Gentilly Girl- a part of the 99%

September 19, 2007

Shock Doctrine Redux

Here’s another review of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”.

‘Nuff fucking said.

September 7, 2007

The “Shock Doctrine” in New Orleans

Well just bugger me with a tuning fork: I thought the B/S surrounding the “rebuilding” of the Gulf Coast in general, and New Orleans in particular, was just the Moron-In-Charge and the Corporate Capitalists’ way of having things their way down here. Sadly, I see that the Prophet, the architect of this insanity down here is Milton Friedman, the creator of the Chicago School of Capitalism.

Here’s some snippets from the Guardian UK in their extract of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”. (Read the whole thing please.)
“One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, “Uncle Miltie”, as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,” Friedman observed, “as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.”

And:

“In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as “the shock doctrine”. He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo”. A variation on Machiavelli’s advice that “injuries” should be inflicted “all at once”, this is one of Friedman’s most lasting legacies.”

And:

“Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.”

I’ve always been a Keynesian type of spirit: a Free Market with checks and balances on certain activities that affected the whole of Society. I never saw this one coming, but thanks to Ms Klein, mine eyes have been opened to Reality. That economic forces would be so brutal to an old culture just to play out their games, to justify their philosophy. My heart hurts, and mainly it hurts because we here in New Orleans may just lose this battle and become as banal a place as almost every other locality in the country is.

“This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman’s counter-revolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change – when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way – moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture – a flood, a war, a terrorist attack – can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.”

Sorry you “Creators”, I don’t wish to be a part of your freakin’ experiment. I want our City back.

Fuck you Chicago School capitalism. Fuck you to the Nth degree. I don’t desire your kind of “purity”.

August 26, 2007

“Hurricane George” is Coming This Week…

Or “How to FUCK an entire region in one easy lesson”.

FUCK YOU GEORGE! GET THE HELL OUT OF MY CITY, ASSHOLE!

Curtsey to Suspect Device.

August 24, 2007

I HATE Materialistic Capitalists…

Some snippets from a current article in People For the American Way:

“As the nation reeled in shock at the destruction of lives and communities wrought by Hurricane Katrina, Americans from all political perspectives came together behind the mission of helping the victims and rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Sadly, however, it seems that a few influential right-wing think tanks, pundits, and legislators see the devastation as a “golden opportunity” (in the words of Jack Kemp) to push through long-sought components of an aggressive and regressive economic and political agenda. Controversial proposals and program cuts that have failed to pass muster in calmer times are now being prescribed as supposedly necessary measures during a period of national crisis.” 

“The Meese report called for the creation of a so-called “Emergency Board” to identify and remove industrial regulations, including environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, financial regulations (to avoid “paperwork”), and worker protections like the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates that federal contracts pay prevailing wages. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, a foe of both regulations and organized labor, commented that the immediate gutting of worker protections is necessary because “[u]nions have never hesitated to line their own pockets with extra taxpayer dollars, especially at the expense of lower-skilled workers.”

“The feverish daydreams of the right wing—to shirk the responsibilities of the government to all its citizens and to shrink it to “the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”—have never been a secret, but neither have they been fully adopted under conditions that lent themselves to calm reflection. As the nation has its mind and heart focused on the Gulf Coast, now is certainly not the time to sneak through an extreme ideologically driven economic agenda that would sacrifice the well being of many Americans. On the contrary— the government must concentrate on rebuilding the lives and communities torn apart by Katrina and Rita, on the path of consensus, not opportunism.”

You know, I have always valued the Social Contract. It, much like the goal of having manners, is to provide the grease that keeps us from killing each other. This is how we obtain Social Justice in a widely divergent polyglot Culture.

All of us are different: varying circumstances, family connections, education… but the Social Contract in this country was meant as a leveling of the playing field. We, each and everyone of us have the Right “to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.  This is our right and responsibility to each other to uphold. It is the glue that holds us together.

For some folk to view the double catastrophe of Katrina/Rita and the Federal Flood of New Orleans a perfect time to subject the American people to a NeoCon social experiment is somewhat like the experiments of Dr. Mengele in Nazi Germany. This is about Human lives and dreams, not the Ruling Elite and their aquireing of more money and toys.

He who has the most toys and shit at Death is NOT THE WINNER. It doesn’t work that way in the ‘Verse. It’s about how and why we live our lives… that we see a little bit of ourselves in those we meet, and we honor their Right to be who and what they are, just as they should do in return.

The NeoCons cannot understand this. They are stunted developmentally as Human Beings, and the kindest act we can perform for these creatures is to place them in a safe place and keep them from preying on each other. Watch over them and hopefully bring some enlightenment to their dark little psyches.

This is why I’m a Progressive Socialist.

June 18, 2007

ICF’s Fun on the Yellow Brick Road Home

The Gret Stet’s Legislative Auditor’s Office just released an audit of travel monies paid to ICF for travel expenses… why am I not fucking surprised at the damn results?

“The state has paid the private contractor running Louisiana’s Road Home program $770,000 more for travel expenses than its actual travel costs so far, according to a review of the expenses by the state Legislative Auditor’s Office.

The audit, released Monday, said the state has paid ICF International Inc. $770,449 more for travel than its estimated costs for the travel of ICF employees and Road Home subcontractors from October through March 31.”

And ICF’s answer?

“ICF officials said that over the life of the three-year contract their travel costs could be larger than the $19 million it will be paid for travel by the state. They said they developed the travel budget in compliance with federal travel reimbursement standards.

“Given the high level of uncertainty in what the actual travel cost would be for such a large and dynamic Program, and over a nearly three-year period, the fixed-price nature of the arrangement presented high financial risk to ICF,” the company said in a statement responding to the audit.”

Round up these carpetbagging Virgina hams and send their asses back to an orbit around the Beltway. Freakin’ ICF earned less than $50M per year prior to taking on the Road Home Program, they’ve done a lousy job doing it, and they’re carving out more profit based on “possible travel expenses”? Travel to where you freakin’ money pigs? Are you going to take separate flights to visit each of the exiles who aren’t home so they can get their grants? No mooks, you will never do that.

Is this how you were able to “reward” your executives with large bonuses when all you’ve done as an administrator is screw the Program up? When you have strung out so many for so long in getting their Block Grants given by Congress for those victims of the Federal Flood of our City? (Like the 11 months we’ve been waiting to fix our house under this Program?)
Where is the Humanity in these Virgina fucks? How can they sleep at night? (Oops… forgot: have 10 Scotch & Sodas, take the Penial Recovery drug, and drop a sleeping pill. This way you can do your old lady for all of 3 to 8 Minutes, and then just roll over and enjoy the sleep of the unfairly enriched Carpetbag crowd)

Oh to Hell with giving these Carpetbabbers travel fare back to Old Vir-”ginny”.

Let’s hang these mooks, fight for our Reparations, and commence with secession from a culture that breeds these kinds of demons.

Sinn Fein!

May 9, 2007

Fuck Entergy NO

So the CEO of our worthless, shareholder-driven utility says that even after receiving many millions of $ from the Feds, customers will still have to face rapist quality bills, and he thinks this shit is fine?

Fuck Entergy and the fat-assed white shareholders. They need to get a real job instead of screwing working folks so that they have ways to pay for their Cheez-Wiz and Tostadas whilst they stare at American Idol.

It’s not that I hate white people, it’s just that I hate lazy, self-serving vegamatic assholes that do nothing but act as leeches upon those who actually work for a living. They are disgusting parasites, and all they deserve is a visit to the gator farm, or a bullet to their brains.

Later this week I’m going to release my buying guide and info for alternative energy. This is really important for the folks here in the City, but it will also help those beyond the borders of our forgotten territory called the Ilse d’ Orleans.

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