Duplicate posting--please ignore

[Jankyn]

The graphic with this is disturbing, but accurate.

http://www.newsreview.com/issues/Sacto/2005-09-22/essay.asp

The neocons' bathtub
New Orleans shows what the radical oligarchs have in store for the rest of us

By Kel Munger


Photo Illustration by Don Button


The warm, filthy water currently being pumped out of New Orleans may look more like a cesspool than a bathtub, but it’s easy enough to drown in. For the past few weeks, the images coming from New Orleans and Mississippi have been both enraging and sickening. The complete breakdown of systems to protect the most vulnerable is maddening, and it’s certainly satisfying to think of heads rolling--at least in a figurative sense--for the series of failures.

But a failure of this magnitude--long-term lack of preparedness, complacency, disorganization and misallocation of resources--can’t possibly be the fault of any one man, or even of any one party. It is, instead, a failure of an ideology.

One of the major proponents of this ideology is Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader who is also one of the chief strategists behind President Bush’s tax plan. Norquist is most famously known for saying that his goal was to cut the federal government down “to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The response, or lack thereof, by federal agencies and officials to the crisis caused by Hurricane Katrina is proof that the plan is working. This is Grover Norquist’s bathtub: full of sewage, toxic waste and the bodies of our citizens. There’s not a rubber ducky in sight.