Tony Blair has opened a new rift with the BBC by attacking its coverage of Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans as anti-American.

His onslaught was disclosed by one of the corporation's arch rivals and critics, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

According to Mr Murdoch, the Prime Minister condemned the reporting as being "full of hatred for America".

Hurricane and hot air
(Filed: 19/09/2005)

Tony Blair is right about the BBC. The corporation's coverage of Hurricane Katrina has indeed been tinged by an unnecessary sense of gloating, as the Prime Minister told Rupert Murdoch.

It is not that BBC correspondents have been inaccurate - although they tended to quote the figure of 10,000 dead, almost certainly an exaggeration, with relish. But, in their reports, one heard a whining undertone, like a bagpipe's drone. How could this have happened in such a rich country? Do the Americans really believe they can sort out Iraq with this in their own backyard? Will they finally learn some humility?

Even if these were legitimate sentiments, the aftermath of a tragedy would be no time to express them. Just imagine, by way of illustration, if, following the tsunami, the BBC had focused on the civil wars of Sri Lanka and Aceh, arguing that victims were, in a sense, reaping what they had sown, since those conflicts had destroyed the infrastructure that relief workers needed. Doing so would have been poor news judgment as well as poor taste. Yet the BBC dwelt endlessly on the deployment of a few hundred Louisiana guardsmen in the Gulf of Mexico.

Especially striking has been the determination of BBC correspondent Matt Frei to hang the blame around George Bush's neck. The officials who had the most direct responsibility for local services - notably the clownish mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin - were reported mainly as articulators of anger against the President, with almost no analysis of their own role.

Well said, then, Prime Minister. But why unload your frustration on Mr Murdoch? It is, after all, up to you to decide whether to renew the BBC's charter. If you really wanted to do something about its ingrained partiality, you could tell them first. Moaning behind the BBC's back to a rival news organisation is both pointless and unmanly.

Part of Weller's obligation for his M.A. was to take eight students a year to Italy.

"When you do that, you have to study Rome again because the Renaissance is such a rebirth of antiquity," he says. "So during 2001, 2003, 2004 I was doing these field trips to Rome, and then the dean of the Fine Arts Department asked me to teach my own class at Syracuse, ad hoc."

Last year, Weller taught a course called "Hollywood and the Roman Empire."

"It's a classics course posing as a film course," he says. "Eighty kids signed up thinking they'd get an easy A from RoboCop. When they saw the reader was 450 pages, including Homer and Suetonius, a quarter of the class dropped out. Those that stayed had a blast reading a portion of the reader, taking a quiz to be sure they'd read it.

"Then I'd show the corresponding movie, one movie a week for 15 weeks, including 'The Odyssey,' 'Troy,' 'Ben-Hur,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Spartacus,' 'Gladiator.' Then they'd write a paper on how the movie compared with the history. There were 20-year-old kids who thought Marlon Brando was just some fat old actor until they saw him walk on screen as Marc Antony. Then their world cracked open and they rushed to see all his movies."

New ranking lets us share in secrets

Greg Sheridan
September 01, 2005

US President George W. Bush has issued a decree upgrading Australia to the highest rank of intelligence partner that the US has in the world.

Australia's new status is equalled only by Britain and vastly expands the quantity and quality of US intelligence our agencies receive.

In order to bring this about, Mr Bush has changed US national disclosure policy.

In the 50 years of the US-Australia alliance, Australia has never before enjoyed this level of access to American intelligence. The agreement ranges from tactical and operational military information through to comprehensive national assessments.

Increasingly, Australian agencies will have direct access to US intelligence systems. Australian military personnel in the Middle East, for example, can already directly access US intelligence databases and real-time battle space imagery.

John Howard has discussed the new intelligence arrangements with Mr Bush at several meetings in recent years.

The Prime Minister raised it again with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at their Washington meeting on July 19.

Defence Minister Robert Hill would not comment on anything related to US presidential decrees or US national disclosure policy, but he confirmed Canberra had a higher intelligence-sharing status with the US than ever before.

"In recent years we have obtained unprecedented access to US intelligence and tactical planning," Senator Hill told The Australian.

"That has been of great value to Australia in terms of enhancing our national security. This is access to the greatest repository of information that exists. It's another sign of the close relationship between the US and Australia."

Mr Howard raised US national disclosure policy at his meeting with Mr Rumsfeld because of resistance to Australia's new status within the US bureaucracy.

While Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld and US service chiefs have strongly backed the new arrangements, the natural inertia and caution of the vast US intelligence and military bureaucracies has meant a lot of operational resistance to their implementation.

Put simply, US spooks are not used to sharing the crown jewels. However, repeated instructions from the top have moved the process steadily forward.

Mr Bush's decree is believed to have followed the annual AUSMIN meeting of Australian and US foreign and defence ministers in Washington last year, where they signed the "US-Australian joint statement of principles on Inter-Operability". Since the turn of the century, there has been a steady deepening of compatibility in equipment and training between US and Australian military forces. All aspects of this "inter-operability" have been canvassed in a secret paper jointly compiled by the US and Australian defence departments.

The AUSMIN statement said Australia and the US had "agreed to enhance inter-operability between our defence forces such as communications, information exchange, operational planning and training".

It has not previously been revealed that these seemingly anodyne words had brought about the most intimate intelligence relationship in Australian history.

The new relationship occurs at many levels.

Canberra now has a permanent senior officer stationed at the US Strategic Command in Nebraska.

US Strategic Command is responsible for integrated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, space and global strike operations, information operations, integrated missile defence and command and control.

It is the most sensitive intelligence hub in the US military network and to have Australians stationed there at high levels of seniority is a sign of the depth of the intelligence relationship.

Australia gains access at all levels - to US raw intelligence, to US assessments of the intelligence and to real-time operational information and planning.

This has meant Australia further upgrading its own security because the US is extremely sensitive about who shares such information.

Australia's new status is a sign of the growing trust the US has in the Australian military and intelligence community. Co-operation between Canberra and Washington in these fields has grown exponentially as a result of both the war on terror and the joint operations in Iraq.

"The U.S. should take Fidel Castro up on his post-Katrina offer to send over 1,586 doctors from Cuba. It could be a PR victory--how many do you think will go back?"

Van Susteren: [inaudible] -- criticism that's being leveled at the government?

George H.W. Bush: The President can take it. And, uh, and, uh -- in the sense that, you know, what do I think as a father? I don't like it. But whether you think it's -- as one who was President -- and I expect President Clinton feels the same way -- it goes with the territory. And I'm, you know, I don't want to personalize this, but we're very very proud of him, of course. And Barbara is. And if somebody wants to tell Barbara about the things that are going wrong, and the President's doing wrong, I suggest you wear your flak jacket.

[Van Susteren's voice in background, words inaudible]

George H.W. Bush [to Clinton]: Where -- where are you?

Bill Clinton: I have a --

George H.W. Bush: You went into the foxhole.

Bill Clinton: No, I -- I got your back [unintelligible]. Let me say, Greta, in response to your first question, we had some people killed in the flood 'long toward the end of my first term, in the New Orleans area, and there was a study done for strengthening the levee system, and I believe that we began to do that 'long toward the end of my second term, then, when the study was done, and the funding, what happened to it, I don't know. But there have been constant efforts to upgrade the system. Now, on the other question you asked . . .

Cavuto: Well, Jim Rogers, you have been arguing, as someone from this area, that the levees have always been a problem and always been a corrupt source of issue [sic] for politicians there.

Rogers: Neil, Neil, none of this had to happen. Or most of this did not have to happen. Those levees have been there -- the Levee Board in New Orleans in the past ten years has bought a casino, a private marina, a private plane, they have several hundred million dollars invested with their friends, but they have not taken care of the levees. If somebody had protected those levees, New Orleans would not have flooded. So this is caused by local politicians, and they should all resign. They're screaming at the President -- they should be resigning. They brought it on themselves.

[. . .] In comparison with the polite sleeve-tugging and forms of nonviolent protest typical of the earlier civil rights generation, the sea change in 1965 may seem at first glance to have been an overdue response to the injustice that black America had endured for so long. But after researching the riot and the policies established in its aftermath, I have come to a different conclusion. In teaching poor blacks that picturesque battle poses were an "authentic" substitute for constructive intentions, the "Burn, Baby, Burn" ethos ultimately did more harm than good to a people who had already been through more than enough.

The eternal question about the riots has been: Why did they happen just then? Leaders like Martin Luther King were baffled about this at the time, and the question is still relevant to assessing the black condition. In 1965, black Americans had been dealing with the short end of the stick for almost 400 years. If black American history from the early 1600s to 2005 could be condensed to 24 hours, then these riots took place at 10 p.m. Why not before? [. . .]

In general, black America had been "fed up" for centuries before 1965. A useful black history must identify a different factor that sparked the events in Watts and across the land. This factor was a new mood. Only in the 1960s did a significant number of blacks start treating rebellion for its own sake -- rebellion as performance, with no plan of action behind it -- as political activism.

This did not come from nowhere, to be sure -- and where it came from was whites. In the '60s, it became a hallmark of moral sophistication among whites to reject establishment mores, culminating in the counterculture movement. The movement was based initially on laudable intentions: Few today could condemn young, informed whites for rising up against political censorship, racism and later the Vietnam War, or a newly concerned white ruling class for turning its attention to poverty and its disproportionate impact on black people.

But political rebellion always leaves in its wake people who are moved more by the sheer theatrics of acting up than by the actual goals of the protest. At the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, for example, the Free Speech Movement rose up against indefensible suppression of students' speaking truth to power. But on the same campus the following year, a new bunch started the "Filthy Speech Movement," based on emblazoning curse words on placards and watching the suits squirm. It was rebellion for rebellion's sake. [. . .]

Certainly not all blacks fell for it. But enough did that some hotheads surrounding some police cars in Watts one night could spark a vast rebellion instead of being shouted down and ignored.Why not just embrace August 1965 as the time when black America, for whatever reason, started "speaking up?" Because to settle for this is to ignore the destruction of black communities that the new mood left in its wake.

This was not only the physical destruction still on view in the black sections of cities like Detroit, or in less renowned cities like Indianapolis, where solid businesses never returned after the 1967 riot, leaving once-fabled Indiana Avenue hard to imagine as anything but the downmarket stretch that it has since been. There is the deeper destruction that was ultimately wrought. The hopeless plight of today's black inner city is often blamed on the flight of low-skilled factory jobs and the rise of drugs in poor urban neighborhoods. These factors surely contributed to inner-city misery, but my research leads me to conclude that they were hardly the leading causes of the psychic deterioration that soon overtook poor black America. That, instead, was the urban welfare state that was in large part the product of the model of high-pitched, menacing protest that had now been established.

That model was quickly taken up by the National Welfare Rights Organization the year after Watts. As has been documented in many studies, Columbia University professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven declared to the press and beyond that poor blacks would be better off seeking welfare payments than working in low-level jobs. They explicitly predicted that if they brought enough people onto the welfare rolls, it would force the government to give a guaranteed income to all poor people. They taught a squadron of activists, many of them black women, to stage rallies across the country and disrupt public meetings calling for welfare to be easier to get, more generous and easier to stay on.

Rarely has radical idealism had such a destructive effect on so many lives. Before the '60s, welfare payments had been intended for widows and women whose children's fathers were nowhere to be found. But in the wake of the new agitation, municipal governments relaxed the old requirements bit by bit.

The new politics of protest was a potent weapon. The riots loomed always as a threat (partly because the Black Panthers loomed menacingly at many of the rallies), and many politicians knuckled under. From 1966 to 1970, the number of people on welfare nationwide doubled from under 500,000 to almost a million. This was not part of Washington's Great Society agenda, which focused on job creation and training. It was a radical side effort, with grievous consequences.

The change was most profound in black communities -- because blacks had been the main target of the recruitment efforts. In Indiana from 1964 to 1972, welfare recipiency tripled in only 11 of 92 counties. Of those 11, only one did not have a heavy black population -- in a state where about 75 counties were almost all white and poverty widespread in about 30 of them.

Over the next 30 years, multigenerational families lived on government money, fathers had no incentive to take care of the children they made, and poor black communities devolved from shabby but stable slums into hopeless, violent deathscapes. This lasted for so long that the precarious stability of old-time black communities was all but forgotten. But while communities changed, black attitude and political protest as performance has come to seem normal. The models for leadership are not Shirley Chisholms, but talkers like Al Sharpton. And when a spark falls, like the Rodney King verdict in 1992, the same impulses and often the same type of violence travel through black communities as did in Watts.

These are the sad examples of what happened when agitprop went mainstream in black activism. The Watts riots were useful in helping push racial injustice further into the national conversation. But the kind of protest model Watts exemplified would best have been left on the margins, as it had always been.

The new mood that the Watts riots inaugurated was a tragedy for black America, dragging poor blacks into depths of malaise they might never have known otherwise. This is why the Voting Rights Act is not the only reason that 1965 is the year that black America must never forget.

Hemmer: Back here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I just want to stop this gentleman to my left here. Sir, we were just talking about the environment in New Orleans and -- give me your name?

Aguilar: My name is Rudy Aguilar.

Hemmer: And you were just giving me some dire information, too. You're with the Department of the Environment down in New Orleans?

Aguilar: I'm with the Department of Environmental -- uh, Environmental -- uh, with St. Bernard Parish.

Hemmer: Uh-huh. So, you know the area. Once this water level goes down, what's the city of New Orleans going to look like, do you believe?

Aguilar: It's -- the city of New Orleans is going to be devastated. The inner city there is -- is -- is destroyed. However, what I want to focus on is where I'm from, the suburbs, which everyone seems to not focus on.

Hemmer: So then what will they look like?

Aguilar: They're going to be dead on top of their rooves. They're dying on top of their rooftops. It's predominantly white areas [unintelligible -- overlapping voices for a second or two] -- people are throwing the race card, you know, trying to save New Orleans, and we have St. Bernard Parish, we have St. Tammany Parish, we have Blackman's Parish, that is being neglected.

Hemmer: Well, we want to put you on to get your word out here, and we'll do that. Okay? Thank you, gentlemen. Good luck to you. I know a lot of people there are working hard in there, and [overlapping voices] keep it up. Okay, terrific. Thank you very much.

Aguilar: Please -- I want to plead --

Hemmer: You have-- you have my word. Thank you, gentlemen. Okay, a lot of stories to get out tonight and we'll continue through the hour, trying to do just that. Scott Snyder is going to join me in a moment from the Red Cross and we'll try to get an update there. . . .

Public budget meetings will begin
ALSO: District D grows; Council meeting date change; Vitter staffer available in St. Bernard; Cleanup help sought
Saturday, August 20, 2005
By Karen Turni Bazile
St. Bernard bureau
A series of public meetings on the proposed parish budget for the 2006 fiscal year will begin in September, said St. Bernard Parish Councilman Craig Taffaro, who is chairing the Executive-Finance Committee.

Before the first meeting will be a summit at a camp owned by Council Chairman Joey DiFatta in St. Tammany Parish on Friday at 6 p.m. The summit is open to the public.


The subsequent meetings will be held in the council committee room at 3 p.m. The overview committee will meetSept. 8. Budget topics and dates are: Fire Department, Sept. 13; general fund, Sept. 29; public works, Oct. 4; recreation and civic center, Oct. 11; water and sewer, Oct. 13; sanitation, Oct. 20; and ,economic development and tourism, Oct. 27.

Taffaro said he will call more budget hearings if there are other areas that need to be covered.

. . . . . . .


ANOTHER CONSTITUENT: St. Bernard Parish Councilman Craig Taffaro is adding another resident to his district.

Taffaro said he and his wife, Debbie, are expecting their eighth child in mid-February.

Taffaro, a licensed professional counselor, and his family live in Meraux, where his wife homeschools most of their children.

. . . . . . .


MEETING DATE CHANGED: The St. Bernard Parish Council will hold its regular meeting on Sept. 8 rather than on its regular meeting date on Sept. 6 because of the Labor Day holiday.

The meeting will be at 11 a.m. in the council chambers.

. . . . . . .


VITTER STAFFER: U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., will have a staff member at the St. Bernard Parish government complex in Chalmette once a month starting Wednesday to hear from residents.

A Vitter staffer will be at the building, 8201 West Judge Perez Drive, from 10 to 11 a.m.

Lori Petitclerc of Vitter's staff will set up a satellite office on the second floor in the parish Office of Emergency Preparedness.

Vitter said he wants to use such offices to make it easier for constituents to find help with matters relating to the federal government.

Anyone unable to go to a satellite office can call Vitter's Metairie office at 589-2753.

. . . . . . .


VOLUNTEERS FOR CLEANUP NEEDED: Officials are looking for volunteers for St. Bernard's annual Coastal and Inland Waterway Sweep cleanup on Sept. 17.

Planners are hoping to top the more than 7,000 pounds of debris pulled in for the initial effort last October.

Entergy recently presented a $5,750 environmental stewardship grant to parish government to help finance this year's sweep.

Cleaning waterways helps wildlife endangered by debris, and it benefits fishers, whose equipment can be entangled, said Rudy Aguilar, environmental engineer for parish government and the cleanup co-coordinator. The other co-coordinator is Jerry Graves Jr. of the parish coastal zone management office.

Last year, people in pirogues cleaned waterways near Paris Road from Virtue Street in Chalmette to the Paris Road bridge in New Orleans. This year, Bayou La Loutre and other bodies of water in lower St. Bernard Parish may be cleaned, Aguilar said.

A party is held afterward for those involved.

Volunteers should call 278-4304.

. . . . . . .


RODRIGUEZ RUNNING AGAIN:

St. Bernard Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez is running for president again in 2007, said Executive Counsel Alan Abadie, who helped with his first campaign. Rodriguez is holding his first annual golf tournament campaign fund-raiser Aug. 29 at the Eastover Country Club in New Orleans.

"We hope to make it a success as an annual event and are looking forward to a good turnout," said Charles Reppel, a special assistant to Rodriguez who is coordinating the tournament.

Reppel said the golf tournament is a shotgun start scramble format. Food and drinks will be served.

For information, call 277-1811.

. . . . . . .


Got an item for St. Bernard Parish Politics? Call the St. Bernard bureau at 826-3830.