pecunium

I volunteered to go to Louisiana.

I volunteered more than a week ago.

I am not, all things considered, surprised that I've not been called up. The problems (in all the states affected) are far away, logistics are complex and it won't be cheap to send a bunch of Calif. Guardsmen to the places hardest hit. The 82nd is already being paid, and they have lift, so shipping them in seems reasonable.

But this (and another hat tip to Making Light who are going gangbusters on Katrina) apalls me.

Blackwater, yes Blackwater, the contractors/mercenaries who are famous for losing four guys in Iraq, is, apparently, patrolling New Orleans.

For corroboration, all one need do is visit their web site.

An extract from the piece linked to above

How do you know that we're finally taking the situation in New Orleans seriously? We're sending in the private mercenaries -- the very same folks we've called on to do the dirty work in Iraq. Reports are beginning to surface that New Orleans and environs are crawling with armed private commandos from Blackwater USA, the North Carolina-based security firm that has risen to prominence with its highly visible role in Iraq. The slide show at the top of this entry comes from their Web site.

A Georgia-based doctor and military veteran who blogs under the name Otter has been down in the disaster zone the last few days, and he has seen the private Blackwater security forces everywhere. He wrote yesterday from a police precinct house in New Orleans:

Blackwater Security is here--clean, well-equipped, and armed to the teeth.

The New York Times has seen them too:

No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.

The company acknowledged yesterday that it has about 150 people in New Orleans so far:

I'd like to think a lot of things, that this will cost less than twice that many guardsmen from other states, that these guys are actually trained (really trained, like with POST Certification and the like) in police procedure. That they have good weapons discipline and restrictive rules of engagagement. But from what I've heard, and read, of them, I don't really have a lot of hope for that.

They actively sought this out too, and FEMA, or someone, decided they were a better fit for the job than guardsmen.

WTF?

(Edited to add) looking around it seems these are being paid privately, to protect the wealthy, and businesses. If this is the case (private money) I'm not sure how I feel about the passage which gives them the right (as civilian employees of people who are supposed to be evacuating) to stroll around with 1: guns and 2: no direct governtmental oversight. Call me funny, but being allowed to hire one's private army, a la the barons of medieval Europe (with liveried servants) strikes me as a less than ideal circumstance.

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From:

bellatrys.livejournal.com

Most ordinary blue-collar Americans, as far as I can tell, and most white-collar ones too, never heard and never registered the Bush "trifecta" joke. That's why they don't remember it, and were able to be convinced that Bush was principled one, they didnt know it any more than the Populusque Romanum knew about his record as killingest governor in the province of Te'as.

The one I was able to reach with and convince of this happening, in 2002, withdrew their unhappy-but-persuaded support for us to attack Saddam - when my careful logistical arguments showing how Iraq had not the capacity to attack us in any conventional way, and how a conventional war against them would not protect us from another 9/11-style attack, did not convince.

Why did they not convince? Because those I was trying to convince had no confidence in my assessment of logistical and tactical let alone strategic matters, because I was not in the military; but when they saw that Bush's purported strong moral character was a broken reed, they both ceased to trust him and took my own authority more seriously.

It is not that the American peasants are stupid and long for war, or that they are incapable of rational thought.

It is that it all boils down in the end to a matter of trust.

There is nothing harder than believing that your world is not as you had thought it - it took me years to be willing to consider the evidence that the Asteroid Theory of Extinction might be valid, because the connotations of that were too horrible, too dreadful to accept: if a single head-on collision with a falling space rock could wipe out all life bigger than a squirrel, because it did, then it could happen to us without warning or possibility of escape.

Who can bear this?

Who can bear the thought that our own provincial and imperial leadres have betrayed us, sold us all "down the River" together, and laughed as they did so?

The Senate and the People of Rome have been kept in the dark and fed lies for so long that they do not know how to believe the truth when the door of the Cave is smashed open by the winds and the daylight pours in, blinding them.

Rome fell from within, because the plutocracy took all the land and bribed the senate to make/enforce the rules in their favor, one law for rich another for poor, and took the jobs away from the freedmen [who had now nothing to do except live on government-subsidized cheap food and fuel in the cities, who were killed by the massive army for daring to protest in the streets, who were allowed to play at voting for this plutocrat-owned Senator or that, while the few aristos who took their obligations seriously came to sticky ends, death or disgrace] and gave them to slaves ["insourcing"] and then towards the end to foreign immigrants, encouraged to come in and settle when economic hardship drove them out of their own original homelands - and then put them in the military to maintain the empire, and treated their families like such dirt that they eventually rebelled - and while rebelling, did so because they still believed, like Ricimer, like the provincials who kept up the traditions even after the center had not held, in the Ideals that their leaders had preached without practicing or even believing.

The plutocracy has Minitrued this story over the centuries into its opposite: lazy free citizens chose to sit around on their asses eating free food and watching reality TV instead of exercising their power as members of a democracy, and didn't have the guts to join the military that was so needed to protect them and the Peace of the Empire - so their leaders were forced to bring in foreigners to do the day-to-day work and fight in the army, but the foreigners were treacherous and deadly and like a cancer took over the empire from the selfish and unvigilant citizens, who deserved their fate for allowing this.

From:

bellatrys.livejournal.com

--Rather than that the supermerchants, megalandowners, and their boughten Senators, played the peoples of the Empire free and slave, citizen and resident, against each other while they looted the wealth of their work, continually subverted the best attempts by emperors, administrators, and reformers to stop the land grab and the job grab and the inflation and gouging and profiteering that sent later generations of the army off to fight in the East and West with badly-made canteens, thin armor and shoddy swords, as archeologists have documented, while the noble ancient families fought each other and played dice with the lives of their people until a barbarian named Ricimer had to step in and do the job of ruling as Patrician, while allowing the fiction of a Roman citizen still running the country, tyring to keep it together as the empire imploded at last.

Here is the operative question, for someone who is not a poor sick mill girl who must put in a full day's work and has not the leisure to reasearch nor the strenght to stay up all night now - when were the levees defunded, and in what order? Does it correspond to the increased insurgency and the growing revelation that their ideologues with bags of cash couldn't turn Iraq into a Corpo paradise? Or does it predate that?

IOW, did they only turn to Gulf Coast oil when it became clear that the flowers and oil-barrels werent forthcoming and that KBR wasn't to be able to rebuild, nor the empire to suppress the rebels, help of Blackwater or not, even if Washington ordered a city sacked in retaliation for the death of four mercenaries they would not be intimidated--?

Or was this whole thing a sleight-of-hand from the start, the aim all along from the start, set into gear with the dismantling of Clinton's anti-terrorist intel units under Clarke and reconfiguring into study teams, and the ignoring of every warning up to and including the Aug. 6 PDB, LIHOP I, and then 9/11 and the resisted investigation which turned into a coverup - all of it, a camouflage to cover the real aims all along, of annexing the neighboring province's adjacent, rich, but inefficient-due-to-aging-infrastructure oil wells to supplement the failing ones in TX and OK?

And that itself the secondary aim, the primary one being the overthrow of the New Deal, of all socialist helps for the working poor, and consolidation of power into an effective one-party state, in a state of Forever War to occupy the hoi polloi--?

I do not know. I don't have that level of access, and I can't do the digging and dates right now or hunt for the names/connections, in the state I am in.

This is the successful conclusion of the Corpo coup that General Smedley Butler thwarted, and which Congress covered up, the names of the principal conspirators that he gave in closed-door testimony that has never been released yet. Then, the servile, kool kids press dismissed him as a wild-eyed conspiracist, because the idea of bankers and captains of industry working with the American Legion to effect a fascist take over here, in America, was too incredible, or too horrible, to contemplate. --Butler ended up writing for socialist magazines, because the mainstream media who had fawned on him as a bemedaled hero, would not listen.

CIA-CACI-Caesar crosses the Rubicon, and the educated, wealthy, superior Senators dither and yammer unable to believe their lying eyes, revealing their hermetically-sealed Beltway mindset and the utter uselessness of Lawful Good, which stands idly by obeying orders to not go in and rescue the victims while the Chaotic Paladins steal and forge IDs and do what they can with what little they have, and rescue a few from the Rape of Gondor.

High crimes and misdemeanors - what is higher than betraying a nation for the good of the ruling elite?

From:

bellatrys.livejournal.com

Tetrarch Nagin goes off to plan rebuilding conferences in Dallas, crocodile tears dry now. Conservative (anti-abortion, anti-affirmative-action, I'm-Jindal-Lite) Governor Blanco meanwhile, having discovered something beneath the old political hackery in her soul, fights probably too late at last against Louisianas betrayal by the Imperial Senate - which is facing demands from some of its members to sieze her province from her and award it to a responsible [privatized, for profit] Provisional Authority, just like in Baghdad. The elite families of New Orleans, having weathered the storm, look confidently forward to a future city cleansed of dirty violent peasants, as celebrated in the WSJ and Town Hall, the most vocal propaganda arm of the Hegemony. --And Texas is overrun with refugees, many of whom have ties of sentiment and kinship and commonality of lot to the local population.

Yesterday morning there was talk on NPR of whether the Games should go on - the Saints to play in this season, and how passionate the survivors were in saying yes, and how to the astonishment of the media mouths they were buoyed by the appearance of their gladiator-heroes, who always lose, and are more loved for that, in their camps to bring aid and comfort. The Saints have connections in Texas, where their owner is from, as well.

--I now understand why Blue and Green were fighting words, in the Eastern Empire, and a horse race the occasion for a political rally and a massacre by government troops.

I pray whatever powers there may be above or on or under, that it does not come to that. But we who have seen bear witness: there is nothing new under the sun.

The senatorial class of Texas may well have brought its doom in through the front gate, as one rabble of barbaroi is united with the disorganized - deliberately disorganized, disenfranchised, kept paraliterate with generations of minitrued schoolbooks - population of freedmen and citizens and virtual-slaves, already there.

Rome did not Fall in a day.