supplies--a goal long sought by his cronies
at the big oil companies.
The greatest concern for poor people in these days has come from President
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who fresh from a chat with Fidel Castro, has
announced that Venezuela will be offering America's poor discounted gas through
its Citgo chain. He's says his price will knock out the predatory pricing at
every American pump. Citgo should issue to purchasers of each tankful of gas
vouchers for free medical consultations via the internet with the Cuban doctors
in Venezuela.
No politician in America has raised the issue of predatory pricing as gasoline
soars above $3. The last time there was any critical talk about the oil companies
was thirty years ago.
Maybe the terrible disaster along the Gulf coast will awaken people to the
unjust ways in which our society works. That's often the effect of natural disasters,
as with the Mexican earthquake, where the laggardly efforts of the police prompted
ordinary citizens to take matters into their own hands.
