America at Large: As those who own petroleum stocks have discovered over the past week, Katrina has been even better for business than the war in Iraq. Now Tom Benson wants to get in on the act as well.

"These people are not 'refugees'.

They are Americans."

- George W Bush, on the displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Benson is the owner of the New Orleans Saints, and even as the National Football League is trying to cobble together the team's still-uncertain 2005 home schedule, Benson is looking to line his coffers. Publicly acknowledging for the first time that he'd like to take advantage of the breach in his lease with the Louisiana Superdome to relocate his team, Benson apparently hopes to initiate a bidding war between Los Angeles and his hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

A blatantly venal transaction like this is bound to meet with some resistance from the image-conscious NFL, which has been working to cobble together a stopgap solution.

The Saints will open their regular season in Charlotte, North Carolina, next Sunday. Their scheduled September 18th home opener, against the Giants a week later, has been shifted to the visitors' venue. Since Giants Stadium will be occupied by the Jets that day, the Giants-New Orleans game will take place the following evening.

Only a hurricane could have gotten the Saints on Monday Night Football, and better yet, from Benson's point of view, as the "home" team he will reap the lion's share of the gate that night.

The last levee having been stanched, an estimated 20,000 human beings remain in what was once New Orleans. Half of them are dead, decomposing corpses floating through the city streets and trapped in the ruined remains of houses.

The other half represent the last line of defiance: gun-toting property owners who have refused to evacuate their premises, despite the entreaties of the authorities.

Were they citizens of some other country we might by now be describing these holdouts as "insurgents", and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has promised they will be removed by force. Shoot-outs to follow.

A Bourbon Street saloon called Johnny White's was the last bastion of resistance, remaining open for business right through the evacuation and after. Apparently some thought was given to shutting the place down and joining the mass exodus, but when it came to locking up the doors, the management and employees realised that not one of them owned a key, because the joint hadn't been closed for a single minute in over 20 years.

Just down the street, the Bourbon Street Blues Company, where my brother Jon worked, has been shuttered. The owners, he has been told, hope to reopen on Christmas Eve "in the best-case scenario".

Jon managed to get out of town hours ahead of Katrina. Making his way to Alabama, he was eventually able to purchase a mobile phone and rent a car - two items all the money in the world wouldn't have gotten him in New Orleans - and arrived on my doorstep a few nights later. He even managed to bring his dog with him, making him luckier than any of his neighbours. Thousands of household pets had to be abandoned during the evacuation, and almost none of them survived.

Even as rescue workers pour into New Orleans to sift among the putrefying bodies, Benson has been pleading with his fellow owners for emergency relief while, evidently, simultaneously conducting behind-the-scenes negotiations to capitalise on the tragedy.

Two days ago, Saints' vice-president Arnold Fielkow confirmed to a New Orleans television station that Benson was weighing offers from San Antonio and Los Angeles. It is inconceivable, on one hand, that Fielkow could have been speaking without his boss's blessing. On the other hand, it is unclear exactly for whom the message was intended, since the number of people in New Orleans who can actually watch a local television station right now can't be more than a few dozen.

The NFL is hoping the Saints will remain nearer to their fan base, and Benson confirmed two days ago the team would play at least some of their 2005 home games upstate in Baton Rouge "to the extent circumstances allow", even as he was casting about for a better deal down the

road.

A Louisiana official described Benson's attempt to capitalise on the tragedy as "pouring salt into the wound", and when the daily New Orleans Times-Picayune addressed the subject in an editorial this week, it noted that "Before Katrina, Saints fans wanted their team to stay. Now they need it to stay."

The suspicion is that NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue may evince more sympathy to the plight of battered New Orleanians than his fellow Texan in the White House has thus far displayed.

President Bush, who spent five years eviscerating the Federal Emergency Management Authority, has now pledged to personally head up an investigation into the inadequacy of the government's response to the debacle in New Orleans, which is sort of like putting Saddam Hussein in charge of investigating his own war crimes.

Tom Benson amassed his fortune through automobile dealerships in San Antonio, and has already determined that the Saints will train and conduct their day-to-day operations out of the Texas city this year, no matter where they wind up playing their home games.

In San Antonio, running back Deuce McAllister was asked whether the Saints had played their last game in New Orleans.

"I don't know," he confessed. "Nothing would surprise me."