Shoot to Kill...Americans?
By louisehartmann
Frontline, The New Orleans Times-Picayune and ProPublica are reporting that in the jumbled days after Hurricane Katrina an order circulated allowing the New Orleans police to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department. Some officers who were aware of the order say they refused to carry it out. Some viewed it as fundamental change on the use of deadly force, which only allow police to fire in protect themselves or others from clear physical threat. The accounts of orders to "shoot looters," "take back the city," or "do what you have to do" are fragmentary and it remains unclear who originated them. So far, no officers implicated in shootings have used the order as an explanation. What is clear is that when local government, was wiped out, and state government was paralyzed, by a massive hurricane, the "authority of last resort" - the federal government - was ignoring the horrors while President George W Bush first went to a birthday party in Arizona and then a country music concert in California. By the time Bush's advisers finally sat him down and forced him to watch a DVD of news coverage they had assembled, 4 days of horror had passed and almost 2000 American citizens were dead. During this first nightmare week the mostly black citizens of New Orleans hit hardest by the flooding received from all levels of government neglect and bullets rather than food, water and shelter.
Comments
#2
What your post immediately brought to mind:
"I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I've been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life."
How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned:
http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2008/06/06/rove_katrina
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Images of Thom
At Mondragon - both the mountain and the cooperative city - in Spain (written about in "Threshold" book)
From Cracking the Code:
"No one communicates more thoughtfully or effectively on the radio airwaves than Thom Hartmann. He gets inside the arguments and helps people to think them through—to understand how to respond when they’re talking about public issues with coworkers, neighbors, and friends. This book explores some of the key perspectives behind his approach, teaching us not just how to find the facts, but to talk about what they mean in a way that people will hear."
From Screwed:
"The powers that be are running roughshod over the powers that OUGHT to be. Hartmann tells us what went wrong — and what you and I can do to help set American right again."
From Unequal Protection, 2nd Edition:
"Hartmann combines a remarkable piece of historical research with a brilliant literary style to tell the grand story of corporate corruption and its consequences for society with the force and readability of a great novel."
These kind of clues are how we know how far down the slippery slope of Freedom vs. Security we have slid. It reminds me of a quote from, Orwell Rolls In His Grave, where people recoil from tragedy's and accusations like this in a general failure of imagination, and nerve.
All we have are whistle-blowers now. Were trapped in a corporate media bubble, and masses will never know from them what is actually happening, and as such we are all headed for an abrupt stop.
It reminds me of a little known theory in physics having to do with how order arises from chaos; A complex system (society/civilization) creates more complexity to deal with the entropic ever changing universe, until it collapses under the weight of its own complexity. It's why empires fall.
However given Natures desire to conserve energy/matter, a new system always arises out of the ashes of the old, and begins it ascension up the ladder of complexity, in an attempt to outrun the ever rising tide of Entropy.
I know I sound like Prof. Falken here, but untill a large enough majority of us recognize whats happening, we're only sliding faster.
The, "I just can't believe that could happen" crowd, Right and Left, are about to be the death of us all.