August 31, 2005
Bush plays the guitar while New Orleans drowns
William Bunch, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, writes on his blog, Attytood: "One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach." The comments on Attytood are fascinating, as some right wing posters try to whistle it all away. Ohmigod, libs politicizing the disaster! Indeed. Very highly recommended. The photograph of Bush playing the guitar is from today's AP. Elsewhere in the news, Newsroom-l subscriber reports that Joseph Farah, publisher of the rabidly right wing World Net Daily, is calling for Bush's impeachment.
By William Bunch
[Excerpts]
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach.
The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?
Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Katrina
by kos
Wed Aug 31st, 2005 at 00:04:42 CDT
[Excerpts]
The last four days I was in an isolated cabin in Clinton, Montana, with
only tenuous links to the outside world. Today was the first time I was
able to truly get a handle on the New Orleans disaster, and it's almost
too staggering to comprehend. It's downright biblical.
I just wish that the president gave a damn about what's happenend.
Unfortunately, he's too busy playing "country rock star".
August 25, 2005
Death by Public Relations
By Jules Siegel
WAR MADE EASY
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
By Norman Soloman
John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0-471-69479
$24.95 314 pages
In "War Made Easy" Norman Solomon demolishes the myth of an independent American press zealously guarding sacred values of free expression. Although strictly focusing on the shameless history of media cheerleading for the principal post-World War II American wars, invasions and interventions, he calls into question the entire concept of the press as some kind of institutional counterforce to government and corporate power.
The utter idiocy of many of the examples he has compiled in this impeccably documented historical review will be familiar to readers who follow the news on the Internet. They achieve fresh impact because of the way Solomon has organized and analyzed them. Each chapter is devoted to a single warhawk strategy ("America Is a Fair and Noble Superpower," "Opposing the War Means Siding with the Enemy," "Our Soldiers Are Heroes, Theirs Are Inhuman") illustrated with historical examples for the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, both Iraq wars, and other miscellaneous conflicts in which the media were almost universally enthusiastic accomplices.
"War Made Easy" should really be subtitled "War reporting doesn't just suck, it kills." It makes you feel like demanding a special war crimes tribunal for corporate media executives and owners who joined the roll-up to Shock and Awe as non-uniformed psywar ops. To be sure, this would raise the issue of whether or not following orders might suffice for the defense of obedient slaves such as Mary McGrory and Richard Cohen who performed above and beyond the call of duty.
"He persuaded me," she gushed the morning after Powell spoke at the United Nations. "The cumulative effect was stunning." In the same Washington Post edition Richard Cohen wrote, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bonechilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."
Solomon demonstrates how this kind of peppy pre-war warm-up degenerates into drooling and heavy breathing once the killing begins. As if observing a heavy metal computer game, the pornographers of death concentrate on the exquisite craftsmanship and visual design of the murder machines, and the magnificence of the fiery explosions they produce.
"When the Gulf War's massive bombardment began," he writes, "a CNN correspondent remarked on the 'sweet beautiful sight' of bombers leaving runways in Saudi Arabia. CBS correspondent Jim Stewart told viewers about 'two days of almost picture-perfect assaults.'"
Los Angeles Times reporter Jacques Leslie was invited onto a helicopter to watch a B-52 strike in Vietnam. "Suddenly gray clouds took shape on the ground in front of us and billowed to a height of a thousand feet or more," Leslie later wrote in a memoir. "I was surprised to feel so little: no horror, no pain, just marvel at the dubious wonders of technology. Had men been killed beneath the smoke? Did they mean anything to me? I knew I should be appalled, but I felt only numbness: it was like watching people die on television."
Skepticism only emerges when it is clear that a given war is not going well, Solomon observes. Otherwise, the media mostly report the war the way the government tells it. They become, in effect, merely another psychological warfare asset. The authorities not only employ public relations firms to assist them, but also discuss the information management strategies in public sessions at think tanks and academic institutions.
"War Made Easy" is a definitive historical text that belongs in every serious library as an indispensable record of the real relationships among government authorities and media outlets. The book should be required reading for journalists and journalism students. It will dispel many illusions about the true reach of freedom of the press and replace them with a much more appropriate and healthier professional cynicism.
Perhaps if Gary Webb had somehow been made aware of all this before writing "Dark Alliance," he might not have committed suicide in the sodden ashes of his ruined career -- because he would have known in advance what he was really up against.
Copyright (c) Jules Siegel 2005. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. You are free to reproduce this story for non-commercial use as long as you include this notice.