Historical antecedents:

The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was “the silver-lining scenario.”

The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”

The genius of the Conservative Movement has been not to wait for disaster, but to create it—and profit from it. As we shall see.

We’re all niggers now, eh?

* * *
For you CTers out there, and those of you who are merely foily, what you are about to read connects the dots better than anything I’ve read yet (via the utterly essential and lingerifique Avedon, the Goddess-like being who puts the aggravation in aggregation). Jane Smiley reviews Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine (which I must read at once), and summarizes Klein’s thesis.* I’m going to fair-use a lot of it here:  Read more 

More shocking news from Watertiger.

Earlier in the day, Bush met privately with Republican donors at an estate in Greenwich, Conn., raising almost $800,000 for GOP House members facing tough re-election fights.  Read more 

Jesus, guys. Why don’t you just invite Cheney into the party? This is just pathetic:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Sen. Joe Lieberman won’t have to fight to stay in the Democratic Party, after all. The state’s Democratic registrar rejected a petition by peace activists to strike Lieberman from the party rolls on Thursday. State law allows for expulsion from the party if the member runs for office under another political banner.  Read more