Bush and his Republican cronies fingerprints are all over the gulf disaster and the gas price rise that will hit the US and the world.

::::::::

New Orleans was looking like it had survived a rough exposure to the hurricane, but it was going to be okay and people could start returning to their homes and businesses.
The hurricane was an act of God.

Then the levee broke-a failure of a man-made construction. .

This was not unforseen. Numerous articles had been written about the risks. A New Orleans Hurricane was ranked as the third most high-risk American disaster, after a NY terrorist attack and a California earthquake. Yet Bush and his Republican rubber stampers in congress (and the DLC republican look-alike democrats) cut the funding for hurricane readiness, for buttressing the levees, for strengthening the ecological buffer zones between the gulf and the city.

Now, Bush is making much about releasing oil from our strategic petroleum reserves. The experts say this is a worthless act, since we have plenty of oil. The problem, the reason our prices at the gasoline pump will be skyrocketing past $3.00 is the damage to the refineries in the region struck by Hurricane Katrina. The Financial times reports that part of the problem is that "there has been no large investment (in oil refineries) for more than a quarter of a century..."

The cutting back on funds for protecting New Orleans from a well anticipated hurricane disaster is a clear example of what happens when people support one of the most popular Republican philosophies of getting rid of government. It wil be government that rescues people, government that supervises the cleanout of th gulf coast. But it was government downsizing that doomed New Orleans It was not the hurricane that killed New Orleans. It was the levee break. Perhaps if Bush and the Republicans had not cut the funds for maintaining the levee and building up the ecological protections, not directly attributable to a cut in funds.

This excerpt from an article in editor and Publisher tells the tale:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars

Grover Norquist 's famous line, that he wants to starve government so it is small enough to "drown it in a bathtub" takes on ironic meaning in New Orleans, where Lake Ponchitrain is still leaking through the two block long hole in the levee.

But do the mainstream media report on the culpability of the Bush administration and the Republican anti-governemment policies that led to this horrible disaster? And I haven't even brought up their failure to deal with global warming, which Ross Gelbspan covered in his Op-Ed

Suffice it to say that the policies, incompetence and moral bankruptcy of Bush and company can now add at least a hundred more dead Americans to the balance sheet, not to mention the tens of billions of dollars this will cost. Maybe Cindy Sheehan and her motorcade on the way to the Washington DC peace march in mid September can stop in Houston at the Astrodome, where the 23,000 New Orleans refugees now staying at the Superdome will be transferred.

Bottom line-this was a horrible storm that became a mega disaster because of failure to fund well thought out projects. Part of the excuse was the drain that the war on Iraq had on our resources. Look beyond the immediate images of the death and destruction and it is clear that what you see is the work of Bush and his Republican cronies. I'm sure his evangelical supporters are praying for the hundreds of thousands who are suffering. But they probably are not facing the reality that their hands are dirty too, that probably, because of their votes for these anti-government corporatist pawns (bush and co.) people died.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation