I have quoted Rivers Pitt extensively this morning below. This seems like it could be an important article about a possible turning point in American history. Churchill said any Government must protect its people. True. The neocons are not doing that, while protesting that they are doing it well. True. But it would be a very major step towards another form of society to see Government in America gearing up to face global warming. They still deny it exists.
I am not confident that real change will take place after Katrina.
Given the way the world's weather is changing there will be another one after this one. If nothing happens next time to change Government then I think they will get the message then.
What is worrying is that the elite is still there in control of everything, and with no influence on the media, and nothing short of armed insurrection seems likely to impact on it. Not surprising the people of new Orleans went out and looted guns.
The elite already control the voting machines so they are no longer affected by democratic influence.
"The Katrina disaster in a nutshell: A storm that had been listed for years as #3 on America's list of "Worst Possible Things That Could Happen" arrives in New Orleans to find levees unprepared because massive budget cuts stripped away any ability to repair and augment them. The storm finds FEMA, the national agency tasked to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters, run by Bush friend Michael Brown, a guy who got fired from his last job representing the rights of Arabian horse owners. The storm finds a goodly chunk of the Louisiana National Guard sitting in a desert 7,000 miles away with their high-water Humvees parked beside them. The storm finds that our institutional decades-old unwillingness to address poverty issues left tens of thousands of people unable to get out of the way of the ram.
Grover Norquist, one of the ideological leaders of our current administration, once said he wanted to shrink the federal government until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. Well, those who believe in his view of things have worked very hard to accomplish this, and we see now what happens when you do that. In this case, the government did not drown. An American city did.
Early estimates of the costs to repair the damage to New Orleans are rolling above $100 billion. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has cost many times more than that. The gigantic tax cuts of a few years ago further denuded the federal budget. Conservative and neoconservative dogma required this, and has left us singularly vulnerable. They have always wanted a weakened federal government, and now we have one, and a lot of people are dead because of it. The cost of this storm, plus the cost of the tax cuts, plus the cost of the Iraq war, plus the long-term damage to our economy caused by high gasoline prices, is going to kick the guts out of our government for a very long time to come."
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