By Staff
With our usual arrogant disdain for an ounce of prevention, we proceed with billions of pounds of cure to further pad the already bloated federal deficit.
Hurricane Katrina's devastation was much more in the cards than 9/11 four years ago.
Despite considerable evidence of intelligence failures, the terrorist attacks were so brutally brazen as to be almost unimaginable outside of a Hollywood movie.
And what would it take for someone to actually be fired from the Bush administration?
Federal Emergency Management Administration Director Michael Brown, with a resume padding scandal on top of FEMA's dismal performance, only got him recalled to Washington and replaced on the front lines by a Coast Guard admiral with a can-do reputation.
Brown waited five hours after the hurricane slammed the Gulf Coast Aug. 29 before asking that 1,000 Homeland Security employees be dispatched, then gave them two days to report.
And their duties included "conveying a positive image" about the government's response for victims.
Perhaps there's a Congressional Medal of Honor in "Brownie's" future.
Alarmingly, it takes a calamity of this magnitude for the media to reveal to us how politicized and dismantled FEMA has become over the past four years when we thought we were beefing up homeland security.
The Bush administration filled top jobs with political patronage appointees with no emergency management experience, cut disaster preparedness budgets and marginalized the agency formerly known for quick reflexes by folding it into the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy, headed by Michael Chertoff, who also has no emergency management experience.
Knight-Ridder Newspapers reported that the number of career disaster-management professionals in senior FEMA jobs has been slashed by more than 50 percent since 2000.
Now Congress has rammed through considerably more billions on the back end than it would have cost on the front end so it can return to its normal routine of cutting taxes to further debilitate everyday government operations, insuring a pathetic response to the next catastrophe to visit our shores.
The federal deficit isn't all that's bloated anymore.
In the rotted underbelly of the richest, greatest nation on earth, corpses bob down historic boulevards, making it impossible to hide the underclass any longer.
After 9/11, recession, Afghanistan and Iraq and this new long-predicted devastation, it is finally falling to shocked Americans to rouse themselves from reality TV and face reality: there is no cavalry to come.
Will we finally gather the resolve to unshackle ourselves from our acquiescence in the politics of unfairness?
Since Ronald Reagan's conservative morning dawned in the land of opportunity more than 20 years ago, we gave up on the poor and shifted the blame for their misery to them and demonized assistance programs as making matters worse.
Relentless right-wing radio tirades tell us that the poor are lazy because of welfare handouts. Why would the impoverished be stranded in blighted neighborhoods, attending deficient schools and living by toxic waste dumps or landfills unless by choice?
Were we really surprised at how many were left huddled on roofs or headed to the Superdome dragging garbage bags of their meager belongings once those with means fled to safety?
You're on your own, the Times-Picayune reported in July.
Reporter Bruce Nolan wrote: "City, state and federal authorities are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own.
They at least envisioned a private initiative, Operation Brother's Keeper, in which churches enlisted members with cars to offer rides to have-nots.
Kanye West, "hip-hop's class act" and "the smartest man in pop music," according to Time magazine's Aug. 29 cover, proved to be neither when he lashed out on an NBC telethon that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
It's not that the president and his pals are racists, their GOP connections give them a vantage point of friends in high places where it's easy to forget that at the bottom of the food chain lurks a poverty that prevents such essentials as cars, credit cards, checking accounts, even enough for a bus ticket out of town.
How could Brown relate?
He landed on his feet at FEMA from the International Arabian Horse Association.
It's harder than ever for a determined poor person to claw their way up by their bootstraps because industrial jobs which created the middle class are disappearing along with that strata of American society.
Income inequality has risen as high as the flood water, leaving the working class few options but to sign up for the armed services and report for war.
Katrina shredded the web of lies about shared American prosperity that is not a safety net.
If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, it ought to be that in America, the greatest country on earth, the less fortunate deserve better.
Tax cuts for the few who need them least drained the public treasury, but not a drowned city when the levees gave way because they have been denied attention by war overseas financed by piling up debt.
If our lawmakers balance their tax cuts at all with spending cuts it will be to whack at entitlements, such as Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program for the poor.
Katrina crowded out other news, including the shameful increase of 1.1 million Americans living below the poverty line last year, compared to 2003. The number of Americans without health insurance increased by 800,000 from 2003 to 2004, the Census Bureau reported.
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: "If a flood of Biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans … a Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water on the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. 'There's concern it would essentially destroy New Orleans' … The big sticking point, not surprisingly, is money The price tag for a complete solution could be as much as $14 billion."