FPF: If you are only going to read one item today, read this
one!
As Franklin says: it's really worth reading it twice!
***********************************************************
Richard Franklin
FRANKLIN’S FOCUS: A FINE ESSAY ON AMERICA'S EMERGING GULAG*
This essay was sent to me by an esteemed subscriber who owns a
truly fine website. He sent it to me because he believed I would
enjoy reading some exceptionally fine writing for a change.
Not only is this a superb essay, it is expository writing at its
best.
As an essay, it beautifully relays the feelings and thoughts of
a writer. As a deliverer of critically important information, it
also shines.
You will enjoy reading this piece on both counts.
I normally don't send out two items within the same 24-hour
period, but this one is too good to be lying fallow on my hard
drive, even if only for another 24 hours.
As always, when it comes to fine essays, I recommend reading it
twice.
It is usually on the second reading that I'm most able to savor
a fine work. Try it. You'll see.
Warmest regards,
Richard
=========================================================
A Horrid Reality
by Sheila Samples
In a sordid slime, harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom--and for others' goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich--
Our god is marching on. ~Mark Twain
While recently watching George Bush's carefully orchestrated
performance from New Orleans' French Quarter a week late and a
billion dollars short, I was struck by the confused desperation
in his eyes, and I was overcome with sympathy.
Not at the spectacle of an out-of-touch derelict engineer racing
to catch the presidential train as it careened crazily out of
the station, but for the vulnerable and abandoned Americans
whose very survival depends upon his empty platitudes and
promises.
In Bush's multiple photo-op visits to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf
area -- including one released of him with his nose pressed to
the window on his initial "flyover" visit -- he's been
ludicrously stage-managed -- soaring nonsensical speeches,
floodlights, cathedrals shimmering in the background, hugging
female black victims brought to him for a camera shot, jouncing
around in the back of a truck, rigidly sandwiched between a
mayor and a governor and refusing to speak to either...This is
Karl Rove's idea of a "hands-on" kind of guy, sleeves rolled up,
hard at work. Bush doing his job. Protecting the American
people. 'Cause that's, like, you know, his job. Protecting the
American people. Did I mention his sleeves were rolled up?
That does it. No more flowery prose. No more screaming into the
wind for Americans to wake up before it's too late. No more
succumbing to an attack of the vapours while daubing my eyes
with a scented handkerchief and plaintively wailing, "when is
enough -- enough?" The reality is the panting war profiteers who
control Bush will never have enough. Their greed is ravenous,
insatiable; it devours everything in its path. They have no
intention of giving up the power and profits for which they have
worked so hard -- waited so long -- to achieve. Not now. Not
ever.
They plan to take it with them when they go. The war machine
Dwight Eisenhower warned us about is cranked up and running, but
it is not freedom they're spreading. It is fascism.
The reality is they are well on their way to attaining a rigid,
one-party international dictatorship; a New World Order wherein
the world and all its wealth and resources belong to a chosen
few -- them. If their plan works, the vulgar lumpen, the
underclass, the "people," will crumple under a cruel
nationalism, blatant racism and heartless militarism.
Like Thomas Jefferson warned -- if left unchecked, the greed of
private banks and corporations* will ultimately "deprive the
people of their property until their children will wake up
homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
The miserly response to Katrina should serve as a wake-up call
to those Americans who can still think. Fascism is on the march
and, when this administration threw down the gauntlet in New
Orleans, it declared open war on this nation's poorer citizens,
most of whom were Black.
White Americans swallowed the spin that FEMA's disaster
brigades, widely heralded for their immediate response to even a
spring shower blowing over the Florida coast, suddenly became so
incompetent when Katrina hit Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama,
they couldn't even figure out how to use the telephone or
deliver a bag of ice.
BLACK AMERICANS KNOW BETTER.
The reality is that FEMA worked perfectly -- a planned exercise
of bureacratic incompetency in order to expand Bush's powers to
declare martial law in the next disaster. It was a well-oiled
machine that thwarted every attempt to get help to those who
were too old, too ill or too poor to leave.
Looking back at FEMA's success in orchestrating "Operation
Ethnic Cleansing," I have to agree with Bush -- Brownie did,
indeed, do a heckuva job...
For example:
FEMA refused the addition of hundreds of assistance personnel
and dozens of vehicles, as well as food and water offered by
Chicago's Mayor Daley. It also refused to let the Red Cross
deliver food; in fact told the agency to leave and not come
back. Renita Hosler, Red Cross spokesperson, said they were "at
the table every single day" asking for access, but were kept out
by the uniformed military.
FEMA REFUSED TO USE THE FACILITIES OF THE USS BATAAN, a 600-bed
hospital ship that just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico
when Katrina made landfall. The USS Bataan is an 844-foot ship,
complete with helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and
water. It has the capacity to make its own water -- up to
100,000 gallons a day -- but this service was also refused.
Another state-of-the-art mobile hospital from the University of
North Carolina -- a convoy that included two 53-foot trailers,
100 surgeons and paramedics, food, water and medicines -- was
forced to park in a gravel lot 70 miles north of New Orleans.
They were marrooned there for several days, frustrated by news
that people were dying and that disease was becoming more
widespread because of contaminated water.
Vice President Dick Cheney directed officials at the Southern
Pines Electric Power Association, not once but twice, to restore
gasoline and diesel fuel pipelines before restoring much needed
power to rural hospitals. Amtrak's offer to help evacuate the
sick and elderly from hospitals and the detention center was
rebuffed, and three trailer trucks loaded with water from
WalMart were turned away.
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, south of New
Orleans, told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" that FEMA
officials also prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000
gallons of diesel fuel, and they cut the parish's emergency
communications line, which was restored, but Broussard said the
Parish sheriff was forced to post armed guards to protect it
from FEMA.
FEMA ORDERED FIRST RESPONDERS NOT TO RESPOND
On its own website, FEMA ordered First Responders not to respond
"unless dispatched" because "self-dispatching volunteer
assistance could significantly complicate the response and
recovery effort." To emphasize the order, FEMA blocked a
500-boat citizen flotilla loaded with aid, and slapped Germany
in the face by turning back a German government plane loaded
with 15 tons of food.
All things considered, it looks like FEMA's response to Katrina
was a catastrophic success. The only thing Bush and his racist
cohorts didn't take into account was the universal shock that
met his unconcerned efforts to flush poverty and crime down the
toilet -- the outrage at remarks of Baton Rouge Republican
Richard Baker, who chortled that God had finally cleaned up
public housing in New Orleans, and of House Speaker Dennis
Hastert, who suggested we could save money by just bulldozing
the area and moving on...
THE LOOTING GOING ON IN NEW ORLEANS is being done by
Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root and the Shaw Group, both
clients of lobbyist and former FEMA head Joe Allbaugh, and by
Bechtel, whose CEO is on Bush's Export Council. Bush immediately
rescended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act which requires federal
contractors to pay workers at least the prevailing wages in the
area. The body snatching is being done by the same funeral-gate
firm that Bush was involved with in Texas -- Kenyon -- a
subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a
scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the
Bush family.
Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally
discarding and desecrating corpses.
HURRICANE KATRINA RIPPED THE MASK FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
and, for a brief moment, exposed the sheer evil, and the
bigotry, racism and greed that lies just beneath the surface.
Those who dared to look upon the face of Bush's god cannot go
home again. They know that the reality these greedy monsters
create for us is one of relentless, non-stop chaos.
Being sucked up into Bush's reality is like stepping out of the
shower, soap in your eyes and, as you fumble for a towel, the
phone jangles. Someone rings the front doorbell while
simultaneously beating on the door -- someone else is pounding
on the back door, shouting incoherently. It is the witching hour
and you are home alone. The dog is barking wildly, the cat is
yowling while scratching frantically on the screen. In a panic,
you race to the window, and fall back in shock. The entire
landscape is exploding in a massive fireworks display. You can
see shadowy figures moving furtively across your lawn, and you
wonder briefly what they are doing, but they disappear into the
flashing lights and noise.
BECAUSE OF WORLD OPINION AND MEDIA COVERAGE, WE LUCKED OUT ON
THIS ONE, but the next "national emergency" -- possibly a flu
pandemic -- could be democracy's last hurrah. Bush is already
boasting of using the military to "quarantine" those affected.*
And it won't be in our homes -- this isn't the measles with the
school nurse tacking a "quarantined" sign on our front doors.
Last year, Bush authorized preliminary studies for the rapid
construction of a National Detention Center Program, complete
with a series of detention centers, to be added to the existing
600 units now in place.
Also, The Department of Homeland Security is consulting with an
Israeli company, Israeli Prison Systems, Ltd. - [Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/c4t98 ] - for the expedited construction
of modular internment camps to be located in rural areas
throughout the continental US and Alaska.
SOUND LIKE A CONSPIRACY? I would hope so, because to survive, we
must come to grips with the fact that we are victims of a vast,
insidious conspiracy fueled by the vociferous greed of those who
have no intention of relinquishing their power.* Political
author Frank Kent once said, "The evils of government are
directly proportional to the tolerance of the people." We must
become a bit more intolerant of those who would control us, or
we will soon be forced to fight for our very lives in the horrid
reality of the New World Order.*
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US
Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor
for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at:
rsamples@sirinet.net. © 2005 Sheila Samples
[Enditem] - Samples story Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/82syn
Related links:
* Concentration camps in the US - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/a3dkg
* Military units: Americans in America killing Americans...
Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/degwj
* US: massive quarantines enforced by the US Military - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/clzbw
* 'Making Dead Friends' - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/5t9j7
* First the Russian revolution, now the end of the US? - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/cygcl
* 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - BBC: video & text-interview of
the United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.:http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v
* American millionaire and car magnate Henry Ford warned 85
years ago about what was permanently being done by this
malignant murderous group, which has proceeded wrecking the rest
of the world with it's greed - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/2xz35
* Are their Corporate News Media Incompetent, Criminally
Negligent or Complicit? - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/cqpfe
* Brainwashed? Take the free 'Gullibility Factor' test to find
out if you're really a mind slave or not - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/cbgnc
* Colin Powell: 'It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the
policies of the state of Israel' - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/22p6c
* Wayne Madsen: What has Israel to do with 9/11? - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/bj754 - 'American' neocons - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/b5vsb
* Help all the troops of whatever nationality to come back from
abroad! We need them badly at home in many countries - AND WITH
ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE PAID FOR BY TAXES - to fight with us
against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managing
ilk - Url.:
http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
* The World Can't Wait! - Drive out the neocons and their 'Bush
Regime' - Mobilize for November 2, 2005! - Url.:
http://www.worldcantwait.org/
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