Saturday, September 10, 2005
THOSE THAT FAIL TO PLAN, PLAN TO FAIL
Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy
By ERIC LIPTON, CHRISTOPHER DREW, SCOTT SHANE and DAVID ROHDE
New York Times, Published: September 11, 2005
The governor of Louisiana was "blistering mad." It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.
Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.
They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before they found enough to empty the shelters.
The official autopsies of the flawed response to the catastrophic storm have already begun in Washington, and may offer lessons for dealing with a terrorist attack or even another hurricane this season. But an initial examination of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force.
Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana, interviews with dozens of officials show.
Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed. Leaders in Louisiana and New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always exactly sure what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington would provide rapid and considerable aid, federal officials, weighing legalities and logistics, proceeded at a deliberate pace.
FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause "human suffering incredible by modern standards." The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on Monday, Aug. 29.
On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.
"He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, 'You've got to understand how serious this is, and this is not what they're telling me, this is what I saw myself,' " the councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, recalled.
State and federal officials had spent two years working on a disaster plan to prepare for a massive storm, but it was incomplete and had failed to deal with two issues that proved most critical: transporting evacuees and imposing law and order.
The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and had to abandon much of its most advanced communications equipment, guard officials said.
Partly because of the shortage of troops, violence raged inside the New Orleans convention center, which interviews show was even worse than previously described. Police SWAT team members found themselves plunging into the darkness, guided by the muzzle flashes of thugs' handguns, said Capt. Jeffrey Winn.
"In 20 years as a cop, doing mostly tactical work, I have never seen anything like it," said Captain Winn. Three of his officers quit, he said, and another simply disappeared.
Officials said yesterday that 10 people died at the Superdome, and 24 died at the convention center site, although the causes were not clear.
Oliver Thomas, the New Orleans City Council president, expressed a view shared by many in city and state government: that a national disaster requires a national response. "Everybody's trying to look at it like the City of New Orleans messed up," Mr. Thomas said in an interview. "But you mean to tell me that in the richest nation in the world, people really expected a little town with less than 500,000 people to handle a disaster like this? That's ludicrous to even think that."
Andrew Kopplin, Governor Blanco's chief of staff, took a similar position. "This was a bigger natural disaster than any state could handle by itself, let alone a small state and a relatively poor one," Mr. Kopplin said.
Federal officials seem to have belatedly come to the same conclusion. Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said future "ultra-catastrophes" like Hurricane Katrina would require a more aggressive federal role. And Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whom President Bush had publicly praised a week earlier for doing "a heck of a job," was pushed aside on Friday, replaced by a take-charge admiral.
Russ Knocke, press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that any detailed examination of the response to the storm's assault will uncover shortcomings by many parties. "I don't believe there is one critical error," he said. "There are going to be some missteps that were made by everyone involved."
But Richard A. Falkenrath, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush White House, said the chief federal failure was not anticipating that the city and state would be so compromised. He said the response exposed "false advertising" about how the government has been transformed four years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"Frankly, I wasn't surprised that it went the way it did," Mr. Falkenrath said.
Initial Solidarity
At midafternoon on that Monday, a few hours after the hurricane made landfall, state and federal leaders appeared together at a news conference in Baton Rouge in a display of solidarity.
Governor Blanco lavished her gratitude on Mr. Brown, the FEMA chief.
"Director Brown," she said, "I hope you will tell President Bush how much we appreciated - these are the times that really count - to know that our federal government will step in and give us the kind of assistance that we need." Senator Mary L. Landrieu pitched in: "We are indeed fortunate to have an able and experienced director of FEMA who has been with us on the ground for some time."
Mr. Brown replied in the same spirit: "What I've seen here today is a team that is very tight-knit, working closely together, being very professional doing it, and in my humble opinion, making the right calls."
At that point, New Orleans seemed to have been spared the worst of the storm, although some areas were already being flooded through breaches in levees. But when widespread flooding forced the city into crisis, Monday's confidence crumbled, exposing serious weaknesses in the machinery of emergency services.
Questions had been raised about FEMA, since it was swallowed by the Department of Homeland Security, established after Sept. 11. Its critics complained that it focused too much on terrorism, hurting preparations for natural disasters, and that it had become politicized. Mr. Brown is a lawyer who came to the agency with political connections but little emergency management experience. That's also true of Patrick J. Rhode, the chief of staff at FEMA, who was deputy director of advance operations for the Bush campaign and the Bush White House.
Scott R. Morris, who was deputy chief of staff at FEMA and is now director of its recovery office on Florida, had worked for Maverick Media in Austin, Tex., as a media strategist for the Bush for President primary campaign and the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. And David I. Maurstad was the Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska before he became director of FEMA's regional office in Denver and then a senior official at the agency's headquarters.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents FEMA employees, wrote to Congress in June 2004, complaining, "Seasoned staff members are being pushed aside to make room for inexperienced novices and contractors."
With the new emphasis on terrorism, three quarters of the $3.35 billion in federal grants for fire and police departments and other first responders were intended to address terror threats, instead of an "all-hazards" approach that could help in any catastrophe.
Even so, the prospect of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a FEMA priority. Numerous drills and studies had been undertaken to prepare a response. In 2002, Joe M. Allbaugh, then the FEMA director, said: "Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a role. There are a half-dozen or so contingencies around the nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is right there in your backyard."
Federal officials vowed to work with local authorities to improve the hurricane response, but the plan for Louisiana was not finished when Hurricane Katrina hit. State officials said it did not yet address transportation or crime control, two issues that proved crucial. Col. Terry J. Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans since 2003, said he never spoke with FEMA about the state disaster blueprint. So New Orleans had its own plan.
At first glance, Annex I of the "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" is reassuring. Forty-one pages of matter-of-fact prose outline a seemingly exhaustive list of hurricane evacuation procedures, including a "mobile command center" that could replace a disabled city hall.
New Orleans had used $18 million in federal funding since 2002 to stage exercises, train for emergencies and build relay towers to improve emergency communications. After years of delay, a new $16 million command center was to be completed by 2007. There was talk of upgrading emergency power and water supplies at the Superdome, the city's emergency shelter of "last resort," as part of a new deal with the tenants, the New Orleans Saints.
But the city's plan says that about 100,000 residents "do not have means of personal transportation" to evacuate, and there are few details on how they would be sheltered.
Although the Department of Homeland Security has encouraged states and cities to file emergency preparedness strategies it has not set strict standards for evacuation plans.
"There is a very loose requirement in terms of when it gets done and what the quality is," said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security. "There is not a lot of urgency."
As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin largely followed the city plan, eventually ordering the city's first-ever mandatory evacuation. Although 80 percent of New Orleans's population left, as many as 100,000 people remained.
Colonel Ebbert decided to make the Superdome the city's lone shelter, assuming the city would only have to shelter people in the arena for 48 hours, until the storm passed or the federal government came and rescued people.
As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Hurricane Katrina moved across the Gulf of Mexico, officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington discussed the need for buses.
Someone said, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there," recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at FEMA and president of an employees' union. Others nodded in agreement, he said.
"We could all see it coming, like a guided missile," Mr. Bosner said of the storm. "We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."
Drivers Afraid
When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials pleaded with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by Tuesday, Aug. 30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, local officials began resisting.
Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, "got afraid to drive. So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school buses."
FEMA stepped in to assemble a fleet of buses, an agency spokeswoman said, only after a request from the state that she said did not come until Wednesday, Aug. 31. Greyhound Lines began sending buses into New Orleans within two hours of getting FEMA approval on Wednesday, said Anna Folmnsbee, a Greyhound spokeswoman. But the slow pace and reports of desperation and violence at the Superdome led to the governor's frustrated appeal in the state emergency center on Wednesday night.
She eventually signed an executive order that required parishes to turn over their buses, said Lt. Col. William J. Doran III, operations director for the state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
"Just the logistics of wrangling up enough buses to get the people out of the dome took us three days," Colonel Doran said. A separate transportation problem arose for nursing homes. In some cases, delays proved deadly.
State regulations require nursing homes to have detailed evacuation plans and signed evacuation contracts with private transportation companies, according to Louisiana officials.
Yet 70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated before the hurricane struck Monday morning, according to the Louisiana Nursing Home Association. This week, searchers discovered 32 bodies in one nursing home in Chalmette, a community just outside New Orleans.
Mark Cartwright, a member of the nursing home association's emergency preparedness committee, said 3,400 patients were safely evacuated from the city. An unknown number of patients died awaiting evacuation or during evacuation.
"I've heard stories," Mr. Cartwright said. "Because rescuers didn't come, people were succumbing to the heat." Mr. Cartwright said some nursing home managers ignored the mayor's mandatory evacuation order, choosing to keep their frail patients in place and wait out the storm.
Symbols of Despair
The confluence of these planning failures and the levee breaks helped turn two of the most visible features of the New Orleans skyline - the Superdome and the mile-long convention center - into deathtraps and symbols of the city's despair.
At the Superdome, the initial calm turned to fear as a chunk of the white roof ripped away in the wind, dropping debris on the Saints' fleur-de-lis logo on the 50-yard-line. The electricity was knocked out, leaving only dim lights inside the windowless building. The dome quickly became a giant sauna, with temperatures well over 100 degrees.
Two-thirds of the 24,000 people huddled inside were women, children or elderly, and many were infirm, said Lonnie C. Swain, an assistant police superintendent overseeing the 90 policemen who patrolled the facility with 300 troops from the Louisiana National Guard. And it didn't take long for the stench of human waste to drive many people outside.
Chief Swain said the Guard supplied water and food - two military rations a day. But despair mounted once people began lining up on Wednesday for buses expected early the next day, only to find them mysteriously delayed.
Chief Swain and Colonel Ebbert said in interviews that the first buses arranged by FEMA were diverted elsewhere, and it took several more hours to begin the evacuation. By Friday, the food and the water had run out. Violence also broke out. One Guard soldier was wounded by gunfire and the police confirmed there were attempts to sexually assault at least one woman and a young child, Chief Swain said.
And even though there were clinics at the stadium, Chief Swain said, "Quite a few of the people died during the course of their time here."
By the time the last buses arrived on Saturday, he said, some children were so dehydrated that guardsmen had to carry them out, and several adults died while walking to the buses. State officials said yesterday that a total of 10 people died in the Superdome.
"I'm very angry that we couldn't get the resources we needed to save lives," Chief Swain said. "I was watching people die."
Mayor Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, P. Edwin Compass III, said in interviews that they believe murders occurred in the Superdome and in the convention center, where the city also started sending people on Tuesday. But at the convention center, the violence was even more pervasive.
"The biggest problem was that there wasn't enough security," said Capt. Winn, the head of the police SWAT team. "The only way I can describe it is as a completely lawless situation."
While those entering the Superdome had been searched for weapons, there was no time to take similar precautions at the convention center, which took in a volatile mix of poor residents, well-to-do hotel guests and hospital workers and patients. Gunfire became so routine that large SWAT teams had to storm the place nearly every night.
Capt. Winn said armed groups of 15 to 25 men terrorized the others, stealing cash and jewelry. He said policemen patrolling the center told him that a number of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped - and that murders were occurring.
"We had a situation where the lambs were trapped with the lions," Mr. Compass said. "And we essentially had to become the lion tamers."
Capt. Winn said the armed groups even sealed the police out of two of the center's six halls, forcing the SWAT team to retake the territory.
But the police were at a disadvantage: they could not fire into the crowds in the dimly lit facility. So after they saw muzzle flashes, they would rush toward them, searching with flashlights for anyone with a gun.
Meanwhile, those nearby "would be running for their lives," Capt. Winn said. "Or they would lie down on the ground in the fetal position."
And when the SWAT team caught some of the culprits, there was not much it could do. The jails were also flooded, and no temporary holding cells had been set up yet. "We'd take them into another hall and hope they didn't make it back," Capt. Winn said.
One night, Capt. Winn said, the police department even came close to abandoning the convention halls - and giving up on the 15,000 there. He said a captain in charge of the regular police was preparing to evacuate the regular police officers by helicopter when 100 guardsmen rushed over to help restore order.
Before the last people were evacuated that Saturday, several bodies were dumped near a door, and two or three babies died of dehydration, emergency medics have said. State officials said yesterday that 24 people died either inside or just outside the convention center.
The state officials said they did not have any information about how many of those deaths may have been murders. Capt. Winn said that when his team made a final sweep of the building last Monday, it found three bodies, including one with multiple stab wounds.
Capt. Winn said four of his men quit amid the horror. Other police officials said that nearly 10 regular officers stationed at the Superdome and 15 to 20 at the convention center also quit, along with several hundred other police officers across the city.
But, Capt. Winn said, most of the city's police officers were "busting their asses" and hung in heroically. Of the terror and lawlessness, he added, "I just didn't expect for it to explode the way it did."
Divided Responsibilities
As the city become paralyzed both by water and by lawlessness, so did the response by government. The fractured division of responsibility - Governor Blanco controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Mayor Nagin directed city workers and Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point man for the federal government - meant no one person was in charge. Americans watching on television saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble mayor and the usually upbeat FEMA chief appear at competing daily news briefings and interviews.
The power-sharing arrangement was by design, and as the days wore on, it would prove disastrous. Under the Bush administration, FEMA redefined its role, offering assistance but remaining subordinate to state and local governments. "Our typical role is to work with the state in support of local and state agencies," said David Passey, a FEMA spokesman.
With Hurricane Katrina, that meant the agency most experienced in dealing with disasters and with access to the greatest resources followed, rather than led.
FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts - buses, food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for specific requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you don't have time to ask for each round of ammunition that you need," complained Colonel Ebbert, the city's emergency operations director.
Telephone and cellphone service died, and throughout the crisis the state's special emergency communications system was either overloaded or knocked out. As a result, officials were unable to fully inventory the damage or clearly identify the assistance they required from the federal government. "If you do not know what your needs are, I can't request to FEMA what I need," said Colonel Doran, of the state office of homeland security.
To President Bush, Governor Blanco directed an ill-defined but urgent appeal.
"I need everything you've got," the governor said she told the president on Monday. "I am going to need all the help you can send me."
"We went from early morning to late night, day after day, after day, after day. Trying to make critical decisions," Ms. Blanco said in an interview last week. "Trying to get product in, resources, where does the food come from. Learning the supply network."
She said she didn't always know what to request. "Do we stop and think about it?" she asked. "We just stop and think about help."
FEMA attributed some of the delay to miscommunications in an overwhelming event. "There was a significant amount of discussions between the parties and likely some confusion about what was requested and what was needed," said Mr. Knocke, the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
As New Orleans descended into near-anarchy, the White House considered sending active-duty troops to impose order. The Pentagon was not eager to have combat troops take on a domestic lawkeeping role. "The way it's arranged under our Constitution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted at a news briefing last week, "state and local officials are the first responders."
Pentagon, White House and Justice officials debated for two days whether the president should seize control of the relief mission from Governor Blanco. But they worried about the political fallout of stepping on the state's authority, according to the officials involved in the discussions. They ultimately rejected the idea and instead decided to try to speed the arrival of National Guard forces, including many trained as military police.
Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, explained that decision in an interview this week. "Could we have physically moved combat forces into an American city, without the governor's consent, for purposes of using those forces - untrained at that point in law enforcement - for law enforcement duties? Yes."
But, he asked, "Would you have wanted that on your conscience?"
For some of those on the ground, those discussions in Washington seemed remote. Before the city calmed down six days after the storm, both Mayor Nagin and Colonel Ebbert lashed out. Governor Blanco almost mocked the words of assurance federal relief officials had offered. "It was like, 'they are coming, they are coming, they are coming, they are coming,' " she said in an interview. "It was all in route. Everything was in motion."
'Stuck in Atlanta'
The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the Gulf Coast drew offers of every possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of putting bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately needed it.
Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New Orleans.
"On the news every night you hear, 'How come everybody forgot us?' " said Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa., told The Dallas Morning News. "We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."
A FEMA spokeswoman said there was no urgency for the firefighters to arrive because they were primarily going to do community relations work, not rescue.
William D. Vines, a former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food and water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer trucks carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La., a staging area for the distribution of supplies.
"FEMA would not let the trucks unload," Mr. Vines said in an interview. "The drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles from Camp Beauregard. FEMA said we had to have a 'tasker number.' What in the world is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork, and it's ridiculous."
Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, who interceded on behalf of Mr. Vines, said, "All our Congressional offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA. Governors' offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA." When the state of Arkansas repeatedly offered to send buses and planes to evacuate people displaced by flooding, she said, "they were told they could not go. I don't really know why."
On Aug. 31, Sheriff Edmund M. Sexton, Sr., of Tuscaloosa County, Ala., and president of the National Sheriffs' Association, sent out an alert urging members to pitch in.
"Folks were held up two, three days while they were working on the paperwork," he said.
Some sheriffs refused to wait. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, Sheriff Warren C. Evans got a call from Mr. Sexton on Sept. 1 The next day, he led a convoy of six tractor-trailers, three rental trucks and 33 deputies, despite public pleas from Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm to wait for formal requests.
"I could look at CNN and see people dying, and I couldn't in good conscience wait for a coordinated response," he said. He dropped off food, water and medical supplies in Mobile and Gonzales, La., where a sheriffs' task force directed him to the French Quarter. By Saturday, Sept. 3, the Michigan team was conducting search and rescue missions.
"We lost thousands of lives that could have been saved," Sheriff Evans said.
Mr. Knocke said the Department of Homeland Security could not yet respond to complaints that red tape slowed relief.
"It is testament to the generosity of the American people - a lot of people wanted to contribute," Mr. Knocke said. "But there is not really any way of knowing at this time if or whether individual offers were plugged into the response and recovery operation."
Response to Sept. 11
An irony of the much-criticized federal hurricane response is that it is being overseen by a new cabinet department created because of perceived shortcomings in the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And it is governed by a new plan the Department of Homeland Security unveiled in January with considerable fanfare.
The National Response Plan set out a lofty goal in its preface: "The end result is vastly improved coordination among federal, state, local and tribal organizations to help save lives and protect America's communities by increasing the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of incident management."
The evidence of the initial response to Hurricane Katrina raised doubts about whether the plan had, in fact, improved coordination. Mr. Knocke, the homeland security spokesman, said the department realizes it must learn from its mistakes, and the department's inspector general has been given $15 million in the emergency supplemental appropriated by Congress to study the flawed rescue and recovery operation.
"There is going to be enough blame to go around at all levels," he said. "We are going to be our toughest critics."Saturday, September 10, 2005
BUSHCO PROFITEERING IN FULL AND BLATANT SWING
Firms with Bush ties snag Katrina deals
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W. Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.
One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President
Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.
Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
Experts say it has been common practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations for policy makers to take lobbying jobs once they leave office, and many of the same companies seeking contracts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have already received billions of dollars for work in Iraq.
Halliburton alone has earned more than $9 billion. Pentagon audits released by Democrats in June showed $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported" costs for Halliburton's work in Iraq.
But the web of Bush administration connections is attracting renewed attention from watchdog groups in the post-Katrina reconstruction rush. Congress has already appropriated more than $60 billion in emergency funding as a down payment on recovery efforts projected to cost well over $100 billion.
"The government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight.
TWO BUSH APPOINTEES AT HALLIBURTON
Allbaugh formally registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root in February.
In lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate, Allbaugh said his goal was to "educate the congressional and executive branch on defense, disaster relief and homeland security issues affecting Kellogg Brown and Root."
Melissa Norcross, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said Allbaugh has not, since he was hired, "consulted on any specific contracts that the company is considering pursuing, nor has he been tasked by the company with any lobbying responsibilities."
Allbaugh is also a friend of Michael Brown, director of FEMA who was removed as head of Katrina disaster relief and sent back to Washington amid allegations he had padded his resume.
A few months after Allbaugh was hired by Halliburton, the company retained another high-level Bush appointee, Kirk Van Tine.
Van Tine registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton six months after resigning as deputy transportation secretary, a position he held from December 2003 to December 2004.
On Friday, Kellogg Brown & Root received $29.8 million in Pentagon contracts to begin rebuilding Navy bases in Louisiana and Mississippi. Norcross said the work was covered under a contract that the company negotiated before Allbaugh was hired.
Halliburton continues to be a source of income for Cheney, who served as its chief executive officer from 1995 until 2000 when he joined the Republican ticket for the White House. According to tax filings released in April, Cheney's income included $194,852 in deferred pay from the company, which has also won billion-dollar government contracts in Iraq.
Cheney's office said the amount of deferred compensation is fixed and is not affected by Halliburton's current economic performance or earnings.
Allbaugh's other major client, Baton Rouge-based Shaw Group, has updated its Web site to say: "Hurricane Recovery Projects -- Apply Here!"
Shaw said on Thursday it has received a $100 million emergency FEMA contract for housing management and construction. Shaw also clinched a $100 million order on Friday from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Shaw Group spokesman Chris Sammons said Allbaugh was providing the company with "general consulting on business matters," and would not say whether he played a direct role in any of the Katrina deals. "We don't comment on specific consulting activities," he said.Saturday, September 10, 2005
MEN ARE OFFICIALLY OBSOLETE
10 September 2005, UK Mirror
SPERM FREE CONCEPTION
SCIENTISTS have made Britain's first "virgin conception" embryos - created without sperm.
They stimulated women's eggs to start dividing and they turned into embryos as if they had been fertilised naturally.
Researchers hope to perfect the technique to make stems cells - immature cells that can be turned into different tissue. They could be used to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease.
Dr Paul de Sousa, from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh which created Dolly the sheep, said: "We have not managed to get stem cells from these embryos, and that continues to be our ambition."
His team took 300 donated eggs and stimulated them in a similar way to cloning.
Only six produced embryos, in a process called parthenogenesis meaning virgin conception in Greek. The embryos also only contained 50 cells. At least 100 are needed to yield stem cells.
The embryos did not have enough cells to create a baby and the scientists say they would never be used for that. Dr de Sousa told the BA Festival of Science at Trinity College, Dublin: "The consent we have is for research purposes only."
Ants, bees, some lizards and amphibians can reproduce by parthenogenesis. Scientists have done it with mice and monkeys. Charity Life said: "It is another example of Frankenstein science."Saturday, September 10, 2005
LAURA 'BABS' BUSH
Laura Bush is so full of Valium she can't even get the name straight:
"Yesterday the President's wife Laura Bush made a double gaffe when she spoke of the support needed for thousands of children displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Speaking to reporters at an elementary school in Iowa, Mrs Bush, 58, wrongly referred to the hurricane as "Karina" twice."
(Reported in the UK Mirror)Saturday, September 10, 2005
INACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS
Timeline of Response to Hurricane Katrina
By The Associated Press
(School buses stand in floodwater in New Orleans, left.)
Aug. 24 — Tropical Depression 12 strengthens into Tropical Storm Katrina over Central Bahamas; a hurricane warning is issued for the southeastern Florida coast.
Aug. 25 — Hurricane Katrina strikes Florida.
Aug. 26 — Katrina weakens over land to tropical storm before moving over Gulf of Mexico. It grows to Category 2 hurricane with 100 mph winds, veering north and west toward Mississippi and Louisiana. 10,000 National Guard troops dispatched across Gulf Coast.
Aug. 27 — Eleven people dead in Florida from hurricane-related causes. Katrina becomes Category 3 storm, with 115 mph winds; hurricane warning issued for Louisiana's southeastern coast, including New Orleans. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declares state of emergency, urges residents in low-lying areas to evacuate.
Aug. 28 — Katrina grows into a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds. Nagin orders mandatory evacuation for New Orleans, but 10 shelters also set up, including Superdome.
Aug. 29 — Katrina, a Category 4 hurricane with 145 mph winds, makes landfall near Buras, La.
President Bush makes emergency disaster declarations for Louisiana and Mississippi, freeing federal funds. Katrina rips two holes in Superdome roof. One New Orleans levee breaks.
Aug. 30 — Hurricane death toll in Mississippi rises to more than 100. Second levee breaks in New Orleans, flooding covers 80 percent of city. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco says everyone still in New Orleans — 50,000 to 100,000 people — must be evacuated. Crowds swell at Superdome and convention center. Rescuers in helicopters and boats pick up hundreds of stranded people. Reports of looting. Bush announces he's cutting short his vacation.
Aug.31 — Nagin estimates New Orleans' death toll is "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands." Blanco asks White House to send more people. New Orleans police calls off search-and-rescue to combat looting. Health and Human Services secretary declares federal health emergency throughout Gulf Coast, sends medical supplies, workers.
Pentagon mounts search-and-rescue, sending four Navy ships with emergency supplies. Bush flies back to Washington.
Sept. 1 — Looting, violence spreads. Military decides to increase National Guard deployment to 30,000. Outside convention center, sidewalks packed with people without food, water or medical care. New Orleans mayor issues "desperate SOS" for more buses to evacuate. Crowds at Superdome swell to 30,000 with another 25,000 at convention center. Bush asks his father and former
President Clinton to lead fund-raising campaign for hurricane victims.
Sept 2 — Bush tours Gulf Coast, acknowledges failure so far of government hurricane relief efforts. Thousands of National Guardsmen arrive in New Orleans in truck convoys carrying food, water and weapons. Congress approves first $10.5 billion for immediate rescue and relief efforts. States as far away as Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming and Michigan offer to accept refugees, who fill shelters in neighboring states. More than 50 nations pledge assistance.
Sept. 3 — Bush orders more than 7,000 active duty military forces to the Gulf Coast.
Sept. 8 — U.S. turns to its allies in
NATO to help bring in food and supplies for the hundreds of thousands of Americans left homeless by Katrina after many nations offering aid complain that they have received no answer from U.S. authorities about what's needed.Saturday, September 10, 2005
RAINY DAY CAME AND WENT, NEOCONS ALREADY SPENT TOO MUCH ON VANITY WAR, ECONOMY GO BOOM SOON
Katrina's Costs Could Approach That of War
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - One storm could end up costing almost as much as two wars. Although estimates of Hurricane Katrina's staggering toll on the treasury are highly imprecise, costs are certain to climb to $200 billion in the coming weeks. The final accounting could approach the more than $300 billion spent in four years to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Analysts inside and outside government agree that the $62 billion that Washington has spent so far was merely the first installment of perhaps an unparalleled sum.
"I cannot put a cost figure on it," Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday in a visit to the hard-hit states.
The government never has dealt with a disaster of this scale: 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast affected, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and an entire metropolitan area under water.
In 1992, the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in Florida and Louisiana cost $35 billion. The price for the 6.7-magnitude temblor in the Northridge area of Los Angeles in 1994 was $15 billion to $20 billion.
Members of the Louisiana congressional delegation say it could cost $100 billion just in New Orleans.
As for the overall toll, G. William Hoagland, the top budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said: "We're obviously over $100 billion. I just don't know how much over."
As the House approved President Bush's second spending request Thursday, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee predicted that lawmakers would repeat the effort in a few weeks. "It will be the greatest appropriations outlay for a disaster in the history of doing this," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif.
The imprecision in calculating the costs reflects a Washington process of handling a crisis and the uncertainty of when the furious spending in the immediate aftermath will slow significantly.
Sounding like engineers, number crunchers talked of the "burn rate" — how much and how fast money was being spent.
The weekend after the hurricane hit Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the government still was writing checks for close to $2 billion per day on items such as the 17 million meals ready to eat, tens of thousands of trailers to house refugees, and contracts to rebuild highways and bridges.
That amount slowed to about $1 billion per day last week and was expected to drop off in the weeks ahead.
At first, Congress decided to give the Bush administration the money it requested, comparing the situation to that in days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Now, the Office of Management and Budget and the appropriations committees in the House and Senate are contacting government agencies to find out what they need for relief, recovery and rebuilding.
They may get mind-boggling answers because Katrina has shattered all the models on picking up the pieces.
Insurers and actuaries have dealt with the wind damage from hurricanes, but not the impact on buildings and roads of an entire city engulfed in bacteria-laced, sewage-tainted water, possibly for weeks.
"An entire metropolitan area flooded is something we don't have a lot of experience with," said Rade Musulin, an actuary with the Florida Farm Bureau.
Among the lingering questions are what will be rebuilt and who does the work; in writing the insurance checks, is it the government or private companies; how long do food stamps and other assistance last; and how much do federal officials provide.
Homes, levees and even the two new light-rail systems in New Orleans have to be repaired or razed.
"It depends on how this proceeds," said Dan Crippen, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "The compensation costs for refugees, you can't keep them in sports stadiums forever. It depends on how quickly they're employed, have homes, how much public assistance. There are so many unknowns here."
The various states and the District of Columbia that have provided a safe haven for evacuees will be sending their bills to Washington. Texas' two senators, in a letter to Bush, asked about reimbursement for enrolling refugees in Medicaid. The city of New Haven, Conn., has estimated that caring for 100 families that is has offered to house would cost $80,000 each, a bill of $8 million.
Mississippi signed a contract for $5.1 million to repair the Interstate Highway 10 bridge in Columbia. If the contractor can finish the work ahead of schedule, a $100,000-a-day bonus is promised.
The images from New Orleans underscore another question.
"Who would pay to replace the Superdome?" asked Scott Lilly, a former appropriations staffer, now a senior consultant with the Center for American Progress.
Robert Lichter, a statistician who studies the use and misuse of numbers in public policy, cautioned against reading too much into the early figures.
"Assume that all estimates are self-interested and all estimates are too low," Lichter said, especially those coming out of Washington. "The government is like a contractor — whatever it says, triple."
___Saturday, September 10, 2005
NARCISSISTS IN CHARGE
"Now We Are Six"
(excerpt from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) : How to Recognize a Narcissist)
If you had a narcissist for a parent, you lived in a world governed by whim enforced without mercy.
Narcissists have normal, even superior, intellectual development while remaining emotionally and morally immature. Dealing with them can give you the sense of trying to have a reasonable discussion with a very clever six-year-old -- this is an age when normal children are grandiose and exhibitionistic, when they are very resistant to taking the blame for their own misbehavior, when they understand what the rules are (e.g., that lying, cheating, and stealing are prohibited) but are still trying to wriggle out of accepting those rules for themselves. This is the year, by the way, when children were traditionally thought to reach the age of reason and when first communions (and first confessions) were made.
Having a narcissist for a mother is a lot like living under the supervision of a six-year-old. Narcissists are always pretending, and with a narcissistic mother it's a lot like, "Let's play house. I'll pretend to be the mother and you pretend to be the baby," though, as the baby, you'll be expected to act like a doll (keep smiling, no matter what) and you'll be treated like a doll -- as an inanimate object, as a toy to be manipulated, dressed and undressed, walked around and have words put in your mouth; something that can be broken but not hurt, something that will be dropped and forgotten when when something more interesting comes along. With narcissists, there's also usually a fair element of "playing doctor," as well -- of childish sexual curiosity that may find expression in "seductive" behavior towards the child, such as inappropriate touching of the genitals, or it can also come out as "hypochondriacal" worries about the child's health and/or being most interested and attentive when the child is ill (thus teaching the child that the way to get Mother's kind attention is to get sick). Having a sick child can also be a way for the narcissistic mother to get the sympathetic attention of authority figures, such as doctors and teachers.
Selected Characteristics of Normal Six-Year-Olds
[Based on Your Six-Year-Old, by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg.]
The items below are not intended to be a comprehensive description of six-year-olds, but only the selected bits that seem to be related to adult narcissists' traits discussed elsewhere [and, yes, I really did compile the traits list weeks before finding this little book]. Besides being difficult and bewildering, six-year-olds are also wonderfully warm and enthusiastic, fine companions, active, curious, intellectually ambitious, philosophically speculative, very interested in the world and how it works, fond of novelty and amusement -- games, music, stories, outings, adventures.
My interest here is in pointing out that many of the narcissistic characteristics that are abnormal in adults are completely normal at six years of age and that the survival of these childish characteristics into adulthood is, essentially, immaturity rather than bad intentions. But bear in mind that, while everyone who grows up passes through this stage of development, most of us spend only a few months this way before moving on to more integrated behavior. Narcissists, on the other hand, apparently spend the rest of their lives in this state of highly volatile ambivalence and uncertainty. I don't mean to play down, in any way, the very bad effects adult narcissists have on their own children, but, for those who've survived being raised by narcissists, it may give a different way of looking at family history. [See "It's A Good Life" for one person's idea of what it would be like if a six-year-old ran the world -- and, I'll add, what life may seem like to a six-year-old with a narcissist for a parent.] It has also bothered me that the little clinical literature I've found is quite hostile to narcissists; I certainly know that they can be utterly impossible, but the truth remains that the narcissists I've known were genuinely lovable about half the time -- the problem being that they want to be treated as "special" in ways that they just ain't special and will hate you for loving them for what they regard as the wrong reasons (though most of the rest of us are far less demanding and are simply pleased when attractive, decent people love us for any reason, special or not).
"Six can, oh so often, be expansive and out-of-bounds, contrary, violent, hard...to live with."(p. 4)
"Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of the game. Whatever he does, he does the opposite just as readily. In fact, sometimes the choice of some certain object or course of action immediately triggers an overpowering need for its opposite." (p. 1, the first paragraph of the book) [Emphasis in original]
"Six's reversals are truly something to be reckoned with." (p. 2)
"I love you" rapidly changes to "I hate you." (p. 2, 6)
stubborn and can't make up mind (p. 2)
"The child is now the center of his own universe." (p. 2, 15) [Emphasis in original]
delighted by any silly thing that calls attention to himself; may do silly, show-offy things to call attention to himself when he feels neglected or shut out (pp. 71-72)
arrogant (p. 7)
self-important ("extremely aware of the importance of being Six") (p. 22)
demands rather than asks (twice on p. 6, 16)
thinks own way is always right (p. 7)
once started, will stick to a course of bad behavior or bad judgment regardless of the inevitability of being punished for it (p. 7)
asks to be flattered and praised as "good," even ("rather sadly and touchingly") following his worst behavior (p. 6)
can't accept criticism (p. 7)
feelings are hurt over very small criticisms, comments, failures (p. 6)
"He is so extremely anxious to do well, to be the best, to be loved and praised, that any failure is very hard for him." (p. 6)
wants to win every time (p. 4, 21, 45)
poor sport, can't stand to lose (p. 7, 16)
argumentative and quarrelsome (p. 21)
defiant, pert, fresh, snippy (p. 6, 17)
competitive, combative (p. 20)
belligerent, verbally and physically aggressive (p. 21)
threatens, calls names, gets physically violent (p. 21)
violent temper tantrums may require physical restraint because of striking out (p. 29)
jealous, envious (p. 7, 21)
to make sure of winning, will cheat or make up own rules (pp. 21-22, 45)
complains that others are cheating and not following the rules (p. 45)
some are very cruel to younger children (p. 22)
does not always tell the truth (p. 16)
will not admit to wrongdoing (p. 41) [Note: A technique is given for getting the facts out of kids that also works with narcissists: instead of asking if they did it, ask how they did it.]
goodness means the things explicitly required or allowed by parents or other authority figures; badness means the things explicitly disapproved of or forbidden (p. 66)
little forgiveness (p. 22)
very critical of others' conduct (p. 22)
expects friendships to be resumed immediately following tremendous complaint and conflict (p. 22)
wants to boss (p. 21)
"Many children think their father knows everything -- even what goes on at home while he is at work."(p. 16)
thinks his teacher knows the best and only right way of doing things; may not know which rules to follow when school rules differ from home rules (p. 18)
"highly undifferentiated -- everything is everywhere" (p. 7)
can't always tell the difference between "yours" and "mine," and so often steals (pp. 39-41)
"random and unconstructive expenditure of energy" (p. 31)
more interested in merely handling or using tools than in what is accomplished with them (pp. 53-54)
less interested in actual final products than in whatever he may be doing at the moment(p. 56)
"Sixes love to dress up and pretend they are somebody else...." (p. 49Saturday, September 10, 2005
WE'RE AT WAR, LET'S PARTY!
Osama and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, New York Times
On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger."
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.
Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
EVERYONE NEEDS TO CALL BUSHIT
Point Those Fingers
By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times
To understand the history of the Bush administration's response to disaster, just follow the catchphrases.
First, look at 2001 Congressional testimony by Joseph Allbaugh, President Bush's first pick to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA, he said, would emphasize "Responsibility and Accountability" (capital letters and boldface in the original statement). He repeated the phrase several times.
Skip to next paragraph
What Mr. Allbaugh seems to have meant was that state and local government officials shouldn't count on FEMA to bail them out if they didn't prepare adequately for disasters. They should accept responsibility for protecting their constituents, and be held accountable if they don't.
But those were rules for the little people. Now that the Bush administration has botched its own response to disaster, we're not supposed to play the "blame game." Scott McClellan used that phrase 15 times over the course of just two White House press briefings.
It might make sense to hold off on the criticism if this were the first big disaster on Mr. Bush's watch, or if the chain of mistakes in handling Hurricane Katrina were out of character. But even with the most generous possible assessment, this is the administration's second big policy disaster, after Iraq. And the chain of mistakes was perfectly in character - there are striking parallels between the errors the administration made in Iraq and the errors it made last week.
In Iraq, the administration displayed a combination of paralysis and denial after the fall of Baghdad, as uncontrolled looting destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure.
The same deer-in-the-headlights immobility prevailed as Katrina approached and struck the Gulf Coast. The storm gave plenty of warning. By the afternoon of Monday, Aug. 29, the flooding of New Orleans was well under way - city officials publicly confirmed a breach in the 17th Street Canal at 2 p.m. Yet on Tuesday federal officials were still playing down the problem, and large-scale federal aid didn't arrive until last Friday.
In Iraq the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the country during the crucial first year after Saddam's fall - the period when an effective government might have forestalled the nascent insurgency - was staffed on the basis of ideological correctness and personal connections rather than qualifications. At one point Ari Fleischer's brother was in charge of private-sector development.
The administration followed the same principles in staffing FEMA. The agency had become a highly professional organization during the Clinton years, but under Mr. Bush it reverted to its former status as a "turkey farm," a source of patronage jobs.
As Bloomberg News puts it, the agency's "upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management." By now everyone knows FEMA's current head went from overseeing horse shows to overseeing the nation's response to disaster, with no obvious qualifications other than the fact that he was Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate.
All that's missing from the Katrina story is an expensive reconstruction effort, with lucrative deals for politically connected companies, that fails to deliver essential services. But give it time - they're working on that, too.
Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time.
Can the administration escape accountability again? Some of the tactics it has used to obscure its failure in Iraq won't be available this time. The reality of the catastrophe was right there on our TV's, although FEMA is now trying to prevent the media from showing pictures of the dead. And people who ask hard questions can't be accused of undermining the troops.
But the other factors that allowed the administration to evade responsibility for the mess in Iraq are still in place. The media will be tempted to revert to he-said-she-said stories rather than damning factual accounts. The effort to shift blame to state and local officials is under way. Smear campaigns against critics will start soon, if they haven't already. And raw political power will be used to block any independent investigation.
Will this be enough to let the administration get away with another failure? Let's hope not: if the administration isn't held accountable for what just happened, it will keep repeating its mistakes. Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff will receive presidential medals, and the next disaster will be even worse.Saturday, September 10, 2005
THE BRIAN WILLIAMS MEMO CALLING BUSHIT ON MEDIA BAN IN ACTION
Making the Quarter rounds
By Brian Williams, MSNBC - We are just back from the French Quarter... checking up on the condition of some old haunts... Arnauds, Brennans... and most of the landmarks that people would remember visiting from even a single Convention-attending visit to New Orleans. We are happy to report that the Quarter is slowly drying out (while the Ritz Carlton hotel, for example, remains surrounded by rancid water that appears to be 30 percent oil) and cleaning up. There are a few random businesses open. It will be a long time before it resembles anything close to New Orleans.
An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.
At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.
We're putting a lot of material into the broadcast tonight, including (in part in response to a flood of e-mail requests) a story about the pets of this region like Cain/Storm my colleague Heather Allan blogs about below. They are often the last to be evacuated and the last to hold on. On any walk through this region you will see dogs without owners. It's heartbreaking to see... then again, there's a lot of that going around here these days.Saturday, September 10, 2005
AND TAKE YOUR GODDAMN CAMERAS WITH YOU
BushCo has ordered an unofficial media blackout on all things Katrina:
Reuters: "The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered."
Bob Brigham: "We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they’re TV trucks around."
Salt Lake Tribune: "'[FEMA has] people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,' said a Texas firefighter. 'We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet.' The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters."
Brian Williams, NBC News: "While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of guard soldiers on our newscast tonight."
Saturday, September 10, 2005
GOFUCKYERSELF, LOSERS!
GOP's New Mantra to America: Go Cheney Yourself
By Davide Sirota - Republicans are very good at talking off the same talking points, and echoing one central message -- it's why you see conservatives of all stripes repeating the same basic lines, whether on Fox, right-wing radio, or mainstream newspapers. The messages are all coordinated from the top -- the party carefully crafts what it wants to say to the American public, and then echoes that. Usually, this machine is used to package some dishonest lie in populist, popular sounding rhetoric.
But now, Republicans are using their machine to tell ordinary Americans to do what Vice President Cheney once told Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) to do: go f*** yourself.
Consider the actions at the top that likely got this new Republican message going: before and during the Katrina disaster, President Bush and Cheney refused to promptly postpone their vacations, and Secretary of State Condi Rice went shopping for shoes and then to a Broadway show, even as her own agency was mismanaging the international offers of aid to flood victims. That "go Cheney yourself" message has subsequently been translated into just another one of the Republicans' full-on political message campaigns, much like, say, the GOP's dishonest Swift Boat message campaign of the 2004 election. We now see party operatives, pundits and politicians applying the "go Cheney yourself" message to every single pressing issue. And there is simply no way such consistency is an accident coming out of today's well-oiled Republican Party apparatus:
GOP TELLS NEW ORLEANS' DEAD TO GO CHENEY YOURSELF: The Associated Press reported that over the weekend, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) - the third ranking GOP Senator - actually blamed the dead in New Orleans for their plight. He said the government should create "penalties on those who decide" to not evacuate a hurricane zone - even though many of the people who didn't leave New Orleans were unable to leave because of financial or transportation obstacles. Santorum nonetheless continued on, saying people should just "understand that there are consequences to not leaving."
GOP TELLS KATRINA VICTIMS TO GO CHENEY YOURSELF: Instead of sympathizing with the plight of thousands of homeless victims of the hurricane, Barbara Bush laughed at them. She told National Public Radio with a chuckle that "because so many of the people [harmed] were underprivileged anyway" the disaster "is working very well for them."
GOP TELLS RESCUE WORKERS TO GO CHENEY YOURSELF: The Salt Lake Tribune reports that when hundreds of firefighters from across America gathered to offer their help to victims on the Gulf Coast, the White House kept them cloistered in Atlanta, listening to lectures. Even as state and local officials begged on TV for help, and even as people were starving and drowning, the administration seemed only interested in itself. As the paper noted, it did allow a team of 50 firefighters to be "ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana in order "to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas."
GOP TELLS MEDIA TO GO CHENEY YOURSELF: With journalists eager to report on the disaster in New Orleans, the Bush administration actually started blocking reporters' access to the city. The message to the media was clear: if you are interested in telling America about what happened, go Cheney yourself.
GOP TELLS AMERICAN CONSUMERS TO GO CHENEY YOURSELF: As oil companies now rake in the biggest profits of any companies in American history, top Republicans are claiming America just can't do anything about the situation, even as Democrats introduce legislation to address the problem. For instance, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – a man with strong ties to the oil industry – claims "he had no authority to regulate" gas prices. Worse, he said price gouging is "just one of those unfortunate things." Then he "urged Californians to drive less and consider carpooling" even though the San Diego Union Tribune noted Schwarzenegger "has famously promoted gas-guzzling Hummers." Media Matters shows how Schwarzenegger is now getting help from the right-wing media.
In some ways, we shouldn't be surprised by this GOP message campaign, even after the disaster on the Gulf Coast. After all, the Bush administration actually told its own Army Corps of Engineers chief to go Cheney himself when he warned them in 2002 that Bush's budget cuts to infrastructure could lead to Katrina-like disaster.
Still, the intensity of the message is incredible, even by GOP standards. And thankfully, as this CNN clip shows, at least some locals on the Gulf Coast are getting pissed, and telling the administration to go Cheney itself. Let's hope that's the kind of backlash (sans profanity) that starts to develop nationally against an administration and a Republican Party that is now openly ignoring the American public it is supposed to be serving.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
WRONG, WRONG WRONG
Katrina Proves Conservatives Wrong
By Cenk Uygur Fri Sep 9, 5:50 PM ET
The fundamental tenet of conservatism is that smaller government is better. That Americans want a limited government. Do you see anyone calling for limited government after Hurricane Katrina?
Quite the opposite – people are screaming for a big, effective government that can help the people of New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama. There are recriminations that government had not spent enough money to maintain the levees that protected New Orleans, that it did not react fast enough to rescue its own citizens and that it was too indifferent to the plight of the dispossessed.
Have you heard one complaint that government was too involved in the rescue efforts? Or that private citizens should handle this matter on their own?
Well, there was one comment.
“But if your city believes that it's entitled, if that's, if that's the worldview of the leaders of a community, then I don't care what their race is -- if their worldview is that this is a welfare state -- "the government needs to protect us. The government needs to feed us. The government needs to transport us. The government" -- well, guess what? The government needs to build the levees. The government needs to make sure the levees are -- the government. You're passing the buck all over the place and accepting all the money that the government's sending in to you, ah, and then something like this happens and then you start, you know, wringing your hands.”- Rush Limbaugh September 1, 2005 on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina
At least Rush has the courage to stick to his guns in the face of overwhelming American opposition. He is saying here that American citizens shouldn’t expect to have their government build levees for them or even to protect them. Rush actually believes in a government so small, it does nothing. That’s called anarchy.
We saw what anarchy looked like in New Orleans – and it wasn’t pretty. If that’s the conservative vision of limited government, America has a clear message to the conservative movement – no, thank you!
Grover Norquist is one of the intellectual godfathers of the conservative movement. He famously said that his goal was “to get [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Well, we tried it their way. We saw what happens when you under-fund levees that protect a city. We saw what happens when you don’t get quick and effective government assistance in a rescue effort. We saw what happens when you drown government in New Orleans.
What wound up getting drowned instead was this brand of conservative ideology. America does not support this type of gross indifference.
I dare Norquist and all of the elected Republican officials who have been running on his agenda to step up and stick to their principles. I dare them to suggest that a limited government should not help the people affected by Hurricane Katrina.
They would be run out of town – as well they should be. Americans simply don’t believe in a government that small, that limited or that uncaring.
We believe in a government that cares enough to protect its citizens and that tries to do best by them. We understand that government might not always achieve this objective and that on occasion it might even get too large for its own good, but at least we agree on the objective – government represents the collective might and the collective kindness of all of us when we are put together.
Ronald Reagan first cut taxes when the highest income tax bracket was 70%. That was simply too much taxes. There is an upper limit to how big government can be. But there is also a lower limit to how small government can be. That is what present day Republicans seem to be missing. There is a limit to how much you can cut taxes and shrink government before you hurt the public welfare.
If we had spent $100 million dollars to adequately build the levees around New Orleans as the Army Corps of Engineers suggested, we wouldn’t now be in the position of spending $100 billion to rescue the city and its inhabitants.
Grover Norquist is wrong. He can’t get rid of government -- the American people won’t let him. Ironically, all he and his cohorts are doing is making government more expensive for the rest of us by being short-sighted with the cuts they have advocated for (and that George W. Bush has agreed to and enthusiastically put in place).
Government is what we do when we all get together for a common purpose. And what we don’t do is leave one another behind. America is not that cruel. It’s about time conservatives understood that.Saturday, September 10, 2005
BACK HOME ON DE OLE PLANTATION
Bush Proves How Far Removed He Is
By Rep. George Miller Fri Sep 9, 8:23 PM ET
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, President Bush proved once again just how far removed he and his Administration are from the life experiences of most Americans. The President issued an executive order on Thursday that makes it possible for federal contractors to pay extremely low wages to workers hired for the Gulf Coast rebuilding. Bush accomplished this by suspending the 1931 Davis-Bacon law, which says that federal contractors must pay their workers a “prevailing wage” on construction projects. Contrary to the misinformation coming from the right wing – that prevailing wages are actually high “union wages,” as John Fund wrote on The Huffington Post last week – the truth is that the prevailing wage is just the average wage for a specific job function in a local area. In parts of the Gulf Coast, these wages for construction workers can be low – even as low as $7, $8, or $9 an hour.
Deep poverty is a major part of the story of Hurricane Katrina, as is now plain for all of us to see. How are New Orleanians and other people in the region supposed to get back on their feet if they can’t even make $7 an hour? Hundreds of thousands of people have just lost everything they had. America has to put Gulf Coast workers back to work – and at wages that can help them and their families get back on their feet. Davis-Bacon guarantees a wage floor when they get back to work. If the President wants to help storm victims he should rescind his executive order immediately.Saturday, September 10, 2005
COWS AND PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT THINGS
German Plane With Katrina Aid Turned Back
BERLIN, Associated Press - A German military plane carrying 15 tons of military rations for survivors of Hurricane Katrina was sent back by U.S. authorities, officials said Saturday.
The plane was turned away Thursday because it did not have the required authorization, a German government spokesman said.
The spokesman, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, declined to comment on a report in the German news magazine Der Spiegel that U.S. authorities refused the delivery on the grounds that the
NATO military rations could carry mad cow disease.
The spokesman said U.S. authorities had since given approval for future aid flights, but it was unclear whether the German military would try again to deliver the rations.
Since Hurricane Katrina struck the United States, many international donors have complained of frustration that bureaucratic entanglements have hindered shipments to the United States.
A U.S. Embassy official, who agreed to discuss the matter only if not quoted by name, blamed the German flight's rejection on temporary technical and logistical problems that have accompanied recovery operations in the devastated region.
German military planes have flown several loads of rations to the Gulf Coast. Berlin is also sending teams equipped with high-capacity pumps to help clear floodwaters.Saturday, September 10, 2005
HORSES AND PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT THINGS
Is the sleeping giant finally waking from his slumber? Will we throw the rascals out of office? Stay tuned!
President's Approval Rating Dips Below 40
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush's job approval has dipped below 40 percent for the first time in the AP-Ipsos poll, reflecting widespread doubts about his handling of gasoline prices and the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Nearly four years after Bush's job approval soared into the 80s after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush was at 39 percent job approval in an AP-Ipsos poll taken this week. That's the lowest since the the poll was started in December 2003.
The public's view of the nation's direction has grown increasingly negative as well, with nearly two-thirds now saying the country is heading down the wrong track.
"As a nation, we are pretty well stretched," said Barry Allen, a political independent from Reed City, Mich. "I approve of some of the things the president has done, and disapprove of others. Overall, I disapprove."
Allen said he liked some of Bush's economic steps during his first term but has been dissatisfied with the president's economic moves in his second term, his Iraq policy and his handling of gasoline prices.
Allen worries Hurricane Katrina has taken the wind out of an economy that was moving in the right direction.
With gasoline racing past $3 a gallon, Bush's standing on dealing with those prices may be one of his biggest problems — seven in 10 said they disapprove.
And just over half in the poll, 52 percent, said they disapprove of the president's handling of the hurricane.
For Bill Kane of Kingsland, Ga., the government's slow response to the hurricane "was terrifying to see in our own country. It made you mad, because it made you think where's our money going?"
More evidence of problems with the storm response surfaced Friday when the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it would discontinue a 2-day-old program to issue debit cards worth to displaced families.
The administration also dumped FEMA Director Michael Brown, who had come to symbolize the stumbling early days of the hurricane response, as commander of Katrina relief efforts.
Brown once served as the judges and stewards commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association.
"Bush puts people in jobs who don't know what they're doing," said Shirley Carignan, a retiree and a political independent from Weymouth, Mass. "I think he's picking friends for these jobs. My girlfriend raises Arabians. You know horses, so what? Horses and people are different things."
The number of people who think the country is on the wrong track grew from 59 percent last month to 65 percent this month. Tumbling consumer confidence after Hurricane Katrina may be contributing to that sense of pessimism.
The RBC CASH Index, based on polling by Ipsos, showed that consumer confidence sank in September to the lowest level since early March 2003 before the start of the Iraq war.
Economic woes and a continuing war in Iraq have been complicated by the continuing hurricane recovery crisis.
"A lot of Americans don't pay attention to their leaders on a day-to-day basis," said Robert Blendon, a public opinion analyst at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "They measure presidents, governors and mayors on how they handle big events like a hurricane. This event is not over because the bodies are going to be discovered day by day."
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On the Net:
Ipsos: http://www.ap-ipsosresults.comFriday, September 09, 2005
CHERTOFF: "NO ONE COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THIS"
US government knew of dire risks posed by Katrina: FEMA document
Fri Sep 9,10:39 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - One million evacuees, and up to 350,000 left homeless: that would be the results of a hurricane hitting New Orleans, according to a year-old document from the US
Federal Emergency Management Agency made public.
ADVERTISEMENT
The government document appears to contradict claims by top US officials that nobody had anticipated the outcome of a powerful hurricane hitting Louisiana as Hurricane Katrina did last week.
The 2004 FEMA document was made public by opposition Democrats in the US House of Representatives.
It explains that a hurricane of between category three and five in strength (on the Saffir-Simspon scale) hitting the southern state of Louisiana would create "a catastrophe with which the state would not be able to cope without massive help from neighboring states and the federal government."
State and federal emergency management officials "believe that the gravity of the situation calls for an extraordinary level of advance planning to improve government readiness to respond effectively to such an event."
In the event of a hurricane hit "over one million people would evacuate from New Orleans. Evacuees would crowd shelters throughout Louisiana and adjacent states."
The hurricane water surge "would block highways and trap 300,000 to 350,000 persons in flooded areas. Storm surge combined with heavy rain could leave much of New Orleans under 14 to 17 feet (six meters) of water. More than 200 square miles (518 square kilometers) of urban areas would be flooded."
The document also warned that it would take weeks to drain the water out of New Orleans because "inundated pumping stations and damaged pump motors would be inoperable" and because the flood protection levees "would prevent drainage of floodwater."
It also noted that rescue operations "would be difficult because much of the area would be reachable only by helicopters and boats," and that hospitals "would be overcrowded with special-needs patients," noting that "backup generators would run out of fuel or fail before patients could be moved elsewhere.
"The New Orleans area would be without electric power, food, potable water, medicine, or transportation for an extended time period," the document read, and warned that "damaged chemical plants and industries could spill hazardous materials."
It added that "standing water and diseases could threaten public health," and that there "would be severe economic repercussions for the state and region."Friday, September 09, 2005
KATRINA BLOWING IN A HARD, COLD WINTER - FOOLISH GRASSHOPPERS WILL DIE
Katrina, an Economic Tipping Point
By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, Friday, September 9, 2005; Page D01
Allow me to dissent from the sanguine view of the economic impact of Hurricane Katrina embraced by the Wall Street herd, policymakers and most forecasters.
By any measure, Katrina is a shock to an economic ecosystem already seriously out of balance. It has reduced national wealth by several hundred billion dollars, displaced hundreds of thousands of citizens, aggravated bloated budget and trade deficits and reduced the political odds for permanent tax cuts on capital. And with so much still unknown, the risks, as they say at the Fed, are on the downside.
Today's crisis is the price of gasoline; next week it could be jet fuel. Higher fuel prices have begun to show up in taxi cab surcharges and freight rates. (By David Paul Morris -- Getty Images)
As always happens with disasters and financial crises, the early forecasts are based on tweaks to the standard forecasting models. These macro-analyses are invariably arithmetic and linear in nature (as in "a $100 billion loss is the equivalent of only a 0.6 percent drop in the S&P 500"). They assume rational behavior by consumers, investors and executives, and timely and effective intervention by the Fed.
But economic crises are by nature unpredictable. They are about the interplay of micro-events that have macroeconomic consequences. They involve irrational, herdlike behavior and tipping points in which the effects are nonlinear and geometric. And the Fed can rarely prevent them.
Pre-Katrina, the unpleasant scenarios all ended in the same place: stagflation, that '70s-era combo of inflation and stagnant economic growth, two conditions that were not supposed to coexist. Post-Katrina, the stagflation odds have greatly increased.
First, consider energy prices, which were up sharply before the hurricane and are likely to settle even higher because of storm-related damage. Today's crisis is gasoline; next week it could be jet fuel; and you can be fairly sure that a heating oil and natural gas spike will follow in the winter.
Higher fuel prices have begun to show up in taxicab surcharges, freight rates and airline tickets. Now that pricing power has been restored in much of the economy, prices across a range of manufactured goods are likely to jump, as well. And with barge traffic backed up, the extra cost of getting this fall's harvest to market translates into higher food costs.
Sharp price increases are also likely in the cost of construction materials and workers as the massive rebuilding begins on the Gulf Coast.
If you thought it difficult or expensive to get a roofing contractor or mason last month, you ain't seen nothing yet.
All of these increases might be relatively benign as long as they don't result in higher wages. But with labor markets tightening, productivity slowing and health benefit costs rising at double-digit rates, inflationary wage and benefits increases are a real possibility for the first time in years.
That's the "flation" part. Now let's consider the "stag."
Start with the lost output from an estimated 400,000 workers whose jobs or companies no longer exist. Add the drag on other consumption as households and firms pay higher prices for energy, transport, food and construction.
The auto industry, already on fumes, now warns of further troubles as higher gas prices drive down sales of gas guzzlers. Insurers can only guess the magnitude of the hit they will take. Airlines will take it on the chin once again. And farm income is almost sure to decline.
Some of that, of course, will be offset by federal spending for relief and reconstruction. But the fiscal stimulus could prove insufficient if many consumers respond to higher prices and pictures of destruction by saving more and consuming less.
Even before Katrina, U.S. economic growth was overly dependent on debt-driven consumption and the housing bubble that was so much a part of it. Now the hurricane could prove to be the long-expected shock that finally forces the economy onto a slower but more sustainable path. The transition would be a rocky one for households and businesses, but rockier still for financial and real estate markets that have overpriced assets and underpriced risk.
And that is where the greatest danger lies. The financial system is often described as the "lifeblood" of the economy, and once infected, it creates a self-reinforcing dynamic in which caution begets caution, weakness begets weakness and selling begets selling.
So far, markets of all sorts have blithely shrugged off Katrina. Given the magnitude of what has happened, and the uncertainty still ahead, that may be the most worrisome sign of all.Friday, September 09, 2005
WHAT THE US MEDIA WON'T SHOW YOU
Friday, September 09, 2005
IS THE GIANT FINALLY AWAKENING?
How Different Groups Feel About Bush, Storm
Friday September 9, 2005 10:46 PM
By The Associated Press
Demographics and details from the AP-Ipsos poll on President Bush, the nation's direction and Hurricane Katrina. The results are taken from a poll of 1,002 adults conducted Sept. 6-8 by Ipsos, an international polling firm. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, larger for subgroups.
WHO'S TO BLAME?
-By more than 2 to 1, Americans say the federal government should have been better prepared for a disaster the magnitude of Katrina. Minorities, 83 percent, were more likely than whites, 64 percent, to feel that the federal government should have been better prepared. People who live in cities were more likely than those who live in the suburbs and rural areas to feel that way.
-Just over half, 54 percent, said they blame President Bush for the slow response to the storm.
WHAT'S THEIR REACTION?
-Two-thirds of respondents said they had a deep feeling of anger that relief for the victims came so slowly. Women, 72 percent, were more likely to feel this way than men, 62 percent. Blacks, 93 percent, and those who live in cities, 75 percent, also had strong feelings of anger.
-More than half, 55 percent, said they had a deep feeling of shame about the way the hurricane response was handled. Democrats, 72 percent, were more likely than Republicans, 33 percent, to say they felt deeply ashamed. Minorities, 68 percent, were more likely than whites, 49 percent, to feel deeply ashamed about the response.
-Just over a third said they felt deeply that the government would have responded faster if the victims weren't mostly black and poor. Almost two-thirds of minorities said they deeply felt that way, while a fourth of whites said they felt deeply that this was the case.
FEELING GROUCHY
-Almost two-thirds say the country is headed down the wrong track. Those who are the gloomiest include people from 18-29, 77 percent wrong direction; nonwhites, 79 percent; those with a high school education or less, 73 percent; those with low incomes, under $25,000, 69 percent; $25,000 to $50,000, 72 percent; Democrats, 86 percent; non-investors, 72 percent.
-Just over half disapprove of how Bush is handling the hurricane response. Democrats, 65 percent, were more likely than Republicans, 17 percent, to feel that way. City dwellers were more likely than those in the suburbs and rural areas to feel that way.
-Seven in 10 disapprove of how the president is handling gas prices. Women, 75 percent, were more likely than men, 64 percent, to disapprove of Bush's handling of gas prices. Minorities, 72 percent, were more likely than whites, 43 percent, to strongly disapprove. Those who make less than $50,000 a year were more likely to disapprove than those who make more than $50,000.Friday, September 09, 2005
DON'T PISS OFF BUSHCO, CITIZEN, OR YOU TOO COULD END UP AN 'ENEMY COMBATANT'
Detention of Enemy Combatant Upheld
WASHINGTON, Los Angeles Times -- A federal appeals court ruled today Jose Padilla, the so-called "dirty bomber," can be held forever in jail as an enemy combatant and never allowed to defend himself at trial, although he is an American citizen and was arrested in this country.
The unanimous decision by a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., significantly boosts the Bush administration's secret program of jailing what it claims are key Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects around the world without filing criminal charges or holding trials in an effort to squeeze intelligence information from alleged terrorist operatives.
The ruling was reached by a three-member panel of the appellate court and was written by Judge Michael Luttig, who is considered by many to be on the short list of candidates to fill the open vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Padilla's attorneys plan to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. But many believe it unlikely they will prevail there, making today's ruling the all-but-final approval of Bush's highly controversial use of executive authority to skirt America's traditional legal process system and decide for himself who will go to trial and who will simply be held incommunicado.
At the heart of the White House argument to keep a half-dozen terror figures in permanent lockup was its fear that a trial could result in their acquittals and permit them to return home and wage a violent campaign against the United States.
But by invoking the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, enacted by Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York and Washington, the president has the power to indefinitely detain some terrorists "in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States."
Equally important, administration officials said, was the need to keep interrogating the suspects and learn as much as possible about how terror cells operate and what other attacks are being planned.
In the case of Padilla, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales indicated today that his continuing incarceration has paid off in new U.S. intelligence about terrorist activities.Friday, September 09, 2005
PROTECTING OUR WIDDLE SENSIBILITIES, MINIMIZING TRUTH
Lack of bodies on TV prompts charge of Katrina cover-up
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Official US admonitions against broadcasting images of cadavers in New Orleans floodwaters have prompted charges that America's media helped cover up the slow US response to Hurricane Katrina.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has taken much of the heat for the lack of organization, asked news organizations not to show pictures of dead bodies.
US newspapers have published photographs of bodies floating in the city, devastated by flooding after Katrina socked the US Gulf Coast. Press agencies, including Agence France-Presse, have also distributed photographs in which bodies were unidentifiable, but which rankled the public, anyway.
However, US television networks have largely abstained from broadcasting such pictures, as they did on September 11, 2001, turning cameras away from those jumping from the twin towers, to avoid putting off viewers.
"The American press is known to be one of the most delicate electronic press in the world," said Larry Siems, Freedom to Write program director, PEN American Center, in New York.
"The press exercise a great deal of caution and even self-censorship. It is clearly illegal under US law, the First Amendment" to the US Constitution, he said.
"Out of respect for the families that are missing their loved ones, FEMA has asked that the images not be shown, but this decision is left to the members of the media," said Mark Pfeifle, FEMA spokesman.
"FEMA personnel on the ground are just trying to be respectful of the families," he said.
Amy Mitchell, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism at Columbia University, said FEMA's motivation behind the request was what mattered most.
"If it was for the purpose of crisis management, that's completely wrong. If it is to protect the families, I can understand the request, it does not mean the media are going to follow it," she said.
Siems said FEMA was part of President George W. Bush's administration, which "has tried in the past to restrict images of the coffins of returning servicemen from Iraq."
"For FEMA to do it seems off-mission, but it comes from an administration that has tried to exert some control over images of important news events," he said.
Mary McGinnis, CBS vice president in charge of news, said, "We take into consideration what time it would air, and on what broadcast. We are totally respectful of the dead and how we portray them."Friday, September 09, 2005
NATIONAL GUARD
Officials: Guard Deployment Hurt Response
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss., Associated Press - The deployment of thousands of National Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina struck hindered those states' initial storm response, military and civilian officials said Friday.
Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that "arguably" a day or so of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana's 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.
Blum said that to replace those units' command and control equipment, he dispatched personnel from Guard division headquarters from Kansas and Minnesota shortly after the storm struck.
Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., whose waterfront home here was washed away in the storm, told reporters that the absence of the deployed Mississippi Guard units made it harder for local officials to coordinate their initial response.
"What you lost was a lot of local knowledge," Taylor said, as well as equipment that could have been used in recovery operations.
"The best equipment went with them, for obvious reasons," especially communications equipment, he added.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said this week that the Pentagon has the ability to cope with both Katrina and the Iraq war, saying, "We can and will do both."
Blum said that overall, the Iraq mission for Guard units across the nation is not limiting the military's ability to expand and continue the rescue and recovery operations in storm-battered states.
"Iraq and other overseas commitments do not inhibit our ability to sustain this effort here at home," Blum said in an interview with three reporters who flew here with him from Washington on Friday.
Blum and Taylor toured the heavily damaged areas around Bay St. Louis. They also met with Guardsmen and other troops who are helping clean up and provide emergency assistance to those displaced by the wall of water that wiped out many homes and flooded a widespread area miles north of the coastline.Friday, September 09, 2005
IT'S CALLED ACCOUNTABILITY
Katrina's Idiot Accomplices: This Is the Perfect Time for Blame
By Jaron Lanier
The idea that it's better to wait before placing blame for deaths due to incompetence related to Katrina is plain wrong. If Katrina had been an attack by a foreign enemy, I could understand the argument that we must present a unified front. That's why I supported President Bush after the 9/11 attacks.
Hurricanes, however, don't read blogs or watch the news. Giving government officials time to spin will do absolutely no good at all in this case. No future hurricane will be scared away by a good speech or photo op.
Just the opposite: If we prove ourselves incapable of learning from mistakes, isn't that an invitation to terrorists? I note that a small plane crashed into the White House in the years before the 9/11 attacks. Is it not possible that terrorists watched and thought to themselves, "Hey, these guys have no domestic air defense!" Are they not now watching and saying, "Hey, these guys will just stumble like idiots and humiliate themselves if we create heavy casualties with a WMD! The world will blame them as much as us, because they'll be partially responsible for many of their own deaths. What a great opportunity for terrorism!"
I'd rather the bad guys see us engage in tough blame-casting and self-improvement than slick spin.
That doesn't mean we should round up whoever the usual suspects are in our minds. I'm ready to see non-Bush administration idiots strung up when it's called for, but I'm not ready for a corruption of the idea of fairness that would demand an equal number of villains from both parties.
Republicans have tended to concentrate on what happened on the ground in the day before Katrina hit and immediately afterwards, perhaps because it is the best way to focus on the activities of Democratic local and state officials. A large number of people didn't quite achieve mental awareness of the potential for disaster until it was too late. It seems terribly unfair for the Feds to use excuses about how no one could have foreseen what would happen and then in the same breath accuse residents or local officials of not having superior judgment.
Based on the information available so far, there are indeed some reasons to complain about the behavior of local officials, and the worst offenders might turn out to have been members of various local police departments.
For some harrowing reading, see this.
The most damaging incompetence, however, took place in the days after the storm passed, as the flood waters rose. Local resources could not possibly have been expected to cope with what happened, and the Feds screwed up in surreal ways, lied about it, and still haven't been able to speak the truth. This must not be obscured by diversionary tactics. It's so shocking and so weird that it's hard to believe, but believe it, don't forget what you saw: For just one example, Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, said he did not know about thousands of people trapped at the convention center until after everyone else in the world knew. He seemed to think this was a good excuse that would make him look good! How much more inept could he possibly be?
Hear no evil
Friday, September 09, 2005
THE REAL NO SPIN DEAL
Trapped in New Orleans by the flood--and martial law
The real heroes and sheroes of New Orleans
September 9, 2005
LARRY BRADSHAW and LORRIE BETH SLONSKY are emergency medical services (EMS) workers from San Francisco and contributors to Socialist Worker. They were attending an EMS conference in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. They spent most of the next week trapped by the flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city. Here, they tell their story.
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TWO DAYS after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the city’s historic French Quarter remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat.
The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and fled the city. Outside Walgreens’ windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized, and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters.
There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.
We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home on Saturday. We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter.
We also suspect the media will have been inundated with “hero” images of the National Guard, the troops and police struggling to help the “victims” of the hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.
The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.
Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.
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ON DAY Two, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina.
Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources, including the National Guard and scores of buses, were pouring into the city. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible, because none of us had seen them.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the city. Those who didn’t have the requisite $45 each were subsidized by those who did have extra money.
We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and newborn babies. We waited late into the night for the “imminent” arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute they arrived at the city limits, they were commandeered by the military.
By Day Four, our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously bad. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that “officials” had told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the city, we finally encountered the National Guard.
The guard members told us we wouldn’t be allowed into the Superdome, as the city’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. They further told us that the city’s only other shelter--the convention center--was also descending into chaos and squalor, and that the police weren’t allowing anyone else in.
Quite naturally, we asked, “If we can’t go to the only two shelters in the city, what was our alternative?” The guards told us that this was our problem--and no, they didn’t have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile “law enforcement.”
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WE WALKED to the police command center at Harrah’s on Canal Street and were told the same thing--that we were on our own, and no, they didn’t have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred.
We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly visible embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we couldn’t stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp.
In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge to the south side of the Mississippi, where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city.
The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation, so was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, “I swear to you that the buses are there.”
We organized ourselves, and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group, and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news.
Families immediately grabbed their few belongings, and quickly, our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and other people in wheelchairs. We marched the two to three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it didn’t dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions.
As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us that there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans.
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OUR SMALL group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and, in the end, decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway--on the center divide, between the O’Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned that we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway, and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet-to-be-seen buses.
All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away--some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot.
Meanwhile, the only two city shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery that New Orleans had become.
Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let’s hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.
Now--secure with these two necessities, food and water--cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).
This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.
If the relief organizations had saturated the city with food and water in the first two or three days, the desperation, frustration and ugliness would not have set in.
Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.
From a woman with a battery-powered radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the city. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us” had an ominous tone to it.
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, “Get off the fucking freeway.” A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of “victims,” they saw “mob” or “riot.” We felt safety in numbers. Our “we must stay together” attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
The next day, our group of eight walked most of the day, made contact with the New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search-and-rescue team.
We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.
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WE ARRIVED at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We eight were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a Coast Guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.
There, the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses didn’t have air conditioners. In the dark, hundreds of us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.
Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport--because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly and disabled, as we sat for hours waiting to be “medically screened” to make sure we weren’t carrying any communicable diseases.
This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome.
Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.Friday, September 09, 2005
GOLLY, IT'S A GOOD THING THE PEOPLE'S OPINION DOESN'T COUNT
FEMA Chief Relieved of Katrina Duties
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown is being removed from his role in managing the Bush administration's Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and is returning to Washington.
Brown, who has been under fire for the federal government's slow response to the storm that devastated much of the Gulf Coast region, will be replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, who was overseeing New Orleans relief and rescue efforts.
Asked if he was being made a scapegoat for a federal relief effort that has drawn widespread and sharp criticism, Brown told The Associated Press after a long pause: "By the press, yes. By the president, No."
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"Relieved of Katrina Duties"? What the fuck does that actually mean? Has "Brownie" been fired as head of FEMA, or merely been sent to the back lines for some spin doctoring?
Friday, September 09, 2005
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SAW IT COMING BUT BUSHCO DIDN'T
Gone With The Water
By Joel K. Bourne, Jr., National Geographic 2004
Photographs by Robert Caputo and Tyrone Turner
The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.
It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are," Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."
The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when."
Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city's natural defenses are quietly melting away. From the Mississippi border to the Texas state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster than any place in the U.S. Since the 1930s some 1,900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal wetlands—a swath nearly the size of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg—have vanished beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars spent over the past decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one acre every 33 minutes.
A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes.
While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes, and barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks second only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison.
Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business leaders, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to forge a radical plan to protect what's left. Drafted by the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration balked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two billion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects. Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin.
To glimpse the urgency of the problem afflicting Louisiana, one need only drive 40 minutes southeast of New Orleans to the tiny bayou village of Shell Beach. Here, for the past 70 years or so, a big, deeply tanned man with hands the size of baseball gloves has been catching fish, shooting ducks, and selling gas and bait to anyone who can find his end-of-the-road marina. Today Frank "Blackie" Campo's ramshackle place hangs off the end of new Shell Beach. The old Shell Beach, where Campo was born in 1918, sits a quarter mile away, five feet beneath the rippling waves. Once home to some 50 families and a naval air station during World War II, the little village is now "ga'an pecan," as Campo says in the local patois. Gone forever.
Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous existence. Hurricanes twice razed the community, sending houses floating through the marsh. But it wasn't until the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) ship channel nearby in 1968 that its fate was sealed. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known as "Mr. Go," was supposed to provide a shortcut for freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never caught on. Maybe two ships use the channel on a given day, but wakes from even those few vessels have carved the shoreline a half mile wide in places, consuming old Shell Beach.
Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes the color of a late autumn sky. Our conversation turns from Mr. Go to the bigger issue affecting the entire coast. "What really screwed up the marsh is when they put the levees on the river," Campo says, over the noise of a groaning air-conditioner. "They should take the levees out and let the water run; that's what built the land. But we know they not going to let the river run again, so there's no solution."
Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just that—letting the river run. A coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, Reed is convinced that breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways would pump new life into the dying marshes. Only three such diversions currently operate in the state. I catch up with Reed at the most controversial of the lot—a 26-million-dollar culvert just south of New Orleans named Caernarvon.
"Caernarvon is a prototype, a demonstration of a technique," says Reed as we motor down a muddy canal in a state boat. The diversion isn't filling the marsh with sediments on a grand scale, she says. But the effect of the added river water—loaded as it is with fertilizer from farm runoff—is plain to see. "It turns wetlands hanging on by the fingernails into something quite lush," says Reed.
To prove her point, she points to banks crowded with slender willows, rafts of lily pads, and a wide shallow pond that is no longer land, no longer liquid. More like chocolate pudding. But impressive as the recovering marsh is, its scale seems dwarfed by the size of the problem. "Restoration is not trying to make the coast look like a map of 1956," explains Reed. "That's not even possible. The goal is to restore healthy natural processes, then live with what you get."
Even that will be hard to do. Caernarvon, for instance, became a political land mine when releases of fresh water timed to mimic spring floods wiped out the beds of nearby oyster farmers. The oystermen sued, and last year a sympathetic judge awarded them a staggering 1.3 billion dollars. The case threw a major speed bump into restoration efforts.
Other restoration methods—such as rebuilding marshes with dredge spoil and salt-tolerant plants or trying to stabilize a shoreline that's eroding 30 feet (10 meters) a year—have had limited success. Despite the challenges, the thought of doing nothing is hard for most southern Louisianans to swallow. Computer models that project land loss for the next 50 years show the coast and interior marsh dissolving as if splattered with acid, leaving only skeletal remnants. Outlying towns such as Shell Beach, Venice, Grand Isle, and Cocodrie vanish under a sea of blue pixels.
Those who believe diversions are the key to saving Louisiana's coast often point to the granddaddy of them all: the Atchafalaya River. The major distributary of the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, if left alone, would soon be the Mississippi River, capturing most of its flow. But to prevent salt water from creeping farther up the Mississippi and spoiling the water supply of nearby towns and industries, the Corps of Engineers allows only a third of the Mississippi's water to flow down the Atchafalaya. Still, that water and sediment have produced the healthiest wetlands in Louisiana. The Atchafalaya Delta is one of the few places in the state that's actually gaining ground instead of losing it. And if you want to see the delta, you need to go crabbing with Peanut Michel.
"Peanut," it turns out, is a bit of a misnomer. At six foot six and 340 pounds, the 35-year-old commercial fisherman from Morgan City wouldn't look out of place on the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints. We launch his aluminum skiff in the predawn light, and soon we're skimming down the broad, café au lait river toward the newest land in Louisiana. Dense thickets of needlegrass, flag grass, cut grass, and a big-leafed plant Michel calls elephant ear crowd the banks, followed closely by bushy wax myrtles and shaggy willows.
Michel finds his string of crab pots a few miles out in the broad expanse of Atchafalaya Bay. Even this far from shore the water is barely five feet deep. As the sun ignites into a blowtorch on the horizon, Michel begins a well-oiled ritual: grab the bullet-shaped float, shake the wire cube of its clicking, mottled green inhabitants, bait it with a fish carcass, and toss. It's done in fluid motions as the boat circles lazily in the water.
But it's a bad day for crabbing. The wind and water are hot, and only a few crabs dribble in. And yet Michel is happy. Deliriously happy. Because this is what he wants to do. "They call 'em watermen up in Maryland," he says with a slight Cajun accent. "They call us lunatics here. You got to be crazy to be in this business."
Despite Michel's poor haul, Louisiana's wetlands are still a prolific seafood factory, sustaining a commercial fishery that most years lands more than 300 million dollars' worth of finfish, shrimp, oysters, crabs, and other delicacies. How long the stressed marshes can maintain that production is anybody's guess. In the meantime, Michel keeps at it. "My grandfather always told me, Don't live to be rich, live to be happy," he says. And so he does.
After a few hours Michel calls it a day, and we head through the braided delta, where navigation markers that once stood at the edge of the boat channel now peek out of the brush 20 feet (six meters) from shore. At every turn we flush mottled ducks, ibis, and great blue herons. Michel, who works as a hunting guide during duck season, cracks an enormous grin at the sight. "When the ducks come down in the winter," he says, "they'll cover the sun."
To folks like Peanut Michel, the birds, the fish, and the rich coastal culture are reason enough to save Louisiana's shore, whatever the cost. But there is another reason, one readily grasped by every American whose way of life is tethered not to a dock, but to a gas pump: These wetlands protect one of the most extensive petroleum infrastructures in the nation.
The state's first oil well was punched in south Louisiana in 1901, and the world's first offshore rig went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947. During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of the state's budget was derived from petroleum revenues. Though much of the production has moved into deeper waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the coast, as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans.
The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana's vanishing marsh.
You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon, the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast. Brawny helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking water to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around the clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the world, seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes an island, which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state to build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated highway to the port. It's also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a bargain.
"We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas," Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I'm third generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the infrastructure to handle it."
The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water lying with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface pressure—a theory known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to slip and the land above them to slump.
"When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it, everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has been reported in other oil-producing areas such as the North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't speculate on what percentage of wetland loss can be pinned on the oil industry. "What I can tell you is that much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there, they're just underwater." The area Morton refers to, part of the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest rates of wetland loss in the state.
The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton's theory, but they've been unable to disprove it. The implication for restoration is profound. If production continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton expects subsidence to return to its natural geologic rate, making restoration feasible in places. Currently, however, the high price of natural gas has oil companies swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas reservoirs. If such fields are tapped, Morton expects regional depressurization to continue. The upshot for the coast, he explains, is that the state will have to focus whatever restoration dollars it can muster on areas that can be saved, not waste them on places that are going to sink no matter what.
A few days after talking with Morton, I'm sitting on the levee in the French Quarter, enjoying the deep-fried powdery sweetness of a beignet from the Café du Monde. Joggers lumber by in the torpid heat, while tugs wrestle their barges up and down the big brown river. For all its enticing quirkiness, for all its licentious pleasures, for all its geologic challenges, New Orleans has been luckier than the wetlands that lined its pockets and stocked its renowned tables. The question is how long Lady Luck will shine. It brings back something Joe Suhayda, the LSU engineer, had said during our lunch by Lake Pontchartrain.
"When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment. But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going to pay."
I finish my beignet and stroll down the levee, succumbing to the hazy, lazy feel of the city that care forgot, but that nature will not.
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Subscribe to National Geographic.Friday, September 09, 2005
HOW THE MEDIA GOT ITS GROOVE BACK
From Deference to Outrage: Katrina and the Press
By Jay Rose, Huffingtonpost.com - I was on a break from blogging when Hurricane Katrina hit and New Orleans went down, but people kept sending me stuff. The article most often sent to me was a commentary by Matt Wells of the BBC, "Has Katrina saved US media?" Possibly it has, he said: "Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina."
The "timid and self-censoring journalistic culture" in the U.S. is normally "no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration," Wells wrote. "But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington."
Other observers made the same point: national journalism was awakening after a period of intimidation, and finding its voice by voicing its anger. Typical was this Agence France Presse report: "In the emotional aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, US television's often deferential treatment of government officials has been replaced by fiercely combative interviews and scathing commentary."
In the New York Times, a review of TV coverage by Alessandra Stanley was headlined: "Reporters Turn From Deference to Outrage." Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle remarked on it:
Bush and his administration have come under withering attack not only from a lengthy and bipartisan list of other politicians but also from anchors on nearly every channel -- opinion-makers in the heat of the moment -- whose voices abandoned objectivity and rose up in questioning tones as they took Bush and federal department heads to task.
Howard Kurtz saw not just a return of backbone, but a renewal of purpose: "Journalism seems to have recovered its reason for being," he wrote. It's a pity he didn't say what that reason was; I would have liked to have heard it. But in Kurtz's mind, the recovery of mission was connected to the display of emotion, like when CNN's Anderson Cooper interrupted Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record) as she thanked some of her fellow officials for their hard work. "Do you get the anger that is out here?" he said. Kurtz:
This kind of activist stance, which would have drawn flak had it come from American reporters inIraq, seemed utterly appropriate when applied to the yawning gap between mounting casualties and reassuring rhetoric. For once, reporters were acting like concerned citizens, not passive observers. And they were letting their emotions show, whether it was ABC's Robin Roberts choking up while recalling a visit to her mother on the Gulf Coast or CNN's Jeanne Meserve crying as she described the dead and injured she had seen.
The repeal of on-air reticence was good, he said. "Maybe, just maybe, journalism needs to bring more passion to the table -- and not just when cable shows are obsessing on the latest missing white woman." Two examples of bringing it to the table: this acid commentary from Keith Olbermann, courtesy of Crooks and Liars ("Let's hope Olbermann does more 'op-ed' type segments on his show from now on") and this more measured one from CBS's Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation.
Alessandra Stanley said the renewed aggression is a reflection of public outrage, "but it is buoyed by a rare sense of righteous indignation by a news media that is usually on the defensive." In this it made a difference that journalists were doing a demonstrably better job than government. "Viewers could see that as late as Thursday, television news crews could travel freely back and forth from the convention center, but water trucks, ambulances and officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could not."
Stanley's colleague David Carr, media columnist for the business section of the Times, also saw a promising switch in direction. In his imagery, the press had hit a low point recently, and was now on the rise.
Mr. Cooper's well-shaded outrage -- he stopped just this short of editorializing -- elicited the kind of anger that has been mostly missing from a toothless press. After a couple of years on the run from the government, public skepticism and self-inflicted wounds, the press corps felt its toes touch bottom in the Gulf Coast and came up big.
Big like it used to be, back in the day. Peter Johnson in USA Today: "Some observers say that Katrina's media legacy may be a return to a post-Watergate-like era of tougher scrutiny of the federal government and public policy issues." Gal Beckerman at CJR Daily wasn't one of those observers. "What happened last week wasn't anything like [Watergate]; it was a lot of agitated, incredulous reporters channeling the anger of the stranded people they were among, and delivering it to those who deserved to hear it."
For the political left, the story was not the "recovery of backbone" but how could it take so long? Salon's Eric Boehlert: "For years, frustrated news consumers have wondered what it would take to finally awaken the press from its perpetual, lazy slumber. Now we know the answer: one ravaged American city and a few thousand dead civilians." The coverage was timid at first, he said. "Eventually, though, the pictures from New Orleans became too ghastly to ignore and reporters turned angry."
"We sometimes find ourselves at a loss as to whether we should be more appalled at the Bush Administration's ideological obsession, its incompetence, its arrogance, its anti-intellectualism, or its dishonesty," wrote Eric Alterman at his perch at MSNBC. "In New Orleans, we see all of these forces at work in a manner that the mainstream media finally finds itself unable to ignore."
Both Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington pointed away from backbone recovery to ask how the Washington Post allowed itself to be used by a nameless Bush official peddling the "fact" that as of Sep. 3rd, Lousiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency. (Newsweek also had it.) This turned out to be wrong. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26.
"The unquestioning regurgitation of administration spin through the use of anonymous sources is the fault line of modern American journalism," said Huffington. "It's time for the media to get back to doing their job and stop being the principal weapon in Team Bush's damage control arsenal." It is indeed inexplicable that a false fact from an off-the-record source -- charging a dereliction of duty in the opposite party -- gets into the Washington Post. That sounds like the behavior of a palace press.
Meanwhile, in the Media Blog at National Review Online, Stephen Spruiell said he expected to see "a lot of these stories about how journalism has 'gotten its spine back'-- by which they mean that journalists are acting like a bunch of know-it-alls to whom the solution to every problem was obvious all along." In his view, a pre-existing inclination to "blame Bush" was simply allowed more room to express itself.
Spruiell thought it was a highlight that "reporters put a lot of passion into their stories and brought the drama right into your living room." But then the lowlight: "The reporters put a lot of anti-administration animosity into their analysis, failing to provide the context of state, local and federal failures and settling on the easy story: Blame Bush." (See also his reaction to this post.)
Why did Giuliani get the credit in New York after 9/11, while Bush gets the blame in New Orleans? That's what righty Hugh Hewitt wanted to know: "Who is in charge when bad things happen to big cities?"
The MSM's answer seems to be: Cities, when things go right and the mayor is courageous and telegenic; the President when the locals are in way over their heads. Not a very satisfactory answer, but MSM is hardly searching for answers, only ratings.
"In the wake of a mortifyingly slow government response to the Gulf Coast disaster, the press is demanding answers from the White House with unprecedented vigor," wrote Dan Froomkin in his White House Briefing column. (See the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions with Scott McClellan.) The "post-Katrina press awakening," as he called it, "is not the result of reporters expressing their personal or political opinions so much as it is about their asking tough questions based on what they, and others, have seen with their own eyes." He continues:
Bush and his aides are finding it impossible to wave off the incontrovertible facts and heart-rending images emerging from the lake that was once a great American city. They're finding it harder to set the news agenda. And the scathing criticism is becoming increasingly bipartisan, freeing reporters from the obligation to make every White House story sound like one with two sides equally based in reality.
A good example is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: "As a test of the homeland-security system, this was a failure."
In Peter Johnson's USA article I was quoted thusly: "Journalists seem to be much more effective than the administration in representing the public's reactions to the disaster," Rosen says. "Clueless federal officials seem to know less about what is happening than the journalists do, and sometimes less than an average TV viewer. This tips the balance of power toward the press, which is why we see such aggressive questioning and on-air criticism close to jeering."
A balance-of-power shift that is specific to the Katrina situation is, I think, more descriptive of what's happened with the press than the sudden discovery of "spine," a recovered sense of outrage, or the return of Watergate-era confidence. This part Johnson did not quote from our e-mail interview: What appears to be a struggle between the White House and the press is always a triangular relationship among journalists, the Administration and the public. Each leg -- the President and the American people, the White House and the national press, the press corps and the public -- counts. If we look at two sides without reckoning with the third we'll always go wrong.
Froomkin last week pointed to the gulf "between what [the] administration says it is doing and what the American public is watching on television." This is the kind of explanation that makes sense to me. That visible gulf--as wide as it's ever been last week--changes the balance of power. Sheelah Kolhatkar and Rebecca Dana elaborate in the New York Observer: "The combination of a sudden catastrophe, diminished communications and a lack of any authority on the ground for days to disseminate, filter or spin Katrina's aftermath has remade the press, and its relationship to the Bush administration."
That too is getting there. Even more to the point was this from the Observer:
"For the most part, we generally arrive at this type of story either just after or as the first responders are responding," said David Verdi, a senior vice president for NBC News. "We're usually standing shoulder to shoulder with the firemen or the policemen or the Marines, which allows us to record the incident. In this story, however, we were here before there was a first responder, and what made this particularly tough was that after Day 2, when it became very apparent to us that there were people in need, there were no first responders that we could see."
The press gained back some of its missing authority because in this situation public authority was missing.
So that's what they're saying about the news media and the Gulf Coast crisis. Now here is my view. Spine is always good, outrage is sometimes needed, and empathy can often reveal the story. But there is no substitute for being able to think, and act journalistically on your conclusions. What is the difference between a "blame game" and real accountability? If you have no idea because you've never really thought about it, then your outrage can easily misfire. This is from Kurtz:
On television, the frustration boiled over at different times. Fox's Shepard Smith shouted questions at a cop who refused to answer, saying: "What are you going to do with all these people? When is help coming for these people? Is there going to be help? I mean, they're very thirsty. Do you have any idea yet? Nothing? Officer?"
PostWatch comments: "I saw that clip live, and kudos to a brave Shepard Smith for charging into the disaster. But the cop he was chasing was obviously entirely out of the loop and in no position to answer any of Smith's questions." Did it matter, then, if the questions were tough?
What are the proper reponsibilities for city government, state government and the national government? If you haven't thought about it, and drawn the necessary conclusions, all the backbone in the world won't tell you where to aim your questions. The New Yorker's press critic is Nick Lemann, who's from New Orleans. He observes:
The wetlands that protected the city on the south and west have been deteriorating from commercial exploitation for years, thanks to inaction by Louisiana as well as by the United States. It isn't Washington that decided it's O.K. to let retail establishments in New Orleans sell firearms—which are now being extensively stolen and turned to the service of increasing the chaos in the city.
What is realistic to expect in a chaotic situation like New Orleans faced in the week after the hurricane? Not an easy question. An intelligent and nuanced answer to that is worth a lot more to journalists than righteous indignation, because if your rage overcomes your realism you will eventually sound ridiculous even to those who share the feeling.
What are the differences in the way our political system handles a problem that is real and manifest (present to the senses) vs. a threat that is real but not manifest at all (abstract until it's right upon us)? If you haven't thought about it, you might find "lack of preparation" inhuman and incomprehensible. If you have, lack of preparation begins to seem all-too-human, and not to plan looks more like a policy choice.
Jeff Jarvis said anger wasn't the best part of journalism's performance after Katrina. "I think the best of it is that journalism knows it has not done its best. That is new."
Last week, as the horror of it only started to rise, Aaron Brown turned his langorous gaze to the camera and tried to ask a correspondent whether we -- CNN, reporters, all of journalism -- yet had our hands around the story, the size of it. He didn't get an answer -- bad communications got in the way -- but that didn't matter, for the question was the answer. No, we did not nearly know what the story was.
Brown was asking his person to think.
I include in that thinking politically about the press itself. Perhaps an "activist stance" (Kurtz's term) is a sustainable direction. Or perhaps it isn't. At my weblog, PressThink, I once asked if we were headed for an opposition press. How can it be avoided if, say, we begin to see the press locked out of New Orleans as the authorities assert control? Maybe scathing commentary should come to the forefront, in the manner of a front page editorial that sticks around and becomes a permanent feature. Or maybe it's reporters acting like concerned citizens all the time.
If you can think with the situation it doesn't matter (for your journalism) if you break down and emote. If you can't think, and can't draw conclusions that influence your reporting, then bringing passion to the table isn't going to change a damn thing. And I don't believe Katrina has "saved" the news media from itself, either, although I agree that nola.com, by turning itself into an online forum, has been an inspiration.
Finally, the challenge for American journalism is not to recover its reason for being, but to find a stronger and better one. The world has changed. It's not enough to be tough.
Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University and is writing a book on what the Internet's doing to the press. His weblog is PressThink.
Friday, September 09, 2005
JUST CUT THE HYPOCRISY AND GIVE YOUR BUDDIES THE KEYS TO FORT KNOX
Read the last paragraph, bearing in mind that reconstruction contracts were already handed over without a peep to Halliburton the day after landfall. Let's see - no-bid contract award, gets to pay workers slave wages, can you say "profiteering", kids?
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Bush faces new questions on relief
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Rescue crews prepared to speed up the retrieval of the dead from Hurricane Katrina on Friday amid reports that President George W. Bush chose unqualified political supporters rather than disaster experts to head the agency leading the relief effort.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired a private firm to coordinate the recovery of bodies in and around New Orleans. The official death toll from the monster storm that hit Louisiana and Mississippi has exceeded 300 but is expected to climb much higher. Officials have 25,000 body bags on hand.
Water levels were slowly falling in a city still flooded with a toxic brew of dark-brown water poisoned by bacteria, gasoline, oil, chemicals, debris and submerged bodies. A fifth of the city's 75 major drainage pumps were back in operation draining fetid water from the city, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported on Friday.
Rescuers were still going door-to-door in New Orleans neighborhoods, trying to persuade reluctant stragglers to evacuate and were soon expected to begin removing people by force. Thousands of people were still believed to be holding out in the city.
Officials said there were fewer fires than in recent days, with 11 on Thursday, the Times-Picayune reported.
POLITICAL TIES TO BUSH
The Washington Post reported that five of the top eight FEMA officials had little experience in handling disasters and owed their jobs to their political ties to Bush.
As political operatives took the top jobs, professionals and experts in hurricanes and disasters left the agency, the newspaper said.
FEMA director Michael Brown, already under fire for his performance as the disaster unfolded, came under further pressure when Time magazine reported that his official biography released by the White House at the time of his nomination exaggerated his experience in disaster relief.
Brown was a friend of former Bush campaign director Joe Allbaugh, the previous FEMA head. Brown had also headed an Arabian horse association. Last week, as criticism of his response to the disaster swelled, Bush gave him a public vote of confidence, saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Brown's biography on the FEMA Web site said he had once served as an "assistant city manager with emergency services oversight," but Time quoted an official in Edmond, Oklahoma, as saying the job was actually "assistant to the city manager," with little responsibility. The magazine also said Brown padded his academic accomplishments.
"The assistant is more like an intern," city spokeswoman Claudia Deakins told the magazine. "Department heads did not report to him."
In response to the report on Time's Web site, FEMA issued a statement that took issue with elements related to an unofficial biography, and described his job in Edmond as "assistant to the city manager."
Bush administration officials were busy rushing fresh aid to the region while also trying to blunt the political fallout over the federal response to what, at an estimated $100 billion to $200 billion, could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
A Pew Research Center poll found 67 percent of Americans thought Bush could have done more to speed up relief efforts, and just 28 percent believed he did all he could. The president's approval rating fell to 40 percent, down four points since July to the lowest point Pew has recorded.
Colin Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state and a possible leader for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, criticized the disaster response by all levels of government in an interview to be broadcast on Friday.
'ENOUGH WARNING'
"There was more than enough warning over time about the dangers to New Orleans. Not enough was done. I don't think advantage was taken of the time that was available to us, and I just don't know why," Powell said in excerpts of the "20/20" program interview posted to the ABC Web site.
The task of retrieving and identifying bodies promised to be grim and difficult. Many were feared to be trapped in the poor, blue-collar subdivisions of the city, where people had no means to evacuate ahead of the storm.
Many corpses have decomposed. Poor people may not have dental records useful in identification. And family members of the dead have scattered across the entire country.
The president sent Vice President Dick Cheney to Mississippi and Louisiana on Thursday to help untangle bureaucratic red tape that had triggered complaints from some of the 1 million people displaced by the storm.
Cheney rode through the streets of downtown New Orleans in a Humvee, the highest-ranking Bush administration official to visit the shattered city center.
Asked about bureaucratic problems, Cheney said: "I think the progress we're making is significant. I think the performance in general at least in terms of the information I've received from locals is definitely very impressive."
Congress on Thursday pushed through approval for $51.8 billion in new aid, after an earlier $10.5 billion was exhausted in the first days since the storm hit on August 29.
Bush immediately signed the measure. "More resources will be needed as we work to help people get back on their feet," he said.
Bush also issued an executive order on Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of the hurricane to pay below the prevailing wage, drawing rebukes from two congressional Democrats who said stricken families need good wages to rebuild their lives.Friday, September 09, 2005
THE ARGUMENT IS OVER GUYS, YOU FUCKED UP ROYALLY. NOW STEP UP AND ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY
Leaders Lacking Disaster Experience
Washington Post - Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska anda
U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.
Meanwhile, veterans such as U.S. hurricane specialist Eric Tolbert and World Trade Center disaster managers Laurence W. Zensinger and Bruce P. Baughman -- who led FEMA's offices of response, recovery and preparedness, respectively -- have left since 2003, taking jobs as consultants or state emergency managers, according to current and former officials.
Because of the turnover, three of the five FEMA chiefs for natural-disaster-related operations and nine of 10 regional directors are working in an acting capacity, agency officials said.
Patronage appointments to the crisis-response agency are nothing new to Washington administrations. But inexperience in FEMA's top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.
"FEMA requires strong leadership and experience because state and local governments rely on them," said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association. "When you don't have trained, qualified people in those positions, the program suffers as a whole."
Last week's greatest foe was, of course, a storm of such magnitude that it "overwhelmed" all levels of government, according to Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record) (R-Maine). And several top FEMA officials are well-regarded by state and private counterparts in disaster preparedness and response.
They include Edward G. Buikema, acting director of response since February, and Kenneth O. Burris, acting chief of operations, a career firefighter and former Marietta, Ga., fire chief.
But scorching criticism has been aimed at FEMA, and it starts at the top with Brown, who has admitted to errors in responding to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding in New Orleans. The Oklahoma native, 50, was hired to the agency after a rocky tenure as commissioner of a horse sporting group by former FEMA director Joe M. Allbaugh, the 2000 Bush campaign manager and a college friend of Brown's.
Rhode, Brown's chief of staff, is a former television reporter who came to Washington as advance deputy director for Bush's Austin-based 2000 campaign and then the White House. He joined FEMA in April 2003 after stints at the
Commerce Department and the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Altshuler is a former presidential advance man. His predecessor, Scott Morris, was a media strategist for Bush with the Austin firm Maverick Media.
David I. Maurstad, who stepped down as Nebraska lieutenant governor in 2001 to join FEMA, has served asacting director for risk reduction and federal insurance administrator since June 2004. Daniel A. Craig, a onetime political fundraiser and campaign adviser, came to FEMA in 2001 from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he directed the eastern regional office, after working as a lobbyist for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown has managed more than 160 natural disasters as FEMA general counsel and deputy director since 2001, "hands-on experience [that] cannot be understated. Other leadership at FEMA brings particular skill sets -- policy management leadership, for example."
The agency has a deep bench of career professionals, said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews, including two dozen senior field coordinators and Gil Jamieson, director of the National Incident Management System. "Simply because folks who have left the agency have a disagreement with how it's being run doesn't necessarily indicate that there is a lack of experience leading it," she said.
Andrews said the "acting" designation for regional officials is a designation that signifies that they are FEMA civil servants -- not political appointees.
Touring the wrecked Gulf Coast with Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff yesterday, Vice President Cheney also defended FEMA leaders, saying, "We're always trying to strike the right balance" between political appointees and "career professionals that fill the jobs underneath them."
But experts inside and out of government said a "brain drain" of experienced disaster hands throughout the agency, hastened in part by the appointment of leaders without backgrounds in emergency management, has weakened the agency's ability to respond to natural disasters. Some security experts and congressional critics say the exodus was fueled by a bureaucratic reshuffling in Washington in 2003, when FEMA was stripped of its independent Cabinet-level status and folded into the Department of Homeland Security.
Emergency preparedness has atrophied as a result, some analysts said, extending from Washington to localities.
FEMA "has gone downhill within the department, drained of resources and leadership," said I.M. "Mac" Destler, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. "The crippling of FEMA was one important reason why it failed."
Richard A. Andrews, former emergency services director for the state of California and a member of the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council, said state and local failures were critical in the Katrina response, but competence, funding and political will in Washington were also lacking.
"I do not think fundamentally this is an organizational issue," Andrews said. "You need people in there who have both experience and the confidence of the president, who are able to fight and articulate what FEMA's mission and role is, and who understand how emergency management works."
The agency's troubles are no secret. The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes careers in federal government, ranked FEMA last of 28 agencies studied in 2003.
In its list of best places to work in the government, a 2004 survey by the American Federation of Government Employees found that of 84 career FEMA professionals who responded, only 10 people ranked agency leaders excellent or good.
An additional 28 said the leadership was fair and 33 called it poor.
More than 50 said they would move to another agency if they could remain at the same pay grade, and 67 ranked the agency as poorer since its merger into the Department of Homeland Security.Friday, September 09, 2005
YEAH, BUT HOW READY ARE YOU REALLY
California Earthquake Could Be the Next Katrina
Los Angeles Times - U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones remembers attending an emergency training session in August 2001 with the Federal Emergency Management Agency that discussed the three most likely catastrophes to strike the United States.
First on the list was a terrorist attack in New York. Second was a super-strength hurricane hitting New Orleans. Third was a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault.
Now that the first two have come to pass, she and other earthquake experts are using the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to reassess how California would handle a major temblor.
Jones, scientist-in-charge for the geological survey's Southern California Earthquake Hazards Team, and other experts generally agree that California has come a long way in the last two decades in seismic safety.
In Los Angeles, all but one of 8,700 unreinforced masonry buildings — considered the most likely to collapse in a major quake — have been retrofitted or demolished. The state spent billions after the 1994 Northridge quake to retrofit more than 2,100 freeway overpasses, reporting this week that only a handful remain unreinforced.
Despite these improvements, however, officials believe that a major temblor could cause the level of destruction and disruption seen over the last week on the Gulf Coast.
More than 900 hospital buildings that state officials have identified as needing either retrofitting or total replacement have yet to receive them, and the state recently agreed to five-year extensions to hospitals that can't meet the 2008 deadline to make the fixes. More than 7,000 school buildings across the state would also be vulnerable during a huge temblor, a state study found, though there is no firm timetable for upgrading the structures.
And four Los Angeles Police Department facilities — including the Parker Center headquarters in downtown — worry officials, because they were built to primitive earthquake standards and might not survive a major temblor. Only two of the LAPD's 19 stations meet the most rigorous quake-safe rules.
"We could be dealing with infrastructure issues a lot like New Orleans," Jones said. "Our natural gas passes through the Cajon Pass…. Water — three pipelines — cross the San Andreas fault in an area that is expected to go in an earthquake." Railway lines are also vulnerable, she said.
A catastrophic temblor at the right spot along the San Andreas could significantly reduce energy and water supplies — at least temporarily, she and others said. Researchers at the Southern California Earthquake Center said there is an 80% to 90% chance that a temblor of 7.0 or greater magnitude will strike Southern California before 2024.
"We aren't anywhere close to where I wish we were" in terms of seismic safety, Jones said.
Seismologists are particularly concerned about a type of vulnerable building that has received far less attention than unreinforced masonry.
There are about 40,000 structures in California made from "non-ductile reinforced concrete," a rigid substance susceptible to cracking. This was a common construction ingredient for office buildings in the 1950s and '60s, before the state instituted stricter standards. Few such structures have been seismically retrofitted, officials said.
Seismic safety advocates have also recently lost some major battles in Sacramento. The state rejected a proposal from the Seismic Safety Commission in the wake of the 2003 San Simeon earthquake to force owners of unreinforced masonry buildings to post warning signs. In that quake, two women died when the roof slid off of a two-story Paso Robles brick building where they worked.
Last week, the Legislature sent to the governor's desk a bill that encourages local governments to develop retrofitting programs for "soft story" wood-frame apartment buildings.
There are an estimated 70,000 such structures in the state, and experts worry that they could sustain major quake damage, because they often have tuck-under parking and lack solid walls at their bases.
The danger of this kind of construction was illustrated in the 1994 collapse of the Northridge Meadows apartment complex, in which 16 residents were killed.
There are other potential safety gaps as well.
Although Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena and several other cities have reinforced almost all their masonry buildings, about a third of such structures across the state remain unprotected, said Frank Turner, an engineer with the Seismic Safety Commission.
A state study published last year on hazard reduction paints a sobering picture of California's earthquake danger. About 62% of the population lives in a zone of high earthquake danger, including 100% of the population of Ventura County, 99% of Los Angeles County and 92% of Riverside County.
Since 1971, there have been at least 13 earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater in the state, and research conducted after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in the Bay Area found a 62% probability that at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or more would strike the Bay Area before 2032.
"We're pretty confident we have some of the best buildings in the world here, but … there are always going to be losses, because these are extraordinary events," Turner said.
Still, Southern California's geography could help prevent a catastrophe on the scale of that in New Orleans.
Because the Los Angeles region is so much larger than the Louisiana city, it is difficult to conceive of a disaster — "short of an A-bomb" — that would blanket the whole city, let alone the whole county, in ruin, said Lee Sapaden, a spokesman for Los Angeles County's Office of Emergency Management.
Earthquakes tend to do the most damage closest to the epicenters. The 1994 Northridge quake, for example, damaged a large swath of the San Fernando Valley as well as parts of Hollywood and the Westside. But areas farther to the east and south, such as Long Beach and Orange County, saw little damage.
A large quake in the Valley would probably still allow emergency supplies and rescuers to reach the area from other locations such as the San Gabriel Valley and South Bay, Sapaden said.
Emergency crews would have better mobility than those in New Orleans, he added, because even if freeways were wrecked, aid would probably be able to get through the vast majority of areas on surface streets. "Here in Southern California, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and Santa Barbara counties would help us out, just like we would help them," he said.
One of the biggest concerns of seismic safety officials is the fate of hospitals.
The 1971 Sylmar earthquake pushed Olive View Medical Center a foot off its foundation, causing the first floor to collapse, killing three patients and a hospital worker. The 1994 Northridge quake knocked 23 hospitals temporarily out of service.
After that quake, the Legislature passed a law requiring that hospitals retrofit buildings to withstand a major temblor or replace them with new ones. About 78% of hospitals have at least one building deemed at risk, said Jan Emerson, spokeswoman for the California Hospital Assn.
But hospitals, many of which are fighting budget problems, have balked at the price tag — estimated at $24 billion for 2002-2030 — and in many cases have successfully pushed Sacramento to delay the retrofitting deadline. The state has already granted about 200 requests for extensions to make the necessary repairs by 2013, according to a state document.
Safety officials said more work is also needed at schools.
A 2002 state study found that more than 7,500 school buildings across California are expected to "perform poorly" in a major temblor.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has completed seismic upgrades to nearly 2,000 buildings, spending $222 million on the effort, according to Richard Luke, director of design for the district.
But the district has not finished upgrades on 600 portable buildings and will look at an additional 239 buildings identified by the Division of State Architect as possibly performing poorly during a major quake.
Jones of the geological survey and Turner of the Seismic Safety Commission believe that one worst-case scenario would involve a massive temblor on the San Andreas fault around where major utility lines run, possibly compromising water and power supplies.
"We should not be at all surprised if something similar to Hurricane Katrina mirrors itself in California," Turner said. "There have been lots of articles written about the failure of levees in the [Sacramento-San Joaquin] Delta, the loss of drinking water in California. This is just the tip of the iceberg."
About 60% of Southern California's water is imported from outside the region in three major aqueducts that cross the San Andreas fault, making them particularly vulnerable to major earthquake damage.
One branch of the 444-mile California Aqueduct, which carries water from the delta, virtually sits on top of the fault for a few miles near Palmdale. A second aqueduct from the Colorado River crosses the fault near Beaumont. And the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which transports snowmelt from the eastern Sierra, runs across the San Andreas in a mountain tunnel between Lancaster and Santa Clarita.
Southern California water managers say they've made progress in recent years building local reserves they could turn to if they lost water from one or more of the transport systems.
With such efforts, "we feel even more confident we are able to provide sufficient water to sustain us during an earthquake," said Debra Man, chief operating officer of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the region's main water wholesaler.
Jim McDaniels, chief operating officer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's water system, said that if disaster struck, the DWP could double its groundwater pumping within the basin and draw from its four big local reservoirs.
Major gas lines also come into Southern California over the San Andreas at several points, including at Indio, Palmdale, the Cajon Pass and the Tejon Ranch. Still, officials at the Southern California Gas Co. expressed confidence that the system could withstand a strong earthquake, noting they have been upgrading the pipeline for years.
Another open question is whether the major quake would cause damage to fire stations, police headquarters and facilities of other emergency agencies, possibly slowing their response. A state study found that many of the 1,300 emergency operations buildings were constructed before strict quake building standards were enacted in 1986, and that only a portion of those had been retrofitted.
At the LAPD, the only four facilities to meet the most recent and rigorous "essential building" standards are the department's newest: the West Valley and Mission police stations and two 911 dispatch centers.
Yvette Sanchez-Owens, head of the department's facilities management office, said she is most concerned about three stations built in the 1960s: Rampart, Hollenbeck and Harbor. Police officers at the Harbor station in San Pedro have been relocated to trailers while a new station is built; officers could be moved out of the Hollenbeck station in Boyle Heights sometime this fall as preparation for construction of a new station begins.
As for Parker Center, it already sustained significant damage during the Northridge earthquake. It is also scheduled to be replaced, but not for several years.
"It could be in real trouble," Sanchez-Owens said. "It's definitely not built up to standard."
Times staff writer Bettina Boxall contributed to this report.Thursday, September 08, 2005
STUPID GREEDY LEADERS, STUPID GREEDY POLICIES, STUPID GREEDY ACTIONS
NO GAS, NO FOOD, NO LODGING Hurricane Victims Get a Taste of Life in Occupied Iraq
By Ted Rall Thu Sep 8,10:40 AM ET
SAN FRANCISCO--Taps run dry. Food rots when the power goes out. Toilets overflow with waste. Looters strip homes, businesses and public buildings. Armed bandits run wild in the streets. Fires rage out of control. Terrified policemen abandon their posts. Flies buzz over bloated corpses. People wave signs at passing helicopters. "Please help us," they read.
"Help is on the way," their head of state assures them. But the government sends soldiers instead of relief workers. The troops treat the victims, who are taxpayers and citizens, as if they were prisoners. Aiming weapons at the sick and dying, they herd thousands into sports arenas where they receive neither water, nor food, nor safe harbor. While indifferent soldiers man checkpoints to prevent the detainees from leaving, babies starve, the elderly die from lack of medicine and children are raped and murdered. They set up checkpoints to prevent anyone from leaving.
Reuters reports from inside a convention-center-cum-refugee camp:
"Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and murdering children. She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the convention center. 'She was raped for four hours until she was dead,' Joseph said through tears. 'Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night.'"
The horror of the aftermath is so extreme that it nearly erases the memory of the initial disaster.
Water, food, housing, electricity: in the modern era, society collapses without them. However, as I found while reporting on the invasion of Afghanistan, they are not equally essential.
I was surprised to discover that I hardly missed food. On the other hand, thirst turns people mean within hours. Water, orange cola and a rusty case of mid-'90s Qatari Pepsi got me through for over a week. The lack of electricity, conversely, proved inconvenient in unexpected ways. Laptops and even satellite phones--essential technology whether writing from a war zone or organizing rescue operations in a flooded American city--rely on rechargeable batteries. Generators are expensive and cumbersome, and they run on gas. But without electricity you can't pump out the fuel.
Shelter took a back seat to hygiene. Absent rain (a safe bet in Afghanistan), I would have picked a hot shower over housing. That had to go double for the newly homeless who have been wading through filthy floodwaters in New Orleans. Whether for drinking or bathing, clean water comes first.
American politicians and bureaucrats neither know life without the basics nor talk to those who do, which is why they failed to respond coherently to the humanitarian crisis caused by Hurricane Katrina. Airlifting bottled water ought to have been FEMA's first priority. Refugee centers ought to have featured rows of portable showers. It is inexcusable that hospitals weren't outfitted with backup generators and fuel reserves to run them. Police, firefighters and other first-responders ought to be equipped with satellite phones powered by disposable batteries.
Of course, the government's biggest mistake was its decision to privatize the evacuation. Those who owned cars fled. 100,000 poor people, who ride New Orleans' streetcar system, were left behind to die. Greyhound's nearly 2,000 buses could have gotten them all out--but commandeering private property is the act of a civilized nation, not the leaner, meaner, tough-break United States. Similarly, storeowners should have distributed water and other emergency supplies under a FEMA guarantee of reimbursement.
It only took a few days for New Orleans to descend into anarchy, for the survivors of Katrina to lose hope, for disgusted Americans to conclude that their leaders are too staggeringly stupid, incompetent and uncaring to protect them from bad weather, much less a terrorist attack. Now think about this: the citizens of cities under U.S. occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have been suffering under similar conditions, exacerbated by an identical lack of planning by the same U.S. officials, for nearly 900 days. New Orleans is Baghdad plus water minus two and a half years.
Still wondering why they hate us?Thursday, September 08, 2005
THE WAR AGAINST TERROR (T.W.A.T.) LOOKS PRETTY TERRIFYING FROM HERE
An iron map of the U.S. shows the toll of dead and wounded American military personnel in Iraq as of August 16, 2005, when this photo was taken, near the ranch owned by President George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas. The U.S. 'war on terror' is saving fewer lives than just spending the money on disease prevention and research, and has probably caused deaths by taking money away from basic services, an expert said on Thursday. (Jason Reed/Reuters)
"War on terror" saves few lives: expert
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. "war on terror" is saving fewer lives than just spending the money on disease prevention and research, and has probably caused deaths by taking money away from basic services, an expert said on Thursday.
The accusation is not new, but Dr. Erica Frank of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta said she has calculated the cost, in terms of lives, of the Bush administration's terror policies.
"The most recent effects of these diversions of funding have been seen in the unfolding tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the surrounding area," Frank wrote in a commentary published in the British Medical Journal.
"Governments must protect their citizens, and anticipating these possible future threats is appropriate and could prove essential to Americans' health."
Frank warned there is a threat that because of the U.S. government's policy, enormous numbers of Americans will die unnecessarily.
On September 11, 2001, 3,400 people died because of the four intentional plane crashes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. But 5,200 other Americans died that same day from common diseases, according to Frank.
To estimate how many Americans died of routine causes on September 11, Frank used national estimates of mortality from various causes.
"Predictable tragedies happen every day. We know strategies to reduce deaths from tobacco, alcohol, poor diet, unintentional injuries, and other predictable causes. And we know that millions of people will die unless we protect the population against these routine causes of death," she wrote.
Yet more money is spent to protect against deaths that are not likely to happen.
"For example, in September 2002, New York was awarded $1.3 million to reduce heart disease, the leading killer of New Yorkers, while $34 million was awarded for bioterrorism preparedness in the state," Frank added.
Proponents have argued that bioterror preparedness would build up the public health structure in general.
"If this is an improvement it sure is frightening to think what this might have looked like before," Frank said in a telephone interview.
She cited numerous reports showing the federal government cut spending to reinforce the levees built to protect New Orleans from the flood that has devastated the city.
"Since the point of investing in counterterror is to protect American lives, the question is a dollar better spent in Iraq or is it better spent here?" she asked.Thursday, September 08, 2005
MAH HERO GEORGE
Thursday, September 08, 2005
BOOOOOO!! HISSSSSSS!!!
Bush suffers in polls post-Katrina
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's image suffered in public opinion polls taken after Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, with some finding growing doubts about his leadership and the country's direction.
After a week of criticism for a slow response to the devastation caused by Katrina, polls released on Thursday registered drops in Bush's approval ratings and in confidence in his leadership.
A Pew Research Center poll found 67 percent of Americans believed Bush could have done more to speed up relief efforts, and just 28 percent believed he did all he could. His approval rating slipped to 40 percent, down four points since July to the lowest point Pew has recorded.
The Pew poll also found a shift in public priorities after Katrina caused a jump in gasoline prices last week, with a majority saying for the first time since the September 11, 2001, attacks that it was more important for Bush to focus on domestic policy than the war on terrorism.
"Americans are depressed, angry and very worried about the economic consequences of the disaster," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew poll.
A WEEK OF CRITICISM
The new polls indicated a week of criticism and political finger-pointing over who is to blame for the disastrous response to Katrina could have taken a toll on the White House.
A CBS poll taken September 6-7 found 38 percent approved of Bush's handling of the storm's aftermath, while 58 percent disapproved. That was a dramatic shift from immediately after the storm last week, when 54 percent approved and 12 percent disapproved.
The CBS poll also found confidence in Bush during a crisis had fallen and only 48 percent now view him as a strong leader -- the lowest number ever for Bush in the poll. A year ago 64 percent of voters saw Bush as a strong leader.
Bush's approval rating fell to 41 percent in a new Zogby poll, with only 36 percent giving him a passing grade on his handling of the response to the storm.
The Zogby poll also found broad pessimism among a majority of Americans after the storm, with 53 percent saying the country is headed in the wrong direction and 42 percent saying it is on the right track.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken on September 5-6 found 42 percent believed Bush did a "bad" or "terrible" job handling the storm and subsequent flooding, while 35 percent thought he performed "great" or "good."
A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken September 2 offered more mixed results, with 46 percent approving of Bush's performance and 47 percent disapproving.
There was plenty of blame to go around for the slow response to Katrina, with local and state governments also taking a hit.
The Gallup poll found 13 percent blamed Bush for the problems in New Orleans, while 18 percent blamed federal agencies, 25 percent blamed state and local officials and 38 percent said no one was to blame.
In the Pew poll, 58 percent thought the federal government had done only a fair or poor job after the storm, but 51 percent also thought state and local governments in Louisiana and Mississippi had done just a fair or poor job.Thursday, September 08, 2005
STUFF THEY DON'T SHOW IN THE US MEDIA
An alligator in the church: The "Swamp Critters" are an additional danger.
Stern Magazine, GermanyThursday, September 08, 2005
ULTIMATLY, THE PRESIDENT IS IN CHARGE
Many Cooks Stir the Pot in White House Recovery Effort
WASHINGTON, Associated Press (Sept. 8) - There are an awful lot of chiefs around the White House these days when it comes to Hurricane Katrina.
There's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose portfolio has swelled to give him not only command of the massive nuts-and-bolts response operation, but also the job of the president's primary daily briefer and oversight of a White House task force set up to coordinate federal agencies' hurricane activities.
There's Andy Card, who as White House chief of staff is the supervisory point person for all things Katrina, even as domestic policy adviser Claude Allen runs the day-to-day doings and policy deliberations of the task force.
Then there's Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Bush dropped into the mix Tuesday when he announced he was sending his No. 2 to the region to ride herd on any government red tape that might be getting in the way of meeting storm victims' still-urgent needs.
At the same time, the White House hasn't ruled out appointing a high-profile outside figure, such as a retired military officer, to a czar-like job overseeing all federal recovery efforts.
There's nothing out of the ordinary about a White House having several people overseeing different portions of such an enormous effort -- in which almost the entire half-million population of New Orleans has been relocated elsewhere, possibly for months or longer, and other Gulf Coast states look as though they were sent through a shredder.
But in this case, with the president under fire for a poor early reaction to the storm, the large cast of sometimes-changing aides being thrown at the response is contributing to a perception that the president has not taken complete control of the situation himself, said Paul Light, a professor of organizational studies at New York University.
"It's just reinforcing this image that the federal government doesn't know who's on first," he said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said there is no need for confusion about who is running things.
"This is a massive catastrophe and it requires a massive response with all hands on deck," he said. "There are clear lines of authority and responsibility. ... Ultimately the president is in charge."
As Katrina moved toward and slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown was the official most often giving Bush storm updates. Now, that person is Brown's boss - Chertoff, the hard-charging ex-prosecutor who is now one of the first people Bush hears from since a morning hurricane briefing became a fixture on his daily schedule.
On Wednesday, amid escalating calls for Brown to be fired, the White House said Bush retains confidence in him. But though Brown is still in the Gulf Coast region directing the on-the-ground response and giving updates to the press, there is no question his public presence has faded.
On Sunday, Chertoff was dispatched by the administration to be its face on all five television news shows, after Brown's earlier damage-control efforts met with little success.
And while Brown was by Bush's side as he first visited the region last Friday, he remained behind the scenes during the president's second Gulf Coast trip on Monday. It was Chertoff who strode to Bush's helicopter in front of the cameras in Baton Rouge, La.
Deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, an amiable former volunteer firefighter who recently added intelligence, defense and homeland security matters to his issue list and often travels with Bush, assumed a prominent role from the beginning. In Crawford, Texas, with the president when the storm was bearing down on the region, Hagin was the top White House representative in communication with federal, state and local officials in the region when Bush didn't participate personally.
Now, Card - who returned to Washington from vacation in Maine last Wednesday, the same day as Bush - has taken over the top administrative duties. Other regular hurricane meeting participants are White House counselor Dan Bartlett, charged with shaping the president's message and image, and the president's homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend.
As for the White House task force, it brings the heads of 12 of the 15 Cabinet agencies so far, plus the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House budget office, to the same table to try to maximize efficiency.
But in a sign of the many challenges before the administration - such as finding long-term housing for storm evacuees, educating their children, getting government benefits to far-flung recipients, draining New Orleans and rebuilding decimated towns - that task force has already spawned nine working groups.
AP-ES-09-08-05 0209EDTThursday, September 08, 2005
GWB IS PISSING OFF HIS NEOCON HANDLERS
(note: Bill Kristol is one of the big dawgs of the neocon powerhouse. He's one of the megalomaniacal founders of the PNAC manifest destiny madness, and the author of much of the neocon agenda propaganda. He's also a big fat GW puppetmaster. Read all about Billy in the Wikipedia)
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?
Washington (By William Kristol, The Daily Standard) - WITH JOHN ROBERTS sailing toward confirmation last week, President Bush had the O'Connor seat "won." The Court was set to move one click to the right (so to speak). Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist died. The president chose to move Roberts over to fill the Rehnquist slot--thereby re-opening the vacancy created by Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement.
One understands the attraction of Roberts as chief. But with this action, in one fell swoop, the president deprived himself and his supporters of the easiest argument for his next nominee: that surely a reelected conservative president is entitled to replace a conservative justice--Rehnquist--with another conservative.
So now everything rides on Bush's nerve. Is he willing to fill the O'Connor seat with a conservative, and can he then make an effective case for that nominee to the Senate and the country? Bush will have three huge advantages in such an effort--a 55-seat GOP Senate majority, popular support for a more restrained and conservative Court, and a plethora of well-qualified conservative candidates (consider Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell, Edith Jones, Priscilla Owen, Maura Corrigan, and Miguel Estrada, for starters). And there are in fact attractive arguments to be made for each of these candidates that go beyond the generic ones and that would make prospects for confirmation good.
So there is no good reason for Bush to flinch. But he could. He may be rattled by the criticism for mishandling hurricane Katrina, and he may think it would be better to avoid too big a fight over the Court. He's always wanted to nominate his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales--he likes him, is loyal to him, and would appreciate the symbolism of putting the first Hispanic on the court. So he might be sorely tempted to do so now.
Would any of his aides have the nerve to tell him that as Supreme Court jurists go, Gonzales would be mediocre--and not a solid bet to move the court in a constitutionalist direction? Would any of them have the nerve to explain to the president that a Gonzales nomination would utterly demoralize many of his supporters, who are sticking with him and his party, through troubles in
Iraq and screw-ups with Katrina, precisely because they want a few important things out of a Bush presidency--and one of these is a more conservative court? Would any of them tell the president that risking a core item in the conservative agenda for the sake of either friendship, diversity, or short-term political spin, would be substantively wrong, and politically disastrous?
Maybe. And maybe Bush doesn't need all these reminders.
But even astute presidents occasionally make big mistakes. And one worrisome straw in the wind is the comment by Bush loyalist John Cornyn (R-Tex.) in today's Washington Post, who, according to the Post, thinks the nominee will likely be "a woman or a minority." Cornyn offered what the Post described as "a vigorous defense of Gonzales." "He would be a very good nominee and one that I would be happy to support," Cornyn said. "I've read about these concerns from some conservatives, and I really wonder where they are getting some of these strange ideas."
Yikes. One hopes Cornyn is just being polite to Gonzales and Bush. Or has he been asked to lay the groundwork for a Gonzales nomination? Did Cornyn talk with Karl Rove yesterday, between the Roberts announcement and his interview with the Post? If so, we conservative constitutionalists are in real trouble. More important, so is Bush.
William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard.Thursday, September 08, 2005
MEET THE FUCKERS
Exposed by Katrina, FEMA's flaws were years in making
When Hurricane Katrina submerged a city, ravaged three states and disrupted hundreds of thousands of lives, it also laid bare huge gaps in the nation's ability to respond to disasters. None is more jaw-dropping than the ineptitude shown by the federal agency created to respond to natural disasters.
Many failures of FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency - have been reported in recent days: People stranded for days on New Orleans' rooftops without food or water. Patients dying for lack of medical supplies. The agency couldn't even get supplies to thousands marooned at the Morial Convention Center - though reporters and even singer Harry Connick Jr. managed to reach the scene.
But a deeper review of the agency's history, the records of its top managers and internal memoranda reveal far deeper problems than a momentary burst of poor decisions. Over the past four years, the Bush administration has replaced competent leaders with people long on political connections but short on disaster management expertise. At the same time, the war on terrorism has drained the agency's resources and reduced its effectiveness.
Katrina would have been devastating regardless, but those actions turned FEMA into something akin to New Orleans' famous levees - a structure sure to fail when a big disaster struck.
Since Katrina, blame for FEMA's blundering has zeroed in on the agency's director, Michael Brown. His failure should not have been a surprise. He had almost no experience in disaster work before he was appointed in 2003 by President Bush, and confirmed by the Senate, to lead the agency. Before joining FEMA as its counsel in 2001, Brown, a friend of the FEMA director who hired him, worked for nine years as a commissioner at an Arabian horse association.
1979: President Carter creates the Federal Emergency Management Agency by executive order out of 16 major agencies. FEMA's initial mission is centered on natural disasters and civil defense.
1992: Hurricane Andrew ravages Florida and Louisiana. Criticism of the agency hurts President George H.W. Bush's re-election efforts.
1993-94: President Clinton appoints James Lee Witt as the first career specialist in disasters to head FEMA. With the Cold War over, Witt reorganizes the agency to focus on natural disasters. FEMA's response to the Mississippi River flooding and the earthquake in Northridge, Calif., wins praise.
2001: Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's 2000 campaign chairman, is made FEMA director. The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon prompt FEMA to focus its efforts on terrorism as well as natural disasters.
2003: FEMA is rolled into the new Department of
Homeland Security. Michael Brown, Allbaugh's former assistant and college friend, ascends to the top job.
2005: Hurricane Katrina slams the Gulf Coast; FEMA's response is criticized.
But that's only the tip of FEMA's management problems. Brown's top deputy, Patrick Rhode, is equally inexperienced, according to his résumé. Rhode worked for Bush's 2000 campaign and for the White House doing advance operations. Another senior FEMA manager, Daniel Craig, had been a lobbyist for electric cooperatives.
In addition, FEMA has seen an exodus of experienced officials over the past four years. By the time Katrina struck, three senior positions were either vacant or filled on an "acting" basis, including the director running Katrina-ravaged Mississippi and Alabama.
The reasons for most of the departures are unclear. But since 2003, FEMA has been downgraded - swallowed up by the new Homeland Security Department, created to protect the nation from terrorism. The shift is logical. Responding to a major terrorist attack has a lot in common with responding to a natural disaster. But instead of building on the existing disaster response system, terrorism became a new and largely separate focus.
According to a Government Accountability Office report, more than 75% of the agency's preparedness grants next year are targeted to state and local readiness for terrorism - a mismatch to reality. Leaders of the National Emergency Management Association feared the impending result. Five of the group's leaders came to Washington just days before Katrina struck to warn Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that the shift, including more proposed erosions of FEMA's role, was weakening their readiness for disasters. The warning was prophetic.
James Lee Witt, the Clinton-era FEMA director who earned rare bipartisan praise for lifting the agency from scandal-prone backwater to a professional operation, says "it's like a stake has been driven through the heart of emergency management."
That is where FEMA stood as Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29 along the Gulf Coast. Hours later, and more than a day after he was warned of the huge storm, Brown sent a memorandum to his boss asking for 1,000 volunteers to support rescuers. Brown said the volunteers would be sent for training within 48 hours. Part of their mission? "Convey a positive image of disaster operations."
What has FEMA been doing with its budget, if not gauging how many people it would need to react quickly to a huge disaster, identifying their skills and training them to be ready?
The path toward improvement is clear. It seems obvious that the FEMA leadership needs to be replaced with professionals. But sacrificial firings would not excuse the decisions that put them there, nor would they entirely fix the problem.
What's needed is a speedy and impartial investigation of what went wrong with a focus on finding the best way to address the dual threats of terrorism and natural disaster.
Bush declared Tuesday that he would lead an internal review. That is neither practical, given the demands on a president, nor would it likely be regarded as credible.
What about Congress? On Wednesday, Republican congressional leaders said the House and Senate will jointly investigate the disaster response at all levels. Oversight is Congress' job, but in the current climate, it's likely to have a hard time finding truth as Democrats try blame Bush while Republicans defend him. Congress also contributed to the problems by ignoring pleas for money to refurbish levees and natural barriers.
A better option might be an independent panel like the 9/11 Commission, or perhaps even the 9/11 Commission itself, given the terrorism connection.
The government got it wrong after 9/11. It can't afford another miss.Thursday, September 08, 2005
HARSH WINTER COME SOON, ANTS WILL SUFFER BUT GRASSHOPPERS SUFFER MORE
Economy faces tough winter: Bodman
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy will face a tough winter due to high energy prices caused partly by a disruption in oil and natural gas supplies from Hurricane Katrina, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman (seen pictured here on right) warned on Thursday.
"There is no doubt that this is going to be a very tough winter season for the American economy (and) for American homeowners," Bodman said in an interview on the "Fox & Friends" television news program.
The Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday Americans who warm their homes with natural gas could see their fuel costs jump by as much as 71 percent this winter in some parts of the country.
Residential heating bills for heating oil will increase by 31 percent, and electricity users will see their costs rise by 17 percent, the Energy Department's analytical arm said in its latest monthly energy forecast.
Katrina slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi 10 days ago with 140 mph winds and flooding. The storm initially halted most Gulf of Mexico crude oil and natural gas production and shut nearly a dozen refineries.
Separately, Bodman said he expected the sharp drop in crude oil prices from last week's record of $70.85 a barrel to be passed on to consumers in the form of lower gasoline costs.
"We would expect that over time that would be reflected at the pump," Bodman said.
On Thursday, oil futures initially fell more than $1.00 to $63.10 a barrel after the EIA reported that the U.S. gasoline stockpile was not drained as much as expected after Hurricane Katrina. Crude prices have dropped by about 9 percent since last week, when the United States and other industrialized nations began to tap emergency reserves.
The national retail price for regular unleaded gasoline jumped 46 cents over the past week to hit a record high of $3.07 a gallon on Tuesday, according to the EIA.
Pump costs have since started falling after two major pipelines that ship gasoline returned to full capacity and many of the refineries shut by the hurricane are back online.
Still, the White House said Thursday that gasoline prices remain too high.
"Some of those prices have come down a little bit since last week, but they're still too high and that's why we took immediate action to address some of these supply issues," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "We view this as a temporary disruption," he said.
The Bush administration has loaned some 12.6 million barrels of crude from the nation's emergency oil stockpile to six refiners, including Exxon Mobil.
The Energy Department is also accepting bids for 30 million barrels of crude oil from energy companies that want to buy oil directly from the government.
President George W. Bush ordered the sale from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of a massive 60 million barrel release of crude and gasoline from the United States and other member nations of the International Energy Agency.
Even though the major Colonial and Plantation pipelines that supply the East Coast with gasoline are running again, it will still be difficult to provide them with gasoline if major oil refineries that make the motor fuel aren't operating, the EIA said.
"Supplying the pipelines with products may become an issue as long as some of the refineries that supply product into these pipelines remain shut down or running at reduced rates," the agency said in its latest assessment on the lingering effects of Katrina on the U.S. energy sector.Thursday, September 08, 2005
YOUR EFFICIENT GUMMINT AT WOIK
Sept. 11 Recovery Loans Loosely Managed
Associated Press - The government's $5 billion effort to help small businesses recover from the Sept. 11 attacks was so loosely managed that it gave low-interest loans to companies that didn't need terrorism relief — or even know they were getting it, The Associated Press has found.
And while some at New York's Ground Zero couldn't get assistance they desperately sought, companies far removed from the devastation — a South Dakota country radio station, a Virgin Islands perfume shop, a Utah dog boutique and more than 100 Dunkin' Donuts and Subway sandwich shops — had no problem winning the government-guaranteed loans.
Georgia business owners, and thousands of others around the nation, the owner was able to secure a government-backed loan through a federal program for small businesses. (AP Photo/Ric Feld)
Dentists and chiropractors in numerous cities, as well as an Oregon winery that sold trendy pinot noir to New York City restaurants also got assistance.
"That's scary. Nine-11 had nothing to do with this," said James Munsey, a Virginia entrepreneur who described himself as "beyond shocked" to learn his nearly $1 million loan to buy a special events company in Richmond was drawn from the Sept. 11 program.
"It would have been inappropriate for me to take this kind of loan," he said, noting that the company he bought suffered no ill effects from Sept. 11.
Arvind "Andy" Patel, 50, said he used his $350,000 loan in fall 2002 to remodel his Dunkin' Donuts shop in western New York state and never knew it was drawn through the Sept. 11 program.
"Not at all," Patel answered, when asked whether his business had been hurt by the attacks.
Government officials said they believe banks assigned some loans to the terror relief program without telling borrowers. Neither the government nor its participating banks said they could provide figures on how many businesses got loans that way.
But AP's nationwide investigation located businesses in dozens of states who said they did not know their loans were drawn from the Sept. 11 programs, suggesting at least hundreds of millions of dollars went to unwitting recipients.
The Small Business Administration, which administered the two programs that doled out Sept. 11 recovery loans, said it first learned of the problems through AP's review and was weighing whether an investigation was needed. But officials also acknowledged they intended to spread the post-Sept. 11 aid broadly because so many unexpected industries were hurt.
"We started seeing business (needing help) in areas you wouldn't think of — tourism, crop dusting, trade and transportation. ... So there were a lot of examples you wouldn't think of, at first blush," SBA Administrator Hector Barreto told AP.
In all, the government provided, approved or guaranteed nearly $4.9 billion in loans, and took credit for saving 20,000 jobs. That would put the average cost of saving a job at about a quarter million dollars each.
Of the 19,000 loans approved by the two programs, fewer than 11 percent went to companies in New York City and Washington, according to an AP computer analysis of loan records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
"I had nothing here," said Shirla Yam, who runs a clothing store in the former shadows of the twin towers that got a $20,000 grant from a local advocacy group but no federal aid after Sept. 11. "I don't know if I'll be here next month."
Under one of the programs, SBA lent money directly to companies that provided detailed statements on how they were hurt. The other program provided incentives — and guaranteed loans from default — so banks could lend money to companies they determined were hurt by the post-Sept. 11 economic downturn.
Most loans were well below market rates — as low as 4 percent, documents show.
SBA officials acknowledged the second program, the Supplementary Terrorism Activity Relief (STAR), left banks on an honor system to determine worthy loan recipients.
"One lender could have been really strict and specific about the borrower providing the documentation to prove that they were affected by the Sept. 11 attacks, and another banker may not have, or may have had ulterior motives for approving loans," said SBA spokeswoman Carol Chastang.
SBA documents obtained by AP show banks had a strong incentive to approve as many loans as possible from the terror program. The banks profited from the interest while incurring little risk because the government guaranteed 75 percent to 85 percent of each loan.
And the annual fee the lenders paid to SBA to get the government guarantee was slashed from 0.5 percent to 0.25 percent — meaning lenders saved an additional $5,000 a year for every $2 million they loaned under STAR.
"There was definitely an advantage to the lender to get that reduced fee," said Christopher Chavez, an SBA official in Colorado. He said he suspects lenders might not always have talked to businesses about damage from Sept. 11 before moving loans into STAR.
While SBA officials expressed surprise at AP's findings, banking officials said the agency encouraged the industry to use the post-Sept. 11 programs liberally, especially when its normal guaranteed lending program was hit by steep budget cuts in 2002.
"They had personnel at our conference stand up and say if you cannot find a reason to move the loan over to the STAR program, contact us and we'll help you find a reason to move it over," recalled Tony Wilkinson, president of the National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders.
Major lenders like Wachovia and Wells Fargo declined to say how many loans they shifted into the terror relief program, saying only that they followed the law.
Wells Fargo, the nation's second largest SBA lender, said the STAR program enabled lenders "to provide funds to new and mature businesses impacted by 9/11" and the bank "continues to strictly adhere to SBA operational standards for all SBA loan originations."
Many loans went to local outlets of some of America's most famous and lucrative companies. For instance, 55 Dunkin' Donuts shops across the country, 14 Quiznos sandwich shops and 52 Subway sandwich shops got loans. Fourteen Dairy Queens — part of the ice cream franchise partly owned by Wall Street billionaire
Warren Buffett — won more than $5 million in loans.
"I just applied for the loan at the bank. I had no idea where the funds came from," said Tom Mayl, who got two SBA Sept. 11 loans totaling more than $800,000 to open a Subway shop in suburban Dayton, Ohio, and a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Sidney, Ohio.
"It doesn't seem right, just on the surface, but I really don't know the details," Mayl said.
Don Robinson said he too didn't need or ask for terrorism relief when he got a $765,000 government-backed loan in 2003 — drawn without his knowledge from the Sept. 11 program — to start a motorcycle shop in Brigham City, Utah.
"Actually, the motorcycle industry grew after 9/11," Robinson said. "People just took their money out of the stock market to buy toys."
Dentists and chiropractors also were frequent, but unwitting, beneficiaries. "They weren't putting their health second to anything else," chiropractor Colby Shores said of his patients in the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y. He was unaware his $87,000 loan with a 4 percent interest rate came from the terror relief program.
The loan patterns uncovered by AP left some seething in the neighborhoods directly scarred by Sept. 11.
"You have to take it back and give it to us. Even now, I could use it," said Mike Yagudayev, who said the SBA would only provide him $20,000 of a $70,000 loan he requested to rebuild his hair salon flattened by the collapse of World Trade Center towers in New York.
"I said, `You know what, take it back. Twenty thousand is like an insult,'" he recalled.
Thousands of businesses far from the devastation had no trouble getting SBA loans, simply submitting short applications that linked their slow business to the widespread economic fallout caused by Sept. 11. For instance:
_Karl Grimmelmann, general manager of KBFS-AM "Hit Kickin' Country" in Belle Fourche, S.D., borrowed $135,000 from SBA's disaster program after learning about it from a news release. He said his station was forced to pay more money to cover national news and also lost advertisers. "Everybody started holding onto their money, plain and simple," he said.
_Margie Olson, co-owner of the Torii Mor Winery in McMinnville, Ore., said her business needed a $125,000 loan because it couldn't sell high-end pinot noir to Manhattan restaurants that had closed. "Everyone started hitting the heavy stuff," Olson said, laughing.
_Melva Kravitz, co-owner of the Little Dogs Resort & Salon in Salt Lake City that offers boarding and grooming services for small dogs, said people stopped taking vacations and boarding their pets after Sept. 11, requiring her $50,000 loan. "It was awful," she said. "You just couldn't go on."
_Christine Hilty, co-owner of Violettes Boutique on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, said the perfume shop lost 60 percent of its business overnight as tourism stopped. She got a $169,500 loan from SBA. "Would we have closed our doors? It was close," she said. "Everyone was afraid to get on a plane. Tourism was totally halted."
Though the loan programs have ended, the government is inheriting a residual burden. Already, taxpayers have been forced to cover about 600 defaulted disaster loans — some approaching $1 million each — from companies that went bankrupt or closed. More defaults are expected.
Jim Hammersley, who runs the SBA's collection arm, said many applicants asked for too much or too little money to keep their businesses afloat.
"The folks that were dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 didn't have anything that certain to try and gauge whether they needed money or how much they needed," he said.
___Thursday, September 08, 2005
THE BUSHIT NEOCONS WORKING HARD TO BRING ABOUT THE ENDAYS
The Bolton backfire: Weaken UN, imperil Americans
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA., Christian Science Monitor - Why is the Bush administration seemingly hurtling toward confrontation with the rest of the world in the lead-up to the World Summit in New York next week?
Almost the first act taken by Washington's new energetic, sometimes pugnacious, UN envoy John R. Bolton, was the submission of a list of 750 amendments he seeks in the draft of the summit's declaration. That text, which deals with issues as important as nuclear disarmament, human rights, global warming, and counterterrorism, had been painstakingly negotiated by world diplomats over preceding months.
There is still time to reach a friendly accommodation on the contested portions of the text. But many nations - most notably the European states that are the strongest supporters of the present draft - now fear that US intransigence on the proposed revisions may be a serious blow to the heart of the UN.
It's true that the UN also faces a serious issue of mismanagement and corruption in its bureacuracy. That issue must be resolved - whatever it takes. But right now, Washington's deteriorating relationship with the world's other peoples concerns me even more: The compact that underlies the way all nations interact within the UN is truly vital to human survival.
President Bush and his aides surely should work hard to reach agreement with other nations on the issues around the World Summit declaration. It would also be good for Bush and all Americans to reflect on the circumstances of the UN's creation and the many benefits it has brought the US throughout its 60 years.
Back in 1945, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman made decisions marked by broad strategic restraint and great wisdom. Two of these were particularly crucial: first, not to retreat to the isolationism the US had pursued after World War I; and second, to exercise Washington's continued engagement with the world through a new body, based on principles of national sovereignty, national equality, and human solidarity. That body was the UN.
The past 60 years have been very good indeed to the US. The UN and the compact among nations that underlies it have certainly contributed to those benefits.
During the cold war, the UN helped mediate what would otherwise have been an even more precarious situation of hair-trigger nuclear destruction. After the Soviet empire collapsed, the UN helped ease transitions on several continents - as it did earlier in helping manage instabilities that arose when the West European nations' empires splintered. The UN-related economic bodies - the
World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, and
World Trade Organization - have meanwhile buttressed a global market system that has generally been very good to Americans.
So why - at a time when it is increasingly evident that in
Iraq, as in the fight against violent extremism elsewhere, the US needs international cooperation more than ever - should the Bush administration and its man in New York be threatening to cause serious disruption to Washington's relations with the world body?
Mr. Bolton - named by Mr. Bush as a "recess appointment" ambassador to the UN last month, bypassing the wait for a Senate confirmation - startled the representatives of most other nations in New York with his list of amendments to the summit declaration.
On one issue he wants amended - the list of "Millennium Development Goals" that the UN adopted back in 2000 - a key Bolton spokesman got downright ornery, accusing UN officials of "manipulating the truth" when they claimed the US had previously endorsed these goals and now seemed to be backtracking from that earlier commitment. (The UN officials look right on that one.)
The tiff over this key issue in international development efforts epitomizes the deeper discord over whether the US really judges that responsibilities within the world system should be reciprocal and based on the principles of human equality and human solidarity - or not. The UN majority today thinks they should be. Bolton and his boss, the president, apparently disagree with that majority.
Yes, it's true that the UN itself is far from perfect. But at the end of the day, the
United Nations is just that: a confederation of the world's largely independent nation-states. It has very little independent existence of its own, and can only ever be as strong as the commitment it gets from its members.
Under Bush - especially since he made the near-unilateral decision to initiate a war against Iraq in 2003 - the commitment of the world's most powerful nation to the UN and its principles has eroded drastically.
To reduce American support for the foundations of this vital institution any further would be crazy.
A UN that is any further weakened means the increased insecurity of everyone in the world. And, yes, that includes Americans.Thursday, September 08, 2005
THE CLUELESS APPLE DOESN'T FALL FAR FROM THE SELF-CENTERED TREE
Bush family Katrina comments draw scrutiny
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush is not the only member of his prominent political family to be drawing criticism for public utterances about Hurricane Katrina: His mother has raised eyebrows too.
In widely reported comments after visting evacuees at a Texas sports arena, former first lady Barbara Bush on Monday seemed to suggest a silver lining for the "underprivileged" forced from their flooded homes in New Orleans.
"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," she said in a radio interview from the Astrodome in Houston, Texas.
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them," she said.
"I think that the observation is based on someone or some people that were talking to her that were in need of a lot of assistance, people that have gone through a lot of trauma and been through a very difficult and trying time," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday.
"And all of a sudden, they are now getting great help in the state of Texas from some of the shelters," he said.
Her son, the president, has faced criticism for saying on September 1 that no one anticipated that New Orleans' levees would break -- even though various federal and state agencies had warned of that scenario.
In his first tour of the devastated region, Bush also praised Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) chief Michael Brown, saying: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Brown has become a lightning rod for criticism over Washington's sluggish response to Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters to hit the United States, and opposition Democrats have stepped up calls for Bush to fire him.
The president has also come under fire for paying tribute to ravaged New Orleans as a place he used to visit years ago "to enjoy myself -- occasionally too much," an apparent reference to the days before he quit drinking.
In an effort to raise the spirits of the hundreds of thousands who have lost their homes, Bush promised to rebuild devastated areas better than they were before, but at one point focused on the home of a powerful lawmaker.
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch," he said on a tour of the region Friday, drawing nervous laughter.
Some Republicans winced, including one disbelieving congressional aide who told AFP: "Lott? He's focusing on Lott? Surrounded by poor people, he talks about a sitting senator?"
There have also been echoes of the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when Bush urged Americans to go shopping and live their lives as normally as possible.
In some of her first remarks after the hurricane, First Lady Laura Bush told Gulf Coast evacuees: "It's very important to get your children in school. It gives children a sense of normalcy."
The White House later put together a plan to help students and school districts affected by the hurricane.
Barbara Bush had raised eyebrows two days before US troops invaded Iraq, when she told ABC television that she was not interested in media commentators' concerns about the war's potential human toll.
"Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose?" she said. "It's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
Filmmaker Michael Moore used the remark in his fiercely anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11," leading former president George Bush to call him a "slimeball" and defend his wife as "a decent, wonderful person."Wednesday, September 07, 2005
WE DON'T NEED YOUR STINKIN' HELP - WE'RE THE GAWDAM YEW-NITED STATES OF FUCKIN' AM-ER-EECA!
Offers of Aid Immediate, but U.S. Approval Delayed for Days
Washington Post - Offers of foreign aid worth tens of millions of dollars -- including a Swedish water purification system, a German cellular telephone network and two Canadian rescue ships -- have been delayed for days awaiting review by backlogged federal agencies, according to European diplomats and information collected by the State Department.
Since Hurricane Katrina, more than 90 countries and international organizations offered to assist in recovery efforts for the flood-stricken region, but nearly all endeavors remained mired yesterday in bureaucratic entanglements, in most cases, at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In Germany, a massive telecommunication system and two technicians await the green light to fly to Louisiana, after its donors spent four days searching for someone willing to accept the gift.
"FEMA? That was a lost case," said Mirit Hemy, an executive with the Netherlands-based New Skies Satellite who made the phone calls. "We got zero help, and we lost one week trying to get hold of them."
In Sweden, a transport plane loaded with a water purification system and a cellular network has been ready to take off for four days, while Swedish officials wait for flight clearance. Nearly a week after they were offered, four Canadian rescue vessels and two helicopters have been accepted but probably won't arrive from Halifax, Nova Scotia, until Saturday. The Canadians' offer of search-and-rescue divers has so far gone begging.
Matching offers of aid -- from Panamanian bananas to British engineers -- with needs in the devastated region is a laborious process in a disaster whose scope is unheard of in recent U.S. history, especially for a country more accustomed to giving than receiving aid.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday that to his knowledge, all offers of foreign aid have been accepted and some have arrived, such as Air Canada's flights to relocate displaced people. But many others must be vetted by emergency relief specialists. "I think the experts will take a look at exactly what is needed now," he said.
FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule said the foreign complaints echo those from governors and officials "across the nation."
"There has been that common thought that because [offers of aid] are not tapped immediately, they're not prudently used," Rule said. "We are pulling everything into a centralized database. We are trying not to suck everything in all at once, whether we need it or not."
European diplomats said publicly that they understand the difficulty of coordinating such a massive recovery effort. In an open letter released yesterday, though, Ambassador John Bruton, head of the Delegation of the
European Commission to the United States, wrote:
"Perhaps one of those lessons will be that rugged individualism is not always enough in such a crisis, particularly if an individual does not have the material and psychological means to escape the fury of a hurricane in time."
Soon after the flooding, the government of Sweden offered a C-130 Hercules transport plane, loaded with water purification equipment, and a cellular network donated by Ericsson.
"As far as I know, it's still on the ground," said Claes Thorson, press counselor at the Swedish Embassy in Washington. He said that along with 20 other European Union nations that have pledged aid, "We are ready to send our things. We know they are needed, but what seems to be a problem is getting all these offers into the country."
So far, Thorson said, the State Department has denied Sweden's request for flight clearance. "We don't know exactly why, but we have a suspicion that the system is clogged on the receiving end," he said. "But we keep a request alive all the time, so we are not forgotten."
German telecommunications company KB Impuls contacted another company, Unisat, based in Rhode Island, with the idea of contributing an integrated satellite and cellular telephone system.
In a region with its communications systems in tatters, the $3 million system could handle 5,000 calls at once, routing them, if necessary, through Germany.
KB Impuls would contribute the equipment and two engineers, supplied with their own food, water and generator fuel, to set it up. Unisat contacted another firm, New Skies Satellite, with offices in Washington, which agreed to contribute satellite capacity.
New Skies even arranged transport, securing a C-130 cargo plane from the Israeli air force, to pick up the equipment and technicians from Germany and bring them to Louisiana. "With one call, I got an airplane," Hemy said. And then, over four days, she and the owner of Unisat, Uri Bar-Zemer, called contacts at FEMA, the American Red Cross, the State Department, even members of Congress, trying to find someone to accept the gift.
Finally the State Department told them that to receive flight clearance, the gift must have a specific recipient. "I was ringing, ringing, ringing -- and nothing," Hemy said. Finally, yesterday, she got a call from the U.S. Air Force's Joint Task Force Katrina Communication Operations division, thanking the companies for the gift and inquiring about the system's technical specifications.
As of late yesterday, the companies were waiting for a written order from the Northern Command to begin the mission. "I don't have a problem confirming that," Bar-Zemer said of the story. But he expressed concerns that disclosing the difficulties in donating could jeopardize the company's chances of actually delivering the aid.
Staff writers Robin Wright and Nelson Hernandez contributed to this report.Tuesday, September 06, 2005
BROWN, CHERNOFF AND GWB INCOMPETENCE MURDERED THOUSANDS
Anger mounts at feds' response
WASHINGTON, New York Times - As the Bush administration tried to show a more forceful effort on Sunday to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, government officials escalated their criticism and sniping over who was to blame for the problems plaguing the initial response.
While rescuers were still trying to reach desperate people stranded by the floods, perhaps the only consensus among local, state and federal officials was that the system had failed.
Some federal officials said uncertainty over who was in charge had contributed to delays, while officials in Louisiana complained that federal disaster officials blocked some aid efforts.
Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said on CNN that the lesson of Hurricane Katrina might be that federal authorities need to take "more of an upfront role earlier on, when we have these truly ultra-catastrophes."
But furious state and local officials insisted that the real problem was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Chertoff's department oversees, failed to deliver urgently needed help and, through incomprehensible red tape, even thwarted others' efforts to help.
"We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water," said Denise Bottcher, press secretary for Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana. "They wanted to negotiate an organizational chart."
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans expressed similar frustrations. "We're still fighting over authority," he told reporters on Saturday. "A bunch of people are the boss. The state and federal government are doing a two-step dance."
In one of several such appeals, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., called on President Bush on Sunday to appoint an independent national commission to examine the relief effort. She also said she intended to introduce legislation to remove FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security and restore its previous status as an independent Cabinet-level agency.
Chertoff tried to deflect the criticism, saying there would be time later to decide what went wrong.
"Whatever the criticisms and the after-action report may be about what was right and what was wrong looking back, what would be a horrible tragedy would be to distract ourselves from avoiding further problems because we're spending time talking about problems that have already occurred," he said on NBC.
But local officials, who still feel overwhelmed by the continuing tragedy, demanded accountability and action.
Far from deferring to state or local officials, FEMA asserted its authority and only made things worse, said Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, south of New Orleans. When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away, he said. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Broussard said on "Meet the Press" on NBC.
One sign of the continuing battle over who was in charge was Blanco's refusal on Friday to sign an order turning over the disaster response to federal authorities.
The governor, who asked President Bush for 40,000 troops on Wednesday, did not want to cede control of the National Guard and did not believe signing the order would speed the arrival of troops, said Bottcher, her press secretary.
Bottcher was one of several state and local officials who said Sunday that they believed FEMA had inexplicably interfered with the delivery of aid from other states. She said FEMA held up aid offered by the mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, and the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson.
Adam Sharp, a spokesman for Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the problem was not who was in command; FEMA repeatedly held up assistance that could have been critical, he said.
The U.S. Forest Service had waited for approval to use its water tanker aircraft to douse fires on the New Orleans riverfront, Sharp said, "but FEMA did not act."
The agency also delayed the use of Amtrak trains to move people out of the disaster zone and the distribution of communications equipment offered by private companies, he said.
"FEMA has just been very slow to make these decisions," Sharp said.
Bob Mann, Blanco's communications director, said he hadn't had a "substantive conversation" with FEMA officials between Wednesday and Sunday, when they finally got in touch.
In a clear slap at Chertoff and the FEMA director, Michael D. Brown, Blanco on Saturday announced that she had hired James Lee Witt, who was the director of the agency during the Clinton administration, to advise her on the recovery.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
HOW COME AID DIDN'T REACH VICTIMS? 'COZ FEMA HAS ITS HEAD UP ITS ASS
Firefighters Stuck in Ga. Awaiting Orders
ATLANTA, Associated Press - Hundreds of firefighters who volunteered to help rescue victims of Hurricane Katrina have instead been playing cards, taking classes on FEMA's history and lounging at an Atlanta airport hotel for days while they await orders.
"On the news every night you hear (hurricane victims say), `How come everybody forgot us?'" said Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa. "We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."
As of Tuesday, some of the firefighters, like Thomas Blomgren of Battle Creek, Mich., had waited at the hotel for four days. Now he and a colleague have been told they may be sent to a hurricane relief camp in South Carolina to do paperwork rather than help the devastated Gulf Coast.
"FEMA hired the best of the best firefighters, got them together and gave them secretary jobs," Blomgren said.
He and colleague Steven Richardson said they followed FEMA's advice and brought huge packs filled with special firefighting suits, sleeping bags and lifesaving equipment to survive in harsh conditions for as long as a month. "But we'd be better off bringing pencils and cell phones," Blomgren grumbled.
Tony Russell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency official in charge of the firefighters, said he is trying to get them deployed as fast as he can but wants to make certain they are sent where the need is greatest.
When FEMA called for 2,000 firefighters from across the country, it made it clear the mission was one of community service and outreach — not firefighting, Russell said. The firefighters are paid by FEMA for their time.
"People are in need," Russell said. "Sometimes you just need to mop the floor if that's what's best for the victims."
Desk work may be the first priority for some firefighters for now, but the mission's needs could rapidly change, Russell said. Those who are upset, he said, are free to go. "This is not a draft," he said.
Russell said it takes at least two days to process and train the volunteers, who continue to arrive each day in Atlanta for FEMA training. Some 500 firefighters have been sent to needy areas and hundreds more await their marching orders, he said.
In the meantime, the firefighters — some from as far away as Washington state — have received vaccines and specialized training, including classes on sexual harassment, the history of FEMA and how to deal with ethnic groups.
Throughout the hotel, burly firefighters in navy blue shirts loafed on couches Tuesday. A few sat outside in the gentle August breeze, enjoying boxed meals.
Kelly Wayne Sisson, a firefighter from La Mesa, Calif., lounged with a candy bar in hand on the floor of the hotel lobby.
"It's been frustrating because we've been here for a couple of days," he said. "But FEMA's a big machine. We'll get sent out when the time is right."Tuesday, September 06, 2005
VOTE THE BASTARDS OUT!
Failure of the government in hurricane planning and relief could hurt Bush, Republican Party
WASHINGTON, Knight Ridder Newspapers - President Bush rushes back to the Gulf Coast on Monday in a second attempt to demonstrate his concern and counter the impression that his administration's response to the calamity has undermined him and hurt the Republican Party.
The fallout could be seen first in the president's agenda, then in next year's congressional elections. Already, Republicans in Congress are signaling an unprecedented willingness to scrutinize and challenge the administration, with calls for hearings into why things went so badly.
The haunting images of black faces pleading for help in New Orleans could set back Republican efforts to make inroads among black voters and jeopardize Bush's image as a forceful leader who safeguards Americans' lives.
Said independent pollster John Zogby: "Republicans will go into next year wounded and without a popular president to help them."
Bush still has time to recover, particularly if relief efforts take hold and then succeed better than expected. One quick poll Sunday found Americans divided over Bush's performance in recent days, hardly the unanimous approval he won after the 2001 terrorist attacks, but also not a solid rejection.
Yet he also faces the prospect of more bad news continuing to sour the public mood. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Sunday the death toll from the hurricane is in the thousands.
"His approval numbers will go down," Zogby said. "Republicans will be hurt because they lead Congress, they lead the federal government."
Bush faces complaints and congressional hearings into why the federal government wasn't better prepared for such a disaster and why it reacted slowly.
The Bush administration Sunday suggested that local officials share at least some of the blame.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Sunday, for example, that federal officials were unaware of dangerous conditions among people crowded into a New Orleans convention center because they hadn't been told of it. "I was on a video conference with state officials and didn't get any information about this," he said on the Fox News Sunday program.
Chertoff, whose department oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, added later on CNN that the inability of the state and local authorities to communicate and coordinate their responses "really caused the cascading series of breakdowns." FEMA "plays a supporting role," he said.
But Democrats noted that Americans forces airlifted food to Afghanistan on the first day of a U.S.-led invasion and started humanitarian airlifts into Baghdad three days after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
Rep. James McCrery, R-La., choked up and spoke of the frustration dealing with the federal bureaucracy. Sen. Bill Frist (news, bio, voting record), R-Tenn., the majority leader, wants hearings into the Department of Homeland Security and its Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"If we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" asked former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
If that sentiment takes hold, it could erode one of Bush's greatest political strengths, the belief that he's decisively and effectively overhauled the federal government not only to better protect against terrorist attacks but also to deal with the aftermath.
"If people start asking about the state of our national preparedness, that's bad for Bush," said Mary Stuckey, who teaches political communication at Georgia State University.
The president's style could hurt him as well.
Bush kept his normal schedule during the first days of the hurricane and its aftermath. He traveled to San Diego, then back to his Texas ranch. He didn't return to Washington until Wednesday, viewing some of the storm damage from the window of Air Force One.
He went to the Gulf Coast on Friday. He said the results were unacceptable. But when he addressed the official in charge of the disaster relief, Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, Bush offered congratulations. "Brownie," Bush said, "you're doing a heck of a job."
When he got to New Orleans, he toured only by helicopter. He did not meet with any of the angry survivors who were asking for food, water or medical attention.
That was a stark contrast to his appearance in New York after the 2001 attacks, when he spent hours with the families of the dead and missing and climbed aboard a debris-covered fire truck, one arm around a New York firefighter and the other brandishing a bullhorn that came to symbolize his success at rallying the country.
" Where was the bullhorn? Where was his hard hat?" asked Paul Light, a political scientist at New York University. "The president has exposed himself to criticism by not reacting faster, not showing greater concern for what was going on."
The first place Bush could feel political fallout is in Congress.
Republicans plan hearings into the federal response that could expose mistakes and oversights inside Bush's government. Also, some Republican proposals, such as one to eliminate the estate tax on multimillion-dollar estates, could get less support at a time when Congress rushes to spend more money on relief.
The hurricane is unlikely to affect the rest of the Bush agenda, however. His proposal to overhaul
Social Security was already at death's door. His nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court was on a glide path to Senate approval.
The longer-term impact could come in next year's congressional elections. Bush already faced the prospect of entering the election year with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.
Analysts say there are still dozens of things that could change the political landscape in a year.
Iraq could get better or worse. Gas prices could rise or retreat.
"We're so far away," said University of Texas political scientist Bruce Buchanan. "At worst, it will be one of the several things people might point to as they make up their minds."Tuesday, September 06, 2005
"BROWNIE" COMPLETELY FUCKED IT UP
Let me get this straight - the job "Brownie" held before being appointed by his good buddy GWB as head of FEMA was president of a freaking horse fancier's club?
-------
Ex-officials say weakened FEMA botched response
Chicago Tribune - Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck.
Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called "a very good exercise."
More than a million residents were "evacuated" in the table-top scenario as 120 m.p.h. winds and 20 inches of rain caused widespread flooding that supposedly trapped 300,000 people in the city.
"It was very much an eye-opener," said Castleman, a Republican appointee of President Bush who left FEMA in December for the private sector. "A number of things were identified that we had to deal with, not all of them were solved."
Still, Castleman found it hard to square the lessons he and others learned from the exercise with the frustratingly slow response to the disaster that has unfolded in the wake of Katrina. From the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans to the Mississippi and Alabama communities along the Gulf Coast, hurricane survivors have decried the lack of water, food and security and the slowness of the federal relief efforts.
"It's hard for everyone to understand why buttons weren't pushed earlier on," Castleman said of the federal response.
As the first National Guard truck caravans of water and food arrived in New Orleans on Friday, former FEMA officials and other disaster experts were at a loss to explain why the federal government's lead agency for responding to major emergencies had failed to meet the urgent needs of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the most dire of circumstances in a more timely fashion.
But many suspected that FEMA's apparent problems in getting life-sustaining supplies to survivors and buses to evacuate them from New Orleans--delays even Bush called "not acceptable"--stemmed partly from changes at the agency during the Bush years. Experts have long warned that the moves would weaken the agency's ability to effectively respond to natural disasters.
Less clout, experience
FEMA's chief has been demoted from a near-Cabinet-level position; political appointees with little, if any, emergency-management experience have been placed in senior FEMA positions; and the small, 2,500-person agency was dropped into the midst of the 180,000-employee
Homeland Security Department, which is more oriented to combating terrorism than natural disasters. All that has led to a brain drain as experienced but demoralized employees have left the agency, former and current FEMA staff members say.
The result is that an agency that got high marks during much of the 1990s for its effectiveness is being harshly criticized for seemingly mismanaging the response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The growing anger and frustration at FEMA's efforts sparked the Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to announce Friday that it has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to try to uncover what went wrong.
Meanwhile, Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record) (D-La.) called on Bush to immediately appoint a Cabinet-level official to direct the national response.
"There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible," Landrieu said. "Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be their approach."
John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said he was bewildered by the agency's slow response this time.
It had been standard practice for FEMA to position supplies ahead of time, and the agency did preposition drinking water and tarps to cover damaged roofs near where they would be needed. In addition, FEMA has coordinated its plans with state and local officials and let the Defense Department know beforehand what type of military assistance would be needed.
"I'm a little confused as to why it took so long to get the military presence running convoys into downtown New Orleans," Copenhaver said.
And there isn't an experienced disaster-response expert at the top of the agency as there was when James Lee Witt ran it during the 1990s. Before Michael Brown, the current head, joined the agency as its legal counsel, he was with the International Arabian Horse Association.
That loss of experienced personnel might explain in part why FEMA was not able to secure buses sooner for the evacuation of New Orleans, a step anticipated by the hurricane disaster simulation last year.
Peter Pantuso, president of the American Bus Association, said, "I have a hard time believing there is any game plan in place when it comes to coordinating or pulling together this volume of business," referring to FEMA's effort to obtain hundreds of buses to move tens of thousands of evacuees from New Orleans. "And what happens in two or three weeks down the road when all of these people are moved again?"
When FEMA became part of the Homeland Security Department, it was stripped of some functions, such as some of its ability to make preparedness grants to states, former officials said. Those functions were placed elsewhere in the larger agency.
FEMA capability `marginalized'
"After Sept. 11 they got so focused on terrorism they effectively marginalized the capability of FEMA," said George Haddow, a former FEMA official during the Clinton administration. "It's no surprise that they're not capable of managing the federal government's response to this kind of disaster."
Pleasant Mann, former head of the union for FEMA employees who has been with the agency since 1988, said a change made by agency higher-ups last year added a bureaucratic layer that likely delayed FEMA's response to Katrina.
Before the change, a FEMA employee at the site of a disaster could request that an experienced employee he knew had the right skills be dispatched to help him. But now that requested worker is first made to travel to a location hundreds of miles from the disaster site to be "processed," placed in a pool from which he is dispatched, sometimes to a place different from where he thought he was headed.
Pleasant said he knew of a case in which a worker from Washington state was made to travel first to Orlando before he could go to Louisiana, losing at least a day. What's more, that worker was told he might be sent to Alabama, not Louisiana, after all.Tuesday, September 06, 2005
AHHHH - SO THAT'S WHERE THE 'BROWNIE' CRAP COMES FROM - IT'S A MOMMA BUSH THANG
Barbara Bush: It's Good Enough for the Poor
By John Nichols, The Nation -- Finally, we have discovered the roots of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism."
On the heels of the president's "What, me worry?" response to the death, destruction and dislocation that followed upon Hurricane Katrina comes the news of his mother's Labor Day visit with hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston.
Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees -- cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases -- former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.
"Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them," Mrs. Bush told American Public Media's "Marketplace" program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.
On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles audibly as she observes just how great things are going for families that are separated from loved ones, people who have been forced to abandon their homes and the only community where they have ever lived, and parents who are explaining to children that their pets, their toys and in some cases their friends may be lost forever. Perhaps the former first lady was amusing herself with the notion that evacuees without bread could eat cake.
At the very least, she was expressing a measure of empathy commensurate with that evidenced by her son during his fly-ins for disaster-zone photo opportunities.
On Friday, when even Republican lawmakers were giving the federal government an "F" for its response to the crisis, President Bush heaped praise on embattled Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown. As thousands of victims of the hurricane continued to plead for food, water, shelter, medical care and a way out of the nightmare to which federal neglect had consigned them, Brown cheerily announced that "people are getting the help they need."
Barbara Bush's son put his arm around the addled FEMA functionary and declared, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Like mother, like son.
Even when a hurricane hits, the apple does not fall far from the tree.Tuesday, September 06, 2005
BROWN TO CHERTOFF: NOTHING URGENT, BOSS, WE KNOW OUR JOB IS TO SPIN GOOD PR ON THE GROUND
FEMA Chief Waited Until After Storm Hit
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000
Homeland Security employees to the region — and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.
Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged.
Brown's memo to Chertoff described Katrina as "this near catastrophic event" but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, "Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities."
The initial responses of the government and Brown came under escalating criticism as the breadth of destruction and death grew. President Bush and Congress on Tuesday pledged separate investigations into the federal response to Katrina. "Governments at all levels failed," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown had positioned front-line rescue teams and Coast Guard helicopters before the storm. Brown's memo on Aug. 29 aimed to assemble the necessary federal work force to support the rescues, establish communications and coordinate with victims and community groups, Knocke said.
Instead of rescuing people or recovering bodies, these employees would focus on helping victims find the help they needed, he said.
"There will be plenty of time to assess what worked and what didn't work," Knocke said. "Clearly there will be time for blame to be assigned and to learn from some of the successful efforts."
Brown's memo told employees that among their duties, they would be expected to "convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public."
"FEMA response and recovery operations are a top priority of the department and as we know, one of yours," Brown wrote Chertoff. He proposed sending 1,000 Homeland Security Department employees within 48 hours and 2,000 within seven days.
Knocke said the 48-hour period suggested for the Homeland employees was to ensure they had adequate training. "They were training to help the life-savers," Knocke said.
Employees required a supervisor's approval and at least 24 hours of disaster training in Maryland, Florida or Georgia. "You must be physically able to work in a disaster area without refrigeration for medications and have the ability to work in the outdoors all day," Brown wrote.
The same day Brown wrote Chertoff, Brown also urged local fire and rescue departments outside Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi not to send trucks or emergency workers into disaster areas without an explicit request for help from state or local governments. Brown said it was vital to coordinate fire and rescue efforts.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said Tuesday that Brown should step down.
After a senators-only briefing by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other Cabinet members, Sen. Charles E. Schumer said lawmakers weren't getting their questions answered.
"What people up there want to know, Democrats and Republicans, is what is the challenge ahead, how are you handling that and what did you do wrong in the past," said Schumer, D-N.Y.
Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, said the administration is "getting a bad rap" for the emergency response.
"This is the largest disaster in the history of the United States, over an area twice the size of Europe," Stevens said. "People have to understand this is a big, big problem."
Meanwhile, the airline industry said the government's request for help evacuating storm victims didn't come until late Thursday afternoon. The president of the Air Transport Association, James May, said the Homeland Security Department called then to ask if the group could participate in an airlift for refugees.
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On the Net:
Federal Emergency Management Agency: http://www.fema.gov
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
The memo from FEMA Director Mike Brown to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is available at: http://wid.ap.org/documents/dhskatrina.pdfTuesday, September 06, 2005
FAILED PROMISES, WRONG POLICIES - CORRUPTION AND GREED AND CALLOUS DISREGARD
The Larger Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, New York Times Published: September 6, 2005
The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.
It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.
But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.
If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.
Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.
Under Mr. Bush, the national infant mortality rate has risen for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.
So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. Nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. On immunizations, the U.S. ranks 84th for measles and 89th for polio.
One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.
"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."
The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.
It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.
None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books ever written on American poverty, "American Dream," by my Times colleague Jason DeParle.
So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that may be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.
Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.Tuesday, September 06, 2005
SO LONG, LITTLE BUDDY
Bob Denver, TV's Gilligan, Dead at 70
LOS ANGELES - Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy first mate Gilligan on the 1960s television show "Gilligan's Island," made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died, his agent confirmed Tuesday. He was 70.
Denver, who underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery earlier this year, died at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina, according to agent Mike Eisenstadt. Denver's death was first reported by "Entertainment Tonight."Tuesday, September 06, 2005
VISUAL TIMELINE - KATRINA VS BUSHCO
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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
FEMA FUCKED UP FROM BEGINNING TO END
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
09/03/2005
Landrieu Implores President to "Relieve Unmitigated Suffering;" End FEMA's "Abject Failures"
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., issued the following statement this afternoon regarding her call yesterday for President Bush to appoint a cabinet-level official to oversee Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts within 24 hours.
Sen. Landrieu said:
"Yesterday, I was hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new understanding for the magnitude of the suffering and for the abject failures of the current Federal Emergency Management Agency. 24 hours later, the President has yet to answer my call for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA, now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.
"I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims -- far more efficiently than buses -- FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.
"But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast -- black and white, rich and poor, young and old -- deserve far better from their national government.
"Mr. President, I'm imploring you once again to get a cabinet-level official stood up as soon as possible to get this entire operation moving forward regionwide with all the resources -- military and otherwise -- necessary to relieve the unmitigated suffering and economic damage that is unfolding."
Today's aerial tour of the 17th Street levee will be featured tomorrow on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Later, Sen. Landrieu will also appear on CBS's 60 Minutes.Tuesday, September 06, 2005
COMPLETE BUSHIT FROM START TO FINISH
The Potemkin Photo Op
Saturday, September 03 2005 @ 09:40 PM Eastern Daylight Time. Contributed by: Stranger at http://www.blah3.com/article.php?story=20050903214041794
I was tuning in and out of Bush's massive photo op on the Gulf Coast yesterday, and everything at the time seemed just a little too pat for me. From the 'briefing' that went on in a hangar full of helicopters to his walking down a street in Biloxi and having three regular citizens walk up to him for comforting to the last press availiability of the day when he announced that the Convention Center was secure and the levees were being repaired, it was clear that the game plan from the White House was for Bush to go to the region, look decisive, comfort a few citizens, and announce at the end of the day that all was well.
It was a full-on effort to change the subject of discussion from the utter failure of the Bush administration to handle the crisis with even a hint of competency, and in true Bush fashion, he wrapped it up at 5:00 PM and announced that he was 'Flyin' out of (t)here.'
But from beginning to end, the entire exercise was a series of lies - a Potemkin photo op designed to fool those Americans who were not bothering to look closely at what was going on. Let's look at key aspects of Bush's trip that were covered by television.
The Briefing: There were a lot of questions asked yesterday morning about the phony briefing that Bush got in that hangar, featuring a backdrop of Coast Guard helicopters. People were wondering why those choppers were not out picking up flood victims or delivering supplies. The reason why is simple - Bush had the majority of helcopter traffic stopped while Marine One was in the Gulf Coast region. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported this (Via AmericaBlog):
Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.
The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.
“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.
The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors after the president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.
This leaves me wondering how many people died while Bush was playing Decisive Leader.
The First 'Comforting Session': Then it was off to Biloxi, MS to survey the damage. As Bush, Haley Barbour and others walked down a street, 2 women appeared seemingly out of nowhere for Bush to 'comfort' them. But it turns out that the two women didn't even live in Biloxi, and had just come down for the day to try to 'salvage' clothes from the area for one of the women's son (were they looters?). But they were apparently reasonably telegenic and happened to be in the area, so they were recruited to represent an area where they didn't even live. A number of threads at Democratic Underground discuss the weirdness of these women showing up in a disaster area. And a trandcript of the conversation between Bush and the women reads like a bad comedy skit:
Bush to women: "There's a Salvation Army center that I want to, that I'll tell you where it is, and they'll get you some help. I'm sorry.... They'll help you.....
Woman 1: "I came here looking for clothes..."
Bush: "They'll get you some clothes, at the Salvation Army center..."
Woman 1: "We don't have anything..."
Bush: "I understand.... Do you know where the center is, that I'm talking to you about?"
Guy with shades: "There's no center there, sir, it's a truck."
Bush: "There's trucks?"
Guy: "There's a school, a school about two miles away....."
Bush: "But isn't there a Salvation center down there?"
Guy: "No that's wiped out...."
Bush: "A temporary center? "
Guy: "No sir they've got a truck there, for food."
Bush: "That's what I'm saying, for food and water."
Bush turns to the sister who's been saying how she needs clothes.
Bush to sister: "You need food and water."
The 'Recovery Efforts': Wherever Bush went yesterday, it seemed as though people were already hard at work rebuilding the affected areas. Unfortunately for Bush, there were a few foreign journalists at his photo ops, and they pulled back the curtain on what we saw on TV to reveal that the 'work' was staged for the media. Here's a translation from the German news show web site.
Christine Adelhardt live from Biloxi:
"Two minutes ago the President drove by with his convoy. What happened here in Biloxi during the day is really unbelievable. All of a sudden the rescue troops finally showed up, the clean-up vehicles; we didn't see those over the last days here. In an area where it really isn't urgent, there is nobody around, all the remaining people went to the city center.
The President is traveling with a press convoy, so they get wonderful pictures saying the president was here and the help will follow. The amount of this catastrophe shocked me, but the amount of set-up that happened here today is at least equally shocking for me.
And there's more, this time on the 'recovery efforts' in New Orleans, from War And Piece:
There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.
ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.
The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.
Levee Repairs in New Orleans: As Bush flew around the skies above New Orleans, CNN began showing footage of a bulldozer and dump trucks working on the 17th Street levee, which was the maqin source of the flood waters in New Orleans. When Bush got ready to leave, he crowed that 'progress is flowing.' But according to Sen. Mary Landrieu, the crew that was working so hard yesterday left and apparently never came back:
But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young and old - deserve far better from their national government.
Control of the Convention Center: Bush made a big deal of telling the nation that the icon for unrest and chaos in New Orleans this week - the New Orleans Convention Center - was secured by the time of his statement yesterday.
I'm pleased to report, thanks to the good work of the adjutant general from Louisiana and the troops that have been called in that the convention center is secure.
But as was pointed out this morning, a report by CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr directly contradicted Bush's statement.
CNN's Barbara Starr reports that there is "no indication" the convention center in New Orleans is secure. She reports there is still much unrest.
And the now-famous Fox News video of Geraldo Rivera inside the Convention Center showed how Bush's idea of 'securing' the center was locking the people in.
All of this information has turned up in one spot or another on the web since yesterday, but I wanted to put it all together in one spot for a reason. Bit by bit, parts of Bush's trip were shown to be less truthful than we deserved. But when you look at the entire trip - and all of the deceit that went into each part of it - it's an inescapable fact that from beginning to end the trip was a menu of lies and self-serving actions that didn't do the region any good. In some instances, like the helicopter groundings halting rescue ops, the trip could conceivably actually killed more people.
And that's the bottom line with this administration. It always has been. Bush, Rove, and the rest of them will go to any measures to get their version of the truth out. and if a few of the little people happen to die in the process, it's no skin off their noses. All of America should know what the true bottom line is.
You are being lied to, and lives have been lost because of it.
[ Views: 25930 ]Tuesday, September 06, 2005
NO BLAMING UNLESS ITS US BLAMING THE OTHER GUYS
Memo to the Media: Stop Enabling the White House Blame Game
Huffingtonpost.com - When it comes to managing political crises (as opposed to national ones), the Bush White House has earned a reputation as masters of damage control. And rightly so -- let’s see you get reelected after
Abu Ghraib, the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” memo, no WMD, no bin Laden (dead or alive), and “Mission (Most Definitely Not) Accomplished”.
Well, according to the New York Times, Rove, Bartlett and the damage control boys are at it again, rolling out a plan to hang the post-Katrina debacle around the necks of Louisiana state and local officials… and, in the process, erase the image of a crassly incompetent administration too busy vacationing to worry about the dying in New Orleans.
Hence, today’s Presidential Visit, Take Two. Can’t you just see Rove yelling “Cut!”, hopping out of his director’s chair, pulling Bush aside, and whispering in his ear: “Okay, Mr. President, this isn’t “Armageddon” meets “The Wedding Crashers”. So this time 86 the stories about how you used to party in New Orleans, and, for heaven's sake, do not focus on the suffering of Trent Lott. And no more hugging only freshly-showered black people who look like Halle Berry -- this time you gotta get a little closer to the living-in-their-own-feces crowd. Alright…. action!”
Look, as much as I despise the way they go about it, I get it: trying to save face by deflecting blame and sliming your enemies may be ugly but it’s straight out of the Rove playbook and has proven highly effective.
What I don’t understand is why the media continue to be star players on the Bush damage control team.
Take the way that both the Washington Post and Newsweek obediently, and ineptly, passed on -- and thus gave credence to -- the Bush party line that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s hesitancy to declare a state of emergency had prevented the feds from responding to the crisis more rapidly.
The Post, citing an anonymous “senior Bush official”, reported on Sunday that, as of Saturday, Sept. 3, Blanco “still had not declared a state of emergency”… when, in fact, the declaration had been made on Friday, August 26 -- over 2 days BEFORE Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. This claim was so demonstrably false that the paper was forced to issue a correction just hours after the original story appeared.
So here are a couple of questions: 1) Had everyone in the WaPo fact checking department gone out of town for the Labor Day weekend? I mean, c’mon, the announcement of a state of emergency isn’t exactly the kind of thing government officials tend to keep a secret. 2) Why were the Post reporters so willing to blindly accept the words of an administration official who obviously had a partisan agenda -- and to grant this official anonymity?
Weren’t they familiar with the Post’s policy on using anonymous sources, which states: “Sources often insist that we agree not to name them in the newspaper before they agree to talk with us. We must be reluctant to grant their wish. When we use an unnamed source, we are asking our readers to take an extra step to trust the credibility of the information we are providing. We must be certain in our own minds that the benefit to readers is worth the cost in credibility. …Nevertheless, granting anonymity to a source should not be done casually or automatically.” Here it was clearly done both casually and automatically.
The Post’s policy continues: “We prefer at least two sources for factual information in Post stories that depends on confidential informants, and those sources should be independent of each other.” Oops. They could have saved themselves a lot of grief if the second source they never got for this story had been a staffer for Gov. Blanco… or, if the price of a phone call was too much, the state of Louisiana website where the truth about the state of emergency declaration was a click away [pdf].
Especially since the Post instructs its reporters: “When sources have axes to grind, we should let our readers know what their interest is” and “We do not promise sources that we will refrain from additional reporting or efforts to verify the information they may give us”. You mean like checking to see if the line of bull they are feeding you is, y’know, a line of bull?
If anything, Newsweek’s effort to assist the Bush damage control effort was even more egregious. While claiming that “Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Barbineaux Blanco seemed uncertain and sluggish, hesitant to declare martial law or a state of emergency, which would have opened the door to more Pentagon help” the magazine didn’t even bother to cite a “senior Bush official”, choosing instead to report Blanco’s alleged failings as fact. Wonder where they got that “fact”? You think it might have been from the same “senior Bush official” that snookered the Post? Josh Marshall wonders…
The unquestioning regurgitation of administration spin through the use of anonymous sources is the fault line of modern American journalism. You’d think that after all we’ve seen -- from the horrific reporting on WMD to Judy Miller and Plamegate (to say nothing of all the endless navel-gazing media panel discussions analyzing the issue) -- these guys would finally get a clue and stop making the Journalism 101 mistake of granting anonymity to administration sources using them to smear their opponents.
The Washington Post corrected its article. Now it should take the next step and reveal who the source of that provably false chunk of slime was. And Newsweek should do the same.
It’s time for the media to get back to doing their job and stop being the principal weapon in Team Bush’s damage control arsenal.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
MAN-MADE ECO-DISATER, COMING RIGHT UP
Few choices to rid New Orleans of poisoned water
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - The toxic brew of chemicals and human waste in the New Orleans floodwaters will have to be pumped into the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain, raising the specter of an environmental disaster on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, experts say.
The dire need to rid the drowned city of water could trigger fish kills and poison the delicate wetlands near New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi.
State and federal agencies have just begun water quality testing but environmental experts say the vile, stagnant chemical soup that sits in the streets of the city known as The Big Easy will contain traces of everything imaginable.
"Go home and identify all the chemicals in your house. It's a very long list," said Ivor van Heerden, head of a Louisiana State University center that studies the public health impacts of hurricanes.
"And that's just in a home. Imagine what's in an industrial plant," he said. "Or a sewage plant."
Gasoline, diesel, anti-freeze, bleach, human waste, acids, alcohols and a host of other substances must be washed out of homes, factories, refineries, hospitals and other buildings.
In Metairie, east of New Orleans, the floodwater is tea-colored, murky and smells of burned sulfur. A thin film of oil is visible in the water.
Those who have waded into it say they could see only about 1 to 2 inches into the depths and that there was significant debris on and below the surface.
Experts said the longer water sat in the streets, the greater the chance gasoline and chemical tanks -- as well as common containers holding anything from bleach to shampoo -- would rupture.
Officials have said it may take up to 80 days to clear the water from New Orleans and surrounding parishes.
SECOND DISASTER?
Van Heerden and Rodney Mallett, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, say there do not appear to be any choices other than to pump the water into Lake Pontchartrain or the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, a key maritime spawning ground.
"I don't see how we could treat all that water," Mallett said.
The result could be an second wave of disaster for southern Louisiana, said Harold Zeliger, a Florida-based chemical toxicologist and water quality consultant.
"In effect, it's going to kill everything in those waters," he said.
How much water New Orleans holds is open to question.
Van Heerden estimates it is billions of gallons. LSU researchers will use satellite imagery and computer modeling to get a better fix on the quantity.
Bio-remediation -- cleaning up the water -- would require the time and expense of constructing huge storage facilities, considered an impossibility, especially with the public clamor to get the water out quickly.
Mallett said the Department of Environmental Quality was in the unfortunate position of being responsible for protecting the environment in a situation where that did not seem possible.
"We're not happy about it. But for the sake of civilization and lives, probably the best thing to do is pump the water out," he said.
The water will leave behind more trouble -- a city filled with mold, some of it toxic, the experts said. After other floods, researchers found many buildings had to be stripped back to concrete, or razed.
"If you have a building half full of water, everything above the water is growing mold. When it dries out, the rest grows mold," Zeliger said. "Most of the buildings will have to be destroyed."
(Additional reporting by Paul Simao in New Orleans)Tuesday, September 06, 2005
LATER, LIKE WHEN WE'VE GOT OUR BULLSHIT EXCUSES STRAIGHT.
The only people who ever say shit like "now is not the time to point fingers" are the assholes at fault. Oh, and, ummm, "Brownie"? What the fuck is up with THAT?
White House: Leave Blame Game for Later
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Criticized for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina, the White House said Tuesday that "we're not going to engage in the blame game" but instead would keep the focus on rescue and recovery efforts across the heavily battered Gulf Coast.
"There are ongoing problems that need to be addressed," said Scott McClellan, the spokesman for
President Bush. "We've got to keep our energies focused on the task at hand." He said there would be time later for a thorough analysis of the government's response.
Just relax and go on about your daily lives, your government knows what it's doing!
Bush was devoting the day to the recovery effort, meeting with his Cabinet, the congressional leadership, representatives of charitable organizations and with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to talk about assistance for displaced students and closed schools. McClellan said the president also was increasing what he described as a sizable personal contribution to the Red Cross and also was sending money to the Salvation Army.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., had told reporters Monday that the Homeland Security Committee would convene hearings as Congress returns this week to examine the "weaknesses and strengths" of the federal response and to "apply the lessons learned."
There has been heavy criticism of the government's response to the hurricane, and city and state officials, Republicans and Democrats have assailed the Federal Emergency Management Agency led by Michael Brown. Bush, during an inspection tour of the devastated region last Friday, praised Brown, telling him, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
McClellan said Bush was not satisfied with the response and that there are problems that need to be addressed. But he would not talk about Brown or say whether any officials had offered their resignation because of the widespread criticism.
"This is all looking at the blame game," McClellan said. "We're not going to engage in the blame game."
He also rejected suggestions that the poor, and particularly blacks, had been abandoned when New Orleans was evacuated. "I think most Americans dismiss that and know that there's just no basis for making such suggestions," McClellan said. "We are focused on saving and sustaining lives of all those who have been affected."
Bush returned to the Gulf Coast on Monday, visiting Baton Rouge and Poplarville, Miss., on his third inspection tour, the second by ground.
Last Wednesday, he had his pilot lower Air Force One, the presidential jet, to an altitude of about 2,500 feet as he flew over the area while returning to Washington. On Friday, he walked a neighborhood in Biloxi on Mississippi's coast and stopped at the airport and a breached levee in New Orleans.
Since his return to Washington last week, Bush hasn't gone a day without a public event devoted to the storm and its devastation. But the administration has not been able to quiet complaints about Washington's initial relief efforts. Congress already plans hearings on the federal response.
During a stop at Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge, several people ran up to meet Bush as he and first lady Laura Bush wandered around the room. But just as many hung back and looked on.
"I need answers," said Mildred Brown, who has been at the center since Tuesday with her husband, mother-in-law and cousin. "I'm not interested in hand-shaking. I'm not interested in photo ops."
State as well as federal officials are facing public criticism for a slow response to the crisis. Behind the scenes, each suggests the other is to blame.
That tension was evident when the president and the Louisiana governor appeared together in Baton Rouge on Monday.
The governor, Kathleen Blanco, had to cancel a planned trip to Houston to visit evacuees after learning at the last minute that Bush planned a visit to Baton Rouge. She has turned to a Clinton administration official, former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt, to help run relief efforts.
After addressing relief workers Monday, the president seemed to choke up, nodded at Blanco and kissed her on the cheek. She nodded back and both left the podium, headed for separate spots in the crowd.
Blanco later played down reports of differences with Bush. "We'd like to stop the voices out there trying to create a divide," she said. "We're all in this together."
During his stop in Mississippi, Bush said he understood his optimism about the region's recovery is hard for others to share:Monday, September 05, 2005
WHY ISN'T THIS STUFF BEING REPORTED BY THE US PRESS - ARE WE ASHAMED THAT WE HAVE TO ASK FOR HELP?
Hurricane Katrina: United in aid pledge
New Zealand Herald - 06.09.05
The United States has officially asked for emergency aid from the European Union in the form of blankets, medicines, food and water. Kuwait is offering US$500 million ($717.56 million) in oil products. Indonesia, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela are among other nations offering help. Britain was to send 500,000 military ration packs, Germany is to ship 25 tonnes of food and Italy is sending first aid kits, blankets and inflatable rafts. The UAE is sending "urgent humanitarian aid" and Afghanistan has offered US$100,000 in aid. Indonesia has offered to send 40 doctors. Cuba and Venezuela, two countries often singled out for criticism by the US, were among the first to offer humanitarian assistance.
Internet lifeline
New Orleans evacuees and relatives are using the internet to try to track down their missing loved ones. Hundreds of people are using craigslist.org to appeal for news on relatives and friends caught up in the hurricane aftermath. Media sites such as CNN.com have also set up internet help centres, including missing persons lists, resources for survivors and ways to donate and volunteer.
Mother drowned
A New Orleans official burst into tears as he described how a woman eventually drowned after promises she would be rescued. Aaron Broussard recounted how the mother of a friend trapped in St Bernard nursing home called every day to ask when help was coming. "He said, 'Yeah mama, somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday [through to] Friday'. She drowned on Friday," Broussard, president of a parish south of New Orleans, said.
Abandoned by officials
Australian tourists caught up in the nightmare of Katrina felt abandoned by their Government, with many instead rescued from devastated New Orleans by Australian journalists. Fiona Seidel, 27, said she felt abandoned by her Prime Minister John Howard. "I'm a good Australian, I pay my taxes, I work, I own a home, I do the right thing, I don't commit crimes and he pretty much wasn't there for me when I needed him," Seidel told Australian television. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the US had only allowed Australian officials into the city several days after the hurricane struck.
UN assistance accepted
The US has accepted the United Nations' offer of help in the hurricane aftermath. Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke to President George W. Bush on Friday and reiterated an earlier offer of UN assistance and expertise in the massive effort ahead. The United Nations and its agencies "are ready to provide emergency staff and a wide variety of relief supplies as and when necessary," the UN spokesman said.
Animals survive
Only three of New Orleans 1400 animals died in the wrath of Katrina, officials say. Audubon Zoo has the good fortune of being located on some of the city's highest ground, but it also had a disaster plan for the animals that worked better than the city's plan for humans. The only fatalities so far were two otters and a raccoon, zoo curator Dan Maloney said. Fourteen staffers stayed at the zoo to care for the animals throughout the storm and the aftermath.
Sinking to new depths
Celine Dion has rounded on US authorities over their slow rescue effort in New Orleans, while actor Sean Penn's personal crusade to save victims took on water. Penn, 45, was in the collapsing city to aid stranded victims but the small boat he was piloting to launch a rescue attempt sprang a leak. Canadian Dion, famed for her theme song from the watery epic Titanic, said: "I open the television, there's people still there, waiting to be rescued, and for me it's not acceptable." Dion has donated US$1 million ($1.43 million) to relief efforts.
Waiting for death
An elderly woman has said she's been waiting for death as conditions in her waterlogged room at Economy Inns Motel worsened with no sign of aid. Margaret Pertuit, 85, said her Mississippi motel was hot, fetid and without sanitation. Jimmy Dubreuil, 23, had tried earlier in the week to enter a Dollar Store several kilometres away but says he was chased out by a police officer who pistol-whipped him. "They started telling us we're thieves," he says. "We're not thieves. We just wanted to feed the babies."
Grishams' gift
Best-selling writer John Grisham and his wife usually keep their charitable donations very private. But they've decided to disclose their US$5 million ($7 million) contribution to establish a relief fund to help Mississippians rebuild after the hurricane.
"In these very, very rare circumstances - this tragic time - we hope the gift will get some attention and inspire other people to contribute money and help our fellow Mississippians on the Gulf Coast," said Grisham, a former state legislator.Monday, September 05, 2005
THE EMPERORS HAVE NO CLOTHES
Looks line the rest of the world reports the truth better than we do:
New Orleans a ghost town for 9 months
New Zealand Herald - 05.09.05
New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US Government believes.
The bleak assessment will deepen the biggest crisis ever faced by President George W. Bush, who last week called the devastation of Hurricane Katrina a "temporary disruption".
As the relief effort finally got under way at the weekend for the tens of thousands of people left without food, water, medicine or the rule of law for five days, the federal official in charge of disaster recovery said reconstruction could not begin until next northern summer.
The President is now facing a political hurricane of his own, with criticism, even from inside his own party, for failing to heed warnings of the city's vulnerability, cutting spending on its defences to pay for the wars on terror and in Iraq, and responding sluggishly to the worst natural catastrophe to hit his country.
Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans - also under fire for poor leadership - said that every day of delay had caused hundreds of deaths. Louisiana's Republican Senator, David Vitter, gave the Bush Administration "an F grade" and Senator Chuck Hagel, a leading contender for the Republicans' nomination to succeed Mr Bush, said: "There must be some accountability".
The criticism is all the sharper because the President did nothing to alter his holiday schedule for 48 hours. Vice-President Dick Cheney remains on holiday in Wyoming and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shopped for several thousand dollars of shoes and attended a Monty Python play, Spamalot in Manhattan as New Orleans drowned.
Dan Craig, director of recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told diplomats that it could take up to six months to drain the city and allow it to dry out. Then debris and other hazardous material would need to be cleared away before rebuilding. Evacuees could be in Government housing for two years.
Officials say that the job of recovering, let alone counting, the dead may not start for weeks. The toll is likely to far exceed the numbers killed in the 9/11 attacks.
A Government exercise last year accurately predicted the disaster with the levees, funding for which Mr Bush drastically cut.Monday, September 05, 2005
WHEN RICH FAT WHITE MEN MAKE DECISIONS
The Blame Game
From The Economist Global Agenda
Almost everyone in need of food and other supplies in the wake of Hurricane Katrina now has access to them, and the evacuation of New Orleans is largely complete. Who is to blame for the botched relief effort: George Bush, local officials, or no one in particular?
What took you so long?
THE evacuation of New Orleans was finally nearing completion on Monday September 5th, six days after the breaching of the low-lying city’s levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. National guardsmen, regular troops and federal marshals—many of whom had been brought in late last week following criticism of the sluggish relief effort—had moved into the worst-affected districts and were making house-to-house searches for the remaining survivors. However, some residents were still insisting on staying with their possessions.
With the survivors now mostly taken care of, the focus is shifting to those who perished in the storm and subsequent flood. The official death toll in the three worst-hit states—Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama—is still in the low hundreds. But the final toll could be several thousand. Many corpses have sunk in the water that still covers four-fifths of New Orleans. Some rescuers have reportedly been told to mark the submerged bodies they find by attaching buoys to them, and then move on. It could be several months before the waters subside, and up to a year before the city is ready to take back those who have fled.
Perhaps 100,000 people either could not or would not leave New Orleans when warned to do so before Katrina struck. Tens of thousands ended up at the city’s official shelter at the Superdome stadium for days, turning it into a sink of hot and smelly misery. Not far away, other homeless people made their way to the city’s convention centre, which quickly became a second giant shelter. By the weekend, these refugees had been bussed out. Some 20 states have offered to house and school refugees temporarily. But the strain is already starting to show in neighbouring states. In Texas, now home to almost half the refugees from New Orleans, officials say they are struggling to cope.
Hurricane Katrina
Sep 1st 2005
The toll of Hurricane Katrina
Sep 1st 2005
South-East Asia and oil
Aug 11th 2005
Insurers and catastrophes
Jun 16th 2005
The oil price soars, again
Mar 10th 2005
The Caribbean after Hurricane Ivan
Sep 16th 2004
United States
The White House and FirstGov, the government's official website, post news on the relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. America's National Hurricane Centre reports on Katrina.
The economic impact of Katrina Sep 2nd 2005
America’s Supreme Court Sep 5th 2005
A deadly stampede in Baghdad Aug 31st 2005
Using the internet to make phone calls Sep 1st 2005
Mergers and acquisitions Sep 1st 2005
The Buttonwood column: investor confidence Aug 30th 2005
About Global Agenda
If the world was saddened by the devastation wrought by Katrina, it was shocked by the breakdown of law and order that followed. Looters roamed the streets, stealing food and water in desperation but also computers, sporting equipment and guns in opportunism. Rapes and car-jackings were reported, and there were angry confrontations between roving thugs and the few shop- and homeowners who stayed. Some saw the social tension as having a racial element, since most of those left behind were poor and black.
Though New Orleans was flooded on Tuesday of last week, it wasn’t until Friday that the relief effort gained real momentum, with the arrival of thousands of national guardsmen. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, gave warning that “they know how to shoot to kill”, and by the weekend they had restored order to most parts of the city. But they and other emergency personnel are under huge pressure, with many of them working round the clock; the New York Times quoted Edwin Compass, New Orleans’s police superintendent, as saying on Saturday that at least 200 of his 1,500 officers had refused to do their job.
Who should have been doing the thinking?
While Katrina was a powerful storm, the extent of the chaos and suffering in her wake has nonetheless been surprising. America has dealt with ferocious hurricanes before, and New Orleans’s vulnerabilities were well known. Thus many are starting to point fingers in relation to both the short-term response and long-term policy failures.
Ray Nagin, New Orleans’s mayor, showed increasing frustration throughout last week, especially with the federal government’s response and its press conferences: “They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying…Get off your asses and let’s do something.” An under-pressure President George Bush criticised the relief effort on Friday, calling it “not acceptable”, before flying to the region to see the damage. Later, he suggested that local officials had made some mistakes. This earned him the threat of a punch on the nose from one Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu.
Many of the immediate difficulties are understandable. As Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, pointed out, the disaster has in fact been a double one. The hurricane’s winds flattened homes on the Gulf of Mexico coast, and shortly thereafter the rains burst the levees, the latter creating a “dynamic” situation while authorities responded to the former. Plugging a hundred-metre hole in a levee while waters rush through is a huge challenge for engineers.
Nevertheless, many Americans are blaming the man at the top. Mr Bush should have gone to the region sooner, his critics say. (He was expected to make a second trip on Monday.) Some Bush supporters worry that the botched relief effort could hurt the president at a time when his ratings are already low, thanks to the troubles of Iraq—though a Washington Post/ABC poll, conducted late on Friday, found that the nation was split down the middle, with 46% saying Mr Bush had handled the crisis well and 47% saying he had done badly.
Some blame Mr Bush on the grounds that some of his administration's longer-term policy decisions have made the response to the disaster more difficult. The war in Iraq, it has been noted, has depleted the number of available national guardsmen by a third or more in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama; many of those serving in Iraq are trained emergency personnel. Others allege that the war has squeezed the budget, causing a postponement last year of projects to improve the levees—though it is far from clear that these could have been completed in time to stop the flooding after Katrina.
Even if some failures can be attributed to the Bush administration, the most important reasons for Katrina’s deadliness may lie in decisions that predate the current president, from Jean Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville’s decision to found the city in its precarious location, in 1718, to the more recent “improvements” in the area’s maritime navigability that have damaged south-eastern Louisiana’s wetlands. For much of the 20th century the federal government tampered with the Mississippi, to help shipping and—ironically—prevent floods. In the process it destroyed large swathes of coastal marshland around New Orleans—something which suited property developers, but removed much of the city’s natural protection against flooding. Support may now grow for a multi-billion-dollar plan to restore the wetlands, though a similar project in Florida has proved difficult.
It is an uncomfortable fact that millions of Americans have made the decision to live in areas prone to this kind of disaster. Though Congress has authorised an immediate $10.5 billion relief package, Denny Hastert, the speaker of the House of Representatives, has expressed doubt that large dollops of money should be spent on reconstruction in a location as exposed as New Orleans (though he later backpedalled). But there remain important questions to be asked at both the local and national level about the failures that led to Katrina’s destruction and chaos. It has provided yet another reminder that decisions made without due regard for the consequences can prove painful indeed later on.
Monday, September 05, 2005
CLEVAH GRASSHOPPERS, THINK TO GET RICH QUICK FLIPPING PROPERTIES, THIS ANT WILL LAUGH AND BUY CHEAP LATER
Housing Slowdown Could Spell Trouble
WASHINGTON, AP Economics - The nation's red-hot housing market may finally be nearing its peak, meaning the end of double-digit annual percentage price gains for homeowners and potential trouble for more recent purchasers who stretched to buy.
That's the assessment of economists, who concede they have been forecasting a cooldown in housing for some time only to be confounded as sales and prices continued to boom.
Sales have certainly been sizzling this year, putting the country on track for a fifth straight year of record purchases of new and existing homes.
Home prices have been surging as well. The government reported last week that prices jumped by 13.4 percent in the April-June quarter this year, compared with the same period a year ago, the biggest increase in 25 years. That is more than double the average annual price gains of 6 percent recorded over the past three decades.
But scattered among the statistics are some signs of a slowdown. In July, sales of existing homes fell by 2.6 percent even though the nationwide median price rose to a record $218,000.
Homes in some areas are staying on the market longer before they sell and the Mortgage Bankers Association reports that its index of demand for home mortgages now stands 11 percent below a June peak.
And none other than
Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan recently said that "the housing boom will inevitably simmer down" with prices slowing and possibly even falling.
The issue of how much of a slowdown will occur and whether home prices will fall or just not rise at double-digit rates will depend to large extent on the course of interest rates in coming months.
"I think what we have in store is a slow deflating of the housing bubble, not a bursting of the bubble," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. "But if mortgage rates rise more sharply than I am expecting, then the downturn in housing could be more severe."
The devastation from Hurricane Katrina could turn out to help the housing industry, mainly through falling interest rates. Investors pushed rates lower this week in anticipation that Katrina and the resulting surge in energy prices will act as a drag on economic growth and could persuade the Federal Reserve to pause in its 14-month campaign to push rates higher. As a result, rates on 30-year mortgages dipped to 5.71 percent, down from a high this year of 6.04 percent set in late March.
David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, said rebuilding from Katrina's devastation probably will not have much impact on the overall housing market since residential building permits for all of Louisiana and Mississippi last year amounted to just 1.8 percent of the national total.
But analysts are forecasting that housing sales will begin to decline from record levels by the end of this year and into 2006. The slowing sales pace is expected to end the super-sized price gains many parts of the country have experienced.
Richard DeKaser, chief economist at National City Corp. in Cleveland, said he believes 53 metropolitan areas, representing 31 percent of the country's housing market, were "extremely overvalued and confront a high risk of a future price correction."
And what might that price correction look like? DeKaser said over the past 20 years, 64 cities have seen home price declines of 10 percent or more over a period of two years. But all of those declines occurred along with a weak overall economy, something not present now.
But if rising energy prices spread into more widespread inflation pressures and the Fed feels it needs to raise interest rates more quickly, then analysts said housing could be in for a rougher landing.
Those most vulnerable in such a situation would be homeowners who took advantage of the growing popularity of various types of new mortgage products such as interest-only loans. They allow buyers to pay only interest initially while charging a lower interest rate that remains fixed for a certain period, often the first three years of the loan.
The problem comes when the introductory period ends. Then holders of these loans are faced with a double-payment shock. The interest rate they must pay is likely to rise and they will have to make not only interest payments but also begin paying back the principal.
Homeowners with already stretched finances may find themselves unable to make the new monthly payments, forcing them either to sell their homes or default on their mortgages. Either development would dump more supply into a slowing market and thus further depress prices.
But many analysts don't believe that doomsday scenario will come into play to any significant extent unless the economy seriously weakens. They note that even with the growing popularity of interest-only loans and various other types of mortgages that feature low down payments, the number of loans going into delinquency has been falling.
Some see a slowdown in home sales as beneficial
"If the frenzied buying levels off, the market will become more balanced between supply and demand" and help to ease price pressures, said Lawrence Yun, senior economist at the National Association of Realtors.
"This will certainly not be like the stock market bust of 2000. We are just going from a rapid pace to a more healthy pace," he said.
___
With home prices in the stratosphere, many buyers have been forced into more exotic types of mortgages to be able to afford to buy a home. Here is some advice from housing experts on what people should consider in the current environment.
BUY OR NOT: Some people have hesitated to purchase a home, especially in the hottest sales areas, for fear they could buy at the top only to see home prices start to decline. Analysts say it is very hard to time the market. If you need to buy because you are being relocated and you plan to be in the new home for several years, the advice is to go ahead and buy. The chances are that even if home prices do fall for a year or two, they will begin rising and you will recoup your investment when you sell.
REFINANCE: For people who now have adjustable rate mortgages, the advice is to consider refinancing to a fixed-rate mortgage. Mortgage rates have been at the lowest levels in more than four decades for an extended period of time. The blow to the economy from Hurricane Katrina and surging energy prices may keep rates low for a while longer. But the expectation is that rates will eventually start rising again and could be above 7 percent by the end of 2006. Moving to a fixed rate would protect against seeing a sharp jump in a low introductory rate. If the adjustable rate mortgage is also an interest-only mortgage, there will be a second payment shock when the homeowner has to start paying interest and the principal of the loan.
INVESTORS: People who have been playing the hot real estate market by buying homes only to turn around and resell them at a profit should reconsider that approach. That strategy could prove dangerous if, as expected, home sales retreat from their current record highs and prices stop rising at double-digit rates.
OTHER IDEAS: People who find they are still priced out of a particular area might consider moving to a smaller house or farther out. For people 62 or older and in need of cash, they might consider taking out a reverse mortgage that would allow them to borrow against the equity in their home and never repay the loan as long as they live in the house.Monday, September 05, 2005
WE DO IT TO OURSELVES
Experts: Too Many People in Nature's Way
Associated Press - The dead and the desperate of New Orleans now join the farmers of Aceh and the fishermen of Trincomalee, villagers in Iran and the slum dwellers of Haiti in a world being dealt ever more punishing blows by natural disasters.
It's a world where Americans can learn from even the poorest nations, experts say, and where they should learn not to build future settlements like the drowned old metropolis on the Mississippi.
The levees in New Orleans inspired a false sense of security, says Dennis S. Miletti, a leading scholar on disaster prevention.
"We rely on technology and we end up thinking as human beings that we're totally safe, and we're not," said Miletti, of the University of Colorado. "The bottom line is we have a very unsafe planet."
By one critical measure, the impact on populations, statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe. More than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous two 10-year periods, U.N. officials reported at a conference on disaster prevention in January.
Those numbers don't include millions displaced by last December's tsunami, which killed an estimated 180,000 people as its monstrous waves swept over coastlines from Indonesia's Aceh province to Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, and beyond.
By another measure — property damage — 2004 was the costliest year on record for global insurers, who paid out more than $40 billion on natural disasters, reports German insurance giant Munich Re. Florida's quartet of 2004 hurricanes was the big factor.
But generally it's not that more "events" are happening, rather that more people are in the way, said Thomas Loster, a Munich Re expert. "More and more people are being hit," he said.
In the 1970s, only 11 percent of earthquakes affected human settlements, researchers at Belgium's University of Louvain report. That soared to 31 percent in 1993-2003, including a quake in 2003 that killed 26,000 people in Iran, whose population has doubled since the '70s.
The expanding U.S. population "has migrated to hazard-prone areas — to Florida, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, particularly barrier islands, to California," noted retired U.S. government seismologist Robert M. Hamilton, a disaster-prevention specialist. "Several decades ago we didn't have wall-to-wall houses down the coast as we do now."
The way America builds too often invites disasters, experts say — by draining Florida swampland and bulldozing California hillsides, for example, disrupting natural runoff and magnifying flood hazards.
"We're building our communities in ways that aren't compatible with the natural perils we have," Miletti said.
The more advanced the nations, the bigger the blow may be.
Terry Jeggle, a U.N. disaster-reduction planner, cites the New Orleans levee system — dependent on pumps that run on electricity produced by fuel that must be transported in. One failure will lead to another along that chain.
"Complex systems invite compounding of complexity in consequences, too," said the Geneva-based Jeggle.
Experts fear more is to come.
The scientific consensus expects global warming to intensify storms, floods, heat waves and drought. Climatologists are still researching whether climate change has already strengthened hurricanes, whose energy is drawn from warm ocean waters, or whether the Atlantic Basin and Gulf are witnessing only a cyclical upsurge in intense storms. Computer models of climate change in the decades to come point to more devastating Category 5 storms.
The prospect of more vulnerable populations on a more turbulent Earth has U.N. officials and other advocates pressuring governments to plan and prepare. They cite examples of poorer nations that in ways do a better job than the rich:
_No one was reported killed when Ivan struck Cuba in 2004, its worst hurricane in 50 years and a storm that, after weakening, killed 25 people in the United States. Cuba's warning-evacuation system is minutely planned, even down to neighborhood workers keeping updated charts on which residents need help during evacuations.
_Along Bangladesh's cyclone coast, 33,000 well-organized volunteers stand ready to shepherd neighbors to raised concrete shelters at the approach of one of the Bay of Bengal's vicious storms.
_In 2002, Jamaica conducted a full-scale evacuation rehearsal in a low-lying suburb of coastal Kingston, and fine-tuned plans afterward. When Ivan's 20-foot surge destroyed hundreds of homes two years later, only eight people died. Ordinary Jamaicans also are taught search-and-rescue methods and towns at risk have trained flood-alert teams.
Like many around the world, Barbara Carby, Jamaica's disaster coordinator, watched in disbelief as catastrophe unfolded on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
"We always have resource constraints," she said. "That's not a problem the U.S. has. But because they have the resources, they may not pay enough attention to preparedness and awareness, and to educating the public how to help themselves."Monday, September 05, 2005
HERE COMES THE RECESSION, GRASSHOPPERS. ARE YOU READY?
Katrina May Curb Economic Growth Into 2006
NEW YORK, AP Business - The physical and psychological damage caused by Hurricane Katrina is likely to reverberate across the global economy in ways that will curb growth well into 2006, economists say.
A spike in already-high energy costs in the United States and around the world tops the list of risks, especially since oil prices are unlikely to return to the levels of early 2004 when they were 50 percent lower than they are today, according to International Monetary Fund Managing Director Rodrigo de Rato.
Katrina shut down large portions of oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when worldwide energy output was already stretched thin. While the storm's impact was most acute in the United States, it also sent fuel costs higher around the globe, squeezing consumers in Europe and Asia and hurting everyone from truckers to fishermen to airlines.
The shock of higher gasoline prices and concerns about supply shortages appeared to cause a cutback in travel over the Labor Day weekend in the United States. Economists say a slump in consumer confidence is likely. "There's a psychological impact. Consumers aren't in a festive mood," said Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wachovia Securities in Charlotte, N.C.
The storm wiped away up to half a million jobs in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas. And its tab is almost certain to top $100 billion, with only about a quarter of that covered by insurance, according to an assessment by Risk Management Solutions of Newark, Calif.
The federal government has pledged billions of dollars of rebuilding funds, but it will take months for the basic recovery efforts to be completed before the money for reconstruction starts flowing. "This is such a different type of disaster than we're accustomed to dealing with," Vitner said.
The full extent of the damage to oil and natural gas infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico is not yet known, but it is expected to be weeks, if not longer, before output is back to normal. The same goes for the facilities that refine crude oil into gasoline, heating oil and jet fuel.
"It's quite likely that the impact of Katrina on energy production will end up dwarfing that of Ivan," said Antoine Halff, director of global energy at Eurasia Group in New York, referring to last year's Hurricane Ivan, which jolted global oil markets for months.
"We have an economy that has shown signs of slowing. With energy prices at extremely high levels — and now moving above those levels — this is kind of a double whammy," Halff said.
Unleaded gasoline now averages $2.86 a gallon nationwide, an increase of about 15 cents in less than a week, costing consumers an additional $57 million a day. That is still below the inflation-adjusted high of $3.11 a gallon reached 25 years ago, but it is getting close enough to become a significant threat to consumer spending in other areas, and not just in the United States.
In Katrina's aftermath, forecasts for U.S. economic growth in the fourth quarter have dropped from 3.5 percent on an annualized basis to 2.5 percent. And that is probably what gross domestic product will average for all of 2006, economists said.
Some local economies will no doubt benefit from the fact that New Orleans will be out of commission for months. Tourists who might have visited the Big Easy will go elsewhere, corporate conferences will be relocated and cities throughout the South will witness a tightening of their rental housing markets as evacuees from New Orleans reestablish their lives elsewhere.
But when winter arrives and the higher cost of home-heating strikes the Northeast and Midwest, consumer spending, particularly among lower income families, is expected to take a noticeable hit.
Michael P. Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers, said the U.S. retail sector will face its toughest Christmas since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The impact of higher energy prices is already hitting hard in Europe, where up to 60 percent of the retail price is made up of taxes.
The price of gasoline rose to the equivalent of $6.70 a gallon in Germany and hit a record high in Switzerland. Spaniards were paying more than $5 per gallon at the end of last week, up nearly 7 percent from a week earlier.
Eurasia Group's Halff noted that the impact soaring energy prices will have on household budgets will be even more significant in emerging economies around the globe as governments begin to roll back costly fuel subsidies.
Surging oil prices have already sparked an economic crisis in Indonesia. The nation's currency, the rupiah, fell to a four-year low against the U.S. dollar as ballooning fuel subsidies to keep prices affordable for the masses are bleeding the government's coffers.
Seeking to avoid a meltdown, the central bank hiked interest rates and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the nation on a televised address that he would have to cut subsidies at some point — in effect raising gasoline prices for consumers.
With the Chinese economy growing at a rate of 9.5 percent, no one is forecasting a dramatic slowdown there, but the impact from higher energy prices has already been felt in shrinking profit margins, regional shortages of gasoline and diesel, auto purchases and international travel, among other areas.
To offset higher oil prices in Thailand, the government has introduced an economic stimulus package and an array of energy-saving measures, including mandating that billboards can be illuminated for only three hours a day and requiring gas stations to close at night.
Thai fisherman have also felt the pinch. In recent months, more than 5,000 fishing boats, accounting for almost one-third of total fishing boats in southern Thailand, have gradually stopped operating as fuel costs ate up their profits, according to Prasant Silphiphat, president of the Fishermen's Association of Thailand.
Andy Xie, an economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong says that economic growth rates across Asia are down by a third to a half of last year, thanks mostly to higher oil costs. "Growth rates could decelerate by another 1 percentage point due to further rises in oil prices," he wrote in a recent report.Monday, September 05, 2005
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS ALERT STATUS "ORANGE" AGAIN? BE VERY AFRAID, OR JUST BE AFRAID?
Experts: Homeland Security Was Off Guard
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Homeland Security Department spent the past four years focused on averting the next terrorist attack and was unprepared to decisively respond to the overwhelming devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, former officials and experts say.
The agency, created after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was still struggling days after Katrina battered the Gulf Coast to coordinate federal rescue and relief efforts and communicate with emergency workers on the ground. The fractured federal response left critics questioning whether the department is prepared to deal with the aftermath of a terror attack.
"I can't tell you that we're lock, stock and ready to go," said former Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Adm. James Loy, who left the department earlier this year. He called the issue "a very, very legitimate question," and said the agency's front-burner issue has been preventing and preparing a response to terrorism.
"Because of the focus in the last four years, we would be better prepared for" terrorism, Loy said.
The devastation left in Katrina's wake stretches over 90,000 square miles — a potentially larger area than anything terrorists could effect with anything but the most lethal of weapons, Homeland Security officials said.
"I think we have to plan for both" terror attacks and natural disasters, Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff said. He said the big problem with Katrina was that a catastrophic storm was followed by an equally devastating breaching of New Orleans' levees, swamping the city.
"I think the problem is we had two events that have been hypothesized that occurred simultaneously," Chertoff said Saturday. "And I guess that does, you know, indicate that at some level with all of the planning and all of resources, if a truly catastrophic event, if an ultra-catastrophe occurs, there's going to be some harmful fallout."
In January, Homeland Security issued a national response plan combining disaster relief programs from at least 12 agencies to ensure streamlined assistance to state and local authorities. It also conducted several studies of New Orleans' vulnerability to hurricanes and other emergencies that would be worsened by its water-bound location and weak levees.
Even so, the department's response to Katrina faltered in areas that included reliable communications systems and the maintenance of law and order, said former Homeland Security intelligence official John Rollins.
"Given three days notice as to the general location of landfall and the projected level of impact, I thought we would have been better prepared for this situation," Rollins said. "We certainly would not have had the luxury of knowledge of timing and location were it a terrorist attack on the levees rather than the impact from Katrina."
Already, some fingers are pointing at bureaucratic problems that may have cluttered the response, including questions about how well the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its director, Michael Brown, have functioned as a branch of Homeland Security.
Well before the hurricane, Brown privately expressed frustration with his Homeland Security superiors over what he considered a lack of attention to natural disaster planning, including strategies for a major hurricane in New Orleans.
While Brown and his management team believed they understood the need to focus on terrorism, FEMA leaders felt natural disaster strategies and spending were often given short shrift by Homeland Security brass.
"We were taking an agency that was maybe 1 percent dealing with homeland security and 99 percent disaster, and folding it into something where it could lose focus and resources," said Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. "And that is what's happened."
Despite the sheer magnitude of the disaster, homeland security expert Daniel Prieto said the federal government has to be prepared to pick up the slack when the private sector and state and local officials can't.
"The federal government is the protector of last resort. Dispassionately, that is where responsibility lies," said Prieto, research director for the homeland security partnership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
"I think this really points out how far we have to go, even after 9/11, even though there was knowledge of this storm coming," Prieto said.
But William Parrish, who formerly held a number of Homeland Security senior positions, said now is not the time to point fingers.
"Every time we have a disaster we have to look at it and see what we can learn from it. This one is going to be studied and studied and studied," said Parrish, now a professor of homeland security and emergency planning at Virginia Commonwealth University.Monday, September 05, 2005
I REMEMBER DOING THE SAME THING AFTER HUGO DESTROYED ST. CROIX
Round-the-clock armed shifts. One warning only, if you jump the fence I kill you, you have no business here, move on now. No real sleep, just tension and adrenaline. I know what is happening to these people....
Residents Guard Neighborhoods From Looters
NEW ORLEANS, AP - When night falls, Charlie Hackett climbs the steps to his boarded-up window, takes down the plywood, grabs his 12-gauge shotgun and waits. He is waiting for looters and troublemakers, for anyone thinking his neighborhood has been abandoned like so many others across the city. Two doors down, John Carolan is doing the same on his screened-in porch, pistol by his side. They are not about to give up their homes to the lawlessness that has engulfed New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
"We kind of together decided we would defend what we have here and we would stay up and defend the neighborhood," says Hackett, an Army veteran with a snow-white beard and a business installing custom kitchens.
"I don't want to kill anybody," he says, "but I'd sure like to scare 'em."
With generators giving them power, food to last for weeks and several guns each for protection, the men are two of a scattered community holed up across the residential streets of the city's Garden District, a lush neighborhood with many antebellum mansions.
The streets, where towering live oaks once offered cool shade, are now often impassable because of huge fallen branches and downed power lines. Lovely porches framed in wrought iron lay smashed. Many of the homes appear only slightly damaged, or even untouched.
But the neighborhoods are stunningly empty, and so quiet that they sound like a forest.
It is a short drive but a world away from the city's downtown, where tens of thousands of hungry, thirsty and increasingly angry people waited in misery at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center before evacuations finally began.
Here, Carolan starts his nightly watch by lighting a big fire in his barbecue pit. Hackett turns his lights on and jams a 15-foot wooden brace against the front door so no one can break through.
The night is "black, black, black," Hackett says. "It reminds me of when I was in Vietnam, it reminds me of Dac To."
They have not had a problem staying awake. Each night there are gunshots in the distance, sometimes people walking through, an occasional car driving by.
"Last night I had to draw down on some people," Carolan says. A car with what sounded like a crowd of drunken, partying kids came through and stopped.
"I had to come out with a flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other," he says, crossing his arms like an X. "I said: `Who are you? Do you live here? What are you doing here?' They said, `We're leaving.'"
Hackett, who in his 50s, lives alone, with his two cats and a bunch of neighbor's pets that he is caring for. Carolan, 46, is keeping watch with his brother, wife, son, and 3-year-old granddaughter.
In the first few days, they were especially fearful. Looters smashed windows and ransacked a discount store and a drugstore a few streets over. Three men came to Carolan's house asking about his generator and brandished a machete. He showed them his gun and they left.
"It was pandemonium for a couple of nights. We just felt that when they got done with the stores, they'd come to the homes," Hackett says. "When it's not easy pickings, they'll go somewhere else."
Things have gotten quieter, the men say, but not quiet.
"What do you say, I'm a survivor," John Carolan says with a laugh, thinking of the reality TV show. "Hey, give me the million bucks now."
How long can Carolan and the others hold out?
Hackett has enough gas and food for a month. Carolan says they have weeks' worth of food and bug repellent, and he will siphon gas from left-behind cars to keep his electricity going.
"Everything we have is in our homes. With the lawlessness in this town, are you going to walk away from everything you built?" Carolan says. "A lot of people think we're stupid. They say, `Why did you stay?' I say, `Why didn't you stay?'"Monday, September 05, 2005
QUO BONO KATRINA
Who profited most in the week after Katrina? Oil Companies and other BushCo buddies, that's who!
Blows your mind, don't it? But then, think about it - BushCo signed a huge energy bill with billions in oil company subsidies, and he released the people's strategic oil reserves to those same companies so they would not suffer needles profit losses. What a great guy, that GW....
Monday, September 05, 2005
WHY DIDN'T THOSE STUPID PEOPLE JUST LEAVE? ASKS MY NEIGHBOR WHILE GASSING UP HIS LEXUS SUV
The Survivors
Living Paycheck to Paycheck Made Leaving Impossible
By Wil Haygood, Washington Post
Sunday, September 4, 2005; Page A33
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 -- To those who wonder why so many stayed behind when push came to water's mighty shove here, those who were trapped have a simple explanation: Their nickels and dimes and dollar bills simply didn't add up to stage a quick evacuation mission.
"Me and my wife, we were living paycheck to paycheck, like most everybody else in New Orleans," Eric Dunbar, 54, said Saturday.
He was standing on wobbly, thin legs in the bowels of the semi-darkened Louis Armstrong Airport, where he had been delivered with many others after having been plucked by rescuers from a roadway.
He offered a mini-tutorial in the economic reality of his life.
"I don't own a car. Me and my wife, we travel by bus, public transportation. The most money I ever have on me is $400. And that goes to pay the rent. And that $400 is between me and my wife." Her name is Dorth Dunbar; she was trying to get some rest after days of peril.
Dunbar estimated his annual income to be about $20,000, which comes from doing graphic design work when he can get it. Before the storm, when he and his wife estimated how much money they needed to flee the city, he was saddened by the reality that he could not come up with anywhere near the several thousand dollars he might need for a rental car and airfare.
"If I took my wife out to dinner, it was once a month," he said, sounding as if even those modest good times had come to an abrupt end. "We'd go to Piccadilly's. Never any movies. Really, it's a simple life. I go to work, come home, talk to my wife, go to bed, then back to work again. A basic existence."
He was rolling two quarters around in his hand, short 50 cents to make a long-distance call to his son. As his eyes began to water, he repeated himself: "Just a basic existence."
The two smooth-faced boys on the floor, sitting on their backpacks, looked more energetic than most. Corey Wise, 17, and Jermaine Wise, 18, were once residents of New Orleans's 17th Ward.
"Our family was already in a financially depressive situation before the hurricane," Jermaine said.
He calculated where the family -- their mother, Marie, is divorced -- stood financially before the wind, water and destruction.
"We had $300 between us," he said, nodding toward his brother. "Mom had about $225 worth of savings. That was our emergency savings for anything. And that was a blessing."
Their home was in a New Orleans neighborhood called Holly Grove.
"A lot of drugs and violence in our neighborhood," Corey said.
"It's hard to just get up and go when you don't have anything," Jermaine said. "Besides, everything we know is in New Orleans."
They went on their way in tandem in search of their mother, somewhere upstairs in the terminal.
A 47-year-old grandmother was rocking a grandchild.
"These people look at us and wonder why we stayed behind," said Carmita Stephens. "Well, would they leave their grandparents and children behind? Look around and say, 'See you later'?" She gave a roll of the eyes behind the raised voice.
"We had one vehicle. A truck. I wanted my family to be together. They all couldn't fit in the truck. We had to decide on leaving family members -- or staying."
She shifted the grandchild in her arms. "I'm living paycheck to paycheck. My mother passed away this year. I was helping take care of her. My real job was as a private-duty caregiver. I had one patient. He died two weeks after my mother passed, on May 6." She calculated that the family made a little more than $2,500 a month -- but that included help from her son Jamel's job. "He's missing now," she added. "So is Eric Stephens, my husband."
They were soon to be Texas-bound. "And I don't even like Texas," she said.
All morning, they kept arriving, walking as if through a morbid dream.
"I got $3.00 on me now," said John West, 39, formerly a resident of the Sixth Ward here. "I'm serious."
He said he has never had a savings account in his life. "I make $340 a month," he said. "I stay with my mother. I give her about $150 of that. His income is from a disability check. His hands got badly burned in a 1993 fire. "I lost a little nephew, but I saved two kids," he said.
West said he has never owned a credit card -- not even before the fire. He said he figures $500 was the most money he could have come up with on such short notice, with the hurricane bearing down.
"And that would have come from my daddy. But he's always been skeptical about giving me any money. And his people got money! He could have given me $1,000, and it wouldn't have hurt him."
So he did not even ask, instead lowering his economic aim by simply wishing he could get his $340 monthly check.
"My mother and father don't even know if I'm alive or dead."
There were a few lucky souls yesterday sitting at the Shoney's restaurant on State Highway 30 in Gonzales. Karen Lavalais, 37, and a friend, Patricia Jones, 39, and various relatives.
"I only work part time at a janitorial service," Jones said. "I make $6.00 an hour. If I didn't have my mama, I'd be one of those victims still trapped in New Orleans."
She works 17 hours a week.
"I had $80 when I got out of New Orleans," Jones said. "And I wouldn't have had that if payday hadn't been that Friday. Eighty dollars with two children."
Lavalais, who formerly lived in the 10th Ward, said that when the hurricane struck she had a total of $94 in the bank, which constituted her life savings.
"And I couldn't even get to that," she said. "So thank goodness I had some gas in my car."Sunday, September 04, 2005
FEDS FUCKED UP BIGTIME, SEZ PRO-BUSH MIAMI NEWSPAPER
Yeah, guys, better speak up now - the season is not even at peak yet, and y'all are, as always, right in the middle of Hurricane Alley...
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Failure compounded by dual disasters
OUR OPINION: RELIEF RESPONSE TO KATRINA HAS BEEN UNACCEPTABLE
MIAMI HERALD - The hurricane-wracked Gulf Coast contains two distinct disaster areas: flooded New Orleans in Louisiana and the wind-shattered Mississippi coastline and interior. Unfortunately, as President Bush rightly said Friday, results of early relief response to both ``are not acceptable.''
There have been failures at every level of government to react to these twin disasters, whose victims all need life-sustaining supplies and shelter. To be fair, the enormous breadth of this dual catastrophe has complicated and hampered relief work. Still, the ultimate responsibility for the deplorable, sometimes fatal conditions on the Gulf Coast this week lies mostly with the federal government. It could have done much more, much quicker -- but it didn't.
Under-prepared officials
That is not to let state and local officials off the hook. By now everyone who has been glued to the television knows that the inundation of New Orleans was a disaster that had been predicted on computer models and in emergency practice drills for decades. Yet New Orleans and Louisiana officials were still under-prepared. While the city offered free transport out of the area to poor residents once the evacuation order became mandatory Sunday, it isn't likely that a lot of those who stayed understood what could happen if a 15-foot storm surge hit -- or if the lake breeched the levees. But officials knew; they were in those practice drills.
Likewise, Congresses past and present and White House administrations of both parties have failed to deliver the funding needed to strengthen the levees against storms bigger than Category 3 and build anti-flooding structures to keep Lake Pontchartrain from overflowing into the city. The Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the levees, has never received full funding from Congress or the White House to meet its mandate to protect New Orleans.
As for the abysmal lack of staging, planning and fast response after Hurricane Katrina to the entire stricken region, look to the post-9/11 change of federal focus from disaster preparedness to homeland security. The U.S. government sends more than $3 billion to states annually for anti-terrorism but a mere $180 million for disaster efforts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, now under the Department of Homeland Security, is a shadow of what it was after successfully retooling following Hurricane Andrew.
Do a better job
The federal government finally snapped to and is pouring resources into the region. Small comfort to those who managed to survive New Orleans' descent into hell or to Mississippians who have yet to see a relief worker. If 9/11 forever changed Americans' collective sense of the nation's invincibility, surely the scenes from the Gulf Coast this week have forever changed our belief that we are immune to Third World-type disasters. Our government must do better.Sunday, September 04, 2005
NOT IN *OUR* BACKYARD
People walk near a helicopter after being rescued in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans Sept. 2.
"They've got to open the base"
Louisiana black leaders, along with Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson, want to take Katrina victims to a shuttered Air Force base instead of shelters. And I'm going with them.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Stephen Elliott, Salon Magazine
Sept. 3, 2005 | BATON ROUGE, La. -- I got on a bus with California Rep. Maxine Waters Saturday afternoon, not sure where we were going, just knowing we were headed to New Orleans to pick up Hurricane Katrina victims. Even as television news is showing pictures of people being rescued by military helicopters and chartered buses, local and national black leaders are seething at the mismanaged evacuation, as well as the haphazard way even the rescued people are being handled. So they've come up with their own plan: to load the remaining residents on buses they've chartered and bring them to England Air Force Base, a shuttered military installation in Alexandria, La.
"My soul wouldn't let me sit and watch this on TV," says Waters, who represents South Central Los Angeles. "I'm just shocked that people have been living for five days, and dying, on the streets of this country. So I came down here, and my friend Cleo Fields came up with this wonderful possibility."
That wonderful possibility, hatched by state Sen. Cleo Fields and the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, is to house the displaced residents at the Air Force base instead of shelters and sports stadiums like the Astrodome, many of which are full anyway. They haven't gotten permission to do that, but that's not stopping them. The black leaders say racism is behind both the late response to the emergency and the dispersal of rescued residents far away from New Orleans.
This morning I saw City Council President Oliver Thomas near tears at the Federal Emergency Management Agency office. He'd just heard the story of a bus of 200 refugees that had been turned away the night before, because all of the city's shelters were full. "So what if the shelters are full?" Thomas asked. "What do you mean full?"
Thomas complained that many people had been turned against New Orleans refugees because of media emphasizing stories of looting and violence, and he asked why they couldn't be housed closer to home. "Texas is being neighborly, while Louisiana is rejecting people. Why do we have to send our people to Texas?"
"The people in Jefferson Parish," Thomas continued, referring to a mostly affluent and white area to the northwest of New Orleans, "have been very clear; they don't want them here." Jefferson and other neighboring parishes were also hit hard by Katrina, and many have no electricity and little or no water pressure. But while Thomas acknowledged that Jefferson had its own problems, "they wouldn't even allow their parish to be used as a staging area."
Thomas' complaint is part of why the Legislative Black Caucus, headed by Fields and state Rep. Cedric Richmond, announced they would bring three buses to pick up those still stranded in New Orleans. The base has not been opened to admit people, but Fields says, "it's better than what they have now. People were airlifted from their homes four days ago and left on the highway. They've got to open the base to these people. It's ridiculous in America that people are sitting on a highway for four days without food and water." Fields reportedly appealed to federal officials to open the base Friday but didn't get an answer. The Rev. Jesse Jackson will also reportedly accompany the bus caravan to England Air Force Base.
I decided to get on one of the buses headed for New Orleans, even though our exact destination wasn't certain. As we left there were reports that people were still stranded along Highway 10, and I was told the intention was to go get them. But Waters was under the impression we were headed for the New Orleans convention center. After we'd driven a few miles we got word that both the highway encampment and the convention center had been evacuated, and it was decided that we'd head to the airport, where thousands of people had been moved from downtown.
"I hope to get people on this bus, and also to see for myself where people are being sent," says Waters, who's the ranking member of the subcommittee on housing of the House Financial Services Committee. "This is Labor Day weekend and it's normally time for a little R&R, but my conscience would not allow that." The feisty Waters almost sounded like she was enjoying herself, though.
But nobody could enjoy themselves once we got to the airport. We were not prepared for what we found. Though it has been touted as a solution to the squalor of the convention center and the Superdome, Louis Armstrong International Airport is on the way to re-creating it. Already there's a huge pile of stinking garbage, and thousands of people outside who can't get in. They're being promised that planes and buses will evacuate them yet again, but they're still waiting. There's no violence because police and soldiers are everywhere, but there's filth and despair.
Our buses filled up quickly, and most people aren't even asking where we're headed.Sunday, September 04, 2005
WE'RE MAD AS HELL AND WE'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE
The Bursting Point
By DAVID BROOKS, New York Times
As Ross Douthat observed on his blog, The American Scene, Katrina was the anti-9/11.
On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.
Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.
The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.
And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.
Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.
Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.
Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.
The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.
It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.
As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.
"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick Jagger sang in 1978.
Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had "been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away."
Americans in 2005 are not quite in that bad a shape, since the fundamental realities of everyday life are good. The economy and the moral culture are strong. But there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case after case there has been a failure of administration, of sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.
Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.
We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.Sunday, September 04, 2005
AN ADMINISTRATION WITH ITS HEAD FIRMLY LODGED IN ITS RECTUM
Falluja Floods the Superdome
By Frank Rich, New York Times
AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.
A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.
In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.
THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.
On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.
The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have.Sunday, September 04, 2005
"THIS COULD NOT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN", BLEATS 'HOMELAND' SECURITY CZAR CHERTOFF
Destroying FEMA
By Eric Holdeman
Tuesday, August 30, 2005; Page A17
SEATTLE, Washington Post -- In the days to come, as the nation and the people along the Gulf Coast work to cope with the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will be reminded anew, how important it is to have a federal agency capable of dealing with natural catastrophes of this sort. This is an immense human tragedy, one that will work hardship on millions of people. It is beyond the capabilities of state and local government to deal with. It requires a national response.
Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why, at this moment, the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security.
Apparently homeland security now consists almost entirely of protection against terrorist acts. How else to explain why the Federal Emergency Management Agency will no longer be responsible for disaster preparedness? Given our country's long record of natural disasters, how much sense does this make?
What follows is an obituary for what was once considered the preeminent example of a federal agency doing good for the American public in times of trouble, such as the present.
FEMA was born in 1979, the offspring of a number of federal agencies that had been functioning in an independent and uncoordinated manner to protect the country against natural disasters and nuclear holocaust. In its early years FEMA grew and matured, with formal programs being developed to respond to large-scale disasters and with extensive planning for what is called "continuity of government."
The creation of the federal agency encouraged states, counties and cities to convert from their civil defense organizations and also to establish emergency management agencies to do the requisite planning for disasters. Over time, a philosophy of "all-hazards disaster preparedness" was developed that sought to conserve resources by producing single plans that were applicable to many types of events.
But it was Hurricane Andrew, which hit Florida in 1992, that really energized FEMA. The year after that catastrophic storm, President Bill Clinton appointed James Lee Witt to be director of the agency. Witt was the first professional emergency manager to run the agency. Showing a serious regard for the cost of natural disasters in both economic impact and lives lost or disrupted, Witt reoriented FEMA from civil defense preparations to a focus on natural disaster preparedness and disaster mitigation. In an effort to reduce the repeated loss of property and lives every time a disaster struck, he started a disaster mitigation effort called "Project Impact." FEMA was elevated to a Cabinet-level agency, in recognition of its important responsibilities coordinating efforts across departmental and governmental lines.
Witt fought for federal funding to support the new program. At its height, only $20 million was allocated to the national effort, but it worked wonders. One of the best examples of the impact the program had here in the central Puget Sound area and in western Washington state was in protecting people at the time of the Nisqually earthquake on Feb. 28, 2001. Homes had been retrofitted for earthquakes and schools were protected from high-impact structural hazards. Those involved with Project Impact thought it ironic that the day of that quake was also the day that the then-new president chose to announce that Project Impact would be discontinued.
Indeed, the advent of the Bush administration in January 2001 signaled the beginning of the end for FEMA. The newly appointed leadership of the agency showed little interest in its work or in the missions pursued by the departed Witt. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Soon FEMA was being absorbed into the "homeland security borg."
This year it was announced that FEMA is to "officially" lose the disaster preparedness function that it has had since its creation. The move is a death blow to an agency that was already on life support. In fact, FEMA employees have been directed not to become involved in disaster preparedness functions, since a new directorate (yet to be established) will have that mission.
FEMA will be survived by state and local emergency management offices, which are confused about how they fit into the national picture. That's because the focus of the national effort remains terrorism, even if the Department of Homeland Security still talks about "all-hazards preparedness." Those of us in the business of dealing with emergencies find ourselves with no national leadership and no mentors. We are being forced to fend for ourselves, making do with the "homeland security" mission. Our "all-hazards" approaches have been decimated by the administration's preoccupation with terrorism.
To be sure, America may well be hit by another major terrorist attack, and we must be prepared for such an event. But I can guarantee you that hurricanes like the one that ripped into Louisiana and Mississippi yesterday, along with tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, windstorms, mudslides, power outages, fires and perhaps a pandemic flu will have to be dealt with on a weekly and daily basis throughout this country. They are coming for sure, sooner or later, even as we are, to an unconscionable degree, weakening our ability to respond to them.
The writer is director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.Sunday, September 04, 2005
FECKLESS AND SELFCENTERED LEADERSHIP
American Caesar
by Rosa Brooks, Los Angeles Times
NERO FIDDLED while Rome burned.
President Bush, who's not big on the classics, probably wasn't thinking about this when he mugged for the cameras Tuesday, playing a guitar presented to him by country singer Mark Wills.
But with the photo now Exhibit A for many liberal bloggers, he may find the comparison hard to shake.
True, while Bush enjoyed his vacation and strummed his new guitar, a great city was being devastated by water rather than fire.
And unlike the Emperor Nero, who was accused by the historian Suetonius of having deliberately started the fire that destroyed much of Rome in AD 64, no one is accusing President Bush of planning Hurricane Katrina.
But the Bush administration deserves substantial blame for the scale of the catastrophe in New Orleans.
An excellent article this week by Will Bunch in Editor & Publisher points out that it was the cost of the Iraq war that led the Bush administration to defund efforts to shore up the vulnerable city's levees.
After flooding in 1995 killed six people in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers started work on a massive civil engineering project designed to strengthen the region's levees and improve the pumping system that regulates water levels.
The work got off to a good start, but in 2003 federal funding started to run dry, leaving many projects — including a planned effort to strengthen the banks of Lake Pontchartrain — on the drawing board.
As early as 2004, the New Orleans Times-Picayune began to report that local officials and Army Corps of Engineers representatives attributed the funding cuts to the rising cost of the war in Iraq.
Facing record deficits, the Bush administration cut costs — and cut corners — by including in its 2005 budget only about a sixth of the flood-prevention funds requested by the Louisiana congressional delegation.
The war in Iraq also has made recovery from Katrina slower and more challenging. The Army National Guard units normally available for domestic disaster relief found rapid emergency response unusually difficult since so many of their personnel are deployed in Iraq. Although more units were dispatched later in the week, the manpower shortage was painfully evident during the crucial first hours.
The Iraq war is not the only reason for insisting that the Bush administration deserves some blame for the magnitude of the still-unfolding catastrophe.
After 9/11, the president promised that the nation would never again be so unprepared in the face of disaster. The Department of Homeland Security was created with a view to ensuring that every American city had adequate emergency plans in place for the kind of large-scale crisis that could accompany either a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.
It was an empty promise.
Four years after 9/11, the fiasco in New Orleans underscores our nation's ongoing inability to cope with serious threats.
Take public health, for example: Hurricane preparation plans — supposedly prepared with the involvement and approval of Homeland Security officials — were grossly inadequate for ensuring a continued supply of medication to the sick and for the evacuation of the ill and disabled, for cleaning up, ensuring safe drinking water or preventing the spread of disease.
With floodwaters, broken sewage pipes, damaged petrochemical pipelines and floating corpses all over the city, no one seemed to have a clear plan.
If a terrorist's bomb, rather than a hurricane, had destroyed a levee around Lake Pontchartrain, no one would hesitate to condemn the administration for its lackluster emergency planning and response.
And federal officials had more than a week's warning that a hurricane was on track for New Orleans — far more time than they'd likely have of a terrorist attack on critical infrastructure.
Not everything can be blamed on the Bush administration, of course, but for millions of Americans, the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is likely to stand as an indictment of Bush's false economies, empty promises and foolish priorities.
Consider Louisiana's wetlands, to take just one example. Policies associated with the administration exacerbated the geographical and ecological conditions for severe flooding. Over the decades, oil and gas company actions played a significant role in destroying the wetlands. Other factors also contributed, including residential development and, ironically, the overbuilding of some of the region's levees. But the "man-made" aspects of the disaster highlight the folly of the policies of unlimited development and environmental despoliation that the administration has so consistently embraced.
Two thousand years after his death, Nero's famous fiddling remains an allegory about feckless and selfcentered leadership in times of crisis.
Bush's guitar-playing antics in the face of the New Orleans devastation may doom him to a similar fate.Sunday, September 04, 2005
POLITICAL CARTOONS
Sunday, September 04, 2005
HOME-FUCKING-LAND SECURITY, DUDE!
Is America *finally* having their "went to bed with a 10, woke up with a 2" moment? Are we FINALLY gonna kick the neocons out of power and take our country back?
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Compounding the tragedy
Seattle Times - The Bush administration came close to a failure of leadership, communication and organization in its response to Hurricane Katrina. The government was too slow in helping thousands of people left stranded, hungry and dying — the sick, elderly and poor.
A measure of any government is how it responds in a crisis. When the richest nation on Earth cannot get water and food to stricken citizens for three or four days — our citizens, our people — something is wrong. New Orleans' mayor grew so weary of waiting for federal help that he issued a "desperate SOS" for aid. President Bush conceded results have been unacceptable. One New Orleans emergency official called the federal response a national disgrace, and it is.
State and local officials bear equal responsibility for sluggish delivery of services, but the enormity of the tragedy quickly bumped Katrina to a national event.
The hurricane could be a political paradigm-changing event. Red and blue America have no quarrel over the moral failure of leaving people in hospitals lacking electricity and in fetid evacuation centers without food and water.
Even Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said ominously, ... "If we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?"
From the day Bush sent troops to Iraq, he exposed himself to a comparison between his spending and attention to foreign affairs and the care and protection of our own citizens. The country has spent more than $200 billion on a war a majority of Americans no longer support.
Then, when our own citizens clamor for assistance, the response is initially disorganized. Relief workers dispatched to numerous natural disasters said they had never seen an event where food and water were flown in so slowly to key locations.
It took three days to get National Guard troops into key positions, leaving marauding hordes in New Orleans to loot and shoot. Those engaging in lawlessness displayed the worst of human nature. Their crimes are without explanation or defense.
Bush and Congress consistently cut spending on levees in the Gulf. The New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper has been pressing for years for money to shore up levees protecting the city.
By week's end, food, water and troops were arriving. For many people who had suffered so much, it was too late.
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OTHER HEADLINES:
Criticism of Bush mounts as more than 10,000 feared dead
Bush sends marines as flood fury grows
Bush panics and sends in the marines
Bush Admits Fault on Hurricane Response
Bush gears up but too late for New Orleans
Bush counters criticism with more hurricane aid
Sunday, September 04, 2005
NOT FOOLING THE REST OF THE WORLD, EITHER
Katrina takes a toll on Bush
DH News Service, Washington: Hurricane Katrina destroyed the lives and livelihood of thousands of poor Americans and has made President Bush vulnerable.
The natural disaster that wiped out a coastal city and was compared by a few Americans to “Hiroshima”, is taking a political toll on President George Bush whose response to the tragedy was neither prompt nor efficient.
The leader’s belated visit to the hurricane-stricken area materialised but the photo opportunities, the finely-tuned, at times, contradictory statements, and the show of sympathy did not dampen the fury of his critics and the flood-victims.
The Bush administration is now fighting on two fronts, trying to tackle a big humanitarian crisis while stemming the rising tide of criticism of its failure to take preventive action and to provide adequate rescue and relief services.
The President is having to defend even more the deployment of resources and manpower to Iraq. He says there are enough troops and money to provide relief at home and to fight the war abroad.
Mr Bush said many right things during his tour of the devastated cities but he also kept adjusting and readjusting his formulations while trying to sympathise with the victims, promising federal aid and expressing optimism about the future.
At one place, he said the response of the emergency management agencies was satisfactory but the results were not. Earlier, he said the situation was “unacceptable”.
The compulsion of having to say things to the TV cameras even on such tragic occasions inevitably means mouthing some meaningless statements.
The President’s holiday turned out to be badly timed. Vice-President Dick Cheney too was on a holiday. Someone reported seeing Secretary of State Condoleezza allegedly buying an expensive pair of shoes in New York. Even after Katrina struck, the President kept one of his political fund-raising appointments.
The mainstream media is generally respectful towards the President but even the mouthpiece of the Republican administration, The Washington Times, sounded a critical note.
As criticism mounted, President Bush embarked on a tour of the affected area, some five days after the event. The President shook hands and kissed some of the victims in the affected areas of the Mississippi Gulf coast and in Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was wheeled out for a press conference.
She is not involved in the rescue and relief operations which come under the department of Homeland Security but the administration sorely needed to project an Afro-American leader.
Earlier during the day, the Congressional Black Caucus met to highlight the inadequacy of the relief efforts. The tragedy has awakened America’s racial demons because blacks have been stricken disproportionately. They dominated the Ground Zero of New Orleans.
Extreme poverty made black Americans more vulnerable to the natural disaster that resourceful whites could escape from in time. The victims got demonised in other eyes as incidents of looting were played up by the media.
Neither the political friends of Mr Bush nor his political foes have commended the official response to the tragedy about which there were several advance warnings.
No one says that the Bush administration caused the hurricane but many critics have traced the problem of flooding to the Bush administration’s policies related to environment, cost-cutting for flood-control schemes and emergency services, and diversion of resources to the Iraq war and tax relief to the rich.
The fact that the hurricane struck while Mr Bush was having his long and controversial holiday did not help. When he visited the storm-stricken area, it had witnessed a chaotic exodus. A vast lake of flood water, human waste, snakes and toxic chemicals had drowned an urban settlement.
The poor could not be evacuated. The survivors kept dying in the absence of food, water and medical centres in the unmanaged make-shift shelters.
The sound bytes coming from the affected areas were about the incapacity of the world’s sole superpower to rush aid to its people or even to rescue them. There were ironic references to Baghdad and even to the famous “Berlin airlift”. The desperate black Mayor of New Orleans kept apologising while using unprintable words about the absence of federal help.
In Washington, the graphic coverage of the dead and the dying prompted the lawmakers to approve 10.5 billion dollars in relief for the Hurricane Katrina victims.
President Bush had responded a few hours late even to the September 11 tragedy. However, he more than made up by providing what was seen as a resolute leadership in what he turned into a “war” against terrorism.
Experts doubt whether his delayed response to this natural disaster will have such a transformational impact.
In the case of September 11, there was a foreign demon to be fought and to be united against. Nature can not be cast in the mould of Osama bin Laden. That tragedy united the nation. The hurricane and the disproportionate suffering of black Americans and the conduct of the poor have only divided the nation.
This crisis is expected to take a toll of thousands of lives. Losses are estimated at 100 billion dollars. The city of New Orleans can not be drained for weeks. It will be easier to build a new skyscraper on the site in New York where the World Trade Centre stood till very early morning on September 11.
The future of New Orleans remains to be debated. Some say it should be abandoned. For months the after-effects of the storm will be felt by the victims who remain without homes or fall prey to infectious diseases.
As if all that was not bad enough, President Bush is having to confront this crisis at a time when his popularity ratings are falling, the Iraq war is not going well, violence is resurfacing in Afghanistan,and the domestic economic scene and the surge in petrol prices are fuelling anxiety.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
GWB LOSING TRACTION WITH HIS HOMEYS
This is an editorial from the most respected Republican mouthpiece/propaganda machine, the Washington Times. Notice they fret about him losing his ability to 'be seen as leading'. If GWB can't even fool the homeys no more, he's in deep kimchee:
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The Washington Times - www.washingtontimes.com
Time to crack heads
Published September 2, 2005 - Troops are finally moving into New Orleans in realistic numbers, and it's past time. What took the government so long? The thin veneer separating civilization and chaos, which we earlier worried might collapse in the absence of swift action, has collapsed.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has suspended his police department's search-and-rescue operations to struggle with looters. Health-care centers remain under siege. The evacuation of thousands of refugees from the squalor and stink of the Superdome, inexcusably delayed, was delayed further when someone fired on a military helicopter. A National Guardsman was shot outside the arena. A Mississippi man murdered his own sister over a bag of ice. Rotting bodies float free above submerged streets and crying children haven't eaten in days. Their parents plead from rooftops for rescue, and survivors of the flood line the freeways by the thousands, stumbling in the sweltering heat with no food, no water and no place to go. If this is not hell, it is close to it.
This horror will not subside with the flood. The government must treat the battlefield of Katrina as it would any other field of engagement: Protect and provide for the innocent and eliminate the enemy, and do it now, before we lose New Orleans. Send the 40,000 troops Gov. Kathleen Blanco has requested. If looters fire on the troops, the troops should answer with suppressing fire. If the United States can project power anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, it can defend New Orleans and the coast of Mississippi.
We expected to see, many hours ago, the president we saw standing atop the ruin of the World Trade Center, rallying a dazed country to action. We're pleased he finally caught a ride home from his vacation, but he risks losing the one trait his critics have never dented: His ability to lead, and be seen leading.
He returns to the scene of the horror today, and that's all to the good. His presence will rally broken spirits. But he must crack heads, if bureaucratic heads need cracking, to get the food, water and medicine to the people crying for help in New Orleans and on the Mississippi coast. The list of things he has promised is a good list, but there is no time to dally, whether by land, sea or air. We should have delivered them yesterday. Americans are dying.