OT: Your tax dollars at work

This is disgusting. From The Guardian:

A year ago the US army corps of engineers proposed to study how New
Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush
administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a
flood killed six people in 1995, the Congress created the Southeast
Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Operated by the corps of
engineers, levees and pumping stations were strengthened and
renovated. In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane
striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential
disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the
federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq
war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers'
request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by
more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration's
additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose
a hiring freeze. The Senate debated adding funds for fixing levees,
but it was too late.

--Sidney Blumenthal,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561356,00.html

.

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