Katrina

I have been covering to some degree the terrible flooding in the Midwest and describing how the levees breaking, leading to the flooding of towns and cities in Wisconsin and Iowa, are a direct result of deliberate Republican neglect of America's infrastructure. Republicans prefer giving your tax money to Halliburton, Exxon and Blackwater than using that money to fix our roads, bridges and levees. This morning on NPR I heard as many as two dozen levees are in danger of breaking as flood waters flow downstream along the Mississippi. A huge chunk of the Midwest has been affected. These levees should have been maintained! This began as a natural disaster, but Republican neglect of the levees is responsible for the scale of the disaster...just like in New Orleans.

Democrats vote for funding to maintain our infrastructure. Republicans vote against that funding. That means, when Republicans are in control, our levees, roads and bridges decay, leading to disaster. But the dedication of Democrats and the neglect by Republicans goes deeper than that.

As the floodwaters rose in the Midwst, Barack Obama grabbed a shovel and helped:

Where was McCain? Where was Bush?

When Katrina hit, we all watched the Bush Administration celebrate McCain's birthday party, Condaleeza Rice shop for shoes in NYC, and, of course, New Orleans flood in a comlpetely avoidable disaster that happened as a direct result of Republican "Drown Government in a Bathtub" policy.

But what most people missed is that Mississippi got hard hit as well. Back then, one of my coworkers had grown up in Mississippi and her family is still in rural Mississippi. She didn't talk about Katrina much, but once I asked her and the devastation to her family, financially, emotionally and psychologically, had been enormous. And the insurance companies were dicking everyone around, refusing payouts if people had gotten a single cent of help from the government.

Americans died needlessly and the survivors are now being screwed by the same right wing extremist policies that let the disaster happen in the first place.

Democracy for America, one of the more effective progressive organizations around, is eyeing the election for Mississippi Insurance Commissioner to get someone on the ground in Mississippi who might actually HELP people rather than hurt them. From DFA:

The fight to bring health care to every American is not just a national issue. It is a local one too. Governors, state legislators, and insurance commissioners are taking the lead on health care, often making a difference when no one else will.

Recently I wrote about planting trees in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine as a way to promote economic and environmental stability, preserve water resources, and to sequester carbon as a way of dealing with global warming. I got lots of replies, particularly on Daily Kos, and will in the near future revisit that issue both to try and get more people donating to plant trees in the region, and to discuss some of the issues brought up in my last diary.

But today I want to discuss another way of possibly addressing global warming through carbon sequestration, and to definitely mitigate some of the problems global warming will mean for coastal areas. I want to discuss the preservation and restoration of wetlands.

Since the Katrina disaster I have become aware of the critical role wetlands play for protecting coastal regions from damage from large storms. One of many reasons why the damage to the Gulf Coast from Katrina was so bad is the degradation of wetlands by human activity. Too often these regions have been seen as a luxury and expendable in the name of progress. But the truth is wetlands are a major buffer zone between storms and storm surges from the ocean and settled coastal regions. A summary of the many vital functions played by wetlands can be found here. And a good summary focused on Louisiana can be found here. But a couple of quotes will suffice for now: