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Stepping back from the horrid immediacies this situation presents, we can discern two intimately connected aspects of our social reality that bear upon the disaster: First, we see the present market-based social and economic order where each must fend for him or herself without any background assurance that society will help when in need. Second, we see that the relationship of this social order with its natural environment is one of dangerous ecological imbalance. These two aspects of our...

Latest commentary from Michael Parenti on the tragedy ay New Orleans...

At least five people have reportedly been shot dead by police in the US city of New Orleans, where a massive effort is underway to aid hurricane survivors. The five were part of a larger group of people crossing a bridge carrying weapons, police official WJ Riley said. The US government earlier announced it had restored order in New Orleans, six days after Hurricane Katrina brought flood waters and anarchy to the city....

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans on Sunday published its third print edition since the hurricane disaster struck, chronicling the arrival, finally, of some relief but also taking President Bush to task for his handling of the crisis, and calling for the firing of FEMA director Michael Brown and others....

Late in the evening of Aug. 24, the Drudge Report, one of the Internet's most frequented websites, featured the headline "Anti-War Protesters Target Wounded at Army Hospital", trumpeting a story from the Cybercast News Service claiming that anti-war protesters were taunting wounded soldiers returning from Iraq....

THE contrasts could not be starker, the contradictions more revealing, than when Hurricane Katrina struck a mighty blow at the crucial southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia in the USA. It was as if the blitzes on Baghdad and Kabul had returned with intense fury to lash back at hapless, innocent Americans, much the way millions equally-innocent Iraqis and Afghans suffered at the unseen hands of American pilots who unleashed death from way up in the clouds. The irony of it is th...

Viewed from the windows of a low-flying Blackhawk helicopter, the scope of Hurricane Katrina's destruction becomes clearer. The Causeway is like a broken spine, large sections of roadway listing disconcertingly into the brown water of Lake Pontchartrain. The modest homes in the Lower 9th Ward have been uprooted and are crushed together in clots like bumper cars. Pyramid-shaped rooftops are all that can be seen of many suburban-style houses in the Lakeview neighborhood. And the expanses of sma...

As the last weary evacuees from the Superdome and convention center headed to shelters, New Orleans drew closer to dealing with its dead, a gruesome landscape of corpses expected to number in the thousands....

There are no immediate plans to clean up a large oil spill spotted near the town of Venice, on the Mississippi River downstream from New Orleans....

Rather than contribute money to the bureaucratic thieves in the American Red Cross, the homophoic Salvation Army or Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing, here is a lsit of grass-roots groups that are doing good work....