A Nation in the Hands of a Criminal Party

I was going to post a piece today about the breakdown of systems in the US as evidenced by the chaos and incompetence on show over the last week in the Gulf states and especially New Orleans.

But when I turned on CNBC this morning I was greeted by the face of the Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson County talking to host Tim Russert. The points he made were these.

• On Monday WalMart turned up at his parish with trailer loads of water bottles to donate to the people of the parish
  FEMA Turned them away
• On Tuesday the Coast Guard pulled up at his dock with thousands of gallons of diesel fuel for the parish
  FEMA ordered them not to hand it over
• On Sunday FEMA cut the communications links for the parish police force and the sheriff had to reconnect them and post guards with orders to shoot anyone who tried to do it again.
• (These are all in addition to FEMA refusing to allow the Red Cross to set up stations inside the city because that would just encourage people not to leave. In other words, they planned to starve people out
  But then they refused to allow in the transport that would carry them out)

But it gets much worse

He then delivered this

The guy who runs this building I'm in, Emergency Management, he's responsible for everything.  His mother was trapped in St. Bernard Nursing home [breaking down].  And every day she called him and said, "Are you coming son? Is somebody coming?". And  he said, "Yeah, momma, somebody's coming to get you."
Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.

And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night. [head drops, inconsolably]

Nobody's coming to get her.
Nobody's coming to get her. 

The Secretary's promised.  Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences.  I'm sick of the press conferences.  For God's sake, shut up and send us somebody."

He dissolved into sobs as he contemplated the horror of what was happening. He said he had been told by the federal government that the cavalry was on the way. All week they have been saying it and only now was he beginning to hear the hoof beats. The cavalry still hadn't arrived, but he could at least hear them over the horizon.

But it gets worse than that.

The interview then switched to Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi who said that his experience had been entirely different, he had pretty well everything he needed from pretty well the get go.

So what is the difference? Almost certainly Barbour is lying about what is happening on the ground, but lets assume he is telling the truth. Louisiana, where New Orleans and Jefferson Parish are, is a Democratic Party government, but Haley Barbour is a Republican.

Here's what I think. The Republican party is a criminal conspiracy who have pervaded the centres of power in the US and are running the system to reward their friends and punish their opponents. It is not possible for these outcomes to be solely the result of even the most egregious incompetence.

At the top there is political cronyism of the highest order and that appears to pervade the system so that, at every level there are politically motivated operatives using the powers of the government for political ends.

We have seen this before. In the dying days of the Weimar republic, the Nazi party progressively inserted its people into the organs of the state, especially, through Hermann Goering, into the police force. It was clearly understood that the law would be applied selectively so that, for example, Brownshirt violence was ignored or enabled, while any other party's violence was punished with the full force of the law.

And that is how the Nazis moved form some electoral success to total control and the fascist state.

I have a dog in this hunt because in Australia, the organs of government have been thoroughly populated with the political appointees of the Howard Government; I have to hope that the Liberal Party here is not a venal, vindictive and criminal as the republican party in the US is showing itself to be.