A Tale Of Two Storms: Myanmar And New Orleans

From ZNet:

Consider, for just a moment, the Bush rhetoric; in fact, just consider one piece of it. President Bush criticizes the Myanmar junta for its failure to allow into the country foreign aid workers to help with disaster recovery. While this criticism appears to be absolutely correct, it ignores an interesting fact: in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster the governments of both Cuba and Venezuela offered badly needed assistance. The Bush administration, under those circumstances, either ignored the offers or turned them down. In fact, the Cuban government had experienced personnel on standby prepared to fly to the Gulf Coast (note: Cuba has a great deal of experience with hurricanes).

What is striking here is not only the hypocrisy of the Bush administration but that few commentators have even noticed. A global chorus of outrage has been expressed with the Myanmar junta, but a significant silence surrounds any comparison with the failures of the Bush administration's approach in the Katrina disaster.

And

In the case of Katrina, the economic policies over the years have drained the public sector of the resources that are needed for disaster response. In the case of New Orleans, as we now know (and as experts AND the people of New Orleans knew then) the levees were not in any shape to withstand a major storm. Coupled with this was the Bush administration's own incompetent response to the disaster, betraying a class and racial bias against the people who were the principal victims of the storm. The refusal to accept outside assistance from Cuba and Venezuela simply added salt to the open wound.

The Bush administration's hypocritical rhetoric should remind us that the Katrina wound has not been healed. The Bush administration has learned nothing from the disaster except how to take advantage of it to advance its pro-privatization agenda for economic development, along with the ability to change the demographics of New Orleans in order to make it more likely that the Republican Party can gain ground. In that sense i see very little difference in the response of the Myanmar junta and the Bush administration to disasters in which thousands of innocent victims have perished or been displaced.

More here.

I was completely infuriated at the time. During the Reign of Chaos, the week following the failure of the levees when the federal government did virtually nothing, I was shocked and amazed that one of the few things they actually did was to keep out people who were ready and willing to help. It wasn't simply throwing "salt on the open wound," as the above excerpt suggests: it was bending New Orleans over and fucking it in the ass, no lube.

And that's exactly what the ruling junta in Myanmar has been doing to its own people. Yeah, in the end, Bush really is no better than brutal third world military dictators. Only the Constitution, and our entire culture's longtime dedication to it, have kept America from resembling such countries more than it does already.

As for the deafening news media silence about such hypocrisy, this is totally normal. Predictable, even, when you apply Hermann and Chomsky's Propaganda Model of the US news media to the situation. That is, mainstream news media, zealously led by such respected "liberal" stalwarts as the New York Times and the Washington Post, always exaggerate the misdeeds of official enemies, ignoring what good they may do, and always ignore the misdeeds of the US and its client states. Bad, bad, evil Myanmar, keeping out foreign aid--this comes with the implicit suggestion that America would never do such a thing.

Well, America did indeed do such a thing, and, juxtaposed against the tragedy in Myanmar, and its rulers' dunderheaded response to it, that's news. That the American mainstream media pretend as though it never happened does nothing but make obvious their role as propagandists for the US political and business establishments.

Disgusting.

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