Outrage and Infamy: New Orleans Not Ready For Devastating Hurricane

The levees in New Orleans are still not ready, and in many areas of the hurricane belt other communities are not adequately prepared.

The odds do not favor Hurricane Dean hitting New Orleans as Category 4 or 5, but it could be a close call and we have entered the danger zone.

Words cannot describe the infamy that could unfold in the coming weeks. In the first Katrina people died because they were too young, too elderly, too poor, too handicapped and too neglected to protect themselves, and those who should have protected them, did not.

The odds now favor, at some point, a rerun which would be an even greater infamy because America knew what could happen, and still did not act in time. Again.

In this new Gilded Age, bridges across the nation could fall down at any time, while we spend more than a trillion dollars on Iraq. Coal coal miners die because of neglect, while the safety shortcomings become policy, with mining interests becoming regulators, and mining company money peddling influence.

In this Gilded Age, companies profiteer from war, the national government bails out big banks and hedge funds while lawsuits are filed to foreclose, a scene from the Grapes of Wrath.

In this Gilded Age, giant bonuses are handed out on Wall Street while poor children and elderly Americans die from hurricanes, the number of homeless veterans goes up while the President pushes tax cuts for the highest incomes.

Ladies and gentlemen, right before our eyes we saw the tragedy and outrage of Katrina and right before our eyes, we see the neglect that continues and threatens an instant replay of infamy.

If disaster strikes New Orleans again, the fault will lie with Republicans and Democrats at the federal, state, and local levels. The fault will lie with the major media that force feeds stories about celebrities and public opinion polls, but does not focus attention on the tragedy that is coming, once again, with the next Katrina.

Make no mistake, death is on the way, and we are not prepared, again. If death does not come with Hurricane Dean, it will be the next one, or the next one, but the clock is ticking and the tragedy is inevitable unless something is done, and soon.

There are not superlative words that fully describe the outrage of this. It is sickening, nauseating, disgusting and un-American that even now the levees in New Orleans are not ready.

If and when a hurricane strikes and the people of New Orleans or other communities suffer preventable deaths, it would not be wrong to call this the moral equivalent of murder.