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The Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility for the magnitude of the diaster that destroyed New Orleans yesterday. Buried deep in the story was the bigger story, When "Compassionate Republicans" govern, average people suffer who need not have suffered, people die who need not have died.
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Cross posted at
TexasKos
Consider these outtakes:
Link The UC Berkeley engineers said the technology and know-how existed to build stronger levees, but the corps had lost some of its expertise starting in the 1980s as it shifted emphasis to managing projects and let private engineers do the design.
Strock said he "would not make apologies" for focusing on project management and disputed the assertion that the corps had lost its technical competence. A second investigation led by the University of Maryland is scheduled to report next month on the institutional and cultural factors within the corps that may have led to the errors.
In deciding whether to build levees, the corps has long used cost benefit analysis that considered the potential loss of property, not human life or the social value of a city. Now, he said, diverse factors will be considered when evaluating whether to build levees.
The Conservative wet dream , to , in the words of Gorver Norquist, make government so small you could drown in a bathtub, was not born in the 80's, but like
Yeats rough beast, "its hour came around at last" under Ronald Reagan. New Orleans was not its first nor will it be its last victim.
The people of New Orleans are just some of the latest human sacrifices on the altar of Conservative ideology.
The buzz words then and now, devolution, downsizing, privatization, were of themselves simply part of a rational policy debate over the size and function of government. But, the Conservatives had learned their lesson. Never admit what you really want, a return to the anarchy and suffering of the Gilded Age. Instead couch your radicalism in code words and fuzzy math. "Government is the problem" , St. Ronnie said. In his addled mind , he believed it too.
As kamarvt pointed out, I stop short of calling this administration, this philosophy what it is. It is systemic poision doled out in candy cane "tax cuts" and macho rhetoric. If Attila the Hun were in charge, it could not be worse for the average American.
It is a public policy deliberately choosing profits over people. In every aspect of public policy it is the same. From Iraqmire to the '
birth tax', from the '
Clear Skies Initiative' to the PMC (Private Military Contractors which I have already blogged about [
Link] [
Link]. It is all the same lethal pattern of incompetence and willful blindness.
Under Bush II, it has come to full and evil flower. A cabal of arrogant ideologues, enamored of the private sector, has turned more and more public functions over to the vagaries of the Corporate marketplace, with no provision for public accountability.
The average American is lead to believe that this means more economic and efficient government. It doesn't.
It has come to mean cronyism, favoritism and public policies that do not serve the common good. It has meant needless suffering and death. Look upon New Orleans and weep , not just for the city and its people, but for all of us. We are still at their mercy and they still don't get it.
