Tax Cuts, War, and Social Darwinism...

From CNN:

(CNN) -- The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands.

"Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN.

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.

"And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there.

It's your fault for being black and poor. If you're dead, you should have listened to us and gotten out of the way?

No transportation? No money? No place to go? Too fuckin' bad.

Unlike the rest of society, the poor blacks in every other part of the country really aren't surprised.

Now is the time. Now we must start talking about social justice. Today is the day we begin changing this country. We must get our priorities straight. Bring the troops home so they can actually protect America. Stop wasting our country's resources fighting the war on porn. We must take everyone trying to curb the use of marijuana and have them take on the task of inspecting our ports. We must have universal health coverage. We must make prescription drugs affordable. We must stop using petroleum like there is no tomorrow. It's time to take environmentalism seriously. Global Warming is real.

Bush has his ownership society. It was never anything but social darwinsism. Everyone for themselves. We've made it nearly impossible for these people to declare bankruptcy. They have no hope at all on any level. Their economic future destroyed. They're lives erased.

After 4 years of platitudes from President Bush about the need to remain vigilant on the home front and the dangers of the "terrorists," it was all bullshit. For four years we have been told that the possibility of a nuclear, chemical, or biological event could be used on a major city in the United States. Strangely, the administrations seems to have had no plan at all for how to evacuate an American city. They had absolutely no plan in place. There was no plan in place to get the indigent out of the way of the coming storm. There was no plan on how to feed these people. There was no plan on how to search for people in New Orleans after the fact.

Bush/Cheney's dig against Kerry was that people couldn't trust him to protect the American people, as if that magical power was given by God himself to George Bush. We clearly see that it is what it has always been just hot air.

The situation that we have right now is comparable to the situation as we went into Baghdad. A situation consisting of chaos and confusion, exasperated by the lack of any feasible plan for dealing with the situation.

There is one difference though. This is at home. BushCo has tried the same thing they did then; namely going on TV and insisting that everything was under control. But we can see for ourselves that it is a lie. People are dying of dehydration, exposure, and a lack of medical attention.

FEMA was actually working on a plan to deal with the aftermath of a hurricane in New Orleans, and gamed out the scenario in an exercise last year that they called "Hurricane Pam." Let me share with you a bit of what they concluded...

It's a recipe for appalling destruction, and it could happen here:
A hurricane packing winds of 120 mph and a storm surge that tops 17-foot levees slams into New Orleans, killing an untold number of people and trapping half the area's residents in attics, on rooftops and in makeshift refuges in a variety of public and office buildings.

Parts of the city are flooded with up to 20 feet of water, and 80 percent of the buildings in the area are severely damaged from water and winds.

On Monday, at the outset of an eight-day tabletop exercise, more than 250 emergency preparedness officials from more than 50 federal, state and local agencies and volunteer organizations began using that catastrophic scenario -- dubbed Hurricane Pam -- to develop a recovery plan for the 13 parishes in the New Orleans area.

The plan will provide a "bridge" between local and state short-term evacuation and emergency response plans, and a longer-term federal disaster response plan, said Ron Castleman, Federal Emergency Management Agency regional director.

Officials are focusing on six major issues they expect to face in the aftermath of a catastrophic storm like Pam:

-- Developing an effective search-and-rescue plan to find survivors and move them to safety.

-- Identifying short-term shelters for those who evacuated, or those rescued in the storm's aftermath.

-- Creating housing options, including trailer or tent villages, for the thousands likely to be left homeless for months after the storm.

-- Removing floodwater from New Orleans, Metairie and other bowl-like areas where levees will capture and hold storm surge, possibly for days or weeks.

-- Disposing of the thousands of tons of debris left behind by the storm, which will include the remains of homes and businesses; human and animal corpses, including bodies washed out of cemeteries; and a mix of toxic chemicals likely to escape from businesses, industries, trucks and rail cars in the flooded areas.

-- Recreating school systems for public and private school students.

FEMA Director Michael Brown acknowledged that they never finished the planning on this because they didn't have the budget. We had the budget for Bush's war and the tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the world. We didn't have a plan to ensure the safety of the poor. We abandoned these people to die. Many of them did, and the rest want answers.

We're fighting a war that is killing the very soldiers we need here at home to protect our people. We are wasting the lives of young men and the financial resources that have been put into Bush's War of Aggression on Iraq are the dollars we need to adequately prepare ourselves for completely predictable natural disasters.

Ask the people in New Orleans if this was unforeseen. Everyone I've heard says that the citizens of New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers didn't consider this a possibility. They considered it a certainty. One day a major Hurricane was going to hit New Orleans, and the levees wouldn't hold unless we put the money into completing the project. Well, that time is here.

As the Bush Administration was cutting FEMA's budget, as well as the budget for the New Orleans district for the Army Corps of Engineers, we continued to give absurd tax cuts to his wealthy friends.

Paris Hilton got a tax cut and the nameless poor in New Orleans got to drown. Bill Gates got a tax cut. Donald Rumsfeld got a tax cut. Dick Cheney got a tax cut. Terrell Owens got a tax cut. James Dobson got a tax cut.

The policy of this administration has been two fold since day 1. They had planned to wage a corporate war in Iraq, and they wanted to alleviate the responsibility of the federal government for taking care of its own citizens.

Congratulations, assholes. You win. We're going to be fighting in Iraq for years to come and you allowed the US Government to abandon its people.

I hope you all sleep well at night.

-The Oklahoma Hippy