UN PO DI CULTURA ECCHECCACCHIO
regà, ho deciso che dobbiamo cominciare a parlare di altro su sto blog, stiamo finendo gli spunti, quindi copio e incollo un articolazzo che mi era piaciuto molto... per non occupare tutto la pagina ne copio un pezzo qui, poi il resto nei commenti... check this out!
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The Flagging Empire
By PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS
Saturday, September 10, 2005 Updated at 2:07 AM EDT
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
All the television pictures from New Orleans of water with people and houses under it certainly captured the world's attention. What the world attended to, however, wasn't so much the feeble efforts to relieve the city as the startling and unfamiliar sight of, as one of my Iraqi e-pen pals puts it, "so much terrible poverty in a country so much rich."
Many of the people being winched off rooftops did not even own television sets, let alone cars or telephones, so it is hardly surprising they had made no plans to escape until their shacks were under 20 feet of water. Another Iraqi pen pal was disturbed by the sight of the looters: "Some I see, they look not much human, like wild men." Some were also cops.
But, as a rehabilitated looter myself — I was in Baghdad two years ago when it fell to the invading Americans — I am in no position to judge a little petty pilfering, particularly when the perps have just lost everything they owned. All in all, the general feeling I derived from these ripples of Arab thought was that, in terms of peeling the veneer of society back to reveal what lurks beneath the codes of law and those who enforce them, the Iraqi capital comported itself a good deal better than New Orleans did.
At least under Saddam Hussein, everyone knew the government lied to them about everything all the time, and also that the media were merely a wing of the regime. Americans may just be waking up to a similar realization, since, thus far at least, no one has told them just how disastrous this disaster is going to be for the nation. You can always tell when the neocons are rattled by some event: They accuse anyone discussing the corporate or government role in it of playing politics with human tragedy. This, of course, is not something they would ever do.
An Egyptian friend of mine was stunned at the inadequacy of the U.S. government's immediate response to the flooding: "They have no trouble sending their armies to the outer reaches of the globe to invade or bomb, so why is it so hard to get help to their own people?" Poor as it is, he added, his country would have thrown all it had into the rescue of its citizens. Of course, being a military dictatorship, Egypt also would have found this a lot easier to do. But the fact remains that members of the U.S. Congress knew all about the disaster potential in New Orleans, so why didn't someone push the issue harder?
Clearly, in the Rumsfeldian system, the flooding of New Orleans was a "known known." CNN's "meteorologists" may not have realized the real danger lay in the sea surge after the storm — they concluded the city was safe the moment the winds had passed. But an article in the October, 2001, issue of Scientific American described the city as "a disaster waiting to happen." According to writer Mark Fischetti, "scientists at Louisiana State University, who have modelled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die." What were the chances that a hurricane strong enough to wreak such havoc would actually occur in the New Orleans area? Better than good, a question of "when," not "if," various authorities told Mr. Fischetti. Therefore, all the more puzzling to Scientific American was the most unscientific response this incipient crisis had received from America's rulers: "Thus far, however, Washington has turned down appeals for substantial aid." And by October, 2001, the government wasn't about to change its mind. The horror inflicted upon New York City and Washington four years ago tomorrow had pretty much guaranteed that for quite some time "substantial aid" would be going to something unscientific, though very American: the War on Terror and vengeance for 9/11.
In hindsight, the $14-billion price tag on the plan that had been drawn up for saving Louisiana's coastline and the Mississippi's delta now must look like a bargain to a Congress that has agreed to $50-billion in aid alone.
It is safe to say that relocating more than a million people, along with the loss of the nation's largest port, and the other economic consequences from Hurricane Katrina will bankrupt the United States. Or would, if anyone dared to call in the country's debts, which now exceed any number of dollars one can write meaningfully — particularly since no one seems to know just what a trillion is anyway. It's a known unknown. The unknown part is what happens to a nation that owes this much money: No other one has ever racked up such a tab. Even so, in the eyes of the world, the emperor stands naked. Monday's issue of London's The Independent noted: "We could be witnessing a significant moment in America. Hurricane Katrina has revealed some uncomfortable truths about the world's richest and most powerful nation. The catastrophe in New Orleans exposed shocking inequalities — both of wealth and race — and also the relative impotence of the federal authorities when faced with a large-scale disaster. Many Americans are beginning to ask just what sort of country they are living in. There is a sense that the struggle for the soul of America is gathering pace." There is also suddenly a sense that the American Empire is in decline, that the only successful wars it has ever waged are the ones against the environment and its own people.
There have been many other omens of such a decline this year. A few days before Katrina struck, for example, tiny Uzbekistan requested that the United States close its military base in the former Soviet republic and remove its troops within six months. This came just a month after a body called the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) asked for a timeline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Central Asia. Originally composed of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the SCO was created in 1996, admitted Uzbekistan in June, 2001, and more recently granted observer status to Pakistan and India . Thus, it embraces a quarter of the world's population and dominates the heartland of what Anglo-American strategists used to call the world island. Although the SCO was formed as an economic union, the joint Sino-Russian manoeuvres scheduled for later this year are beginning to make it look more and more like a military one.
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