Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was “immoral” for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt.
It’s an absurd notion, but it’s fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen.
The agency was put back in working order by President Obama, but ideology still blinds Republicans to its value. Many don’t like the idea of free aid for poor people, or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.
Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA’s budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. The Ryan budget, which Mr. Romney praised as “an excellent piece of work,” would result insevere cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which wouldcut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.
You know what? Fuck this. People should pay for their bad decisions? Okay. And THEN WHAT? God Almighty, then what? Then they’ll have paid, and there will still be flood water over everything, and people will be broke and homeless, but hey, at least we can go to sleep at night knowing somebody’s paid … how? What is the practical benefit to anybody of saying to someone who’s been fucked over by nature or life too bad, so sad, I’mma take the ten bucks we would have spent on that and throw it at Starbucks?
I do not GET THIS. I don’t. What the TITS. When a disaster strikes I want big government, small government, medium-sized government. I want all the government ever. I want the neighbors and the charities and the churches and the families and the friends, too. Every crack in the plaster needs to be patched and every problem needs to be solved, and I want as many people putting that puzzle together as possible. All hands on the fucking deck. Here’s a bucket. Start bailing the water out.
I wanteverybody to be figuring out how to do more, instead of fighting over the best way to do less without looking like too much of an asshole about it.
And you know, I think the majority of Americans want this, too. It’s just that for the past 40 years we’ve had this constant drumbeat of no we can’t, it’s too hard, we can’t afford it, everybody fends for themselves, there’s no help for anybody, let’s all just go home and if you have to step over a homeless dude to get to your car then do it because that’s the price of doing business. People deserve to have their homes submerged and their shops wiped out and their lives ruined because of where they live or what they do or who they are, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it, because only government is big enough to solve this problem and we all know government isn’t the answer to anything anymore.
But deep down we’ve still got that nagging feeling that somebody somewhere ought to be on top of shit, that most of the time people don’t deserve what they get (and thank God for that, by the way, she says while conducting the express train to hell), that we are better and bigger and stronger than this, and we’re just straining against the goddamn harness to do something. And disaster preparedness and emergency management are some of the most basic things government can do to prevent us from tearing ourselves apart when something shitty happens, to take that instinct and direct it outward instead of inward.
To make us help, rather than letting us hurt.
A.