How The Game Is Played

Homeland Insecurity

If you are watching the reports from CNN or others (any channel but Fox, who ofcourse are trying desperately to spin this PR disaster favorably for the current administration), then you can't help but be struck by the simialrity between the current reports and past reports from war-torn areas of the third world. Lawlessness is so bad that aid workers work in fear of their lives.

One has to ask, how did it get this way? Part of the answer is that the Bush administration took the opportunity after 9/11 to gut FEMA, the government agency that should have been managing this disaster. But is our president right when he says this is a disaster that "could not be anticpiated?" Compelling evidence indicates that our government was warned, and ignored the warnings. Not only did our government chose to ignore this situation, but the current administration exacerbated it by cutting funding to the army corps of engineers in New Orleans in order to fund his war in Iraq.

Finally, ex FEMA director James Witt, an expert in disaster management, has observed in a CNN interview that the natural barrier to hurricanes is wetlands. But Bush policies on ecological issues have resulted in those very wetlands being destroyed at a rate of a football-field a day.

Looking at the disaster in New Orleans, one has to ask the inevitable question. George Bush has justifed all of the above to the american people with the promise that he was making them safer and wealthier. Where was the wealth promised when thousands of New Orleans poorest citizens died because they couldn't afford to own the cars that would have evacuated them in time? Where is the security when disasters are compounded by an inability of the government to respond?

And if George Bush's FEMA had existed before 9/11, how much worse shape would New York City have been in on that fateful day?

Posted at 06:55PM Sep 04, 2005 by gameguy in Java  |  Comments[1]