(Father Greeley)2 deadly sins did Big Easy in

[EC]

<snip>
The tax benefits for President Bush's friends, "the haves and the have mores" as he called them in an unwise slip of the tongue, have aggravated the deficit problems for which the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren will have to pay. Much of the debt is owned by the Chinese, who have also taken over the clothing market. Median family income and real wages fell again this year (according to the Wall Street Journal) and the proportion of the country that lives in poverty has risen again. The cost of gasoline climbs almost every day because the obscenely profitable oil companies have not plowed any money into building new refineries for the last 15 years. The proportion of people without any health insurance also has increased.

Many industries -- airlines and automotive especially -- are trying to make money by outsourcing jobs to other countries and curtailing the salaries and benefits of workers. The most notable of the offending industries -- Big Oil and Big Pharma -- are piling up profits squeezed from lifeblood of the working and middle class. No one cares about poverty anymore, so long as it is limited to the poor (like the people who couldn't escape from New Orleans because they couldn't afford autos).

Now the country faces the task of rebuilding a major city and its port and its oil refineries and the rest of its crucial industries and its flood control system and providing new homes for the homeless of the city, which is practically everyone. One has to ask where the money will come from. The administration will characteristically talk big but do the job on the cheap, just as it has done the Iraq war with its inadequate body armor, unprotected vehicles, amphibious landing craft used as tanks and not enough troops. New Orleans has become our second contemporary Big Muddy, and it will be mishandled as badly as the first. Karl Rove will doubtless spin it all into a big victory for the president.

<snip>

The strains and the tensions that the New Orleans crisis will cause in the American economy are a punishment for the pride and greed of this country. The punishment is not imposed by the Almighty (who has better things to do than to spin out a vast storm to wipe out sin in the Big Easy) but it will be the result of the present cult of greed and pride. Ronald Reagan reintroduced this cult into our society, and George W. Bush has refined it to its logical conclusion. Greed is good. Pride in America is good, and anything goes.

<more> http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel09.html


To those assholes that say God did it for their sins...they are looking at the wrong sins and wrong sinners...

[Sanity Claws]

1. Thanks for alerting us to this article

I want to repeat that the sins are greed and pride!

[opihimoimoi]

3. Sickening and disgusting False Pride and Selfishness/Greed

Hall Marks of the Pub Party.

[gademocrat7]

2. Amen

[Iris]

4. Good old Father Greeley.

If only there were more like him.

[EC]

6. I was hoping he'd be on

Bill Maher's tonight...someday...

[bluedawg12]

5. The moral majority has the wrong ethics.

Sex is thier main moral issue- not poverty, bigotry and hate, a damaged environment, and life only counts when it's one white woman in Florida.