Los tres presidentes will be asking for money, money, money for hurricane relief, and let’s hope they ask for some from the oil companies.

Meanwhile, the basic needs of water, food and shelter have to be fulfilled before financial donations can be processed. You can participate by joining a group near you to collect materials, or by starting a collection drive and helping it get to the refugees. That means getting hold of a truck and taking the essentials of water, ice, energy bars, bug spray and first aid straight to the victims, as a group in my community (Cheverly, Maryland) is doing.

Houston, Texas, is taking in at least 45,000 refugees. Here are some Houston destinations in need of items dropped off or delivered:

1. The Houston Food Bank needs volunteers and paper goods, cleaning supplies, bottled water, peanut butter, heat-and-eat foods, single-serving foods and snacks that don’t require refrigeration. (713-223-3700 or www.houstonfoodbank.org/katrina.htm)

2. The Astrodome in Houston needs most non-perishable items, but especially baby products like diapers and wipes. Drop off supplies at Gate 11, between McNee and LaConcha streets, on Kirby.

3. Food is needed at North Channel Assistance Ministries, 13837 1/2 Bonham Street.

4. Food is needed at St. Peter Claver, 6500 N. Wayside.

5. Food is needed at LangstonFamilyLifeCenter, 2814 Quitman.

6. The Katy Chamber of Commerce at 2501 S. Mason Road, Suite 230, is taking donations of goods and services. (www.katychamber.com or 281-828-1100)

7. The Houston Chapter of the Red Cross is accepting donations of bottled water in crates of 24 only. Drop them off at their office, 2700 Southwest Freeway.

8. The U.S. Coast Guard station at Houston’s Ellington Field is seeking donations of goods for hurricane victims. Call 713-578-3000 for information on their needs.

Products typically needed include:

Bottled water

Baby food and formula, baby wipes, diapers

Toilet paper, sanitary wipes, feminine products

Insect repellent

Socks

Flash lights with batteries

Aspirin, Neosporin, first aid kits

Plastic garbage bags

Propane tanks

Camping utensils, tarps, tents

Manual can openers

Pet food

Generators

Small AC Units

Liquid Soap

Canned goods (with can openers), trail mix, nuts, cereal bars, crackers

Getting water promptly to the victims and refugees of Hurricane Katrina is essential. One relief effort being coordinated in the rural South is the bottled water drive through Delta State University, in Cleveland, Mississippi – on Highway 61, about an hour and a half south of Memphis.

The campus Student Government Association is partnering with the BolivarCountyEmergencyOperationsCenter and the local Red Cross chapter. Donations will be accepted through Friday, Sept. 9.  

Here are the addresses for dropping off or delivering factory-sealed containers of water, as soon as possible:

·        Delta State University, Highway 8, Cleveland MS 38733 (1-800-GO-TO-DSU or 800-468-6378). Drop off at the information booth, first floor of the H.L. Union Building

·        Knight Rider Mart, intersection of Highway 8 West and Bishop Road (664 Highway 44 North), no phone number given

·        The Bolivar Commercial newspaper, 821 North Chrisman Av, ClevelandMS (662-843-4241) 

N.b.: The Bolivar Commercial office is probably the best bet, for now, unless you can reach someone at the local Chamber of Commerce or through the county. “Suitcase campuses” tend to be partly closed down on weekends, especially over a holiday weekend.

Call the Bolivar EOC (fire dept) at 662-843-2300 before sending or giving them any more water, because as of 3:46 p.m. EST they still had some left and want to clear out the space before taking on more water supplies.

“The water will be transported and dispersed throughout Mississippi to victims and work crews dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.”

Call the statement office at (662) 846-4715 for further information. [Unfortunately, phone communications will be at a minimum over the Labor Day weekend.]

Once again, we are all paying a price for the small-time chicanery of big corporations, and not solely with regard to surging (gouging) gasoline prices. Capital Plaza, at 6200 Annapolis Road in Landover Hills, Maryland, is geographically far removed from the initial impact of Hurricane Katrina, but it is still a microcosm of what could have been done.

As PG residents inside the Beltway know, the Capital Plaza mall space has sat underused for several years now while its owner-manager, the Nellis Corporation, tried unsuccessfully to land a series of big stores to serve as anchors for mall development. Some of the underused space was left when Hechinger’s, the large local hardware chain, went bankrupt, some when other department store chains went under. Compounding the problem, the landlord kept the mall’s remaining tiny, struggling business tenants on month-to-month leases for more than two years, basically guaranteeing that no vibrant mall traffic could grow and develop. This year, they terminated even those leases.

The result:  one million eight hundred thousand-plus square feet (1,805,560 sf) of commercially developed space goes begging, almost half a million square feet of it (491,650 sf) enclosed.

On behalf of the victims of the dreadful hurricane, we could have made some halfway decent lemonade from this lemon. Let’s start with the most important issue:  life and death. Citizens of New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport among other cities have been displaced and stranded with only their lives — without belongings, without shelter, without even food and water – sitting and lying on what remains of streets and highways. The cities and their terribly poor outlying rural surrounding areas have people clinging to their last half-bottles of water. These desperate American citizens do not have facilities even for sewage, much less for ordinary amenities that usually taken for granted. Making the situation more desperate is the fact that help can hardly get to them unless it is transported by air – meaning that cargo planes and helicopters are needed. And they can hardly get out to safer havens without air transport – meaning, again, cargo planes and helicopters.

The Capital Plaza parking lot is big enough for helicopters to land in and is also located conveniently near the College Park airport, which serves private planes.

The mall buildings at Capital Plaza are not palatial, by any means. I am well aware that only desperate people would appreciate being sheltered what remains of a shopping mall.

But the flood refugees are desperate. And those mall buildings do have, or until days ago still had, some essentials for minimal shelter, aside from floors, roofs and walls, they have or recently had plumbing, security, even air-conditioning. The parking lot is also more than big enough for back-up generators.

I am aware that the logistical difficulties of conveying refugees to this area would be immense. But the local American Legion and countless other organizations stand ready to help, should any organizing ability be offered at any level.

Unfortunately, the Capital Plaza property has been leased by the Wal-Mart corporation, after a stealthy local lobbying campaign using tactics of infiltration and duplicity. (Wal-Mart, of course, is the source of many of those guns now being used in looting New Orleans.)

And now Wal-Mart has already begun demolition at Capital Plaza. Perhaps if we move fast enough, we can intervene and can still use this space for the valuable effect of saving lives and health.

The power of a fantasy is not always reduced by its ludicrousness. Tin-pot “Il Duce” of Italy, Benito Mussolini, envisioned himself as heir to Julius Caesar and proposed twentieth-century Italy as a “New Roman Empire.”

George W. Bush, whose personal fondness for dressing up in costumes has been amply demonstrated, apparently fancies himself the rightist avatar of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a figure on the world’s stage on course to reverse everything accomplished by FDR and by the New Deal.

The parallel, which exists only in Mr. Bush’s mind, is becoming progressively more overt. CNN reports that the president is about to set out on a course of public speeches to compare the “war on terror” to WW2. The objective, bizarre as it is, is to make the “war on terrorism” seem a global war, and thus to make it into a global war. That innocent people are dying by thousands, and that American service personnel are being injured and killed, hardly weighs in the scales. The odd unit in the White House wanted to invade the Middle East (“We’re at war,” Bob Woodward quotes Bush as saying immediately after 9/11), and they did it; they want to exert an inappropriate control over the other branches of government, the states, and the press, and they’re doing that too.

The objective is not to reduce terrorism but to pump it up into the “global war” that administration mouthpieces keep claiming it is, relying partly on the self-evident fact that every nation includes a young male population, and partly on the reliability of their own policies to inspire hatred around the globe. Any thinking person knows you can’t actually fight “terror” with a “war” or send legions around the world to deal with guerrilla tactics, but the administration and its media outlets use the most transparently offensive Orwellian language to discredit peace itself, or any notion that maps onto rationality, and every Bush appointment and policy amounts basically to throwing gasoline on the flames. Meanwhile, that we actually have, in office, in the White House, an odd crew that at some level wants a world war is so genuinely unthinkable that it is almost impossible to state in public discourse. The unthinkable has become unmentionable, but it’s happening: our President Tlevesoor is operating to reverse Roosevelt on every significant foreign and domestic policy.

The signs are accumulating. Bush has made increasingly explicit criticisms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally, including remarks about “Yalta” made abroad. Inveterate antagonists of New Deal policies including Social Security are being nominated by Bush for positions they would never have gotten before, including judgeships. The White House has even attacked Social Security (backing off for now), and according to Professor Yoshi Tsurumi of Baruch College, who taught Bush at Harvard Business School, Bush referred to Social Security and Medicare as “socialism” thirty years ago. Tsurumi has confirmed these remarks to me in a telephone interview.

The assault through private depredations is not just on Social Security but on all security. The Bush administration is not merely attacking Social Security; it is bent on undermining all security for a huge and self-confident middle class. The attacks are indirect as well as direct. When an employer like Wal-Mart moves into an area without providing affordable health benefits, the cost of employee health care is thrown upon Medicare. Policy moves that weaken private charity or state services throw a further health burden upon Medicaid. Meanwhile, corporate employers are not exactly being encouraged to provide good pensions for their employees. While corporate income at the top goes ever upward with bonuses, stock options and “golden parachutes” either not tied to performance or tied mainly to stock price, pensions are joining health insurance as a benefit out of reach even for middle management. A court decision allowed bankrupt United Airlines to break its pension promises.

Meanwhile, the White House has not supported the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which was designed to shore up employees’ retirement plans like those at United. And while taxing huge inheritances is falsely called a “death tax,” the administration continues to impose what amounts to a “survival tax”; patients in long-term care or assisted living generally have to use up all their assets in the world to qualify for Medicaid. And it goes without saying that any effort to prevent or to redress abuses through collective bargaining, public agencies like OSHA, or private litigation is savagely opposed by everyone working with the White House.

Even a short chronology from the over-all ‘Plamegate’ timeline is informative:

April 21, 2003: Judith Miller article appears in the New York Times, buttressing administration claims about Iraq WMDs (“smoking gun” etc); Miller also appears on Fox News the same day making the same claims about an Iraqi scientist as source for WMD claims.