It doesn’t make sense to blame Hurricane Katrina on the Bush Administration or even to directly or solely blame the Bush Administration for the tragic failure of government to protect New Orleans from flooding and the slow, ineffective response to Katrina.

But it does make sense to connect this failure of government to the anti-government ideology and policy of the Reagan-Bush presidencies and to the incredibly distorted way in which our Federal government uses the $1.7 trillion it spends each year.

The Bush Administration has done something which no other administration in the history of the country has done: cut taxes during wartime. That is a radical act, a full-blown attack on the ability of the Federal government to fulfill its obligations to the American people. Regardless of whether or not one believes the invasion of Iraq was warranted or wise, it is clear that making a commitment to spend one billion dollars a day on that war and, at the same time, cut taxes was foolhardy and irresponsible. It was the work of ideologues, people who don’t deal well with reality.

This administration has crippled the Federal government, essentially thrown it into bankruptcy. No problem. This administration doesn’t believe that the government is a useful institution, at least not for anything other than waging war and providing welfare to private corporations. Its attitude towards government is consistent with the thinking of Bush supporter Grover Norquist who said, "I don’t want to destroy the Federal government. I just want to make it so small we can drown it in a bathtub."

The problem with that policy is that there are certain, crucial functions that the Federal government is better able to perform than any other institution in the country. One of those functions is to finance the construction of flood control projects of the kind that could have protected New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. The experts have known for a long time that New Orleans was vulnerable to the devastation that occurred. They also knew what could have been done to protect it. But we didn’t have the public funds or the public will to do it. So the Bush Administration cut the flood control budget for New Orleans in 2005 from 110 million to 40 million. That’s a big cut. But even the 110 million wouldn’t have protected New Orleans from Katrina.

But wait a minute. What if we could have devoted one or two billion dollars to protecting New Orleans? What if we could have built something on the order of the dykes that Holland has built to protect itself from gigantic storms? After all, two billion dollars is only 4 percent of what the United States spends each year on its war machine.

Yes folks, yours and our government spends $500 billion each year on building and maintaining its war machine. If you count all expenditures for past, present and future military purposes, including the $157 billion of interest on the national debt attributable to past wars and military spending, the Federal government spent $715 billion for military purposes in Fiscal 2004. That is 42 percent of the money which the Congress has discretion over, i.e. excluding Social Security and Medicare which are paid out of trust funds. Our government spends more on defense than the next 19 countries in the world combined – that includes Russia, Germany, Japan, China and all of Europe. Compare that with Sweden which spends about five percent of its Federal budget on the military.

No wonder we don’t provide healthcare to all of our citizens. No wonder 20 percent of our children live in poverty. Is it possible that this is a partial explanation for the fact that our murder rate is eight times as large as that of any other country in the industrialized world or that our incarceration rate is four times that of the next highest country -–Russia – and 12 times as high as that of the Scandinavian countries?

If we weren’t using 42 percent of our Federal budget to finance our war machine, is it possible we could have built a flood control system that would have protected New Orleans from the disaster that we knew was going to occur sometime or other?

Is it any wonder that an administration that doesn’t believe in the value of government would hide the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Department of Homeland Security and appoint a Director who had no experience in emergency management? Hey, let’s find a place for Brownie. He’s a good guy. Hell, it’s only a government job. No big deal.

But, you say, it costs money to build and protect an empire. Yes it does. Lots of it. And historians are telling us that it is precisely the building and maintaining of empire that contributed to the downfall of the Roman, Spanish, French and British empires.

A hundred years from now, people will look back at this with the same kind of wonder and incredulity we have about slavery. You mean a plantation owner could sell a woman’s husband to some other plantation owner? You mean the slave women were used as breeding stock? You mean the slave children were taken care of by their older siblings, not by their mothers who were too busy working in the fields or the big house?

And in 2105 they’ll be saying? Are you kidding me? They were spending 42 percent of their Federal budget on killing people and bombing buildings? At a time when many of their citizens couldn’t afford decent healthcare and fifteen percent of their citizens lived in poverty and their infant mortality rate was higher than 35 other countries in the world? What was wrong with those people? They must have been really screwed up.

Yes they were. But they didn’t know it.

We’re all to blame for this situation – Democrats, Republicans, Christians, Muslims, southerners, westerners, bankers, teachers, cowboys, truck drivers, capitalists, tree-huggers, hawks and doves. To the extent that elections are fair – and I think they basically are - we have elected the people who have made these decisions. Many of the decisions that led to this were virtually impossible to avoid, given our ascendancy to the position of world’s only superpower.

But let’s be honest about this. Let’s take to heart M. Scott Peck’s definition of evil as "people who don’t own their imperfection." Let’s look the truth in the face. In 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed and we no longer had any enemies capable of hurting us, we could have devoted ourselves to shoring up the United Nations and turning it into a truly effective mechanism for resolving inter-governmental conflict and for dealing with the threats of terrorism and ethnic cleansing. We would have had to give up some of our sovereignty and transferred some of those military expenditures to the UN. Had we done that we could have used the UN to track down Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice. Of course, we can always say, "Well, no other empire ever did that before." But we could have done it. And we didn’t.

And we could have heeded President Eisenhower’s warning that we were in danger of falling prey to a coalition of the military establishment and the defense industry which would suck up funds that were needed for education, healthcare, employment programs, highways, bridges, schools and, yes, flood control. But we didn’t.

We’re not nearly in as good a shape as we think we are. We aren’t even close to being the best country in the world. As Morris Berman has written in The Twilight of American Culture, we are a country that is in decline. We meet each of his criteria of a dying culture:

• Increasing inequality of wealth and living standards.

• Diminished returns to society from investments in technology (e.g. spending 500 billion a year on the war machine instead of helping our people).

• A dumbing down of the citizenry.

• Decrease in spiritual sensibility.

The first step in changing is being aware of what is true. It’s time we took the blinders off and woke up to a reality that is not all that pretty. And did something about it.

The task before us is to gracefully give up some of our relative dominance in the world, allow other countries like China to have their place in the sun and begin to use our great people and resources to help our own citizens lead better lives. That will require making sure that our corporations are free to compete effectively in the world economy. But it doesn’t require that we push other countries around as we have been doing for the past 40 years.