Bush Administration "Incompetence"

[Amended on Tuesday September 06. Minor corrections, some clarifications and expansions, and
a new section on "N'awleans World (at the end of the post).]

As yet another Bush Administration disaster hits the people of the US I see intelligent people blaming this administration for incompetence. That is just not the case (or at least not to anything like the degree they believe). And to understand why this disastrous (for the bulk of the US) administration is not incompetent you have to understand their true objectives and how those objectives differ from yours.

Imagine that you take your car in to be serviced and the mechanic "accidentally" sets the gas tank alight and the car is a total write-off. From your perspective, with the objective of getting the car serviced, the mechanic is totally incompetent. However, the mechanic has heard a (false) rumour that you've been screwing his wife so his objective is to fuck you over and make you believe it was an accident due to his incompetence.

Yes, if the Bush administration actually meant any of their campaign promises and the stuff they keep spouting (other than, of course, giving as much money as they can to their obscenely rich cronies) then you would be entitled to believe that they were well-meaning but incomptent. But if there's one thing we've learned it's that Bush lies about everything (unless it's giving even more money to his rich cronies). There is not a spark of humanity in any of the senior figures in the administration, it's all about stealing from the poor to give to the rich. And in that respect they have been fairly competent (they could have stolen more and upset fewer people had they been good con-men, but they are achieving their objectives). To quote from advice during an earlier scandal that nearly resulted in impeachment: follow the money.

9/11

Take, for example, the apparent gross negligence over the warnings about 9/11. Nobody could ever have imaginged aircract being used as missiles, not even if they'd seen Tora, Tora, Tora, or the pilot episode of The Lone Gunman, or seen the anti-aircraft batteries protecting Bush, Rice et al. at a G8 summit in Greece only months beforehand. Bullshit! On the very day it happened, Cheney was personally in command of at least one exercise simulating that very event. But then look at what they gained:

• Bush got a much needed boost in his plummeting popularity ratings.
  
  
• Bush's rich cronies at the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) got the trans-Afghan pipeline contract the Taleban had recently reneged on. That pipeline was a vital link to what was estimated at the time to be around $5 trillion in oil reserves in the Caspian Sea Basin.
  
  
• Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay needed that pipeline desperately because of a white-elephant power-plant he had built, and was contracted to run for a fixed cost, in India. Had the pipeline come along in time to provide cheap natural gas to India then "Kenny Boy" might have been able to paper over the cracks long enough to steal even more Enron money.
  
  
• The Republicans got the excuse to ram home the inappropriately-named USA PATRIOT Act which tramples over civil liberties and allows them to act against anyone who might expose their crookedness.
  
  
• Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton (to which he still has proven financial ties despite denying them) got gigantic no-bid quartermastering and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not only that, Halliburton didn't even do an honest job, inflating prices so high they're beyond credibility. Not only that[squared], Halliburton actually charged those vastly-inflated prices for goods and services they did not supply. Oh, and the Halliburton subsidiary KBR was implicated as a go-between in the CIA's smuggling of opium from Afghanistan to fund black ops like Iran/Contra so is probably doing so again.
  
  
• An excuse to invade Iraq for oil. Something that had been on the plans since 1992 when Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz drafted a strategy report for Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney suggesting that the US needed to invade Iraq and the rest of the Middle East to steal the oil (it was more politely phrased than that but that's what it boiled down to). This was a plan that would be brought up again by Zalmay M. Khalilzad in 1995. You don't recognize the name? He was formerly Chief Consultant to the aforementioned Unocal. After the US invaded Afghanistan he was made Special Envoy to Afghanistan. After the US invaded Iraq he was made Special Envoy to Iraq. I think you can figure out who will be appointed Special Envoy to whichever country Bush next invades for oil.
  
  Various neocons popped up over the years espousing the same thing. In 1997 the neocon thinktank Project for a New American Century was formed. Key figures included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, James Bolton, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, William Bennett, Dan Quayle, and James Ellis (JEB) Bush . All people who are, or have been, either been key figures in, or exerted powerful influence upon, the Bush administration. In 1998 PNAC tried (and failed) to convince Bill Clinton to invade Iraq and depose Hussein even if he couldn't get the full support of the UN Security Council (where else have we heard of that plan?)
  
  In 1999 at a speech to the London Institution of Petroleum, Dick Cheney speaking of the impending shortfall between demand and supply of oil stated that:
  
  

  
  [...]the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.
  

  
  
  In 2000 PNAC released a "white paper" which was almost identical with the administration's strategy plan adopted after 9/11. Pre-emptive strikes. Ad-hoc coalitions but a willingness to act alone if necessary. Military imperialism, with a view to dominating natural resources (i.e., oil).
  
  Can you imagine that? These people have been having wet dreams about invading Iraq for its oil since 1992 and then on September 11th 2001, because of their own apparent negligence and incompetence they were lucky enough to get their dream come true with an excuse to invade Iraq. Well, you might not believe it if you follow the money.
  
  Oh, and here's a very interesting phrase from that PNAC white paper:
  
  

  
  The process of transformation [of the US military into a gang of invaders supporting the theft of oil] is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.
  

  
  

In case your memory has let you down, 9/11 was only the second attack by an enemy upon US soil. The first attack was Pearl Harbor. Both attacks were unannounced by the perpetrators although in both cases there were very strong indications of impending attack. The number of casualties were approximately the same in those two attacks. It was for these reasons that 9/11 was widely referred to as "A second Pearl Harbor." A new Pearl Harbor. The sort of event these neocons dominating the Bush administration were yearning for so they'd have an excuse to invade Iraq for oil.

So because of their "incompetence" the very sort of event they predicted would be necessary to make their dreams come true happened and their wet dreams actually came true. And they've convinced most people that at worst they were incompetent and at best it was their underlings in the CIA who were incompetent. Follow the fucking money.

The WTC

This deserves to be dealt separately from 9/11 itself because the targets of the attack could have been any high-rise or cherished building. The Sears Tower. The Empire State Building. The Capitol. The WTC was not chosen randomly by some crazed arab.

The twin towers had never run at a profit. You'd think that if the Rockefeller's (who were really behind the cut-out organizations) couldn't run them at a profit then nobody could. You'd have to be damned confident of your business skills (or incompetent) to think that you could. And yet just seven weeks before 9/11, Larry Silverstein bought them. By coincidence, that was the time the Pentagon were drawing up firm (not provisional) plans to invade Afghanistan even though they had no reason to do so at that time and world opinion (and international law) would have been against them.

The original owner of the twin towers didn't have insurance against acts of terrorism. So the Rockefellers were really lucky that Silverstein (whether supremely confident in his business acumen or supremely incompetent) came along. Had Silverstein not bought the towers, the Rockefellers would have made a heavy loss. Silverstein had the foresight to take out insurance against acts of terrorism.

Now here's where you have to question if Silverstein was a genius or an incompetent. If you're going to buy an expensive property, particularly one nearing the end of its design life, you'd get a survey done. You'd check the construction plans, you'd get the building surveyors in, the whole works. But Silverstein clearly did not do that.

How can we know this? Well, remember the outrage about Bush forcing the EPA to lie and say the air was safe to breathe when it wasn't? Once again he showed that he values monied interests more than the health and safety of those who aren't obscenely rich. One of the reasons the air wasn't fit to breathe was that it was full of asbestos. That asbestos came from the twin towers, which were among the last buildings in NYC to use asbestos in their construction before it was outlawed.

What difference does that make? The normal way of demolishing a high-rise is with a controlled explosive demolition. It's quick and it's cheap. A few experts spend a week or two going over the plans and placing explosives. You've probably seen films of this type of demolition on TV. The building collapses in on itself very quickly and almost all of the large debris is contained within its own "footprint." If you haven't seen a controlled explosive demolition you have almost certainly seen the collapse of the WTC towers, which looks remarkably similar.

The authorities would not have permitted a controlled explosive demolition of those towers precisely because of the asbestos it would release. Demolition of those towers would take many, many men. They would all have to be wearing airtight suits. They would have to work their way slowly down from the top using hand-held power tools. The section they were working on would have to be encased in a gigantic balloon-like covering with very powerful pumps sucking air in and passing it through gigantic filters so that no asbestos particles escaped. The airtight suits, the balloon-like covering and the filters would all have to be thoroughly decontaminated on at least a daily basis. Expensive enough that even the Rockefellers, with all their vast wealth, would wince at the cost.

Yet Silverstein was so "incompetent" he either never looked at the building plans or had a survey done or thought that in the decades (at most) those buildings would last before their structural integrity could no longer be trusted and they'd have to be demolishd he could make enough money to pay for the demolition costs. From buildings that even the Rockefellers couldn't run at a profit, he was going to make enough profit to cover those immense demolition costs in (at most) a few decades and still walk away having made more profit than he could have made in interest had he put the money in a bank (either that or he is supremely incompetent).

So weren't the Rockefeller's lucky that Silverstein was so incompetent? And wasn't Silverstein lucky that the Bush administration were so incompetent that 9/11 happened despite all the warnings?

There are some surprising twists to the tale.

• The fires in the twin towers were not that fierce: there was a lot of black smoke indicating incomplete combustion and low temperature. A firefighter in the South Tower could see the seat of the blaze and said it would only need a couple of water lines to deal with it.
  
  
• The South Tower, where the angle of impact meant most of the fuel burned in a giant fireball outside the building collapsed in half the time of the North Tower. Imagine that. The less fuel, the hotter the fire burns and the more quickly it can cause the destruction of a building. Osama bin Laden is an evil fucking supergenius. He not only conceived of using aircraft and missiles when wunderkind Condi Lies 'R' Us could not, he invented homeopathic fire: the less you have of it, the greater the effect. With this homeopathic fire he could light a match and turn the earth into a cloud of vapour, because the less you have the greater the effect.
  
  
• The fires were dying down, as evidenced by the increasing darkness of the smoke (indicating incomplete combustion of the fuel) and therefore cooling, when each tower collapsed. It's obviously another wondrous effect of homeopathic fire: the colder it burns the hotter it is. I don't quite understand that, but it's clearly true. When the steel members were at their hottest the buildings were standing but as the fires cooled and the steel members cooled then the steel members softened and the buildings collapsed. I told you this guy was a supergenius. You can look at all the engineering references about the strength of structural steel and you won't find any mention of this effect. What you will find is that at the highest possible temperature of a fire caused by aviation fuel that constructional steel will still have more than 50% of its strength and that the building codes in NY require structural steel to have a strength of more than 6 times its maximum rated load.
  
  
• No high-rise of similar construction has ever collapsed because of fire either before or since. Not even the one in Madrid that was recently fiercely ablaze from top to bottom for seventeen hours. Of course, that wasn't a homeopathic fire but just an ordinary fire.
  
  
• Despite no similar tower before ever collapsing from a fire and architects wanting to examine the remains to see why these buildings behaved so differently, the remains were carted off before any forensic analysis could be made. The steel, which would have been of great interest, was sold off as scrap to smelters in foreign countries.
  
  
• The contractor in charge of clearing away the remains was Controlled Demolition, Inc.
  CDI is one of the world's leading companies in demolishing high-rises using controlled explosive demolition. It's only coincidence that the two towers collapsed in a way that looked exactly like a controlled explosive demolition. Of course, if it had been an explosive demolition then CDI would have spotted tell-tale signs and alerted the FBI that something was amiss. Really! To those of you who are thinking "the best way of ensuring that those clearing away the remains don't spot signs of a controlled explosive demolition is to hire the people who set the charges" all I can say is "For shame! How could you think such a thing?"
  
  
• Many senior figures in Bush's administration were formerly management figures in the oil industy (Condi even had an oil tanker named after her). The Rockefellers made their start in the oil industry (Standard Oil before it got split up) and are still major shareholders in the offshoots of Standard Oil). Most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer. The Bushes and the Saudi Royal family have very close ties. Relatives of Osama bin Laden were flown out of the US at a time when all air traffic was grounded.
  

If I were patient enough I'd go into detail about WTC 7 catching fire for no reason. About how WTC 7 collapsed even though no aircraft hit it. About WTC 7 being used to store evidence about various crimes that were on the point of an investigation re-opening. About WTC 7 holding evidence related to the Oklahoma City bombing. About how US military explosives experts said there is no way the truck bomb could have done that damage to the Oklahoma federal building and that it was a controlled explosive demolition. About how the Oklahoma building contained evidence about the Waco debacle. About how the remains of the Oklahoma building were carted away and buried (with barbed wire and armed guards protecting the burial site) before a forensic examination could be performed. About the company that carted away and buried the remains being Controlled Demolition Inc.

I don't know where the evidence relating to 9/11 is stored, but if it's a high-rise I wouldn't want to live or work in it because "incompetents" in the administration keep choosing to store evidence that might expose their "incompetence" in buildings that crazy terrorists just happen to decide to blow up. Freaky, huh?

Follow the fucking money.

Iraq

Then there is the apparent incompetence in Iraq. This bunch ignored sage advice from the State Department and the Pentagon about keeping the peace after the initial fighting was over. They ignored experts telling them their obligations under the Geneva Conventions to protect necessary infrastructure and instead posted guards to protect only the Oil Ministry and the Secret Police HQ . They illegally violated the Geneva Conventions by torturing prisoners and "incompetently" allowed details of those activities to leak out. The result is an escalating cycle of violence and destruction that will never end for as long as the US remains in Iraq. But look what they gained:

• Halliburton, Bechtel and the like are getting new funds every day to repair the oil pipelines that the insurgents keep blowing up.
  
  
• The large arms manufactures such as General Electric (who own NBC, incidentally, and it's just coincidence that NBC never says anything bad about the war in Iraq) and the Carlyle Group (George HW Bush is a shareholder and used to be a consultant - it was almost like he had a hotline to the pResident) are making money hand over fist.
  
  
• The big oil companies said before the war that they didn't want a war in Iraq, that it was the worst thing they could conceive of because it would likely decrease global oil production at a time that it was only just meeting demand. Those same oil companies have recently reported record profits, made because they can charge high prices in order to ensure that "demand drops to meet supply." Schweeet. And the mainstream media all fell for it - about the only anti-war sentiment they did report was the oil companies saying they thought the war was a bad idea. Need a bit more profit? Just arrange for "the insurgents" to blow up a pipeline again and tell the press that you always thought the war was a bad idea.
  



• In fact, despite the supposed Iraqi government, ukases put in place by Bremer mean that the Bush administration is in control of carving up Iraq's oilfields and insisting they be sold to US oil companies. Those ukases by Bremer are totally illegal under international law.
  
  
• They're constructing fourteen permanently military bases in Iraq which would come in very handy if they should want to invade one of the surrounding oil-rich countries. Not that such a thought would ever cross their minds.
  
  
• They're constructing the largest US Embassy in the world there. Iraq has no need of an embassy that large. Maybe if they were to invade all the other oil-rich countries in the area they're need something that size as to hold the imperial government of that region. Not that such a thought would ever cross their minds.
  

Of course, the war is taking a toll in blood and treasure. But the blood comes from poor people who enlisted because it was the only job they could find or because they hoped it would pay for an education. And thanks to Bush's tax cuts for the obscenely rich, and consequent effective tax increases on all but the obscenely rich (increases in state taxes to offset the reduction in federal grants), the money is coming out of the pockets of the poor, the middle class, and the lower-upper class but not the pockets of Bush's obscenely rich cronies.

Had the Bush administration listened to the people in the State Department and elsewhere things might have gone smoothly. No looting. No destruction of all the unguarded ministries. No destruction of the infrastructure after the initial fighting, so Iraqis would still have running water, working sewage systems and electricity. Above all, no hatred of the US by Iraqis and no cycle of violence. By now it could all have gone so smoothly that the US would have pulled out months ago. In fact, by international law, once order had been restored and a sovereign Iraqi government was in full control, the US would have been legally obligated to pull out but until order has been restored they are legally obligated to stay and fix things.

Had this crowd not been so "incompetent" the US would now be completely out of Iraq and none of those money-making opportunies for Bush's obscenely rich cronies would exist. Follow the fucking money.

The Economy

The economy is going down the shitter so hard and so fast it must be causing a sonic boom down at the sewerage works. Most people assume it is just a side-effect of Bush being so "incompetent" that he wants to reward his rich cronies no matter what happens to the economy (even though his father criticised Reagan's similar policies of "trickle down economics" as being "voodoo economics." But, in fact, giving the obscenely rich those massive tax cuts is merely a way of achieving an even bigger theft from the poor to give to the rich.

This is a standard ploy of those obscenely rich bastards known as international bankers. First they allow the economy to boom so the working class invest in shares and buying larger homes. Then they completely fuck the economy so that people have to sell those shares for pennies on the dollar and can't afford mortgage payments so have their homes reclaimed. Then all that wealth can be hoovered up by the obscenely rich.

BTW, just because the prices on every company's shares plummet it doesn't mean that the companies have no intrinsic value, although that value cannot be realized until the economy recovers. It's just that the people who bought shares when they were $10 each no longer have jobs and so the only way they can afford to eat is to sell the shares for whatever paltry sum they get. The price of goods and services is established by what we're willing to pay. One day you can afford to pay $1,000,000 for a house; the next day you have to sell it for $100 just to eat - but it's the same house, it's just that your income has plummeted. All the hard-earned work you put into paying your mortgage has now been traded for enough money to buy a week's food. Everyone is in the same situation, so it really doesn't matter if everyone agrees that a house like yours is worth $1,000,000, or $100 or $100,000,000 zorkmids. One day you planned on selling your $1,000,000 house so you could buy a $1,000,000 yacht. The next day you can only get $100 for your house but the guy selling the yacht can only get $100 so it all balances out.

Money is a "token trade economy" which means that instead of a farmer having to cart around a truckload of pigs when he wants to buy a car he sells the pigs for money and uses the money to buy the car. It's more convenient that way: the person he wants to buy the car from probably couldn't use a truckload of pigs and would have to find somebody to barter the pigs with for something he wants. And it's real pain asking somebody if they can break a pig because you don't have anything smaller. So these figures aren't real in any absolute sense, only in the relative sense of what everyone agrees they should be. The figures that have meaning are what your weekly wage is compared to your weekly living costs.

A house is $1,000,000, my weekly pay is $10,000, and my weekly shopping is $100? That's cool. A house is $100, my weekly pay is $10 and my weekly shopping is $0.10? That's also cool. As long as everyone is in the same system and no jobs are lost, the two situations are effectively no different. But when economies collapse jobs are lost for the duration of the collapse and your weekly pay is not $10 but zero. See the Charles Dickens character "Mr Micawber" for an excellent summary.

Well, everyone would be in the same boat it would if it weren't for the obscenely rich. During the boom times they encouraged you to spend your hard-earned cash on property and shares instead of putting it in the bank. So when the bust comes you have a house worth $100 and shares that are barely worth the paper they're printed on. But the obscenely rich have lots of money in the bank and they can afford to buy the property and shares. When the boom times return the house they bought from you for $100 is once more worth $1,000,000. By manipulating cycles of bust and boom they transfer $999,900 from your pocket to theirs. When the boom comes they have a house worth $1,000,000 and you once had $100 from them (long since spent upon food). So if you want somewhere to live and something to eat you'll have to work for a pittance until you drop dead - no retirement for you and that's how the obscenely rich want it.

When share traders "pump the market" in this way it is illegal and they face prison if caught and convicted (conviction is far less likely if your surname is "Bush"). When governments (rather, the powers behind them) pump the economy then they're either hailed as geniuses or incompetents. Bush is not incompetent, he's pumping the economy down just like he was instructed to. Follow the fucking money.

Iraq and the Economy

But there is another advantage to flushing the economy right now. The war in Iraq is grinding the army down. They're being killed by bullet and bomb. They're being given death sentences of rapidly-developing cancers because of the fallout from Depleted Uranium munitions. They're being stressed to breaking point. Recruitment is way down, with even gigantic recruiting bonuses not being enough to make up the numbers. Re-instating the draft would be political suicide because it would hit a very broad cross-section of society. The only people who could be certain of evading a draft would be the friends and relatives of the obscenely rich, which is how the members of this administration dodged the draft in Viet Nam (chickenhawks, the lot of them).

The draft isn't an option. When it's only those in poverty enlisting for the money and you don't have to enlist you're less likely to be concerned because it doesn't affect you. When there's a draft then unless your name is Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, or the like, then it could be you that gets drafted tomorrow. The elections after a draft would show such a massive swing to the Democrats that not even all the vote-stealing tricks used in the last two presidential elections could swing the result without a civil rebellion occurring.

The opinion polls of registered voters said 95% would vote Democrat, and the exit polls showed that 95% voted Democrat, but the Republicans carried the elections with 51% of the vote. It was obviously another 'moral values' thing. Or maybe those shy Republicans not wanting to admit they were going to vote Republican. And nobody would vote against the Republicans for reinstating the draft in this noble war on Terra because everybody agrees it's worth the sacrifice to honour those who have died in Iraq by sending more to die in Iraq.

Even the dictator of a Banana Republic would be ashamed of vote-stealing that blatant and even the oppressed citizens of a Banana Republic would rise up in arms. Then again, Bush is well on his way to becoming a dictator and the US is well on its way to becoming a Banana Republic, so if the Republicans get desperate enough they'll try it. But if they do need to rig the vote that blatantly it won't be because of reinstating the draft. That's one reason they won't have to rig the vote because it isn't going to happen.

When the economy collapses, which it will very soon, people will be queueing around the block at the merest possibility of getting a part-time job licking toilet bowls clean at McDonalds. They will be desperate for any job, no matter how lowly-paid, no matter how degrading, no matter what the labour conditions, just so they can "put food on their family." Oh, and look - there's the US Military desperate for warm bodies that it can turn into cold bodies to sustain Bush's plunder of Iraq. You can bet the recruiting bonuses won't be so high then. When the choice is you and your family dying of starvation now, or you hoping there's a small chance of surviving a term in Iraq so you can all be fed for another year, you're going to enlist.

It's a no-brainer. Maybe by the time you get killed in Iraq the economy will have recovered enough that your wife can get a job that pays a pittance and your children can work in coal mines for a few extra pennies. When the hunger pangs hit, you're not going to say "I'd rather that I, my wife, and my children all starve to death than enlist to serve in this illegal war to make Bush's cronies rich." Nope, you're going to be down at the recruiting office joining the long line to sign up.

The volunteer military is made up overwhelmingly of the poor who are desperate for a job or who hope it will pay for an education so they can lift themselves out of poverty. Bush desperately needs more people in the military. Due to his "incompetence" there will soon be a lot more poor people desperate for a job. Follow the fucking money.

Katrina

And you thought that the underfunding of flood defenses was yet more Bush administration "incompetence" while siphoning money to their obscenely rich cronies either directly in tax breaks or indirectly in munitions/reconstruction contracts.

The obscenely rich people flew out of New Orleans in their own private planes. The rich could afford plane tickets with an airline. The moderately rich could afford to fill their gas tanks and drive to safety. The ones who had no choice but to stay were the poor (who are disproportionately black). They're going to be refugees looking for some way to survive for months, if not years. There are already far more people seeking even the crappiest of jobs in the areas they have fled to that they don't stand a chance. Bush is constantly cutting funding for any sort of welfare. What are these people going to do? That's right, they're going to enlist because that might keep their family fed for a few months before they get killed.

Bush couldn't plan for a hurricane to hit New Orleans, but by underfunding disaster prevention measures across the nation he increased his chances of striking it lucky sooner rather than later. He would have siphoned that money off anyway, but if anyone in the administration realized that siphoning the money to pay Halliburton's outrageous no-bid contracts would increase the chances of a city's worth of poor people enlisting out of desperation, they would have chuckled at the thought.

The Bush administration so "incompetent" that it ignored all the warnings from FEMA about the disaster that was likely to happen? Follow the fucking money.

Conclusion

Those are just a few of the more egregious examples of this administration's greed and inhumanity. There are many others. But you remain unconvinced because you've heard the adage:

Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.

That applies to ordinary, decent, honorable human beings who possess a conscience. It does not apply to this administration. The second law from Bart (of bartcop):

Any time a person or entity makes a "mistake" that puts extra money in their pocket, expect them to make that "mistake" again and again and again.

Incompetence? If it was something that happened only occasionally it wouldn't be incompetence but misjudgement. If it was something that happened all the time but resulted in them losing money it definitely would be incompetence. If it was something that happened all the time and sometimes they made money and sometimes they lost money and overall they broke even it would probably be incompence. The more the winnings outweigh the losses then the less likely it is the result of incompetence.

Every so-called piece of "incompetence" displayed by this administration has resulted in money going into their pockets and/or the pockets of their obscenely rich cronies. Follow the fucking money.

Addendum Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Some typos and grammatical errors (I'm sure there are more) corrected. Some expansions and clarifications added which do not invalidate the initial post, merely avoid the possibility of people quibbling about detail or logic (for example, the Madrid fire lasted only 17 hours rather than the full day my increasingly-faulty memory told me). Also added stuff about Osama's fiendishly-clever invention of "homeopathic fire" (which is vaguely amusing).

And now a significant addition:

N'awleans World

There is so much about Amerikkka I know little of. I have since read that, because there was gambling allowed on Mississipi riverboats, investors had their greedy eyes on turning New Orleans into another Las Vegas. Big profits to be made. However, they'd have to find some way of moving out the poor people and taking over their property so they could turn N'awleans into a clone of Vegas. If there were beggars in the streets then Republican moralists like Bill Bennett (who made money preaching moral values) might be tempted to throw a dime in a beggar's cup while walking to the casino where he'd blow millions of dollars gambling. Of course, the casinos want every dime they can get, so the foolhardy rich must not be allowed to encounter the poor at any time.

Amongst the poor in New Orleans were great musicians. A few were fortunate enough to become famous and rich, but they were lucky. Among the poor in New Orleans were those who were master chefs in the art of Cajun cuisine. The music and the cuisine were as much a part of the attraction of New Orleans as the gambling. People visited to listen and eat, and some of those people also gambled on the riverboats. The riverboat operators made a lot of money from the gambling and the poor made a little money from the music and cuisine. The music and cuisine was the heart and soul of New Orleans and the gambling was a sideshow. But the gambling sideshow was more profitable than the main event.

And so it was to the advantage of the casino operators to rip the heart and soul out of New Orleans because people would still come to gamble on those "olde authentice rivere boatse." New Orleans would suffer a loss. The former inhabitants of New Orleans would suffer a loss. American culture would suffer a loss. But the casino operators would make a big profit and that's all that counts.

The damage wreaked by Katrina will give the casino operators what they want. It will be months before most of New Orleans is habitable again. The poor, who contributed the most to its culture will have to settle elsewhere and be unable to afford to return or will have to enlist in the military just to survive (for a few months before an IED gets them). Most of them will never be able to return. The heart and soul of New Orleans has been ripped out of its bloody chest and scattered to the winds, never to return. Which means a lot of vacant property that can be turned into casinos, and strip malls, and Churches of Elvis and similar tasteless (but profitable) crap. You think Bush underfunded flood defenses because he was incompetent? Think again. Follow the fucking money (if this is difficult for you, do a google search on
the keywords "Abramoff", "Delay", "Casino" and "Indian") and see what turns up.

Here is my vision for the future New Orleans It will be a theme park run by Disney called "N'awleansworld."

It will feature "authentic" Cajun cuisine that tastes little like the real thing. I suspect McDonalds will get the franchise on that so expect to see "McGumbo" (which will taste good but nothing like the real thing and will be about as nutritious as rat poison), and "McJambalaya" (which will taste good but nothing like the real thing and will be about as nutritious as rat poison) and McShrimpCreole (which will taste good but nothing like the real thing and will be about as nutritious as rat poison), etc.

It will have "theme bars" that play sanitized crap that bears as much relation to the real thing as elevator muzak[turdmark] bears to music. It will sound vaguely similar but will contain nothing whatsoever that stirs the soul with feelings of splendour or which queries in any way the status quo (particularly that bit of the status quo amongst inbred, bigoted retards in the southern states that thinks "niggers should still be slaves").

It will have animatronic[turdmark] "people of colour" scattered around to give you that "good ole N'awleansworld history." Like Cigar Store Indians ought to sort of vaguely remind you of your history (without bringing to mind the appalling genocide) these ought to sort of vaguely remind you of your history without reminding you that blacks are still discriminated against in the south but we pretend it's because they're "lazy welfare queens." These animatronic[turdmark] puppets will say things like "Yes, massa boss, us niggers can be house niggers if'n our skins is white enough like Colon Powell but if'n our skin is deep black then we are evil shirkers who must be horswhipped four times a day. Now please try some of this delicious McGumbo before you whip me."

You want to call me too cynical? Google for the terms "nixon" and "southern strategy". Fucking evil racist fucking bastard, exceeded in evilness by George HW Bush who was, in turn, exceeded in evilness by George Wanker Bush. Follow the fucking money.