How New Orleans Was Lost

How New Orleans Was Lost
by Paul Craig Roberts

--snip--

Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the U.S. government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katrina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corps of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.

Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corps of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.

Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "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."

http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=7131

and for so much more that he has done.

In the end a catastrophe like this is a far greater threat to the country than terrorism. Not that terrorism is a zero threat. It is a threat, but some people in this country seem to suggest that that is the only way Americans could be killed.

the number is quite insignificant compared to traffic deaths or cancer or heart attacks.

.... to the death toll that has undoubtedly already accrued as a result of Katrina.

It boggles the mind that the levee funds were diverted. The amount of money we are talking about would not fund the Iraq war for one single goddamned day.

Does this government ever have a contigency plan? If I were as incompentent as these scheming bastards, I'd be unemployed.