LEBANON VERSUS NEW ORLEANS

We should expect foreign socialists, especially smart ones like "lenin", to notice that Hezbollah's reconstruction of Lebanon is far more effective than what Bush has been doing, or not doing, for New Orleans. However, the American public, this author included, has to be reminded time and time again that the New Orleans relief effort is so "bankrupt" because its "humanitarian" impulse is merely a mask for what is really an ethnic cleansing, or at least this is what one gets from Lavelle and Feagin's piece in the Monthly Review and Malik Rahim's interview in Democracy Now. We should be reminded of this reality time and time again until it sinks into our big brains that we need to be thinking about America's legacy of race and class discrimination again.

Apparently it has made it to the US mainstream media, even, that Hezbollah has been doing a better job in reconstructing Lebanon than the US in New Orleans. And so we have this quote, from a commentator on Alternet: "The Adminstration is so 'gung ho' on privatizing government functions, why don't they outsource the recovery of New Orleans to Hezbollah? They have a good track record at this and they would probably be a low bidder too."