Bush and Third World America

Bush and Third World America
by Manuel Valenzuela

A nation thinking herself invulnerable to Earth and her forces has been woken from her fantasy-filled, prescription-laced stupor of grandeur, our belief in American exceptionalism and omnipotence eviscerated, lying splintered along with thousands of Gulf Coast homes. Upon our eyes has been thrust the reality that we are no different than banana republics or mosquito coasts, third-world nations or lands swamped by corruption or tyranny. Americans have been slapped in the face by Katrina, forced to confront the vulnerability of our character and the impotence of our wealth, seeing the incompetence of our highest leaders and the ineptitude of our sacred government. For if “Red” China can evacuate half a million people from an oncoming typhoon, resulting in the death of ten people, and if “communist” Cuba regularly evacuates hundreds of thousands with every oncoming hurricane with no deaths, how can America fail when it is the greatest nation on Earth?

We have been confronted with the reality of crony, survival of the richest capitalism, a system where only those with money escape and thrive, and those without remain and perish. For years we are conditioned with this capitalistic fiction, the American Dream it is called, a fallacy that creates fantasy-filled thoughts out of socially engineered subsistence, fabricating worker bees and soldier ants out of human flesh, molding automatons and slaves from the womb, forever destined to serve the exploiters and subjugators of humanity, those Bush calls his base and we call capitalists and exploiters of human beings.

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What haunts us upon looking at a city such as New Orleans, whose buildings survived Katrina but not its under funded barriers and levies, is that an American city, the Big Easy, withstood Katrina’s powerful winds but not human greed. It shows us that more concern was given Bush’s failed war in Iraq than an American city at the heart of black America. It shows us that had the levies and barriers been properly funded, and had Bush not diverted monies away for his little quagmire in Iraq, perhaps New Orleans would never had been flooded, saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in costs. A few hundred million dollars was taken from the funding of barriers and levies and given towards the war in Iraq, risking the lives of thousands for the legacy of the Bush administration and the profits of the corporate world.

Through the greed of the warmongers an entire American city now lies in ruins, its hundreds of thousands of citizens dead or made refugees wondering the wastelands of America, sent to live in gymnasiums and projects and borrowed homes. The fact that most displaced people are black is not by coincidence, for Bush has risked not his life but that of many, many thousands. The administration knew full well the dangers of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans but instead of helping to secure the city’s safety they gambled that the remoteness of a devastating hurricane hitting the Big Easy was so slim that the risk was worth taking. All for a war in Iraq that has only succeeded in making America a target of more people, making us less secure in our own cities.

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=8121

:applause: