First, he ignores the disaster in New Orleans for the first couple of days, and now, he’s allowing federal contractors to pay workers less than the prevailing wage as they try to rebuild the city.

What is this prevailing wage? $9 an hour.

For a “born again Christian,” he sure does seem to hate the poor.

Rogers Cadenhead has a shocking story of suburban police preventing people from escaping the hell that the Superdome had become:

When buses charted by the group to escape New Orleans never showed up, they camped out beside a police command center on Canal Street, believing it was the best place to get aid, protection, and information. They were told they could not stay there and should leave the city on foot over Highway 90, which crosses the Mississippi River from New Orleans to the suburb of Gretna, a city of 17,500 people.

Running out of food and water, they walked to the bridge, growing in number to around 800 people as word spread of a safe way out:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City.

Here we see the ugly face of the “every person for themselves” America that Republicans are trying to impose upon us. It’s an America of class warfare - with the rich waging war on the poor and casting off all compassion for those who are in need.

Usually, this class warfare is more subtle - economic exploitation, tax cuts for the rich, decreases in programs for the poor. But in this case, the mask was ripped off and the class warfare resulted in shots being fired.

What a shameful place our nation has become.

It really bothers me that our government would be willing to spend hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars to kill people in Iraq, but couldn’t be bothered to spend a few hundred million NOW to save people here in the United States.

Yesterday, I was watching CNN and noticed how freely they seemed to be tearing into the government’s - pardon my language - fuck ups regarding Hurricane Katrina and the disaster in New Orleans. I don’t think I was imagining it. This article today on their web site absolutely tears into Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, refuting every single one of his justifications for the slow response. It’s absolutely a must read, and it is good to see the media finally calling this administration on its lies.

I’ve been pretty busy the last week, and probably wouldn’t have had much of intelligence to add to the conversation about the horrors which have happened in New Orleans this week in any case. But the incredibly poor response by our government to this tragedy has really started to get to me in recent days. How is it that our government could have been COMPLETELY unprepared for the worst-case scenario in New Orleans - a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane, the consequences of which (destruction of the city) had been widely understood for years (I remember reading about just this scenario over a year ago)? Why weren’t there National Guard units ready to help evacuate the city BEFORE the hurricane struck, and to oversee any additional evacuations required afterwards?

I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that most of the people who needed to be evacuated are poor (and possibly because they are black and don’t, in general, tend to vote Republican).

But Kevin Drum (via Laura Rosen) has something that shows me clearly where this administration’s priorities are:

There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

After reading that, I had to try really hard to keep my language clean in this post.

How many thousands of people died because our government didn’t see fit to prepare for a FORESEEABLE disaster? How many more people died because Mr. Bush stayed in Crawford and played guitar with his buddies instead of immediately mobilizing the National Guard to get in there and save people? And he has the guts to stage a publicity stunt to make himself look good (but in actuality not do too damn much)?

I sincerely hope that the warmth of the American people can come to the aid of those who are suffering and overcome the absolute neglect of their government. And I can only pray that God would do some good in this dark hour.

That being said, the most important thing for any of us to do is to give at this point. Give our money in the short-term, and if the opportunity arises, our time to directly help in the long term (along with more money). Our government may have gone cold-hearted, but we certainly must not.