In the new New Orleans, an American city now sharing ominous parallels to Baghdad, the “insurgents,” that is to say residents who refuse to leave their homes—likely understanding that if they do so their homes will be bulldozed, not unlike the homes of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—are now considered on par with common household pests. “The cockroaches come out at night,” Dean Nugent, of the Louisiana State Coroner’s Department, said of the residents who have defied military orders to “evacuate,” or surrender their homes, possessions, and pets to the government (no word on what exactly will happen to the possessions, but pets are systematically exterminated). “This is one of the worst places in the country. You should not be here. Especially you,” he told a female reporter, insinuating that the remaining residents are not only flat-bodied insects of the family Blattidae, but also rapists and possibly murderers. Cecilia M. Vega of the Chronicle adds: “Nugent, who is white, acknowledged he wasn’t personally familiar with the poor, black neighborhood, saying he only knew of it by reputation.”

Not documenting and possibly never reporting the actual death toll in New Orleans is apparently not a concern for most Americans, who remain almost completely in the dark, if we can believe polls conducted by the corporate media. “A new CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey finds that 58% of Americans say they are following news coverage of the hurricane disaster—and a vast majority give the media high marks,” reports Editor & Publisher. Even more disturbing is the fact far too many Americans seem to not be troubled that Bush (or anybody else in government) will never be held to account for the fact thousands of people waited days to receive urgent water, food, and medical attention. “At the same time, only 43% of Americans give President Bush a passing grade in response to Hurricane Katrina, with 54% disapproving, and 7 in 10 call for an independent probe of the federal response…. Americans are also more likely to believe that the slow response was a result of bureaucratic inefficiency (49%) than a lack of adequate preparation (40%).” Of course, CNN and Gallup did not ask if Americans believe the government deliberately left the victims of Katrina to their fate. It is simply unthinkable government would do such a thing—Operation Northwoods, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Navy bacterial experiments on the people of San Francisco, CIA experiments with Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii on the unwitting people of New York, U.S. military releasing mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Dresden), and countless other examples not withstanding.

Indeed, the New World Order crew considers millions of Americans as little more than “cockroaches,” although they are not as forthright as the racist yahoo Dean Nugent. Our neoliberal rulers (and the current neocon clique) are adamantly opposed to the idea of the “public good” (as in saving hurricane victims) because for the global elite the “market rules” and no appreciable larger community or social consciousness exists outside of their own narrow economic interests—thus neocons and so-called “conservatives” (who are reactionaries, not traditional conservatives) blame the impoverished victims of Katrina for their own lack of resources and class-bound ineptitude (such not being able to afford a car or a motel room out of harm’s way). But regardless of this facile blame game, the neolibs and neocons consider Katrina a sort of naturally occurring structural adjustment program that will punish the “useless eaters” (Untermensch) and ultimately reward the financial elite as they invest in a radically transformed—”demographically, geographically and politically,” as the elitist James Reiss unabashedly informs us—new New Orleans, now earmarked to become an upscale tourist destination minus a troublesome under class deemed expendable (or easily displaced).

It is the task of the Pentagon to make certain the corporate media—instinctively sniffing around ghoulish stories, such as the sensationalistic prospect of the New Orleans dead—are not allowed access, and for good reason: it is not so much the dead or the bogus claim of respecting the families of the dead, but rather the Pentagon’s desire to conduct operations under an impenetrable dark cloud of secrecy. In essence, Katrina is an exercise—call it a war game—to test out operational methods that will be used down the road as martial law (or martial law without martial law, as in New Orleans) is rolled out elsewhere in the country under the guise of a terrorist attack or some other tenuous (and manufactured) excuse. CNN and the alphabet corporate news ministries—even though they faithful serve the Bushian agenda on most occasions—will not be permitted to snoop around, as they are not allowed to snoop around Iraq where lessons in covert warfare (engineering “pseudo-gang” terrorist groups led by phantom terrorists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) are learned and archived in databases. In the meantime, in true Orwellian fashion, the Army 82nd Airborne Division will threateNo Photos of Dead “Cockroaches” Allowed in New Orleansn journalists as they claim to follow U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison’s temporary restraining order against a “zero access” policy announced by Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, a “John Wayne dude” who can “get some stuff done,” namely reduce a constitutional republic to a totalitarian nightmare in short order.