The current leaders of our country and those republicans who came before them in the 80's and 90's did a great job of denigrating government and its civil servants. As a result it became fashionable to talk about how awful any government effort was no matter how critical to the needs of the American people and to hype the miracle of the market place and the superiority of the private sector. Public schools, community medical services, welfare programs, social security, unemployment insurance, regulation of investments, pollution, energy supply...all these important parts of a civilized society were cut, slashed and bashed. What was left...the husks of once great programs and organizations...were used for political patronage and graft.

And so we find out that FEMA on which the Gulf Coast was depending was run by a person who may or may not have interned somewhere in Oklahoma for a short period of time as a public relations rep, and we find that his two top assistants had no disaster/emergency experience what so ever. Our president who has been boasting about how he and his team will protect and secure the American people had no idea what was going on in their own government and had no idea how to get things moving to save countless human lives and alliviate suffering. When the chips were down...they couldn't even get to town.

I worked my whole life in government. In mental hospitals, institutions for the retarded, schools, juvenile justice, adoption services, and the like. It was a rich and rewarding life of work. I saw the mentally retarded of New York's horrific institutions in the seventies completly turned around and made producive and capable of returning all but the most severly disabled to the community as a result of a class action suit and alot of hard work by state workers. I saw teachers whose whole life commitment was to other people's kids and who worried over and nutured those kids within their roles as if they were their own. I saw day care licensors take fine tooth combs to those places where families leave their babies when they go off to work. And on and on. I saw civil servants much more often than not give of themselves in the human services field from their heart and with all their energy.

These fools who manipulate the American people into allowing themselves to be stripped of the very vital services they need when things like Katrina occur must now be taken to task. They must be driven from our public life back to the country clubs and horse farms from whence they came and they must be replaced by people who don't believe greed is a moral value and who see that collectively we can rebuild our institutions, care for our needs and be a society that never again has to watch a city suffer as New Orleans has. While it was not possible to stop nature, it was possible to help our fellow humans more effectively than they were.

There is a guy who is just getting some attention. He is the head of the FEMA workers union. He said it was the career people in FEMA who put out dire, clear warnings well before the hurricane hit. But Mr. Bush and Chertoff and Brown don't need reality based information and they certainly wouldn't dain to pay attention to a notice like this from a commie civil service outfit like the NOAA:

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.
PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD
FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE
BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A
FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH
AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY
VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE
ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE
WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN
AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING
INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY
THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW
CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE
KILLED.

and they didn't know there were people in the civic center and they couldn't get bottles of water in and they couldn't.....we must take back our government and its institutions so that we can be a civil society again.