America in a nutshell II

I skipped over the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina last week because I was in Auckland and Not BloggingTM - but they just get more and more horrifying, and demonstrate even further that the United States is a sick society that does not give a rat's arse about its poorest, weakest, and most vulnerable members. There's the story I read on the plane up, about how when buses finally began arriving to evacuate the New Orleans superdome, (rich, white) guests from the Hyatt hotel over the road were bumped to the head of the queue. There's the piece I saw on TV, about the residents of an old people's home who were simply left to die by their caregivers, their bodies found a week later floating next to their wheelchairs. And then there's the report (via Kevin Drum) that police from neighbouring jurisdictions stopped people from leaving New Orleans at gunpoint because they simply did not want to have overwhelmingly poor, overwhelmingly black refugees even passing through their neighbourhoods on the way to safety:

"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.

[...]

The bridge in question -- the Crescent City Connection -- is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.

Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.

[...]

"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

And so people who could have simply walked to safety were instead trapped for five days in a Hobbesean hell-hole. The official bungling which has marred the relief effort is one thing, but this is simply utter callousness - or as Drum puts it, "calculated savagery". What the hell sort of society does this...?