Raptus regaliter:

When my bleakest long term predictions start being realized i am becoming more aware that there will not be much left of the US constitutional democratic republic for any of my grandchildren to grow up in. This pretty much sums up one aspect of something i said a long time ago.

President Bush proposed the creation of a "Gulf Opportunity Zone" to encompass "the region of the disaster in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama." You won't find specifics in Bush's speech, but you can find them on the Heritage Foundation's website, since it proposed the idea in its "manifesto on post-Katrina policy" last week. According to Heritage's plan, the "opportunity" in the zones is actually for the wealthy few and for special interests seeking to strip away government protections and regulations. Heritage calls for a panel of government and private sector officials to target "regulations at all levels" to be "eliminated or simplified," for capital gains taxes and the estate tax for the ultra-weathy to be repealed, and for waivers on environmental rules.

The US will build, is building as i type this, security camps(razor wire hung to keep people in) in the southern great plains full of trailers and manufactured boxes and reconfigured storage containers in which thousands of the impoverished descendents of slaves will live, work, shop, play, and maybe have some rudimentary education for their children. Meanwhile billions and billions of dollars will be spent on refurbishing the Gulf Coast to accomodate the latest and greatest billionaire homeland also in security camps, this time with the razor wire facing out and protected by the most expensive government financed private security forces that could have ever been trained in Iraq. It almost appears that Iraq was merely a testing ground for the type of development and services the US intends to provide for its citizens. The rich will get the luxury estates of their dreams built to their specifications while the rest of the population will live hand to mouth until they too find their way into the camps working for room and board in government sponsored company towns cleaning up hazardous waste and making toxic materials and products to be sold to China and India. Are you getting the idea, yet???? It is already fucking happening.