This Week You Need To Know

Our 'Tsunami' Was Called Katrina!

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

August 31, 2005

The sheer horror of that human catastrophe which was set in the process of creation by the continuing ugly negligence of the Bush-Cheney cabal during the weeks before, during, and since the passing of the natural catastrophe of Katrina's "American Tsunami," has already unleashed a political after-shock, far greater in human and material consequences than the events of September 11, 2001. The aftershocks of what is already, the inevitable horrors to be met in the days just ahead, will be measured, chiefly in humanitarian, physical, and political-psychological consequences, which, combined, will have the greatest significance for the future of the current government of the U.S.A., and have ominous implications for governments also world-wide.

On Aug. 2, the general warning had been issued, that we must expect major storms to hit the Southern coasts of the United States during the immediate period ahead. That warning should have activated an order from the President of the U.S.A. to the relevant National Guard, FEMA, and other institutions, to develop an immediately operational plan of precautionary, preventive, and emergency action, to deal with all of the obvious contingencies represented by a probable "Camille-like" event. We now see, clearly, that those urgently needed emergency preparations did not occur.

This great human catastrophe has occurred, chiefly, because the Bush-Cheney Administration chose, willfully, to allow a clear warning of a mere natural catastrophe, to be transformed into the present, vast human catastrophe. The President unfortunately, was on what appears to have been a permanent vacation; the Vice-President, unfortunately, was not.

The typical procedure would have been for the President of the U.S.A., on Aug. 2, 2005, or during the morning briefing on the morning after that, to put a relevant four-star or three-star general in charge, under a Presidential order, of an emergency task force of augmented Corps of Engineers and National Guard forces, in cooperation with FEMA, to craft an immediate war-plan for the worst-case expectation of one or more "Camille"-like events from Florida west along the Caribbean coast for the months of August and September.

Notably, the use of National Guard Blackhawk helicopters —then absent in Iraq —would have been a routinely included point of emphasis for such a contingency. The fact that the Cheney-Rumsfeld operations had stripped the relevant states along the Caribbean coast of much of this needed capability, would have been among immediate points for emergency corrective action at that time: as of August 2-3.

There is nothing new in the strategic thinking of European civilization for challenges of that type. Plato, in his Timaeus, made precisely the distinction and relationships between great natural and man-made catastrophes. The negligence of the Bush-Cheney Executive from Aug. 2, 2005 on, is the point of immediate guilt of that Administration in our obligation now, to distinguish between the murderous effects of a natural catastrophe, and the mass-murderous consequences of a man-made catastrophe created by the negligence of the incumbent Presidency.

As a result of that negligence, unless what are presently unlikely, miraculous rescue measures intervene, far more than 100,000 American lives are presently in immediate jeopardy, from combined direct and indirect effects in progress during the days immediately ahead. So far, the current theatrical posturing by the Bush-Cheney Administration, while sharks swim among the floating corpses in the streets of New Orleans, will do very little to deal with the immediate human catastrophe now in progress in the immediately stricken areas. The rescue teams which should have been deployed in readiness on the days before Katrina struck, were concentrated chiefly in National Guard units deployed, together with their helicopter-rescue capabilities, in Iraq.

However, the culpability of the vacationing mind of President Bush and the overactive propensities of the Vice-President Cheney who has taken over the job of replacement for the perpetually vacationing mind of the President, is only the relatively more recent contribution to the vast human economic and other catastrophes now suppurating northward from the coasts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Right now, a section of the United States, with direct effects on millions of our people, is being destroyed.

Beyond the sheer horror of what could have been prevented, even during the time available to President George W. Bush, Jr., since Katrina left the tip of Florida, there have been decades of negligence by the U.S. government and many others, negligence driven largely by a cultural paradigm-shift of the U.S.A., a turning away from the world's leading physical economy, to our present condition as a nation of virtual slave-labor shacks and vast gambling enterprises, where an essential part of the world's once-greatest agro-industrial power once dwelt. Over several decades of shift, since approximately 1967-68, from a production-oriented to a so-called "services" economy, we have allowed the destruction of the quality of productive employment and community life which had been our national standard of reference for the application of our constitutional principle of promotion of the general welfare of the people of the U.S.A. and their posterity.

In our zeal for ever cheaper labor, and lower taxation, we have been destroying the industries, farms, and basic economic infrastructure of the U.S.A., continuously, over a period of about thirty years. In that process, as we see in the Third World-like conditions developed proximate to the gambling paradises of Louisiana and other once-proud states, we have accumulated the pattern of negligence which permitted a "Camille"-like natural event to reduce an entire region of the the United States along the Caribbean coast into a spectacle like that produced by the way in which a deadly Tsunami hit the coastal regions of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India. These changes of the past three-odd decades, combined with a degree of negligence of the Bush-Cheney regime, is tantamount to gross, impeachable negligence; this negligence has produced a margin of effects which promise, at least, to be worse than those of Sept. 11, 2001.

The natural catastrophe, as Plato said, was beyond man's present power to prevent; the greater catastrophe was created by the unnatural conduct of the leadership represented by the President and his ostensible manager, the Vice-President.

Meanwhile, in Europe

When we compare these recent days' events here in the U.S.A. with the usual situation of kindred forms of catastrophes in Asia, we are confronted with our recollection of the advantage which modern European civilization came to enjoy, relative to Asia, for example, as a result of the basing of the modern form of sovereign nation-state republic on the principle of the supreme law of the common good. This is the principle of promotion of the general welfare for ourselves and our posterity, in the supreme law of our republic, the Preamble of our Federal Constitution. This same principle is pervasive, usually with less authority, but present nonetheless, especially since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, throughout the good nations of modern Europe.

This principle of natural law is otherwise known as the Christian principle of the common good, as the supreme principle of natural law to which all governments and peoples should be obedient. This principle has been the secret of all those economic and related achievements in promotion of the improvement of the conditions of life and freedom of peoples of European civilization, and elsewhere where admiration for the same principle is shared, as among Jews and Moslems as for Christians.

At the present time, what claims to be the higher law of individual greed, sometimes called "shareholder value," has systemically subverted our Federal Constitution, replacing U.S. law with the Lockean doctrine of law set forth in the Preamble of the constitution of that slaveholders' conspiracy known as the Confederate States of America.

At the present moment, as in political campaigns in Germany and other parts of Europe, as here in the U.S.A. itself, that great moral principle, on which all of the great achievements of modern European civilization in human rights and prosperity have depended, is in grave danger. The law of the jungle, as we witness in the worst cases of states in Asia and Africa, and as the same law of the jungle is amok in Central and South America, is afoot. It was that same predatory instinct, the law of the social-economic jungle, which had been the heart and soul of the Bush-Cheney Administration, even before Bush's 2005 effort to rape the Social Security system premised on the Christian principle of the general welfare; the Bush policy which has been the true spiritual inspiration of the catastrophic negligence which the Bush-Cheney team has inflicted, the human catastrophe heaped upon the routine natural catastrophe of Katrina.

On this moral issue, as reflected in the horrible negligence of the Bush-Cheney team, the entirety of humanity is placed in jeopardy, as the greatest financial crisis in modern history is now about to descend upon, not only the U.S.A., but the world as a whole.