Frederick the Great

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This sort of goes along with our discussion in the Glitches post — in today’s Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson writes about the great Frederick Douglass. Never let it be forgot that every civil rights activist since stood (and still stands) on Douglass’s shoulders.

Jackson mentions a speech Douglass made 200 years ago in Boston. “The speech was given at Boston’s Music Hall after a mob drove Douglass out of the Tremont Temple,” Jackson wrote. I believe this is that same speech. Jackson ties what Douglass said about slavery to gay marriage legislation that was pushed by Mitt Romney in the final weeks of his term as governor of Massachusetts. Inspirational and thought-provoking stuff.

Glitches

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I am having more computer problems this morning (with the spare laptop), so I want to get something up quickly while I still can.

First off, have any of you using McAfee security software noticed your PCs doing some inexplicable things lately? Like suddenly turning off for no apparent reason? I ask because this week I’ve had spontaneous shutdowns on two separate computers while McAfee was doing scans and updates in the background. That may be a coincidence, but I do wonder.

Second, yesterday Cindy Sheehan led a group of protesters who shouted down and stopped a House Democratic press conference on ethics reform. Rahm Emanuel, of whom I am wildly ambivalent, was the leader of the press conference.

“Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic leadership can no longer tell us what is on the table,” Mrs. Sheehan said. “We are the ones that put them in power and they are not including the peace movement. … It needs to be at least included in the discussion.”

She demanded the elimination of funding for the war, an investigation and impeachment of President Bush for what she called “lies” to justify the war.

Mrs. Sheehan was leading about 75 others lobbying congressional offices when they happened upon the press conference. The Democrats were there to present new ethics proposals as part of the 100-hour agenda with which they plan to begin the House majority today.

I’d like to hear your opinions on this. I was in the middle of a commentary on this very matter when the PC shut down (and fortunately recovered), and I may still finish it, but you guys have your say first. Points to ponder:

I’m all for holding Dems’ feet to fire, and if, say, in 2006 Sheehan had accomplished a similar shutdown of a Republican press conference we might have applauded (or not; I don’t generally like disruptive tactics that shut down speech). Are we being hypocritical if we complain about yesterday’s protest?

Is it really fair to slam Nancy Pelosi for not being sufficiently antiwar after she went out on a limb to get Jack Murtha appointed House Majority Leader?

Is it really fair to slam Dems for not holding investigations when Joe Biden is about to begin hearings on the Iraq War? Which is not something they could have done until now.

Did Cindy Sheehan actually play a role in getting Dems elected in the recent midterm elections? I honestly don’t recall.

Finally, do you think protesting in this matter could play a productive part in ending the war, or might it be counter productive by making an antiwar position more politically untenable?

Richard Dawkins and Fundamentalist Atheism

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In a recent Huffington blog post, E.J. Eskow describes the traits of the fundamentalist atheist. This reminded me that after I wrote about “God Nazis” last November, followed up by “Dichotomies,” I had vowed to someday write a longer post about why Richard Dawkins is off base about religion.

But first, about fundamentalist atheism: The fundamentalist atheist, Eskrow says, is dogmatic, intolerant, elitist, and authoritarian.

They’re dogmatic. Their movement is based on a piece of dogma which can’t be challenged without enraging them. It’s sociological and historical in nature, not theological, and can be summed up as follows:

    “Humans would be better off if religion in all forms was eradicated.”

Are they right? Nobody knows. … I’d like to see some research into the issue of religion and human conflict, perhaps by an interdisciplinary social sciences group. I’d like to know more, so that I can make an informed decision.

Fundamentalist atheists think they already know, without study. In our only personal encounter, Sam Harris pointedly refused to consider reviewing the work of the Fundamentalism Project or any other scholars who have studied the impact of religion on society.

Only Dennett proposes any real research – and he’s the least popular of the lot. The others are already sure the world would be better off without religion, and they throw gentle and passive forms of theism like Quakerism into the burn pile along with the more organized and militant forms.

Another pet belief of theirs is that our society doesn’t permit criticism of religion. They hold this belief so strongly that they’ve written several best-selling books about it. The fact that this might be a contradiction doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.

You can read the rest yourself, it’s a short post.

It’s true that a great many bad things have been done in the name of religion, but a great many good things have been done in the name of religion also. Note that you can substitute the word “politics” or even “science” for “religion,” and the statement would also be true. The point is that human beings act out in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of reasons, and if one were to eliminate every kind of movement or organization or discipline that has ever been associated with doing harm, you’d have to pretty much do away with civilization itself.

H. Allen Orr discusses the same point in the January 11 New York Review of Books (“A Mission to Convert“):

Throughout The God Delusion, Dawkins reminds us of the horrors committed in the name of God, from outright war, through the persecution of minority sects, acts of terrorism, the closing of children’s minds, and the oppression of those having unorthodox sexual lives. No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion. So we all agree: religion can be bad.

But the critical question is: compared to what? And here Dawkins is less convincing because he fails to examine the question in a systematic way. Tests of religion’s consequences might involve a number of different comparisons: between religion’s good and bad effects, or between the behavior of believers and nonbelievers, and so on. While Dawkins touches on each, his modus operandi generally involves comparing religion as practiced —religion, that is, as it plays out in the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence— with atheism as theory. But fairness requires that we compare both religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward. And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before. …

… it’s hard to believe that Stalin’s wholesale torture and murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao’s persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But Dawkins’s inability to see the difference in the severity of their sins— one of orders of magnitude—suggests an ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.

I contend that oppressions and genocides and atrocities are not caused by religion or ideology, but by dark and fearful impulses arising from subconscious depths. These impulses then latch on to a belief or a cause for justification, and the carnage begins. Religion served that purpose over many centuries of human civilization. But if one kind of cause goes out of fashion, another will be found that serves just as well.

I agree with Dawkins on many points. For example, I agree with him (and Sam Harris) that good socialization is a better prerequisite for moral and ethical behavior than religious belief. I agree that much religion is a stew of shams and inconsistencies and superstition that people use as an emotional crutch. What Dawkins writes about religion is, IMO, generally true of that part of religion he is writing about.

Unfortunately, like every other fundamentalist atheist I’ve ever encountered, he is profoundly ignorant about religion as a whole. The small part of religion he knows and writes about is not representative of the whole. He’s like a really backward space alien who lands on the North Pole and assumes the whole planet is covered by ice. And, because he doesn’t respect religion enough to study it, he remains willfully ignorant of it. This is, pure and simple, elective ignorance, which is the hallmark of a fanatic.

What Theo Hobson says here about Martin Amis applies also, IMO, to Dawkins.

What is striking is that Amis uses the phrase “religious belief” with such little care, with such little “passion for the particular”, in Marianne Moore’s phrase. Once this imaginary enemy is in his sights he forgets his usual habits of meticulous attentiveness to detail, humility before the awesome complexity of the world. Basically, he loses it, he goes ape: a more primitive form of mind takes over.

It is a fascinating blind spot. For it exactly illustrates the very fault of which he accuses religious belief: that it kills nuance, difference, respect for the actual and particular.

Orr again:

The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins’s cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.

The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?).

Atheists fundamentalists are no better than the creationists who insist that evolution hasn’t been “proved” because it’s “just a theory” and no one had found a fossil of the Missing Link. You cannot have a meaningful discussion with a creationist until you can sit him down and relieve him of his assumptions — like, what is “proof”? What is “theory”? What is “science”? Most of the time, creationists have only a hazy and mangled notion even of what evolution is.

Dawkins has his own “missing link” bugaboo, which is the existence (or not) of a material God. Marilynne Robinson wrote a review of The God Delusion for the November 2006 issue of Harper’s that speaks to this nicely.

The chapter titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God” reflects his reasoning at its highest bent. He reasons thus: A creator God must be more complex than his creation, but this is impossible because if he existed he would be at the wrong end of evolutionary history. To be present in the beginning he must have been unevolved and therefore simple. Dawkins is very proud of this insight. He considers it unanswerable. He asks, “How do they [theists] cope with the argument that any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide?” And “if he [God] has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know,” and “a first cause of everything.. . must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers).” At Cambridge, says Dawkins, “I challenged the theologians to answer the point that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable. The strongest response I heard was that I was brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an unwilling theology.” Dawkins is clearly innocent of this charge against him. Whatever is being foisted here, it is not a scientific epistemology.

“That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology,” Robinson continues. And then, of course, you ought to clarify what you mean by exist. Dogen’s Uji argues that being is time. What we normally think of as “existence” is a function of time and matter. It’s very difficult for the human brain to grasp any other kind of existence. Thus, ideas about God run the gamut from an anthropomorphic creature with a personality, emotions, likes and dislikes, and thoughts — perhaps even political affiliations — to, well, something that has no form, no emotions, no personality, no likes and dislikes, no senses, no cognition. Quoting Karen Armstrong,

In my book “A History of God,” I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn’t think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God. …

… Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn’t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words.

But this is a terribly difficult thing to do. Twenty-five centuries ago the Buddha taught that the existence of a God or gods was irrelevant, which is a nice distinction from saying there isn’t one. Instead, the Buddha taught that through the discipline of the eightfold path the true and absolute nature of existence itself is revealed. (This is a bit like looking at the picture of a vase and then realizing it’s also two faces. I can’t explain it any better than that.) But any preconceptions whatsoever about this reality — the literature refers to Buddha Nature or sometimes Suchness — gets in the way of realization, so it’s better not to cling to ideas or doctrines about What It Is.

Saying that our limited notions of existence do not apply to God or Suchness or Whatever is not the same thing as a “god of the gaps” argument. Even some Christian theologians (Tillich, for example) consider the G/S/W thing to be the ground of beingness, or existence, itself, upon which all other beingness and existence depends. Tillich’s understanding of God is about as far removed from the “watchmaker” Dawkins derides as a Da Vinci painting from a child’s crayon drawing.

Let me say (if you are new here) that I do not “believe in God” as people normally understand those words, and in particular I don’t believe in a personal God, yet I am religious. And I sincerely believe that if Dawkins ever tried to wrap his brain around religions as I understand it, his head would explode. I can tell from his writing he hasn’t even been exposed to much about religion and has no idea how ignorant he is.

If Richard Dawkins wants to apply himself to a criticism of Tillich, or Spinoza, or Dogen, or any other religious teacher or thinker who doesn’t fit the religion mold in his head, that’s grand. But until he does, he’s stuck at the level of claiming evolution can’t be proved until someone finds the Missing Link.

“The Last Regular Republican”

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Sidney Blumenthal’s latest column deserves a close reading. It shines a light on another part of our recent political history, when the Republican Party was taken over by the Goldwater-Reagan “pseudo conservative” faction. Further, it shows us how the Bush II Regime tied the Reaganite conservatives back to the Nixonian imperial presidency, giving us the worst of several possible worlds in one toxic White House.

When the late Gerald Ford became President, he chose Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. And this mightily pissed off the Reagan faction, including Reagan himself. Reagan actually snubbed the President on a visit to Washington.

Reagan’s motive, however, was ultimately personal pique – he was “disappointed that he had been passed over himself,” according to his biographer Lou Cannon. Reagan thought of himself as the rightful heir apparent and Ford as nothing but a “caretaker”.

Ford had a dismally low regard for Reagan, dismissing the threat of his potential challenge. “I hadn’t taken those warnings seriously because I didn’t take Reagan seriously.” Ford considered Reagan “simplistic,” dogmatic and lazy. Reagan, for his part, argued that Nixon’s 1972 mandate was not a Republican victory but an ideological one for junking the old Republicanism and that Ford was betraying it. “The tragedy of Watergate,” Reagan said, was that it “obscured the meaning of that ’72 election.”

Reagan’s assessment of the 1972 election makes absolutely no sense to me. About the only thing Nixon had in common with Reagan was red- and race-baiting. Nixon was an internationalist who favored détente with the Soviet Union and who visited the other Evil Empire, China. And Nixon had no ideological problem with applying some “big government” solutions to domestic problems. Nixon’s administration established the Environmental Protection Agency, for pity’s sake. I think Reagan was hallucinating.

Reagan accused Ford of fatally weakening national security. He opposed Ford’s pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to treaties reducing the production of nuclear weapons and Ford’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975, which held the Soviet Union for the first time to standards of human rights. Reagan’s critique appeared against the backdrop of the collapse of South Vietnam and the scene on April 30, 1975, of helicopters evacuating US personnel from the roof of the US Embassy.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

In April 1975, the Senate Operations Committee under the chairmanship of Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, released 14 reports on the abuse of intelligence. It chronicled “excessive executive power”, “excessive secrecy”, “avoidance of the rule of law”, “rogue” operations and even spying on domestic politics. “Whatever the theory,” the report concluded, “the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.”

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld – moved from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense as his deputy, Dick Cheney, was promoted to the chief of staff job – created a Team B of hawks within the Pentagon who attacked the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate for supposedly underestimating the Soviet Union’s military strength. Rumsfeld began making speeches assailing detente, claiming that the Soviets were flagrantly violating treaties negotiated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another hate object of the right who was long associated with Vice President Rockefeller.

The CIA officially responded by calling the Team B report “complete fiction.” And CIA Director George HW Bush said that Team B set “in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.” Nonetheless, Rumsfeld’s inflation of the Red menace, based on faulty data, turned up the flame under Ford. Rumsfeld had his own motive: He wanted to be named vice president, a nomination that in the end went to Sen. Bob Dole, considered acceptable to Reagan.

To appease the Right, Ford pressured Rockefeller not to run as vice president in 1976, an act Ford himself called “cowardly.” Bob Dole would would be Ford’s running mate. Now, get this:

Rockefeller advised Ford: “I’m now going to say it frankly … Rumsfeld wants to be President of the United States. He has given George Bush [another potential vice-presidential choice] the deep six by putting him in the CIA, he has gotten me out … He was third on your list and now he has gotten rid of two of us … You are not going to be able to put him on the [ticket] because he is defense secretary, but he is not going to want anybody who can possibly be elected with you on that ticket … I have to say I have a serious question about his loyalty to you.”

Just think … President Rummy.

Rummy lost his government job when Jimmy Carter was elected. He played some small roles in the Reagan Administration, such as special envoy to the Middle East (1983–1984, during which time the famous Rummy-Saddam handshake took place), but for most of the Reagan years and after Rummy retreated to private industry until Junior brought him back to Washington in 2001. Blumenthal continues,

Cheney and Rumsfeld, since their days in the Nixon White House, had observed the imperial presidency besieged. Under Ford, they saw it reach its low ebb, and they were determined to restore the presidency as they imagined it should be – unchecked by an intrusive Congress, shielded from the press, and unobstructed by staff professionals in the intelligence community who did not clearly understand the present dangers that required just such an executive.

After the 2000 election, Vice President-elect Cheney held a dinner at his house where he held forth that the new administration would finish off Saddam Hussein, a job that the elder Bush had left undone, opening him to charges of softness. Rumsfeld, appointed by the new president as secretary of defense at the suggestion of Cheney, named one of the key members of the Ford-era Team B, Paul Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary. At the first meeting of the National Security Council with Bush, Wolfowitz raised the question of invading Iraq.

And there you have it. Through the Bush II White House, the drown-government-in-the-bathtub Right was tied together with the Nixonian “Executive Power Ãœber Alles” Right. This gives us secretive, oppressive, antidemocratic government that can’t govern. Nice.

Blumenthal writes that “Ford was the last regular Republican to serve as president.” If you’re much younger than I am you may not remember what a “regular Republican” is.

Sweet

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At his photo-op swearing in, Rep. Keith Ellison will use a copy of the Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn’t the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies — the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.

Ellison will take the official oath of office along with the other incoming members in the House chamber, then use the Koran in his individual, ceremonial oath with new Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Keith is paying respect not only to the founding fathers’ belief in religious freedom but the Constitution itself,” said Ellison spokesman Rick Jauert.

Salted Peanuts

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Here is the BBC story Keith Olbermann mentioned in his special comments tonight. Justin Webb of the BBC writes,

US President George W Bush intends to reveal a new Iraq strategy within days, the BBC has learnt.

The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces. …

…The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush’s Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.

Its central theme will be sacrifice.

The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers.

The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.

The proposal, if it comes, will be highly controversial.

Already one senior Republican senator has called it Alice in Wonderland.

Olbermann said that Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News had corroborated the part of the story about extra troops. Other reports say that General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, is about to lose his job because he has said he doesn’t need more troops.

Gerard Baker writes for the Times (UK; emphasis added),

In the coming days he [Pressident Bush] is expected to announce not the beginning of the US disengagement his critics want, but a deepening of the effort to build a stable and democratic nation there.

This likely new approach is not only fraught with military and political risks, but increasingly represents a very lonely furrow for the man in the White House. It is backed perhaps just by Mr Bush and a handful of close advisers, in the face of opposition from senior military commanders, a resurgent Democratic party that takes control of Congress this week, and even from many within his own Republican party.

Those close to the discussions say the President is leaning against the recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, headed by James Baker, his father’s Secretary of State, for a steady drawdown of US troops. Instead, advisers say, he favours a “surge” of American forces of perhaps 30,000 or more troops in addition to the 140,000 there, with the aim of restoring order in Baghdad especially. Senior military commanders have been sceptical. General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, has publicly expressed doubts, and will be stepping down shortly. General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, is also known to be cautious — he too may soon leave his job. So entrenched have been the military doubts that one adviser said that there had been no serious discussion of the “surge” strategy until it was proposed by an outside group of military thinkers about a month ago. Mr Bush will be both bucking the views of senior military and taking a large political risk. …

… Even more problematic for Mr Bush is that growing numbers of senior members of his own Republican party are against a significant troop increase in Iraq. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska senator and a possible Republican presidential candidate, recently returned from Iraq to tell friends he was convinced a surge in US troops would be folly.

Here’s the punchline:

Aides close to Mr Bush say that he is determined not to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam.

And Mr Bush has been influenced heavily in his thinking, it seems, by Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State to Mr Ford and Richard Nixon. According to Bob Woodward’s book, State of Denial, in 2005 Mr Kissinger sent Mr Bush a copy of his famous 1969 “salted peanut” memo to Mr Nixon. In it the Secretary of State warned against troop withdrawals from Vietnam, saying that they would become to the American people like salted peanuts — “the more US troops come home, the more will be demanded”.

Salted peanuts?

I Haven’t Disappeared

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My laptop crashed this morning, an event which sort of ate my morning blog time. It should be fixed in a day or two. Meanwhile I have an older (and slower) laptop as a backup, so I’ll get something posted eventually.

New Orleans: What a Difference a Year Didn’t Make

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Jeff Franks writes for Yahoo News,

In New Orleans, 2007 begins much the same way 2006 did, with large swaths of the city still wrecked and abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and local officials promising that better days lie just ahead.

All that’s missing is President Bush to drop in for a photo op.

Sixteen months after Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city and killed more than 1,300 people, less than half of the pre-storm population of nearly half a million has returned.

About 80,000 homes in Orleans Parish were damaged, and most remain that way, creating a panorama of blight in the hardest-hit areas, which were largely poor and working-class neighborhoods.

Many businesses remain closed or struggle to survive. The landmark French Quarter restaurant Antoine’s, run by the same family since 1840, said last week its business was down 60 percent from pre-Katrina and its future in doubt.

Franks goes on to discuss the “Road Home” project, which is a state-administered program to distribute $7.5 billion in federal money to people whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Katrina. As of this week the program had distributed money to only 97 out of 90,000 homeowners who have applied. Louisiana officials blame Congress, which took its sweet time — ten months — to allocate the money. But there are problems at the state level as well, as this blogger explains. A contractor chosen to distribute the money seems to, um, not be performing up to expectations. The Louisiana House and Senate have passed two resolutions to terminate the contract. Yet the contract remains in effect.

Mayor Ray Nagin also continues to turn in an underwhelming performance. Franks says he “finally appointed a czar to oversee the city’s recovery effort” last month.

Bob Herbert’s New York Times column today looks at the poor of New Orleans.

Sixteen months have passed since the apocalyptic flood that followed Hurricane Katrina. More than 13,000 residents who were displaced by the storm are still living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Another 100,000 to 200,000 evacuees — most of whom want to return home — are scattered throughout the United States.

The undeniable neglect of this population fuels the suspicion among the poor and the black, who constitute a majority of the evacuees, that the city is being handed over to the well-to-do and the white.

If you talk to public officials, you will hear about billions of dollars in aid being funneled through this program or that. The maze of bureaucratic initiatives is dizzying. But when you talk to the people most in need of help — the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the children — you will find in most cases that the help is not reaching them. There is no massive effort, no master plan, to bring back the people who were driven from the city and left destitute by Katrina.

Only the federal government could finance such an effort. Neither the city of New Orleans nor the state of Louisiana has anywhere near the kind of money that would be required. “You’ve got a lot of people who don’t have a place to stay,” Gov. Kathleen Blanco told me in an interview on Friday, “and they’re spread all over creation.”…

… The simple fact is that no one at any level of government, city, state or federal, has shown the leadership that was needed in response to this astounding tragedy.

Herbert writes that the exiled poor and black of New Orleans are increasingly convinced the federal government wants to prevent them from returning to New Orleans. This reminded me of Riverbend’s recent post, in which she said Iraqis are certain the many U.S. blunders in Iraq were actually part of a plan to destroy Iraq. Maybe, but I still think you really cannot overestimate the colossal incompetence and corruption of the Bush Regime.

Yet there are poor people in New Orleans. They aren’t necessarily the same poor who lived there before Katrina, but they’re there. Many are illegal immigrants who were lured to New Orleans, often by federal contractors, to do the hard cleanup work for slave wages so the contractors can pocket more of our tax dollars. And now the city’s fragile health care infrastructure is straining to care for a boom of Latino babies being born to mothers who have no health insurance.

Thus, the city’s former deep poverty is being replaced by deeper poverty.

Instead of using federal money for projects that would have not only rebuilt the city but would also have provided jobs with reasonable pay to the devastated residents — money that by now would be flowing generously through New Orleans retailers and other businesses — tax money is disappearing into the pockets of contractors and subcontractors. And the underground labor pool the contractors are exploiting may be tomorrow’s wretchedly poor residents, clinging to subsistence at the edge of a rich nation.