September 5, 2005

We return with great sadness in our hearts, and with a great pain of shame!

How shameful is the ruling class in the U.S.A? Or, how shameless!

Our collective lived in the southern Louisiana town of Lafayette, during four of our youthful, formative years. Being only a two-hour drive away, New Orleans was always the ideal place to spend a weekend, or just a crazy night. We have been to our share of Mardi Gras and have taken many a fond walks down St Charles Ave, beholding the mixture of Spanish, French, and Colonial architecture, riding on the tram, going by Tulane and Loyola universities, and will always remember with a smile how amused we became when, upon first looking at a map of the city, we realized that Jefferson Ave ran parallel to Napoleon Ave, and fruther, of the two, Napoleon Ave was the more substantial one. And, of course, we remember the French Quarters. Bourbon Street is alive in our minds, as are the raw bars, the Jazz bars, the tourist traps; Pat O’Brian’s and its Hurricanes (a most potent drink that tastes like an innocent, most delicious punch, yet when not drunk carefully, will knock out any young-blooded boy or girl after a mere two tall-glassfuls.)

We weep as we write these words, however, not because of buildings lost, but because of what we saw on TV screens and in pictures on the internet or in newspapers: thousands upon thousands of people looking like they had been abandoned by all the human beings in the world. We had seen Third World refugee camps far better organized than the carnage we were seeing on television. And even that was not the worst of it.

To our horror, we saw soldiers pointing guns! At whom, we asked ourselves, are they so keenly pointing their ugly guns? At the victims; at those poor victims of this other-worldly tragedy! At the people who had already lost their loved ones, their homes, and all their belongings; at people who were drenched, hungry, thirsty, and at children, whose basic needs were most maliciously being neglected by the anti-social humanity within which they were born; cast into this world as if mere garbage to be washed away into the seas!

This horror has been brought to us by naked, unashamed, unscrupulous, unsheathed and unchecked capitalism of an imperialist nature that constitutes the U. S. ruling classes’ preferred form of being. The ugliness, the shame, and the downright anti-humanity of this reality should be seen clearly without any delusions.

In two articles previously published by our collective, we welcomed the peoples of the North to the Third World, as well as painted a general picture of the Nomadic Abstracts, into which capitalism transforms all of us: a price world capitalism is not only willing to pay (since it bears not a real 'cost’ for them), but is actively organizing to make sure will be paid by the working classes.

New Orleans is a textbook picture of that price. Look at it without looking away!

The true Reality of the existence of the citizens of the so-called First World has now been clearly established to include the sacrifice of entire cities, not only in faraway places such as Iraq or Afghanistan or Groznyy, i.e. in the Colonies, but even in artistic heartlands of the Colonizer countries.

This, of course, should lead us to conclude that there has ALWAYS been a Third World, exactly and physically at the heart of every belly of every First World Beast. In times of 'normality’ it is simply easily forgotten by those who manage the circus side of the bread-n-circus show. But, when disasters as huge as this befall the already-poor, the point becomes harder to cover up.

Look at the price the rulers are willing to pay, and don’t look away!!

In view of this clear barbarity, this clear message of setting the limits of what the ruling classes in the US are willing to pay out of the pockets and lives of the working classes, we must recognize that we need to organize our oppositional activities so as to radically change the terms of the costs of running this system. And in this light, we urge the readers, however few you may be, to read carefully the modest proposal we have advanced for a radical reformulation of taxation in the countries of the First World, in our article, entitled, Taxation or Racketeering. We strongly urge our comrades in Europe who may have contacts with Left European publications to consider the proposal seriously and to publicize it, should they see the value in our proposal.

For you, New Orleans, our heads hang in shame, our hearts are heavy with sadness and grief, and our minds are mad with rage. But, the spirit, as distraught as it may be, is also angry and determined and resolute in the fight against this barbarity that pushes itself on us all the while promoting itself as completely natural, nay, necessary as well as reasonable!

What shame! What horrible, unforgivable, utterly disgusting shame!

Some related articles:
This is criminal: report from New Orleans, by Malik Rahim
What Cuba Has Offered the People of the Gulf Coast, by Fidel Castro
Guess Who Castrated FEMA?, by Henry Breitrose