Saying that Bush is not qualified to hold the office of President may sound to some people like typical Bush-bashing; however, I'm not talking about Bush as an individual but as the designated leader of a large group of people who have the responsibility to govern this country. I'll use the term "Bush" here to refer to that group of people who make up his administration. A significant contributing factor to the failure of the federal government to respond adequately to the Katrina disaster is the widespread belief conservative politicians harbor that normal, ordinary governmental action is detrimental to the welfare of the citizens it is supposed to serve. Put as simply as possible: people who hate government cannot govern. The conservative movement in this country has gained ever-increasing support among Americans by emphasizing a single issue--government taxes the American people far in excess of any genuine need it has for the money it extracts for day-to-day, year-to-year operations. The best way, according to conservatives, to correct that horrible condition of economic oppression is to cut taxes over and over again. Bush has made his political career out of that misguided, and ultimately dangerous, proposition. How do you fight a war against terrorism? As cheaply as possible. How do you protect the homeland? As cheaply as possible. How do you wage war in Iraq? As cheaply as possible. How do you prepare for natural disasters? As cheaply as possible. How do you improve the national response to education? As cheaply as possible. How do you maintain port security? As cheaply as possible. This list is endless. Conservative politicians have consistently done exactly what the American voters have empowered them to do--cut government programs across the board with massive tax cuts until virtually every responsibility the federal government has can no longer be executed.

03/11/06

The government we have now (failure to capture Osama bin Laden; failure to secure a peaceful conclusion in the war against Iraq; failure to respond adequately to Katrina; failure to anticipate 9/11, 8/29, etc.; failure to prevent the ever-increasing number of Americans living below the poverty line) is the direct and inevitable result of the conservative belief that government is the enemy of good governance. The conservative agenda over the past fifteen years has perfectly accomplished its purpose. The government, especially on the domestic side, has been starved to the point that it can no longer meet the basic requirements of governance that any reasonable person should expect and that every citizen of this country should demand. We cannot pay for port security. We cannot pay for rail transpostation and urban mass transit. We cannot pay for infrastructure improvements. We cannot pay for health care service. We cannot pay for police protection that does not violate our rights or endanger innocent people. We cannot pay for decent educational opportunities. All these basic functions of government have been budget-starved out of existence by the conservative agenda. This headlong rush into already critically eroded government service will continue unabated until the American voter recognizes the fact that good government requires basic levels of funding to meet its responsibilities. Bush is convinced, and says over and over again, that the best government is one that offers virtually no service to its citizens whatsoever. That is the government we now have.

03/15/06

Looking at the government response to Katrina is one way to evaluate the validity of the point I am making here. It is a multi-layered and complex problem. The current administration, as part of its strategy to deny responsibility for its failure to respond adequately to the disaster along the Gulf Coast, has encouraged and participated in a campaign to confuse and cloud both the visual and verbal evidence to the contrary. Part of my purpose here is to attempt adding clarity to the issues that have arisen with regard to how the government's response is perceived. An issue that stands out in this regard is a photograph, widely displayed in the media for weeks after New Orleans flooded, that showed a large number of school busses parked in a flooded parking lot in the city. The existence of those busses was used to illustrate the fact that FEMA (and the federal government) were not solely responsible for the fact that 60,000 citizens of New Orleans were left behind in the evacuation of the city prior to Katrina's landfall. The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, since he did not order the use of those busses as evacuation vehicles, was set up as an example of how local government failed to act in a timely and effective manner to avoid the disaster that overtook the city on Eight-Twenty-Nine. That FEMA promised, but did not deliver, evacuation busses is rendered irrelivant in the face of the fact that Nagin failed to respond before FEMA did. The logic, I suppose, is that, if Nagin had acted first and "properly," then FEMA would noy have had to do so later. Hence, FEMA/Bush cannot really be faulted for the failure to evacuate the city because local government failed first before and during the ensuing human crisis.

03/16/06

Ray Nagin was asked once that I know of why he did not order the use of the school busses as a means of evacuating the people who ended up at the Superdome and Convention Center after the levees breached on 8/29. His answer was that there were no drivers available to move the busses out of the city. That answer says everything that needs to be said about the issue; however, it does not explain why there was no one available to drive those busses. Explaining that requires a considerable knowledge of the pre-Katrina circumstances that governed the status of those busses. The busses were not city property and, as Mayor, Ray Nagin had absolutely no authority over their disposition prior to Katrina's landfall. The busses were owned and operated and maintained by the Orleans Parish School System. At the beginning of the school year (August 2005), the Orleans School Board was engaged in an effort to secure a $50 million loan to fill a budget short-fall that would have closed parish public schools in a matter of weeks if the money was not secured. At the close of business on Friday, August 26,2005, the Board had not found the money and, if I remember correctly, had not found a single financial institution that had expressed any interest whatsoever in loaning any money to the Orleans School System. Interest in the proposition was absent because the FBI was maintaining a field office in the Parish School System headquarters on the West Bank to facilitate its on-going investigation into the corruption, fraud, and malfeasance which had caused the $50,000,000 budget crisis in the first place. Katrina ended the FBI investigation, as far as I know.

What, then, does any of this have to do with the school busses not being used to evacuate the Superdome and Convention Center before Katrina reached New Orleans? In the first place the bus-drivers were independent, contract workers who could not legally be ordered by anyone to drive a bus anywhere other than where the school board assigned them. As soon as it became obvious that Katrina was a real threat to New Orleans, the drivers and the school board both left the city in order to secure the safty of their families. There was no one in the city to order the drivers who were no longer there either. Nagin would not have been able to contact those drivers, if they had remained in the city, because he did not have their contact information. Ask another simple question: how well maintained were those busses. If there had been drivers available for them (there was not), how far would any of them have been able to travel in a hurricane evacuation before they broke down, blocked evacuation routes, and stranded passengers in the open air with Katrina less than 48 hours from landfall? No one can say for sure, but from personal knowledge of seeing those busses running their routes every school day in the Parish, and judging from the base of how many broke down every day under normal operational stresses, putting them on the evacuation routes Saturday morning (08/27/05) might well have caused a much worse disaster than the one America witnessed on Eight-Twenty-Nine. The School District, in other words, was not maintaining those busses in a way that made them road-worthy in a hurricane evacuation. It would have been foolhardy to put those busses on any of the FOUR available evacuation routes out of the city. Any well-maintained automobile can travel for eight to ten hours at five or ten miles per hour but no school bus from Orleans or Jefferson Parish could have done so.

Read what I'm saying carefully. Only four routes out of the city exist: Highway 61 west to Baton Rouge (we drove that one on 8/27/06 and reached the capitol 12 hours after we left New Orleans); Interstate 10 west to Baton Rouge; the Causeway across Lake Pontchartrain to the North Shore and Interstate 12 west to Baton Rouge or east into Mississippi; and Interstate 10 east to the interior of Mississippi or to the Florida panhandle. We have tried three of those routes during evacuations--all required a minimum of 8 hours to reach a viable transit point beyond the endangered area. Putting Orleans Parish school busses into a ten-mile-per-hour traffic jam with literally 1.2 million people fleeing a hurricane would be nothing short of criminally insane. In fact, this is a well-recognized reality in regional disaster planning in southeastern Louisiana because no mention of using school busses for evacuation has ever been mentioned in any disaster management plan.

To repeat what I said earlier: blaming Ray Nagin and local government for failing to use school busses for evacuation is a way to cloud and confuse where the real fault lies. FEMA promised busses for pre-landfall evacuation. Those busses did not arrive until five days after landfall, on Thursday night, September 1, 2005.

03/17/06

Another pertinent fact, though one that cannot be used to fix blame on anyone in particular, but is nevertheless critical in understanding why so many things went to hell in a shopping cart, is that Katrina's timing as it emerged as a threat to southeastern Louisiana was as unfortunately horrible as anything could have been. I know this also from personal experience. After I got home from work on Friday, August 26, 2005, I watched reports from the National Hurricane Center on local television that were based on the 4 PM advisory. Advisories are issued every six hours and the next one was not scheduled until 10 PM that same night. At 4 PM Katrina was crossing Florida and was expected to enter the Gulf of Mexico as a low-level category 1 hurricane on a heading more north than west. The point of expected entry into the Gulf strongly suggested that the eye-wall would continue moving more north than west taking it into the Florida coast somewhere between Tampa Bay and the "big bend" region at the eastern end of the panhandle. Relative to New Orleans at the time, the worst case possibility was that it might make landfall on the border between Alabama and Florida at the extreme western end of the panhandle. I was overjoyed by that news because it meant that Katrina represented no threat to New Orleans whatsoever. I was not happy that Florida was about to be lashed yet again but relieved that we were not going to need to evacuate to avoid catastrophe.

Katrina crossed the west coast of Florida about 50 to 100 miles south of where it was supposed to be, heading south/southwest. The storm had failed to make the swing to the north that the 4 PM advisory expected and instead had increased its motion toward the south. The 10 PM advisory repositioned the probable track west to a position very close to the one followed by Betsy (1965) and Camilie (1969), both of which devastated Louisiana and Mississippi. The 10 PM advisory was the most frightening piece of television news I have ever seen. We do not own an automobile and had to rent one every time an evacuation was necessary. Previously we had plenty of time to do that. This time--the car rental outlets were closed already and I was not aware of the national rental desks where it was possible to reserve and/or rent a car when local outlets were closed. For about 45 minutes I sat in front of the television paralyzed by fear. I saw a graphic as part of the advisory that reported real-time water temperatures between Katrina's location at 10 PM and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. I couldn't believe what I was looking at: mid-gulf about 300 miles south of landfall--88 degrees F; 150 miles north and halfway to the coast--89 degrees F; at the coast--90 degrees F. The track could be wrong and Katrina might miss east or west enough to spare New Orleans. The water temperatures were not wrong. What they meant was that Katrina was going to increase in power as it approached landfall. 88 degrees translates to a high level category 4 or a low level category 5. For every degree of water temperature above that, you can add one more level of intensity. Katrina had the potential of being a category 7 hurricane when it reached Louisiana--ha! ha!--very funny because there is no such thing as a category level above 5.

Doom was the only thing on my mind when I finally called the local number of the car rental agency. Voice mail gave me the option of connecting to the national desk--which I did not know was an option. I touch-toned 2 and waited while the phone rang. A human being answered the phone. I was expecting more voice mail. I think I said "thank god," not that I believe there is one, and the operator sounded perplexed when he said "can I help you?" After I got the confirmation number for the rental, I could not believe it meant anything. Rental cars disappear in New Orleans during evacuations in minutes, not hours. Overbooking holds true for airlines and car rentals at an equal level of occurrence. I was reasonably calmed by my success; however, because the rental agent was not aware yet of the fact that his company would have no rental cars in southeastern Louisiana by 8 AM Saturday morning.

The point here is not really obvious from what I have been saying. Katrina became a recognized threat to New Orleans a little more than 48 hours before it made landfall. The nationally approved evacuation plan for Louisiana goes into motion as soon as a hurricane reaches a point equivalent to 72 hours before it reaches New Orleans. By the time anyone knew Katrina was a threat to the city, the evacuation plan was already 24 hours behind its designated initiation point. Not only that, but also significant is the fact that most people in New Orleans are not home at 10 PM on any Friday night to watch a hurricane advisory. People party. Many don't get home until well after midnight and are not in any condition to comprehend, if they look at, a hurricane advisory. Most people sleep in on Saturday mornings. Many until mid-morning or mid-afternoon. This was verified Saturday morning when we went downtown at 7 AM to get in line at the car rental office on Canal Street. There was no line. The only people on the street were homeless. No one showed up while we waited for the office to open (8 AM). No one was leaving the hotel across the street to rent a car because they found out that all flights out of New Orleans were booked beyond capacity by those fortunate enough to know by then that they had to get out. The tourists were trapped. Michael Brown expressed concern in his conference call to President Bush that the hotels were not closing down. He saw that as a dangerous problem. The hotels could not shut down because that would have forced thousands of people out on the street with no way to leave the city. We were lucky. We got a car. We got out.

03/22/06

The real problem with the subject of Katrina, however, as important as the things I have mentioned so far are, can be summed up in one giant word: LEVEES. Let me start this rather technical discussion with the Industrial Canal on the eastern edge of the city. There was a levee and floodwall structure on the land side of the canal (western side) that protected eastern New Orleans and the 9th Ward from hurricanes. The levee and floodwall structure was 18 feet high along the canal and was supposed to stop a category 3 storm surge from flooding the eastern half of the city. There was a serious engineering problem with that theoretical hope, however, that proved fatal to a large number of people (500--1,000?) who lived in the areas most severely flooded by Katrina. The design flaw is a shipping channel that runs from the Industrial Canal eastward to the Gulf of Mexico along the northern edge of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes. It is called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or MR GO, for short. The channel is 38 feet deep and about 100 yards wide--deep and wide enough to allow the passage of an ocean-going frieghter (cargo ship--oil tanker) into the Industrial Canal at the Port of New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico without running up the Mississippi River. Because of the bends in the river and the fact that the channel hits the Gulf northwest of the river's mouth, the distance a ship needs to travel to reach New Orleans is reduced by 20 to 50 miles (I don't actually know how much distance is circumvented by MR GO). When the channel was first proposed (after Betsy in 1965), everyone in favor of it believed it would considerably increase the amount of shipping that was directed from foreign ports to New Orleans. It was going to be an economic machine that was going to vastly raise the per capita income of the city. That never happened. Cargo traffic did not increase in and out of the port to any significant degree.

Objections to the concept of digging a channel through the marsh along the northeastern flank of Louisiana were several and loudly proclaimed at the time. All the objections were based on water dynamic engineering concerns. People who studied the problem relative to storm surge development during hurricanes argued that such a structure would allow a unique storm surge to develop along the channel that would be higher than normal (as it moved over undeveloped marshland without MR GO in place) and would move at a higher velocity than normal as it approached the western levee and floodwall along the Industrial Canal. This was a theory based on sound engineering principles but no concrete data that demonstrated its veracity. The Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers actively lobbied for funds to create the channel and won approval for it in 1965. They dredged the channel and opened it for traffic. They redredge the channel every year to keep it open even though hardly any shipping companies used it to reach New Orleans. The issues that were raised against the channel's construction were forgotten as time passed by most people because nothing ever happened to cause any concern. No hurricanes appeared in the proper configuration to test the theory until Katrina hit.

What happened on 08/29/05 may have exceeded the warnings engineers used in 1965 to oppose the dredging of MR GO. When Katrina crossed 30 degrees north latitude, where the heart of New Orleans is located relative to the equator, a secondary storm surge was generated by the prevailing winds whipping across the northern edge of the eyewall heading from east to west. The wind velocity at that time was below a category 3 level--probably around 90 to 125 miles per hour. That is a guess. It may be several more months before truly accurate wind speeds are calculated from the data that was collected as the hurricane moved across New Orleans. The category 5 storm surge, which occurred in the northeastern sector of the storm, was worse than the one I'm talking about. It reached a level 32 feet above sea level and slammed ashore in southern Mississippi and Alabama, moving from south to north not east to west. The MR GO storm surge reached 23 feet in height and moved down the channel from the edge of the eyewall due west (not north) at a rate of travel just below the wind velocity that propelled it against the floodwall of the Industrial Canal. It is not hard to imagine what happened. A wall of water (8 pounds per gallon) 23 feet tall moving at 80 miles per hour overtopped the floodwall and flattened it. It obliterated the levee. The lower 9th Ward flooded to the level of rooftops in a matter of an hour or less. Three more bodies were recovered there yesterday from the same block of rubble left behind by Katrina. Sadly, there will be many more.

Would it be safe to assume that MR GO is history, that it will be shut down and closed over? There is a moritorium on dredging but there is no consensus yet that it should be permanently closed. In fact, there is pressure being brought to bear, some of it by the Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers, to keep it open, to continue dredging it year by year with little or no economic benefit to show for it. The power of commerce, even when it is only an unrealized potential that has not materialized in 40 years, seems to be enough to overtop all reason to the contrary for closing down an engineering nightmare that may have caused the deaths of 1,000 innocent people. Some business-obsessed Republicans may benefit by keeping MR GO open but no one who might live again in the 9th Ward, Gentilly, or the rest of eastern New Orleans, assuming any of it is ever rebuilt, stands to benefit in the least by such greed and insanity.

04/03/06

The levees that protected the city on the western side, the ones along the 17th Street and London Avenue drainage canals, which also suffered catastrophic collapse on 8/29, were just as flawed as the Industrial Canal structures were. The same culprit was responsible for them--the federal Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers. The first structural flaw is an old one that dates back to the time when floodwalls were added to the levees themselves. In order to add levels of protection to the city from a backwash storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain, which is what Katrina produced, the decision was made to add floodwalls to the earthen levees that were already in place along the two drainage canals. Drainage canals are necessary to remove rainwater from the city because such accumulation cannot flow out of the city naturally since most of the city is lower overall than Lake Pontchartrain, lower by as much as 8 to 20 feet depending on what parts of the city one is talking about. The water is pumped out of the city through its system and network of canals and pumping stations. The city was seriously flooded four or five times in the fifteen years I lived there. It would have been flooded four or five times a year over that same period if the drainage canals and pumping stations were not in place. They are a necessity. Five or six feet of rainfall flood water in front of my house--three different locations--would disappear in ten to twelve hours after accumulation when the pumps were running properly. The system worked well even if some people always complained about flooding and the lack of protection offered by the system of canals and pumps.

The design flaw of the levees was relatively simple in nature. Core samples were drilled in the 1940's and 1950's along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals that indicated stable, non-porous soils needed to anchor sheet-piling existed below a depth of 40 feet. That was a well-established fact that no one disputed. It is still true today. Soils above 40 feet are composed of large percentages of porous, organic material that allow water to flow with relative ease from the water side to the land side of every levee along both canals. Most of the time the water levels in the canals are well below the elevation of the foot of the levees. Sheet-piling set in place to a depth of 40 feet will prevent water flowing from the canal to the land side of the levee. When the levees become saturated with water, they collapse, especially if they are topped by the weight of a cement floodwall. No one disputes these facts. The problem is that, after the decision was made to install floodwalls, someone was given the task of drawing a graph to be used as a guide for how deep the sheet-piling had to be driven to adequately support the weight of the floodwalls and prevent water saturation from undermining the earthen levees. The depth established by the core samples (40 feet) was written on the graph as 17 feet and that is how deep the Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers drove the sheet-piling. The Corpse (sic) then made the false claim, year after year as it were, that New Orleans was protected from a category 3 hurricane because the levee and floodwall system was adequate to withstand that level of storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain. Wrong. Katrina was a category 2, or lower, when it reached New Orleans and the levees and floodwalls collapsed.

There were signs before Katrina that problems existed with the levees. After even minor storms, ponds of water appeared on the land side of the canals. That water had seeped through the porous soils beneath the sheet-piling, even through the actual levees themselves because the canal bottoms were 18 feet below the base line of the floodwalls. People reported the ponding along the land side of the levees for years after significant storms but nothing was ever done to address the problem. The local levee-boards, the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, and the Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers, all ignored the problem. Katrina made it clear just how dangerous faith in the strength of the levees and floodwalls had become.

04/05/06

A second design flaw, according to engineers, is the shape of the floodwalls themselves. The ones in place for Katrina were I-beams, with a short base to stand on. The sheet-piling was driven through the center of the level straight down into the too-porous soils of the levees. The floodwalls were placed directly on top of the sheet-piling, which prevented the floodwalls from sinking into the earthen levees. According to analysis, the pressure of the water in the canals as Katrina passed to the north of the city, pressed into the top of the I-beams and tipped them back toward the land side of the structure. The problem, however, that caused the collapse came at the foot of the floodwalls when the base lifted ever-so-slightly off the ground at the toe (side facing the canal), allowing water to slip beneath the base of the floodwalls. The soil composition at the top of the levees was such that it became very slippery when the water moved under the base of the floodwalls. The water in the canals created enough pressure to push the walls backwards and they slid down the backside of the levees into the city, opening a breach across the earthen structures that were eaten away by the water flowing over them in a relatively short period of time. The Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers is correcting this problem by using floodwalls with an inverted T-shape to create a wider base at the bottom of the wall. They have also decided to drive secondary pilings at an angle paralleling the inner slope of the levee on the canal side of the structure to add support to the walls, since it was also discovered that the toe of the levees was much weaker than the center-line through which the sheet-piling was originally placed.

Another new feature meant to solve the problem of the drainage canals is the creation of movable flood gates at the opening of the canals into Lake Pontchartrian, which can be closed when a hurricane approaches the city, reducing the amount of water from the Lake that can be back-blown into the canals as a storm passes northeast of New Orleans into Mississippi, as Katrina did. Good idea? Bad idea? A problem is that rain-water removal from the city when the flood gates are closed is reduced by as much as 90%. Many critics of the plan, which is already being executed, suggest that the Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers has simply devised another way to flood the city when a tropical storm or hurricane comes too close to New Orleans. I'm not sure how serious a problem this might be. Areas of New Orleans that did not flood after Katrina traditionally do not flood during rain-generated events either. Areas that were destroyed (70-80% of the city) by the Katrina flood do flood during rain-events. If flooded areas are not re-built, and that question is still open, then concern over the issue is meaningless.

Another huge problem, and one I have not seen addressed by anyone, is the apparent fact that the only areas of the levees and floodwalls that are being replaced by the new designs are the ones that actually failed during Katrina. This is a problem, if I'm right about this, because the parts of the system that did not fail are going to be just as weak as they were before Katrina--and, in fact, even more vulnerable to collapse in the future because they will be flanked on either side by areas of superior strength. Water under pressure, as it is in canals affected by storm surge, always seeks the path of least resistance to its flow. The re-built sections of the levees, if they actually are stronger than pre-Katrina structures, and there could be serious questions about that, will force the water pressure against the weakest remaining parts of the structure, against the ones least capable of resisting collapse, against the ones that were not re-built. Even if those areas of the levees and floodwalls did not suffer catasprophic failure, one must assume they were damaged enough to reduce their overall effectiveness to withstand storm surges. When the Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers claims the re-built levees have been restored to pre-Katrina strength, I'm not sure anyone should feel reassured.

04/08/06

A member of the Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers was interviewed yesterday (04/07/06) on one of the national news programs about levee strength levels in New Orleans. He began by asserting the level-3 category claim but reduced that assessment almost immediately to level-2. Then he said that the levees would certainly withstand 90 mile-an-hour sustained winds. He linked this assessment to what Katrina actually produced in stating emphatically that the re-built levees would be restored to pre-Katrina levels. His on-camera delivery was rapid-fire and probably would have been very confusing to someone unfamiliar with levee strength levels either before or after Katrina. The 90-mile-per-hour wind-speed seemed to be his bottom line. A tropical storm becomes a hurricane when its maximum sustained winds reach 79-miles-per-hour. Add 11-miles-per-hour to that and you get 90. That is a low or mid-level category 1 hurricane. The main spokesperson, or even the head of operations for the Army Corpse (sic) of Engineers in New Orleans, as recently as yesterday, said that the re-built levees in the city would be safe as long as wind speeds did not exceed 90-miles-per-hour, as long as they did not exceed the force of a mid-level category 1 hurricane. While he was saying this, however, because of his confusing method of delivery, he steadfastly implied that the levees would survive a category 3 hurricane. This assertion, of course, is the same gross exaggeration that gave the citizens of New Orleans their dangerous, and for many, deadly, sense of safety prior to Katrina.

04/12/06

I have been reading American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, by Kevin Phillips, a newly published account of how the radical right of born-again Christians (George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Bill Frist, Tom Delay, etc. if not ad infinitum) in this country are driving us over the cliff of their delusional belief that Armageddon (the war between good and evil that will end the world as we know it) is only months or days away from commencing. The core constituency of the Bushies (25-33% of the American people) believe that the invasion of Iraq (the NEW BABYLON under Saddam Hussein) is the first battle of Armageddon, which is why they still support Bush's insane war against Islam in the Middle East (read Holy Land). They are hastening the rapture of the Second Coming by doing work that "God" has so far refused to do for himself over the course of the last two thousand years. Paul counseled Cristians in the 1st Century against marriage altogether because he believed that the Second Coming was only months or days away. The concept of the "rapture," popularized recently in the Left Behind novel series, is totally extra-Biblical and pure heresy if anyone cared about such things anymore. Does make you wonder why the born-agains are so intent on preserving the sanctity of a sacrament against intrusion by gays and lesbians when Paul condemned it anyway as a distraction that endangered everyone's chances of salvation at the beginning of the Long Wait all Christians have had to endure for the Second Coming. Just another one of those elements of total and absolute ill-logic so favored by the religious right in this country and everywhere else they have appeared over the years.

I have not finished Phillips's chapters on "Borrowed Money" but only began reading them last night. I know what he is going to say. To the born-agains deficit spending and debt accumulation, even in light of the obscene levels to which the Bushies have driven it ($9 trillion in the newest federal debt ceiling limit), is irrelvant and meaningless because it will all be made so by the Second Coming and besides the people who own our National debt, Arabs and Chinese, are all going to hell anyway (infidels and heathens that they are) as soon as the "repture" comes to save us/Bush even from our/Bush's insane deficit spending and debt accumulation. So anyway, this is an up-date on my struggle against badly underfunded government to secure the Congress-approved and promised reimbursement for the damages I endured as a consequence of Hurricane Katrina destrying my life on 8/29/05. I lost my job. I lost everything I owned. I became a homeless refugee. This happened in America in the 21st Century. To me and four hundred thousand other citizen of a destroyed city. Seven months later, more than enough time mind you for the Second Coming to come and go several times over, just two nights ago, I got a call from the Small Business Administration with GOOD NEWS (insert "Gospel" here): I have been pre-approved for a $40,000 loan at 2.687% interest with monthly payments of $170.00, deferred for twelve months, to cover the losses I sustained because the Army Corpse of Engineers failed for thirty years to build the New Orleans levee system up to the standards necessary to withstand a category 1 (90-mile-per-hour sustained winds) hurricane. The "thirty years" matter here in another way--that is how long it will take me to pay off the loan. Why is this insane? I'm 61 years old and will have to live until I'm 91 to pay down the debt. Simple math--any born-again Christian might be able to do it--61 + 30 = 91.

Another obvious question--to me anyway but perhaps not to anyone else not caught in the quagmire of born-again political evasions that are the Bush administration's response to disaster relief--and believe me--every American is caught in that quagmire--what in the hell does the Small Business Adnimistration (SBA) have to do with the Katrina relief effort that is supposed to be managed by the the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)????? In the relief application packet FEMA sent me as soon as I applied for assistance was a six page form, printed on blue paper, that was to be filled out and submitted to the SBA for a loan to cover hurricane losses. After six phone calls back to FEMA, someone finally told me I was supposed to send that form to the SBA, which would reject my application for a loan, send it back to FEMA, which would then consider the merits of my claim for reimbursement for property damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. That relief aid would be a grant, not a loan, at about half the value of the assessment of losses determined by the SBA after my property was inspected. What's the point of the SBA/FEMA run-around-circle? Probably the hope that the Second Coming would intervene in the seven months already passed before I saw a dime of the money Congress appropriated to assist Katrina refugees so that Bush and his cronies could ascend into heaven on the day of the "repture" with all the money that was supposed to help America's poorest citizens recover from the worst natural, read man-made, disaster in our country's history. At best, according to the purely charming woman at the SBA who brought me my share of GOOD NEWS, I'm looking at two-and-one-half more months before my claim is settled. Everyone I have dealt with at the SBA and FEMA deserve the highest praise for what they have had to endure over the last 7 months. It is frustratingly maddening for everyone involved in this catastrophe, and while some employees of the agencies involved have not been able to help much, simply because so little of this makes sense to anyone not a born-again Christian, everyone I have encountered along the way has been caring and symathetic.

Phillips, in American Theocracy, argues that the federal government for the last thirty years or so has been relatively intent on expanding the debt ceiling of its spending levels as a way of stimulating the economy and preventing the occurrence of the recessions that have periodically plagued the country's economic development in the years since the Great Depression. Phillips makes a strong case for his argument. What has happened since Bush took office is a two-pronged assault on fiscal responsibility that has undermined our economic system as seriously as the government's neglect of leeves in New Orleans undermined the basic safety of its citizens. Financial institutions, and their Rebublican-based bidness of money lending and laundering, were deregulated by the federal government (what did Tom Delay, Newt Gindrich, et. al. give back as quid pro quo for bribes from lobbyists?, you ask) to the extent that they are now free to charge interest on loans (credit cards especially) that range upward to 30%. Congress also passed a bankruptcy bill that makes it virtually impossible for average consumers to get out from under debts accumulated by anyone who is ever foolish enough to charge anything on a credit card. The new loan-sharks are credit card company CEO's and bank managers. So, why is the SBA in charge of offering low-interest loans to refugees from Katrina as a way to "help" them recover from the losses incurred from the government sponsored and orchestrated disaster that destroyed New Orleans? Why offer me a loan--instead of a grant? Why make the loan $40,000 for property I lost when the grant covering the same loss will be half as much? How is borrowed money less valuable by 50% than money given as a grant? Why are FEMA grants worth half as much as SBA loans? My compassionate conservative protectors at the Federal level clearly want and expect me to become a debtor paying 2.687% today but 30% tomorrow when they, like other lending institutions, jack the interest rate arbitrarily to levels that good, but not born-again, Christians used to call sinful usury. In fact, not too many years ago usury was a capital crime punished by death. I'd like to stick the needle in George W. Bush's arm myself--since as far as I can see he bears responsibility for everyone who died in Katrina's aftermath and is just as guilty for shell-gaming loans to people who need relief from the financial burdens his governance created along the Gulf Coast. Instead, his government comes up with another way to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, to burden Katrina survivors with debt they can never repay, while he turns his backside to helping us recover from that devastating catastrophe.

Saddam is on trial for killing 142 people in southern Iraq. Bush is not on trial for killing several thousand in southern Louisiana and condemning thousands more to a lifetime of debt in the guise of relieving our burdens of loss from Katrina. One should not forget either that Bush signed execution warrants as Governor of Texas that killed 270 people during his term in office here. Most of them were guilty of killing people. How is what he has done different than what they did?

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