this is the future

The Bush administration's 2005 budget cut funding for the shoring up of New Orleans' levees by more than 80%, to under $4 million. And it's not because they didn't know there was a problem.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Pres. Bush has requested, and Congress has authorized, $60,000,000,000 of new funding for FEMA, a DHS (Homeland Security) agency. Here is a sample of FEMA's activities in New Orleans:

There have been many reports of FEMA blocking relief efforts. Globalstar reported that a truck carrying more than 1,000 satellite telephones was barred from the disaster area. Aaron Broussard, the President of Jefferson Parish, which neighbors New Orleans, criticized the governments response on the September 4, 2005 edition of NBC's Meet the Press. Broussard described how FEMA blocked water deliveries from Wal-Mart, blocked the shipment of fuel to his area, cut emergency communication lines and described how the local sheriff posted armed guards to protect the lines after they were reconnected.

"We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA--we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, 'Come get the fuel right away.' When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. 'FEMA says don't give you the fuel.' Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice."

- wikipedia

Meanwhile, inside the city . . .

What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet. . . .

Rush hour in downtown now means pickups carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses, S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters hungry for action, and the occasional tank. About the only ones commuting by bus are dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.

- Dan Barry, NY Times, Sept 8, 2005

They must have a reason, and that reason must be incomprehensible.