If America were a train and George Bush its engineer, one helluva wreck is just around the bend. And if America were a corporation and George Bush its CEO, it would make Enron look honest.

Writing in The Toronto Star, columnist David Olive decries a U.S. administration run by nothing but a bunch of failed, unethical businessmen

Bush: he's no Warren Buffett

That would be a shame, given that business savants as varied as Kennedy treasury secretary Douglas Dillon and Silicon Valley legend Dave Packard served ably in Washington.

Many of the most prominent CEOs in the current administration aren't real business people at all, but faux CEOs who after a lifetime in politics cashed in on brief stints as trophy CEOs at Fortune 500 firms before returning to public life in George W. Bush's White House.

With few exceptions, those CEO stints — at Halliburton Co. (Dick Cheney), rail operator CSX Corp. (John Snow), and George "dry hole" Bush's string of oil-exploration flops in Texas — were not models of exemplary corporate stewardship.

Just the same, future historians will make the connection between the most CEO-heavy administration in memory, headed by the first MBA president (Harvard, no less), and a White House of unsurpassed fiscal recklessness, flawed strategic thinking, failure to execute even on its best ideas (its unrealized goals of education reform and energy self-sufficiency, for instance), and a stubborn unwillingness to change course when conditions dictate.

With his successive rounds of tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, in tandem with a 37 per cent increase in federal expenditures and Bush's refusal to veto a single spending bill from the GOP-controlled Congress, this White House has in a short five years boosted the national debt by 12 per cent, to almost $8 trillion. America is increasingly a hostage of its foreign creditors.

In a recent study titled "The Grand Old Spending Party," the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, says that "Throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend."

Bush has conducted three wars — on the Taliban, Saddam's regime, and terrorism — without asking a dime of sacrifice from Americans. Indeed, Bush persists in seeking to make his earlier tax cuts permanent and to eliminate the estate tax.

Even with federal spending at a post-World War II high of $22,000 (all figures U.S. dollars) per household, Bush and the GOP congressional leadership are deaf to bipartisan calls to postpone by a year the new prescription drug benefit for seniors — a $139-billion handout to Big Pharma that actually does little to help the elderly.

Or to downsize last summer's pork-laden, $286.5 billion highway bill, the costliest in history, with its $8.5 million for seven transport museums, $4 million for a parking garage in Oak Lawn, Ill., and $220 million for a road extension in Alaska that GOP Sen. John McCain decries as "a highway to nowhere."

The supposed managerial expertise of an administration headed by two former oilmen would suggest a high level of preparedness to protect a region that is the biggest U.S. gateway for oil imports, is home to America's largest concentration of petroleum refineries, and is America's biggest transit point for lumber, coffee, rubber and steel.

But preparedness was woefully inadequate for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The Bush administration cut funding for the Army Corps of Engineers's proposed refurbishment of hundreds of kilometres of levees in the region. Bush folded the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into the new agglomeration of 22 agencies known as the Department of Homeland Security. The administration slashed FEMA's budget, and installed in the demoralized agency's top posts refugees from Bush political campaigns who lacked expertise in disaster-management, triggering an exodus of FEMA's most talented staff.

In the aftermath of Katrina, Bush and Congress hastily began to channel what may ultimately amount to $200 billion — the equivalent of Denmark's GNP, or $400,000 for each of Katrina's half-million displaced people — through FEMA, which lacks the prowess to handle anything like $200 billion.

Its 2003 budget of $87 million accounted for a miniscule 0.03 per cent of total government spending.

"You can easily compare FEMA's internal resources to what you saw in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: a small, underfunded organization taking on a Herculian task under tremendous time pressure," Steven Schooner, a contracting expert at George Washington University, told The Wall Street Journal last week. "That is almost by definition a recipe for disaster."

Again, common sense argues for re-establishing FEMA as an independent agency; or better yet, creating an agency autonomous of the administration and headed by a can-do leader like Rudy Giuliani, Gen. Tommy Franks or Colin Powell to expedite reconstruction and ensure the efficacious spending of the restoration outlays.

Halliburton and Bechtel are under federal investigation for alleged government over-billing on Iraqi reconstruction contracts.

Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management, hired by FEMA to collect human remains in the Katrina-stricken region, is a subsidiary of funeral operator and longtime Bush contributor Service Corp. International (SCI). In Texas and Florida, SCI has settled class-action lawsuits alleging improper burial methods. (In one case, bodies were dug up and tossed in the woods so plots could be resold.)

Katrina subcontractor Goldstar EMS, a star-crossed ambulance provider, is being pursued for local tax arrears, is under federal investigation for suspected Medicaid fraud and is now operating in bankruptcy.

Another firm whose luck has changed for the better since Katrina is Bode Technology Group Inc., hired by FEMA to identify the bodies of storm victims. Bode was fired last month by Illinois state police over allegations of shoddy work.

Meanwhile, in contacting local contractors in the Midwest last week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch learned that even the most persistent were failing to obtain Katrina-related work.

Typical was independent contractor Kevin Williams, who has an excavating firm in Sedalia, Mo. and whose petitions to FEMA have been less than fruitful. "I've tried calling, e-mailing, NOTHING," he told the paper.

Katrina, of course, is a disaster that has disproportionately afflicted the poor. One of Bush's earliest responses was to sign an executive order suspending contractors on Katrina-related work from federal law requiring employees be paid the local prevailing wage, which means many will be toiling for a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.

Edward Sullivan, head of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department, described Bush's regard for the working poor as "legalized looting of these workers who will be cleaning up toxic sites and struggling to rebuild their communities, while favoured contractors rake in huge profits."

Bush, more obsessed with tax cuts than any president in modern times, has also declared a tax-free Gulf Opportunity Zone. A tax holiday might help the few surviving restaurateurs in the French Quarter, but not 400,000 New Orleans residents who have lost their jobs and have no income from which to deduct tax.

Asked about this odd policy move at a luncheon for GOP supporters last week, Bush responded: "Somebody said the other day, well, that's a tax break. That region is going to have zero income anyway. There's nothing there, in many parts of it. It makes sense to prove economic incentives for jobs to exist." Read that passage six times and it still doesn't make sense.

With his job-approval rating in decline even before Katrina, it didn't take long for Bush to begin reminding Americans that he is a war president and deserves their patriotic support.

Last week he linked Katrina with the war on terrorism. Terrorists, the president said, are "the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We're in a war with these people." It appears that the president and the rules of logic have parted ways.

If only the U.S. were run more like a business, was the Bush/Cheney mantra in 2000; then America would be a more contented kingdom.

But a sustainably prosperous business doesn't hand vital tasks to cronies, fail to vet its suppliers, starve essential employees of job fulfillment, or blame its shortcomings on bogeymen.

Remember Hans Island - that tiny, brass monkey cold, chunk of Arctic rock that both Denmark and Canada claim is rightfully theirs, and have agreed to disagree about?

According to a leading Canadian academic, who's also a geologist, actual ownership of the frozen flyspeck really doesn't matter. Hans Island's true value, he says, is that it has raised public awareness about the importance of the Arctic and the immense responsibility polar nations share in protecting its future.

Here's what Robert Gilbert, writing in The Toronto Star, had to say about the value of his recent Arctic field  trip.

As I collected geological specimens in support of my research and commented that I was returning Greenland to Canada piece by piece, we exchanged pleasant banter about the Hans Island dispute and how it should be resolved.

The spirit of our discussion reflected the formal negotiations between Canada and Denmark over the ownership of Hans Island.

In this dispute, the island itself and the sea around it are unimportant.

It is a tiny speck in the vastness of the Canadian Arctic and of Greenland. There are no potential economic resources on the island. It has no real strategic importance to either nation, nor has it value in their future commercial endeavours.

What is important about Hans Island is that the controversy has awakened Canadians to their Arctic in a manner unlike any since the sovereignty crisis created by the voyages of the supertanker, Manhattan, through the Northwest Passage in 1969 and 1970.

For most Canadians, the Arctic is a huge, cold, sparsely populated region that has limited relevance to us as individuals or even to the nation as a whole.

Yet, for example, the recent developments in diamond mining in the Arctic make Canada one of the major producers of diamonds in the world.

The industry brings significant revenue not just to the North but to all Canadians. The potential for sustainable exploitation of living resources from the polar sea holds similar promise.

The Arctic environment is being changed sooner and more greatly due to human-induced global effects than any other region on Earth except the fringes of Antarctica, even though the causes of these changes originate in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.

Rising temperatures, shrinking glaciers and sea ice, changing ecology and threatened wildlife, and the impact of these on Arctic inhabitants must receive concerted and thoughtful attention by scientists, managers, politicians, and Northerners.

Greater resources should be committed to understanding our North and to mitigating the effects of these changes.

Consciousness of Hans Island helps justify this need in the minds of Canadians.

Along with the South Polar Region, the Arctic is the last unspoiled wilderness in the world.

This, too, conveys a special relation between Canadian people and their land, and a unique responsibility for its stewardship.

The Hans Island issue has also made us aware that there are important circumpolar environmental and human issues that may be profitably addressed by collaboration among northern nations.

Northerners have always been aware of this, based in part on the common ancestry of the Inuit in North America and Greenland.

What matters is not the ownership of a tiny island, or even that we agree to disagree about that ownership, but that the people of Canada, Denmark and the other polar nations recognize that they share responsibility for the most remarkable region on Earth.

Last superpower finds itself more alone

What those 48 months prove is that no nation, no matter how powerful, can impose its will on world affairs for long; no president, no matter how cocksure or anchored in dogma, can stand steady astride the globe.

If you think that's just leftist guff or more viral anti-Americanism, think again. It's part of the growing, notably mainstream, consensus that 9/11 presented the Bush administration with an opportunity it still can't grasp.

Richard Haas, a leading foreign policy analyst and insider in successive U.S. administrations, argues in his book The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course, that his country is overestimating its own strength and stamina.

"The U.S. does not need the world's permission to act," he writes, "but it does need the world's support to succeed."

That's painfully evident in Iraq where the U.S. is bogged in the predicted quagmire and may ultimately leave behind three fragile states, including a southern, Shiite theocracy dominated by fundamentalist Iran. But what's more worrying to Canadian observers, including former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy and Paul Heinbecker, Ottawa's top man at the United Nations until November 2003, is the underlying pattern.

Since the planes sliced into the World Trade Center, Washington has increasingly turned away from integrated international responses in favour of makeshift coalitions it can control. Results are mixed.

Afghanistan and tsunami relief warrant check marks; Iraq and a summer deal with India that increases the risk of nuclear proliferation do not. Whatever the score, Axworthy is correct when he criticizes the method as the ultimate in à la carte internationalism and Heinbecker, who now leads Laurier's Centre for Global Relations, Governance and Policy, is right to worry about a shift from lasting alliances built on shared values to ones glued together by passing interests.

Two factors make those coalitions of convenience more threatening. One is the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes and regime change; the other is that this president, like so many predecessors, came to the White House with the limited international perspective of a U.S. governor.

"The world," Heinbecker muses, "pays an enormous price for the inexperience of American presidents."

That price is particularly high in Canadian dollars. In declaring all-out war on terrorism, George W. Bush, with the quiet acquiescence of Paul Martin's government, also assaulted civil, legal and privacy rights with implications that continue to unfold before the Arar inquiry. And America's international muscle flexing creates foreign policy challenges for a northern neighbour who wants to be seen as reliable in Washington and distinctly independent at home.

Jean Chrétien managed that well by making the border a priority while sending troops to Afghanistan but not to Iraq. Martin's task is to do everything possible to secure the continent, encourage the U.S. to remain constructively engaged abroad and resist pressure to join in unwise foreign adventures.

It's tricky stuff that will test everything from this government's ability to deliver a complex message to managing the trend towards what the military calls the interoperability of Canadian and U.S. forces. Requiring the wisdom to support the U.S. when it's right and the courage to say no when it's wrong, Canada's efforts will be more readily executed if this president, or the next, is persuaded by the post-9/11 experience and the sound advice Haas offers.

Four years less a day after the world rushed to America's side, the last standing superpower finds itself more alone, surprisingly vulnerable and facing defining choices. It can continue, without multinational support, the problematic, ad-hoc strategy of shaping the world to its own likeness and liking. Alternatively, it can either turn inward, as Heinbecker fears, or, as Haas hopes, abandon singular, often destructive, dominance for constructive, inclusive leadership.

Powerful forces push and pull the U.S. in opposite directions and it's not yet clear which way it will bend. But as this anniversary rolls past, the U.S. and its allies have something sobering to consider.

In the aftermath of a horror, a naïve president less cautious than his father and held hostage by advisers with their own agendas let slip an opportunity.

The solidarity found in New York and Afghanistan was squandered in Iraq and today the country finds itself with fewer and more equivocal friends.

The first of those tragedies remains the most shocking, the second is somehow sadder.

The world's richest, most powerful nation is reeling from its worst natural disaster in history, yet its leadership failed miserably when the people needed them most.

Reduced to homeless, starving, frightened refugees, Greater New Orleans' 1.4 million citizens are asking hard questions and demanding honest answers from those in charge - particularly the man at the top - President George W. Bush.

Sadly, hollow excuses in place of decisive action just don't cut it when - with each terrifying passing hour - you feel your country has abandoned you.

New Orleans: A Made in Washington Tragedy

They don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn, excuse my French, everybody in America, but I am pissed.— New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

On Thursday night New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin gave an interview to a local radio station, WWL-AM, and its correspondent, Garland Robinette. It makes for tough listening, particularly the ending, when Robinette falls to tears, and finds himself struggling with his sign-off.

Robinette had asked the question everyone would want to ask: What had the mayor said to U.S. President George W. Bush, who had not, at least not then, made an appearance on the ground in the besieged city? "I told him we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice," the mayor told Robinette.

Nagin was referring to the president's ceremonial airborne viewing of the Gulf Coast and the devastation delivered by Hurricane Katrina. After the flypast, the president had held a Rose Garden press briefing in which he quantified shelters (78,000), and tarps (10,400) and ice (3.4 million pounds) and promised that, with time, "New Orleans will be back on its feet." The scene seemed a mere pit stop amid a five-week "working vacation" at the ranch, the one down the road from where the mother mourned the death of her soldier son.

How do you reckon that, when your citizens are dead, and stuck in attics, and on rooftops and there is no optimism anywhere to be spotted in the landscape? "You pull off the doggone ventilator vent and you look down there and they're standing in there in water up to their freaking necks," said Nagin. And then the lootings and the shootings and the rapes. "You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off their jones, if you will. And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns."

How do you reckon that you've not being given the help you need? "We authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick ... Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up — you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need?"

Nagin figured that Bush, and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, had better "get their ass on a plane." By the end of the interview, neither man could speak.

Yesterday, Bush quick-stepped across the emerald green veldt of the White House lawn — suit, white shirt, blue tie — on his way to make a personal connection with the people of Mobile and Biloxi and New Orleans. It was time. Four days after the fact. "The results," he said of aid and rescue efforts, "were unacceptable."

The words, flat as fetid water, came too late. In this, one of the worst disasters to be visited upon the richest nation in the world, the president failed the test of leadership and could not, even after excoriating criticism started to mount in the media, show himself to be emotionally touched by the events before him. The New York Times had deemed Bush's Rose Garden speech "casual to the point of carelessness."

Howell Raines, ex of the Times, compared the "dilatory" performance of the president to that of the president's father. "George H.W. Bush couldn't quite connect to the victims of Hurricane Andrew, nor did he mind being photographed tooling his golf cart around Kennebunkport while American troops died in the first Iraq war," wrote Raines. "After pre-emptively declaring a state of emergency, the younger Bush seemed equally determined to show his successors how to vacation through an apocalypse."

The evocation of Joseph Conrad (who wrote "Heart of Darkness.") was fitting. As once-tranquil waterways delivered Conrad's "immense darkness," images of the Gulf Coast bore an eerie resemblance to lawlessness in Sierra Leone or Liberia. Almost as eerie are the premonitions, now being sifted like entrails, which forewarned of this very apocalypse.

A single spare fact, cited by Scientific American, makes the point: every 24 minutes, Louisiana loses an acre of land. The deterioration of the coastal wetlands, the patchwork efforts to maintain canals and pumping stations, the constant reallocation of water in the below-sea-level city, was a delicate balance sustainable only by the infusion of massive amounts of capital and the absence of any major disaster. Full-scale restoration was pegged at $14 billion (U.S.)

The capital did not come.

When the worst did come, the attachment of blame, or what the first Bush president called "the blame game," predictably commenced. The assessed ineptitude of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of disaster response, has come in for widespread criticism, but that, too, leads back to Washington, as FEMA has been rolled into the Homeland Security Department, and has perhaps become emasculated, or at least disorganized, in the process.

Governor Blanco was inexplicably slow to invoke the activation of the executive order that allowed out-of-jurisdiction law enforcement officers to enter the disaster area. That order wasn't issued until Thursday, the same day President Bush laggardly requested $10.5 billion in emergency aid.

New Orleans Mayor Nagin blamed FEMA, the governor and Homeland Security for taking perilous decisions about the city's pumping stations.

The itemization of blunders and mishandlings is bound to continue.

The person destined to remain in the eye of the storm is Bush himself. Not since the release of the infamous photos of Abu Ghraib has the phrase "failure of leadership" had such currency. Those best positioned to assess that charge are the victims themselves. Some of those in the Big Easy may harken back to the days of Louisiana governor Huey Long, a demagogue and a corrupt demagogue at that, but one who championed the state's poor.

By the end of the day yesterday, Bush, arisen from his torpor, had been given an eyeful. As proof of leadership it was too little, too late.

New Orleans' throbbing hearts: Nowhere else in U.S. have African Americans known more freedom, pain, oppression

Oppression from the hand of slave owners — the French, the Spanish, the French again, then the Americans — from poverty and from the unique geography of the Crescent City. And now from Hurricane Katrina. Yet the highly complex, nuanced relations between the races in the city's early years, a dynamic unique to New Orleans and nowhere else, allowed blacks some room to flourish.

This city, its streets now floating graveyards, is arguably the heart of black American culture. This is how Carroll Case sees it. Case, 65, who retreated from his New Orleans apartment to his home in southwest Mississippi, is a tour guide based in the French Quarter in one of only five cities in the country that require its guides to enrol in a city history course to become certified, he says.

What follows is his attempt to explain what Katrina threatens to rip away.

To a place with the same latitude as Cairo, the first slaves were shipped in pens like cattle to a plantation, an area now known as Algiers on the West Bank, directly across the Mississippi River from Canal Street.

"As many as 10,000 blacks came into New Orleans," Case says. "Those that were not suitable were either shipped back or beaten or killed. They were conquered, basically."

Among this melting pot of French and Spanish landowners, gamblers, whores and European rejects, the slaves fought alongside everyone else for survival in "The Town That Care Forgot," a freewheeling, violent, hot and disease-ridden place where not many expected to live past 30.

"Diversity breeds violence. New Orleans from the very beginning has been extremely violent. The whites were terrified of the fact that the blacks may get together and massacre the whites," Case says.

"They passed laws that would not let any of the black people get together. If a slave owner let his slaves get together, if he was caught letting them, he was branded with the fleur-de-lis."

Yet, despite the societal rigidity, lust blurred the lines, spawning classes of mulattos, quadroons and octoroons.

"The blacks were more accepted there than anywhere else in America. They were so ingrained into the system," Case says.

There were also "free people of colour" in New Orleans, some of whom bought their freedom and some who even owned their own slaves.

But that acceptance, of course, had its limits, with blacks forced into the bottom of society and into Roman Catholic baptisms.

To what is now Louis Armstrong Park alongside the French Quarter, slaves would sneak off to secret voodoo meetings in Congo Square, sometimes right after leaving the Catholic Church.

Case calls it the most historic gathering place for blacks in New Orleans. Where the religion was nurtured behind a screen of banana and ginger plants.

Where they built fires, banged bones off stretched deer hides, danced the bamboula and calinda. White men were known to commit suicide when they heard a police raid found their wives fornicating with black men in Congo Square.

That sense of rebellion remained intact, even when the races grew further apart, with the well-heeled whites stealing away in the Garden District, with the French, Spanish and slaves in the French Quarter, leaving the "free people of colour," the skilled artisans, to settle what is now the Ninth Ward area in the early 1900s.

The land was cheap, presumably in part because the land was low. "Who would want it?' Case says.

President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration built the Desire housing project there in the 1930s, but back then, "those were wonderful places to live. They didn't even lock their doors in the projects. It was just a community and everyone trusted each other."

But the fight for civil rights and the enduring poverty of the blacks living there fuelled an eruption.

"The Ninth Ward has always been the nest of the underprivileged people. It's the soul of the city. It's the tenderloin district."

But it's also the heart of the city's gang wars and drug trade, Case says.

Those problems took a strong hold in the early 1960s.

"That turned the projects into a basic hellhole and they would literally take the dead people they shot during the gang wars, they would take them to other projects and leave the bodies. That created tensions between the different projects in the Ninth Ward."

Hurricane Betsy hit this neighbourhood in 1965 and then like now, it flooded the Ninth Ward — the lowest, poorest and blackest part of town.

There's speculation that officials dynamited levees near the projects to siphon water away from white neighbourhoods.

"I don't know of any place that is so interwoven with good and evil," he says.

"They will go back and try their best to make sure that culture never goes away. Their roots go deeper than anyone's roots."

-Both articles are from Saturday's Toronto Star