When the levee breaks

It has been two years since New Orleans was flooded by defective levees, levees that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has now admitted were defective.

Today, two years later, New Orleans and the Louisiana Gulf Coast is still a mess. The utilities company, Entergy New Orleans and Entergy Gulf Coast cannot provide reliable power or gas service and has filed for bankruptcy despite the fact that their parent company, Entergy Corporation, is recording record profits. If they cannot provide services then government should step in and provide services (that's the whole point of government -- We The People band together and provide services for ourselves that for some reason private enterprise can't or won't provide), but local governments are bankrupt because stores cannot operate without electricity and property taxes cannot be paid without income from jobs that can't be there without electricity, and the federal government refuses to give them any money unless they provide matching funds and besides the federal government won't allow them to provide electrical service to replace the service Entergy isn't providing using these funds.

So now people have moved back, but they're not getting the services they spent so many years paying for -- no fire protection, no police protection, no flood protection (the levees are sitll broken, the U.S. Army Corps of engineers says it will not be until 2011 that the levees are even to the level of protection that they were *supposed* to be at in 2005). The Republican response is, "well who needs government?". But the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and Louisiana Gulf Coast will have an easy answer to that, as they show you the remnants of fire stations and police labs, the roads washed away that can't be rebuilt because the federal government won't provide money, the mountains of trash from gutted homes that FEMA is legally responsible for removing but refuses to see... they need the government they spent so many years paying for, the government that is supposed to provide public services like roads, fire protection, and disaster management. Unfortunately, recovery money is largely going to Bushevik cronies instead. What the people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast are getting is the sort of "service" that a stallion gives to a mare, right up the ass...

-- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin