The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: from natural disaster to national humiliation

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The catastrophe that is unfolding in New Orleans and on the Gulf coast of Mississippi has been transformed into a national humiliation without parallel in the history of the United States... The reactionary mythology of America as the “Greatest Country in the World” has suffered a shattering blow... Washington’s response to this human tragedy has been one of gross incompetence and criminal indifference. People have been left to literally die in the streets of a major American city without any assistance for four days. Images of suffering and degradation that resemble the conditions in the most impoverished Third World country are broadcast daily with virtually no visible response from the government of a country that concentrates the greatest share of wealth in the world... The government’s callous disregard for the human suffering, its negligence in failing to prepare for this disaster and above all its utter incompetence has staggered even the compliant American media... In the figure of the president, George W. Bush, the incompetence, stupidity, and sheer inhumanity that characterizes so much of America’s money-mad corporate elite finds its quintessentially repulsive expression... Can anyone seriously believe that the current administration and its Democratic accomplices in Congress are going to launch a mass program of low-cost home construction, rebuild schools and provide jobs for the hundreds of thousands left unemployed by the destruction? More.