New Orleans: Dress Rehearsal for the Big Ugly.

This is going to get kind of nutty, so let's get a few things straight right from the top: I don't think that the Bush administration WANTED New Orleans to be completely flooded, nor do I think that the FEMA-tards INTENTIONALLY let tens of thousands of people languish without food or water in the waterlogged ruins of the city for nearly a week. I don't think that they CARE that it happened, but it wasn't like they planned it.

However, for all the potential political fall-out that the botched relief effort might generate, in the long run, the New Orleans apocalypse will serve as good practice for the upper 1% when things got to shit on an international level.

The single unifying thread of the Bush administration's policy over the past five years has been the hollowing out of the federal government: cutting budgets, benefits, services, stuff you would think would be pretty goddamn essential (like, say, LEVEE MAINTENANCE AND IMPROVEMENT!) , and, when money is spent for politically expedient reasons (starting a cool war in Iraq, trying to bribe old voters with a Medicare drug benefit), financing it through borrowing, while cutting the taxes of the upper 1%. No matter the situation, no matter the crisis, no matter the cost, upper class taxes get cut. Even as congress reconvened to vote on a 10 Billion dollar aid package for hurricane-damaged areas, the first order of business is ending the estate tax permanently. Meanwhile, millions more Americans have fallen under the poverty line, health care costs and consumer debt spiral out of control, and the permanent underclass struggles through lives of unmanagable difficulty. The conditions that allowed so many to die in New Orleans did not start with the flood: they had been created by generations of systemic poverty and institutional neglect.

What's the long term goal here? It may not be conscious, but I believe that what the upper class is doing is essentially girding up for the end of the world. They are redirecting the flow of capital to such an extent that the gap in wealth between them and the other 98% of Americans (not to mention other 99.9999999999999999999% of the world's population), so that, when the government eventually collapses under the weight of its unmeetable social obligations, they will be able to survive. With their vast monies, they won't have to rely on a crumbling government and infrastructure. Gated communities, cleaned and sanitized by private contractors, guarded by private security details, travel via individual helicopters to visit their fellow oligarchs in other gated communities: safe, at all times, from the rabble, who will become more and more desperate as the tax-starved skeleton of the federal government begins to fall apart. Peak oil, the bursting of the housing bubble, rampant deficits, will combine to create an unprecedented, irreversible Depression.

The top 1% will be protected by the hermetically-sealed Halliburton universe that their tax breaks will buy for them. For the rest of us, American cities will all start to look like New Orleans on day three of the flooding. And the government will behave similarly. Witness the militarization of the Federal response to the New Orleans evacuation crisis: National Guard units surrounding the city, putting up cordons and preventing people from leaving the city, or the Superdome, at GUNPOINT. Witness the Hyatt hotel company sending a private convoy of water and food to the tourists and employees trapped in the New Orleans Hyatt on Wednesday while people were literally dying of thirst a block away at the Superdome. Witness those same tourists and employees being evacuated from the city on Friday BEFORE thousands of people who had been waiting at the Superdome for days in much worse conditions (National Guard soldiers even helped them with their bags). Witness the instant demonization of those who were trapped in the city, derided as looters, rapists, even insurgents (according to the Army Times). When the military finally entered the city, they talked of securing it, as if it were Tikrit.

This is going to be the drill from now on when the inevitable economic collapse causes cities across the country to fall into chaos. Those rich who had not yet repaired to the secure exurbs will be quickly spirited away, either by their private guards or the Army (even when the economy falls, there's always money for the Army, and plenty of people desperate enough to join, even if it means turning their guns on their own people). Everyone else will be corralled, contained, shot if necessary, and dehumanized into irrelevance by the media (there will always be a media: even the rich need distraction), and the destroyed cities will become permanent military encampments.

While the New Orleans disaster may prove sobering to those souls who worry about the capacity of their government to protect America, for the elite, it was a reassuring reminder that the government will always protect the right Americans.