Romney and Ryan’s disdain for FEMA (the agency that helps the needy and not needy when disaster hits) is no surprise. It fits into their faux ideology of small government.
It continues to amaze me that the followers of Right Wing Tea Party Republicans cannot see that in effect they are putting their lives in danger. They are putting America’s security and well-being in danger.
What these followers fail to realize is that this tax cut for everything small government mentality is just a façade. The followers of those that expound these policies simply allow the wealthy few to pay little to the society’s infrastructure that gave them the wherewithal to be successful. What is ironic is even as they preach small government; whenever they stumble it is governments they demand bail them out.
To everyone reading this help your fellow Americans. Help your brothers and sisters understand that the GOP has turned into the party that systematically protects the wealthy. The outcome of the method they chose to protect the wealthy results in the pilfering of the middle class, the decimation of the middle class, and soon the death of the middle class. When they are done taking all the marginal wealth of the middle class we will become but indentured servants.
If you doubt it, think about the most dangerous wealth depleting financial instrument they have created, the reverse mortgage. It used to be that one’s home was the asset that one could pass on to increase one’s offspring’s wealth progressively every generation. They use our own vanity against us to entice us into giving the last vestige of our wealth to the bank, the wealthy.
Wake up my friends. Wake up.
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A Big Storm Requires Big Government
Published: October 29, 2012 207 Comments
Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they’re lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.
Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” 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 in severe cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which would cut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.
Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages. After Mr. Romney’s 2011 remarks recirculated on Monday, his nervous campaign announced that he does not want to abolish FEMA, though he still believes states should be in charge of emergency management. Those in Hurricane Sandy’s path are fortunate that, for now, that ideology has not replaced sound policy.
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