the list of countries that wanted to help New Orleans - neo cons said NO

[donsu]

http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/29651


CREW RELEASES REPORT DETAILING INTERNATIONAL ASSISTANCE OFFERS IN WAKE OF HURRICANE KATRINA


Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released the most comprehensive matrix available to date detailing all offers of assistance from around the world in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

-snip-

The matrix includes all international offers, whether they were rejected or accepted and the reasons why, if available. The documents reveal a number of disturbing responses to offers from 145 countries and 12 international organizations from around the world.

For example, an email from Jeffrey Goldstein, a U.S. Embassy official in Estonia, to several DOS officials, states:

It is getting downright embarrassing here not to have a response to the Estonians on flood relief. And now I see from the staff meeting notes that the task force may disband soon. We know that what the Estonians can offer is small potatoes and everyone at FEMA is swamped, but at this point even “thanks but no thanks” is better than deafening silence.
-snip-
------------------------

the neo cons couldn't have anything get into the way of taking advantage of Katrina to rid N.O. of blacks. there was money to be made, don't ya know.

[ButterflyBlood]

1. This has nothing to do with neocons

Check out this excellent post earlier on what a neoconservative actually is: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=905068

[donsu]

2. they are common criminals and come under the neo con blanket

nt

[ButterflyBlood]

4. No, that's not what a neocon is

Neoconservative isn't a blanket term for anyone in the administration or right winger you dislike. Read the above post.

This is a very good post with a valid point, but people on DU need to quit horribly abusing the term neoconservative, it's quite a big embarassment to the site.

[melody]

9. You are narrowly defining a complicated thing -- and really Bush isn't a conservative at all

If we want to be anal about it -- Bush, Cheney, etc, are radical right-wingers. They use the term
"conservatives" as a noun, not as an adjective. "Neocon" is a vastly more complicated matter than
you and your source want to paint it as. It has many different origins, not just one, and they all
call themselves "Neocon".

The only embarrassment is in someone trying to force their own narrow definition on DU.

[ButterflyBlood]

11. I'll agree that Bush isn't a real conservative

However that doesn't necessarily put him in the neocon category. At the very least though, he implements neocon policies, which makes him closer to one than some of the people described as neocons I've seen here.

I've seen for example the anti-gay marriage amendment described as "neocon crap". Gay marriage has nothing to do with neocon ideology however, and it's just plain old religious right crap, nothing to do with neoconservatism. While one can argue DU shouldn't have a narrow definition imposed on it, that doesn't mean the term should be thrown around as a blanket term for anything we dislike, in which case it loses its meaning, much like the Freepers describing all policies they dislike as "socialist".

Perhaps what should be clarified in the end is that neoconservatism is a completely different thing from the religious right and corporatist big business CEOs, and thus doesn't necessarily sum up anyone in the admin, or who supports the Republican Party.

[stillcool]

5. I think there can be more than one interpretation..

of what a 'neo-conservative' is or is not..and I disagree with the OP in the link that you provided that one should be 'embarrassed' by the using the term to describe those that subscribe to the current agenda.
For instance....from the book "The Rich and the Super-Rich"..by Ferdinand Lundberg written in the 60's now available free for download because of it's copyright expiration

A Note on Neo-Conservatism

All the neo-conservatives from H. L. Hunt and Barry Goldwater on down resemble Buckley in that, whatever their rated wealth (which is usually small), they are insecure. Some feel subjectively more insecure than others; all are objectively insecure in a changing world. They are caught between big corporations on the one hand and big government, Communist or liberal, on the other. But, envying the big corporations and wishing to be included among them, they direct most of their fire against the cost-raising social aspirations of the people from whom established capital does not feel it has so much to fear. (If necessary, entrenched capital can stand social reform as in Sweden, passing the costs on in price and taxes. It has, in any event, more room for maneuver and holds all the strong positions.)

But the Goldwaters and Buckleys, with their obscure department stores and oil concessions, are in a different boat. They have begun to suspect that they may never make it to the top, there to preen before the photographers. Sad, sad. . . . Hence, they cry, government should not be used to meet the needs of the people, despite the constitutional edict that it provide for the common welfare; government should merely preside over a free economic struggle in which the weak submit to the strong stomachs. As for the Big Wealthy in the Establishment, in the Power Structure, the Power Elite, they should not, say the neo-conservatives, allow themselves to be deluded by infiltrating nurses, governesses, tutors, teachers, wandering professors, swamis, university presidents and others bearing the spirochita pallida of political accommodation. For accommodation has its own special word in the vocabulary of neo-conservatism. It is: Communism.

The neo-conservatives or radical rightists, like the radical leftists, are discontented. There is, however, a different economic basis to the discontent of each. The leftists own no property, therefore see no reason to embrace a property system; the rightists still have some but feel their property claims slipping, feel they are being precipitated into the odious mass of the unpropertied. They foresee being thrown out of the Property Party; for many of them, in fact, are heavily indebted to the banks. The illusion of the radical rightists is that they can yet save their property claims, not by restoring free competition and subduing the rivalrous Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Fords and Mellons (whom they admire and fear as well as envy) but by inducing these latter to join in an all-out assault on the sans-culottes and descamisados.

However, established wealth, seeing no good for itself in upsetting a smoothly running operation which it feels fully capable of controlling, is not interested in this vexing prospect, Hence the outcries of the neo-conservatives against "the Eastern Establishment" and the "socialism" of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. In Buckley's National Review these self-dubbed conservatives sound like inverted Marxists in yachting clothes.
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.html

[ButterflyBlood]

6. If it was written in the 60s, then it's quite outdated

The use of the term back then was no doubt quite different, the current brand of neoconservatism didn't emerge until the late 80s.

[stillcool]

7. why don't you read the book first

..and then assert your opinion on others? Open mind much?

[ButterflyBlood]

8. I'll try to get around to it

But I still stand by saying that a book written in the 60s isn't a good definition of a teminology that began it's modern day use in the late 80s.

[stillcool]

10. well...try this on...

The Origins, Financing, and Impact of the Neoconservatives
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The first two paragraphs of William Grieder's "Rolling Back the 20th Century", (in The Nation, May 12, 2003) disclosing what every left-leaning follower of political events in the US knows intuitively, project that, as currently lead by President George W. Bush's handlers, in the wake of the Post-Iraq war, the GOP's rightwing has a definite grip on the immediate future of American politics. As dark as this outlook may seem to the left, it should not come as a surprise. The roots of this situation trace back almost a quarter of a century, paralleling the emergence of what is called the neoconservative movement. According to Grieder,

George W. Bush, properly understood, represents the third and most powerful wave in the right's long-running assault on the governing order created by twentieth-century liberalism. The first wave was Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 allowed movement conservatives finally to attain governing power (their flame was first lit by Barry Goldwater back in 1964). Reagan unfurled many bold ideological banners for right-wing reform and established the political viability of enacting regressive tax cuts, but he accomplished very little reordering of government, much less shrinking of it. The second wave was Newt Gingrich, whose capture of the House majority in 1994 gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in two generations. Despite some landmark victories like welfare reform, Gingrich flamed out quickly, a zealous revolutionary ineffective as legislative leader.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

In the JSTOR database, i.e., fulltext scholarly journals, the first use of neoconservative traces back to 1932, in a history of philosophy study, authored by a German. (In the context, 'neoconservative' emerges as a translation of a concept orginally in German, so the coinage may have occurred as part of the translation. By the 1950s, the term was frequently used, especially in the sense of a revival of conservative thought. Take the article, "Democracy, the New Conservatism, and the Liberal Tradition in America", by Stuart Gerry Brown, Ethics, Volume 66, Issue 1, Part 1 (Oct., 1955), 1-9. In 1955, according to Brown,

if any sense can be made out of the intellectual confusion which has characterized America in the decade since the end of the Second World War, it would seem to be a gradually concerted movement backward -- a revival of conservatism, even at times of reaction. Liberalism has been pronounced officially dead, though most politicians seem still to feel a need to profess it' The fear of international Communist aggression has led to an obsession with security and a growing constriction of thought and action. There is a call for religious revival to provide aid and comfort in a world of anxiety and tension.' Political thinkers who, twenty years ago, might have been speaking their pieces as bits in the liberal ferment of the New Deal, are turning nowadays to the prescriptions of Burke -- and remaining largely aloof from the world of affairs. They urge upon us the ideas of eccentrics from the American tradition like Calhoun and John Randolph of Roanoke; they teach us to prefer Adams to Jefferson; they defend the Sedition Act; and they as sure us that the American Revolution was in fact no revolution at all. The talk is of conservatism and of distrust in equality and democracy.
--------------
Representative books of the 1950s conservative revival are

Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (1950); Russell Kirk, Randolph of Roanoke (1951), The Conservative Mind (1953), and A Program for Conservatives (1954); John H. Hallowell, The Moral Foundation of Democracy (1954); and Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (1955). Other books which serve the neoconservative movement by revising Revolutionary and Constitutional history are W. W. Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States (1953); Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (1953); B. C. Rodick, American Constitutional Custom (1953); Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (1954); and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) (Mr. Hartz uses "liberal" in the nineteenth-century sense). The thesis that an American revolution did in fact take place, bringing with it fundamental social and libertarian reforms, is maintained by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Jackson (1945) and The Vital Center (1949); Dumas Malone in Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951); Irving Brant's volumes on the life of Madison, especially James Madison, Father of the Constitution (1950); and Stuart Gerry Brown in The First Republicans (1954). It's curious that books by Leo Strauss are not included in this list.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/neo-conservative_families.html

In the United States and Britain, neo-conservative think tanks have been phenomenally successful since rising to prominence in the 1970s. Margaret Thatcher was co-founder of Britain's Centre for Policy Studies before becoming party leader, and her government's manifesto was written by her think tank. It advocated the busting of union power, free trade, restructuring the tax system to favour families and a raft of what were once neo-conservative fetishes now considered mainstream.

The capture of the White House by the Republicans in 1980 ushered in the first-wave neo-conservative revolution in the US. Ronald Reagan's favourite think tank was the hawkish Institute for Contemporary Studies, from where he drew Edwin Meese as attorney-general and Caspar Weinberger as defence secretary. A former chairman is the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

If there was a global godfather of this neo-conservative movement, it would be Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrian economist and social theorist was a rival of British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes' interventionist ideas came to dominate policy after World War II, while Hayek's drifted into the back rooms of history.

But he didn't give up: in 1947, he set up the Mont Pelerin Society, a secretive group that met annually to map out a neo-conservative counterattack against the growing socialist character of postwar economies. It played midwife to scores of neo-conservative think tanks, among them the Heritage Foundation (1973) and the Cato Institute (1977) in the US and Australia's CIS (1975).

The society and its progeny have been enormously influential: of the 76 advisers in Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign, 22 were members. And its members include Nobel laureate Milton Friedman (a former president), Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus and former New Zealand finance minister Ruth Richardson. Greg Lindsay, the executive director of the CIS in Sydney, is a former vice-president. Neo-conservative think tanks now dominate the political debate in much of the West.

In Australia, as elsewhere, they ply their trade by publishing "independent research" from a network of like-minded scholars whose reports invariably end up backing the neo-conservative world view. Staff and friendly scholars are paid to write newspaper articles which are submitted - usually free - to opinion pages.

By publishing reports that confirm their arguments, neo-conservative think tanks seek to mould public debate. But they also peddle influence, holding closed seminars and lectures where visiting international conservative luminaries address selected rising members of the political elite - such as last week's CIS gathering on the Sunshine Coast. Von Hayek would have been pleased. He died in 1992, but not before Thatcher rewarded him with a visit to Buckingham Palace, where he was bestowed with a Companion of Honour - a tribute to the most successful, if unheralded, political puppet-master of the past century.

Wilson da Silva is a Sydney journalist who has extensively researched think tanks in Australia.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/12/1060588392062.html

[King Coal]

3. We should not have accepted any help from any other country.

We had too much drinking water, food, and money available as it were. Besides, those people in the Domes never had it so good. It was a step up for them, so let those ugly-minded furinurs keep to themselves.

[Uncle Joe]

12. This was logical considering neocon psychology.

Consider the implications, had they allowed 145 nations; all of them weaker than us militarily and many of them in far worse economic straits, to have aided us during our moment of pain and crisis.

Had the corporate media given the American People daily reports of this happening, it would have been devastating to the neocon inspired national impression, of us against them and American Empire. Our national mood could well have become more Earth as a whole oriented, thereby resulting in a major threat to neocon ideology if not extinguishing it altogether.

Their basic philosophy is built on a false pride and they couldn't bring them selves to accept help, because this would have required humility and created a major national psychological threat to their power.

This reminds me of a proverb from the bible.

"Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall."