[PAA-Discuss] FW: The Year the Levees Broke

[Lee Loe]

Bit of important history. Lee

 

  _____  

From: Greg Palast [mailto:palast at gregpalast.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 10:01 PM
To: leeloe at igc.org
Subject: The Year the Levees Broke

 


THE YEAR THE LEVEES BROKE



By Greg Palast in New Orleans.
August 24, 2006

What is the unreported cause of the majority of the 2,000 deaths that
occurred after the levees broke last year on August 29?  Catch Greg Palast's
investigative exposé this Monday on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! And on
Tuesday, watch his one-hour Special on LinkTV. Listings at LinkTV.org.


The Year the Levees Broke

America went through a terrible year. The levees broke in New Orleans. When
bodies floated in the streets, the Republican Congress saw an opportunity
for more tax cuts and consolidation of the corporatopia they had created for
their moneyed donors. The Democratic Party was clueless, written off,
politically at death's door.

The year was 1927.

Back then, when the levees broke, America awoke. Public anger rose in a
floodtide, and in that year, the USA entered its most revolutionary period
since 1776. The thirty-four-year-old utility commissioner of Louisiana, Huey
P. Long, conceived of a plan to rebuild his state based on a radical program
of redistributing wealth and power. The ambitious Governor of New York,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, adopted it, and later named it The New Deal. America
got rich and licked Hitler. It was our century.


It's 1927 again.

But this time, the Haves and Have-Mores have something better for you than a
New Deal. They are offering "opportunity" -- a lottery ticket instead of a
guarantee. Like double-or-nothing in the stock market instead of Social
Security -- will the suckers go for it? There's one born every minute. I
can't believe they're the majority, but at last count, they numbered over 59
million. And they vote.

Years from now, in Guantánamo or in a refugee relocation "Enterprise Zone,"
your kids will ask you, "What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?" We may
have to admit that conquest and occupation happened before we could fire off
a shot.

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they're under attack.
That's how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little
we have.

On Tuesday, your President, George W. Bush, will return to New Orleans, on
the anniversary of the levee breach.

There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican president going for the
photo op as the Mississippi rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and
President Calvin Coolidge sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, "a little
fat man with a notebook in his hand," who mugged for the cameras and
promised to build the city a wall of protection. They had their photos
taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay or, rather, the Ken Lay
railroad baron equivalent of his day.

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial.
As The Depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called
for, of all things, balancing the budget.

Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician, the state's
electricity regulator, stood up on the back of a flatbed truck rigged with
loudspeakers, and said, roughly,

"Listen up! They're lying! The President's lying! The rich fat jackals that
are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into
imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope, and
when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they
drown your kids. I say, Kick'm in the ass and take your share of the wealth
you created."

Huey Long was our Hugo Chávez, and he laid out a plan: a progressive income
tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and
America, Social Security old age pensions, veterans benefits, regulation of
the big utility holding companies, an end to what he called, "rich men's
wars," and an end to the financial royalism of the elite One Percent.

Huey Long even had the audacity to suggest that the poor's votes should
count, calling for the end to the poll tax four decades before Martin Luther
King succeeded in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical anthem:
"Everyman a King." The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928, Huey
"Kingfish" Long was elected Governor of Louisiana.

At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. The elite
liked it that way, but Long didn't. To pay for the books, the Kingfish
levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies refused to pay for
the textbooks. Governor Long then ordered the National Guard to seize the
oil fields in the Delta.

It was Huey Long who established the principle that a government of the
people must protect the people, school them, build the infrastructure,
regulate industry and share the nation's wealth -- and that meant facing
down "the concentrations of monopoly power" of the corporate aristocracy --
"the thieves of Wall Street," as he called them.

In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party.

FDR and the party establishment, scared witless of Long's ineluctable march
to the White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted, called it the New
Deal and later the New Frontier and the Great Society. America and the party
prospered.

What happened to the Kingfish? The oil industry and local oligarchs had few
options for responding to Governor Long's populist appeal and the success of
his egalitarian economic program. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a
U.S. Senator,
was shot dead. He was 42.

It's 1927 again.


**********
Excerpted from Greg Palast's just-released New York Times bestseller, "ARMED
<http://www.gregpalast.com/mailing/link.php?URL=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5ncmVncGFsYXN0
LmNvbS9tYWRob3VzZS9pbmRleC5waHAvb3JkZXItdGhlLWJvb2sv&Name=&EncryptedMemberID
=MTU3MDc%3D&CampaignID=28&CampaignStatisticsID=20&Demo=0&Email=leeloe at igc.or
g>  MADHOUSE:  Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the
Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the
Front Lines of the Class War." Go to www.GregPalast.com
<http://www.gregpalast.com/mailing/link.php?URL=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5HcmVnUGFsYXN0
LmNvbQ%3D%3D&Name=&EncryptedMemberID=MTU3MDc%3D&CampaignID=28&CampaignStatis
ticsID=20&Demo=0&Email=leeloe at igc.org> .




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