Greg Palast: The Year The Levees Broke

Greg Palast

The Year the Levees Broke

America went through a terrible year. The levees broke in New Orleans. When bodies floated in the streets, the Republican Congress saw an opportunity for more tax cuts and consolidation of the corporatopia they had created for their moneyed donors. The Democratic Party was clueless, written off, politically at death’s door.

The year was 1927.

Back then, when the levees broke, America awoke. Public anger rose in a floodtide, and in that year, the USA entered its most revolutionary period since 1776. The thirty-four-year-old utility commissioner of Louisiana, Huey P. Long, conceived of a plan to rebuild his state based on a radical program of redistributing wealth and power. The ambitious Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, adopted it, and later named it The New Deal. America got rich and licked Hitler. It was our century.

It’s 1927 again.

But this time, the Haves and Have-Mores have something better for you than a New Deal. They are offering “opportunity” — a lottery ticket instead of a guarantee. Like double-or-nothing in the stock market instead of Social Security — will the suckers go for it? There’s one born every minute. I can’t believe they’re the majority, but at last count, they numbered over 59 million. And they vote.

Years from now, in Guantánamo or in a refugee relocation “Enterprise Zone,” your kids will ask you, “What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?” We may have to admit that conquest and occupation happened before we could fire off a shot.

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they’re under attack. That’s how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

On Tuesday, your President, George W. Bush, will return to New Orleans, on the anniversary of the levee breach.

There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican president going for the photo op as the Mississippi rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and President Calvin Coolidge sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, “a little fat man with a notebook in his hand,” who mugged for the cameras and promised to build the city a wall of protection. They had their photos taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay or, rather, the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of his day.

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