As Hurricane Irene sets a course for The Carolinas, then up the East Coast towards New York, then on to the New England area, some people are taking it seriously. The U.S. Navy for instance.
Did you watch The Second Fleet leave port from Norfolk, Virgina yesterday?
They wisely left the harbor and went into open water far out into the Atlantic Ocean to face Hurricane Irene from a safer place.
Safer in the sense that those ships are designed to handle open ocean, but can be sitting ducks while in a harbor during a hurricane.
They did not take any elderly, sick, homeless, or financially impaired people with them.
The elderly, sick, homeless, and financially impaired people are being beaten down, and have been beaten down for some time now by Hurricane GOP.
The wealthy right wing, whom the GOP serve, have left town for vacations in Europe, Hawaii, or exotic places to "ride out the storm" with their new tax refunds, originally called "The Bush II tax cuts for the wealthy".
Once upon a time every government agency considered themselves to have a mission of protecting elderly, sick, homeless, or financially impaired people in times when conditions make it impossible for them to stand alone.
That is why we all gave those agencies a little of our money, our tax dollars, to use to help elderly, sick, homeless, or financially impaired in such times of need.
The elderly, sick, homeless, and financially impaired people on the streets won't be on any naval ships, won't be rescued by state and local governments who need help themselves, because of Hurricane Bad-Economy, which was brought to us originally by the Bushies.
In the first post of this series Dredd Blog posted:
Long before the Deepwater Horizon disaster Dredd Blog predicted the future of governmental response to disastrous catastrophes.(Triage: Still In Deep Water, see update here). The right-wing doctrine of "me first, you last" has now permeated the governments, so the people will continue to suffer.
For example, in the post New Government Climate Change Policy: Triage we pointed out that governments would morph into hyper-selfish entities.
Dredd Blog opined that those entities would develop programs to ensure the survival of government bureaucrats, programs not designed to ensure the survival of their people, and would increasingly keep those policies hidden from their people by the power of the state secrets doctrine.
The courts have ruled that it was MOMCOM that caused the flooding catastrophe in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, by making defective levees to protect the elderly, sick, homeless, and financially impaired people on the streets of New Orleans.
The GOP now say that government itself is bad, when actually it is only bad government that is bad ("bad government" means right-wing imperialistic forms of militant government).
Good government, government which is solemnly dedicated to the populace, not the military fortress or Wall Street, is not a bad concept.
Thankfully Irene lost power and came down to a Cat 1 at landfall.
That means more elderly, sick, homeless, and financially impaired people on the streets will survive this one.
I see on TV that the government is relying heavily on the Red Cross and similar entities.
ReplyDeleteThe government is in the war business, so they don't have much time for catastrophe that happens to the populace.
That is life in a wartocracy.