Angry

"The responsibility of government for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."
-Winston Churchill

At a news briefing on Saturday afternoon, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater...” Uhhh last time I checked Louisiana was a state not a city. Right off the rip Alfred E. Neuman and his bunch of merry idiots were at it again. Bush says things like “we are not satisfied”, or “no one could have foreseen”, who the fuck is “we”? Once again he doesn’t take responsibility for his administration. No one could have foreseen? I mean you take a below-sea-level city, mix in a levee that was repeatedly checked and repeatedly reported as insufficient, add one bad bitch of a hurricane and you have a city that is now 80% submersed. Your whole premise for why you should be re-elected was protecting the country. Did you mean only from terrorists? And what message does this disaster send to terrorists? How can we send a message of “bring it on”, we’re prepared for whatever you throw at us, when you couldn’t even save your own people from this? Of the billions of dollars being spent daily in Iraq, not even one third of that would have been needed to improve that levee and make sure this didn’t happen. Instead of spending $454 million on bridges for Alaska, that levee should have been improved, instead of spending $193 million in Iraq, that levee should have been improved, instead of spending $500 million on the Department of Defense, that levee should have been improved. But it wasn’t. This administration promised us protection on all levels from all threats. It said the other side couldn’t do it. The Vice President said (and by the way, where the hell is he? Has anyone seen him or heard from him?) I’ll protect you, while the other guy will let you die. Well he didn’t and they didn’t and they should pay.

Everyone wants to make this about Black and White, maybe it is but I don’t think so. I think it’s just sheer ignorance and incompetence on the part of our government. I think that Bush is no more competent to run this country then my son is. But he is the President. He was voted into office and he is accountable. Period. There is no we or they or them. He should be saying “I” and “Me”. Stop shifting the blame, take responsibility for once, and do something. Pull some resources from the war and use them for your own country. If he didn’t deserve to be impeached for lying to us about the war, then he damn sure does now. Where’s Kenn Starr when we need him? Bush says the response was unacceptable and he wants an investigation. How do you investigate yourself? Let us all guess how this investigation will turn out.

Kanye West… grow the hell up. There is a time and place for everything and that wasn’t it. That was more about you than anything. Maybe George Bush doesn’t care about Black people. I think a more accurate statement is that he doesn’t care about poor people. But that’s been evident since he stepped into office. This is not a black or white thing. I saw white babies on the news suffering too. I saw white elderly people sweating and starving and dying in the sun too. It’s so easy to blame race when something like this happens. It’s the easy way out. But it goes much, much deeper than that. This was a failure of government on all levels. This is the result of a government with a singular focus. They have focused on one thing and one thing only. Terrorism. I want to say to our government, while you have your blinders on this country is suffering. While you send our troops to the slaughter, this country is suffering. While you spend dollar after dollar, waste resource after resource, cut budgets and programs, this country is suffering. Now you want us to believe this disaster was unforeseen. Bullshit. It was inevitable. You knew exactly what needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans from a disaster like Katrina, yet federal funding for Louisiana flood control projects were diverted to pay for the war in Iraq. You cut funding when New Orleans was sinking. You cut funding even after it was reported that one major hurricane like Katrina could wipe the city out and kill thousands. You knew when you gave the Army Corps of Engineers $3.9 million, that they needed $20 million to finish the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project. You knew the levees needed building up and the pumping stations needed protection and you turned your back.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said.

"The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans City Business this

June 5:
The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.
But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.

I’m angry that once again our President failed us. I’m angry that innocent lives were lost. I’m angry that citizens of the United States of America were forced to beg and grovel for food and water from the very government that swore to protect them. I’m angry that once again the President chooses to hide behind lies and deception instead of taking responsibility. I’m angry that this will happen again. There are more vulnerable cities out there. Vulnerable to hurricanes and earthquakes, volcanoes and tropical storms, and as long as money is being wasted in Iraq then funding will be cut here.

The President told us we needed this war. We needed to spend what we had to spend, send who we had to send to protect our country. To save American Lives. There are dead babies in New Orleans Mr. President. Who protected them?