Bill O'Reilly simply wanted the police and National Guard to shoot down "looters," that is to say those attempting to survive by taking food and drink from stores, thus sending the ruling corporate elite's message: "law and order" (i.e., protecting corporate property and banks) is more important than human life, especially expendable African-American human life, for what the robber baron Jay Gould said a hundred years ago still applies today: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." As if to comply, Kathleen Blanco, the Democrat governor of Louisiana, dispensed with a bit of threatening machismo: "These troops are battle-tested. They have M16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will." In fact, with an intolerant right-wing grumbling in the background, Ms. Blanco expects soldiers to kill poor people as they loot stores devastated by the storm (stores that are insurance write-offs) because it is of paramount importance to send a message to the lower and dispensable classes, even those starving and suffering from dehydration.

But it was the neocon columnist Jonah Goldberg who really dropped the mask and revealed the attitude of the ruling elite toward the poor and suffering. "I think it's time to face facts," a malicious Goldberg writes for the neocon house organ, the National Review. "That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared." Of course, this should not be surprising coming from a person who believes not all cultures or people are of "comparable worth," thus concluding the "natural aristocracy" (composed primarily of his Straussian buddies) are entitled to rule over the "losers" and "serpents."

Katrina will dominate the focus of corporate media for some time to come. In due time, however, after a few starving looters are shot to send a message and "order" is restored (and poverty slips from the radar screen), the focus will return to Natalee Holloway, Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, and other such drivel.

As we watch the horror of Katrina, we should recall that preeminent neoliberal, Henry Kissinger, who proposed population control for all the "useless eaters" of the sort wandering the flooded streets of New Orleans. Kissinger, as far back as 1974, discussed with leaders of the Club of Rome on how best to reduce population (in other words, genocide). "We are letting people breed like flies without allowing for natural causes to keep population down," commented Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Department's Office of Population Affairs. "We raised the birth survival rates, extended life-spans by lowering death rates, and did nothing about lowering birth rates." In the brave New World Order envisioned by Kissinger and Ferguson, there "will be dislocation and food shortages," and maybe even natural disaster as a template.

Is it possible this is what we are witnessing in New Orleans and the Gulf states now?