REPUBLICANS SLAP SANDY VICTIMS IN FACE

The 112^th congress is gone but the bitter taste it is leaving in the mouths of America will linger for a long time. The very last bit of business that they should have done capped the year. They slapped the victims of hurricane Sandy in the face by delaying financial aide—a ghastly but typical Republican action or better inaction.

I have long maintained that the purpose of government is to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves. In this case, it is FEMA or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Imagine you lost everything in the storm and go to a bank for a loan to rebuild. The bank tells you they will not give you a loan because you have nothing of any value—you have no collateral—of course, they are correct. You have just lost everything. The bank is there to make money by lending money but they want collateral. The United States Government should provide that collateral with government insured loans; that is what emergency management laws do.  As an aside, it means the bankers, many of who hate the Government for interfering in their business, are guaranteed a profit.

We saw FEMA fail, or at least greatly delay action, in New Orleans after Katrina and we are now seeing the same thing after Sandy.  The one thing both failures have in common is that the Republican Party is responsible.  How many times do they have to slap you, the American people, in the face before we stop voting for them? The definition of insanity is touted to be doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Rather than insanity or mental illness, I prefer to use the term ‘ignorance’, which means it is something that can be corrected by learning.