For the crowd of "we can do both"....be world police and help actual Americans.
Shocker...D.C. can't or won't
[Helene: 'White Katrina':
A Louisiana friend texted yesterday to say he has a sick feeling that Helene will end up being our "white Katrina." The greater part of Katrina's cruelties was borne by the black folks in and around New Orleans. Helene, though, seems to have targeted a predominantly white population in Appalachia.
Malcom Kyeyune says it's more like America's Chernobyl. He points out that as bad as the Katrina response in 2005 was, the US was far more prepared for that disaster than it has been for Helene. But then, says Kyeyune, America was a different country then. Excerpts:
So while it can be said that Bush's administration fumbled parts of the Katrina relief efforts, they at least did so in the context of America as it existed back then. The planning wasn't always good, but there was planning. The helicopters didn't always go to the places they were most needed, but at least they were there in large enough numbers. This is worlds apart from the reality of America in 2024. Today, the institutions are weaker, the deficits are bigger, and the US empire itself- then at the height of unipolarity- is critically overstretched. There aren't enough helicopters, nor enough troops. A decent portion of the Tennessee National Guard, rather than helping rescue Americans in their own home state, are currently deployed to bases in Kuwait. In 2024, the only way for the US military to source enough men for its various far-flung bases and military commitments is to lean heavily on the National Guard. The Guard is supposed to be the primary muscle when it comes to domestic disaster relief, but as the regular Army is falling apart, there simply aren't enough resources available anywhere in the system anymore.
This means that even though the victims of hurricane Helene have found themselves stranded within a stone's throw of some of the US military's more significant military bases- Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty are both located in North Carolina- very little help has been forthcoming. There remains a belief in the West that, despite various recent reversals and losses, the US military is a machine with near-godlike powers: if it really wanted to, it could fill the sky and blot out the sun with an uncountable number of helicopters and planes, whenever and wherever it wants.
Almost a week into the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, those endless helicopters have failed to appear. And as America readies to surge more troops to the Middle East to potentially fight Iran, it's clear that they can't appear, at least not without seriously breaking something somewhere else. Troops and aircraft busy in Tennessee or North Carolina can't be deployed to Jordan, Iraq or Syria. In theory, the US military exists to protect the lives of Americans that's why it falls under the Department of Defense. In practice, Americans have largely been left to fend for themselves, 50 miles away from their own military bases, just in case those soldiers and helicopters are needed on the other side of the world.
Kyeyune says that when he talks to friends in Washington to find out what the people of the imperial capital are saying about the suffering from Helene, he is shocked to discover that nobody is much talking about it at all. More:
What is going on right now isn't malice, it's somehow even worse: it's senility. People weren't enjoying the suffering of fellow Americans; they were simply so oblivious and zoned out that they couldn't even notice a problem.
Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.
This has led him to think that Helene might well be America's Chernobyl. Chernobyl became "Chernobyl" not because of the number of casualties, but because what it revealed about the fragility and incompetence of the Soviet system. Well, let Kyeyune explain:
The real reason Chernobyl looms so large in stories about the last days of the Soviet Union was because of all the lying, the governmental incompetence, and the shared sense that the Soviet Union itself was a senile construct that no longer had any real point. A healthy society, one in which people still feel a sense of purpose and common belief, could have endured far worse disasters than Chernobyl. But by 1986, the Soviet Union was a place where neither the rulers nor the ruled believed the system still had a reason to exist. By the end, talk of socialism, Karl Marx and historical materialism seemed like nothing more than an absurd joke.
Read the whole thing. I remind you that one major factor in the fall of the Tsar was the regime's failure to do right by those Russians suffering from the 1891-92 famine, which took 500,000 lives. It shook the middle classes, and deeply damaged their confidence in the governing order.]