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My family had a little get together this weekend. There were Aunts and Uncles, BBQ chicken, and potato salad. We drank wine and beer, and my cousin Hugh drove his remote control car into the pool - there were no survivors. My grandmother made key lime fingers, which while not very tasty where an excellent water repellent.

After the extended family had left Lynne and Linda, family friends, remained. Not longer after that, the conversation turned to hurricanes, wars, and idiots. I'm not completely sure if any real conclusions were reached, but I did pick up a few things: even with the huge tragedy in wake of Katrina there are deeper problems in this country that will remain long after New Orleans is back on its feet.

It boils down to the three dirty little secrets of Katrina: poverty, cronyism, and Iraq.

New Orleans is one of the poorest city in the US. 27.9% of New Orleans lives in poverty, almost 1 in 3. While some of these people are poor due to their own hand, most are poor for reasons outside of their control. They are part of the millions in this country struggling under the yoke of structural poverty. This is not something that white suburbia likes to think about, let alone talk about during an election year. They are now refugees not because they didn't want to live town, but because they couldn't. They had no cars, no access to public transportation, and the evacuation plan for New Orleans did not account for them. They were told to go to the Superdome, and there wasn't even a plan for the next day at the Superdome.

Which leads us to cronyism. Mike Brown was the college roommate of Joe Allbaugh. Joe was the prior head of FEMA, and Bush's chief of staff during Bush's tenure as Governor of Texas. The rumor is that Joe helped clean up Bush's National Guard record, but that's just a rumor. What we do know is that Joe cut millions in disaster mitigation from FEMA's budget. As recently as this summer, FEMA denied Louisiana communities' pre-disaster mitigation funding requests.

Then Joe appointed Mike Brown as FEMA's Deputy Director and General Consul. Mike had just left, I swear to god, a gig as the Judges and Stewards Commissioner of the Arabian Horse Association. I've spent some time with the show horse crowd. They are in their own little bubble world; crazed and ungrounded. Mike was seen to be a little to crazy for that group. He had become known as the "czar", for his zeal and breath of power in rules enforcement. He was the Darth Vader of the Arabian show horse circuit.

He eventually had to leave because there were over 17 complaints regarding his office, and a number of lawsuits. A legal defense fund had to be created because legal fees had put the IAHA $900,000 in debt. I wonder how many people can be bussed out of New Orleans for nine hundred large. Meanwhile his legal fees drove the IAHA into the ground, and they had to merge with the AHA.

During his time running FEMA, $30 million was sent to Miami for disaster relief after Hurricane Frances. Frances did not affect Miami. Some of the inspectors sent to south Florida had records such as embezzlement, drug dealing and robbery.

Sounds like the perfect guy to run disaster management.

The final leg of this triangle of shame leads us to the National Guard. No, there's nothing shameful about the guard. They're doing incredible work far outside what they originally signed up for under unbelievable conditions... in Iraq. The administration keeps saying that they have more than enough National Guard to handle the situation in Louisiana and Mississippi. Bullshit. 40% of the national guard is in Iraq. I know that the Bush administration likes to ignore reality when it isn't favorable, but at some point you have to deign to the truth.

I'm not going to talk about how the Bush administration likes to ignore the poor and non-caucasian. That's left as an exercise for the reader.