Despite the mass of voice and opinion about the New Orleans tragedy, I still find it necessary to briefly express my own pain and despair at witnessing this disaster. It’s traumatic to witness the suffering of others, and it’s even more disturbing to know that they’ve been left to their own devices in their time of greatest need, and then scapegoated by the mainstream media.

Some would say that “talk is cheap”, or some such; but the fact is, the events in New Orleans allow like minded people (and people in like circumstance) to realise what it is that binds them, or us together.

With this in mind, I write today about New Orleans, in the hope that my small and relatively insignificant voice might join with other voices, to once and for all prevent similar things from taking place in the future.

As far as I’m concerned, this “natural” disaster was preventable. It’s quite clear at this point that the repair work on the levees could have minimised the extent of damage to people and the city. Funding for this had been sought and rejected, warnings had been made.

I asked myself: would a similar, preventable accident have taken place in, let’s say, downtown Washington D.C.? Would the needed repairs have been made in a timely manner? Would the needed funds have been made available? And if it did happen, would the response have been similar? I think the answer is fairly obvious to all of the above.

It is axiomatically a state responsibility to look out for, and care for the basic human rights of ALL its subjects. The failing of U.S. free-market capitalism, and capitalism in general, is that it looks after the rich first, and places the agenda of profit above ordinary people, the environment, and basically all else.

Getting still closer to the title of this essay. Aren’t the objectives of a state, and the value it places on people demonstrated fairly clearly, when one realises that the Secretary of State was at a Monty Python musical, the day after the flooding took place?

Even more ironically, just this Tuesday, the same Ms. Rice announced that “people all over the world have a right to live in dignity, to have human rights respected, to have brighter futures.” This remark was made in conjunction with the appointment of Jay Lefkowitz, a new U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea. Is it not the most basic human right, to be helped and nurtured during ones greatest time of need?

She’s quite right in her sentiments. But even if this statement is sincere (yeah right!), despite the irony, she alone must know that this could never be possible under the profit system.

When questioned about the response, or lack of in New Orleans being a race issue, she likewise quite accurately answered: “That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I just don’t believe it”[sic]. Again, she knows that it’s got nothing to do with colour, but everything to do with class, social position, and whether it is profitable to help.

Why was Rice promoting North Koreans’ rights, and the whole worlds’, when literally at the same point in time, the folks in New Orleans, in her own country were basically left to fend for themselves, and then treated worse than cattle? If one makes pronouncements about grand ideals like human rights, surely one should be leading by example…

This, like most issues of the profit system, reveals a hideous irony. Accidents are warned of, and ignored; problems are faced when they’re too serious to keep one’s head in the sand (or can be “spun” to ones advantage).

The U.S. plutocracy has been setting the pace for the world, sending us all jumping through hoops, and we’re now caught in a global economy which is subject to a value system, which, let’s face it, has no value.

If anything, the tragedy that the folks in New Orleans are going through has revealed the real U.S.; the values of its expressed democracy, and how the rulers and wealthy, and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, ultimately have nothing but contempt for ordinary working people and the poor. The “champion” of democracy is nothing but a shiny golden vessel, filthy and rotten on the inside.