Defunding the Levees: "Lives Very Likely Will Be Lost"

David Sirota's piece in In These Times is out, and looks to be a very solid telling of the tied fates of Bush's budget-smashing tax cuts and the levees surrounding New Orleans.

This is a reality visible in the numbers. Year after year, the Bush administration insisted on massive tax cuts for the wealthy. And year after year, the White House refused to provide the funding government experts said was needed to strengthen levees, beef up hurricane preparedness and get federal emergency response ready for an onslaught from Mother Nature. America's budget surplus, built in the '90s to serve as a rainy day fund, was robbed to provide more and more giveaways to the rich. When the rainiest day of them all came, our country was left totally -- and unnecessarily -- vulnerable.

Read the rest for the whole tale of tax cuts for the wealthy, fired whistleblowers, and urgent warnings. Sirota builds a good list of specific tax cuts and some of the specific homeland security cuts that went along with them, and retells one of the more damning examples of Bush administration obsession:

The Bush administration not only refused to heed Army Corps of Engineers warnings about the danger of cutting funding to the New Orleans levees; they fired Army Corps of Engineers head (and former Republican Congressman) Mike Parker mere days after Parker himself testified to Congress about those dangers.