More on the Katrina Aftermath
Some of the wilder TV moments I’ve seen in the past few days:
- Geraldo Rivera making a young baby cry by taking it from its mother and holding it up to the camera, then bawling himself as he hectored Sean Hannity on Fox. (Crooks and Liars has video.)
- Bush, touring the devastated region on Friday, picking the worst possible time to do his smirk-and-chuckle act. Definitely missed a chance to deliver the bullhorn-from-Ground-Zero moment there. (Commentary by Kevin Drum and Jeffrey Dubner.)
- Various other TV journalists (like Anderson Cooper) snapping at their handlers back in the studio, or at politicians trying to put a happy face on the disaster-relief efforts. See CNN’s very interesting roundup of the discrepencies between official and on-the-ground versions of the disaster: The big disconnect on New Orleans.
The usual suspects are attacking Bush, and the usual suspects are defending him, and I’m not terribly impressed with the more knee-jerk reactions on either side. Digging into the meat of the story, though, there do seem to be some pretty clear connections between the inadequacy of the federal response and Bush’s history with FEMA.
First, let’s dismiss this early talking point of Bush’s (since abandoned, as far as I’m aware), when he said that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Take a look at this Scientific American article, for example, from October of 2001: Drowning New Orleans.
A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.
There’s a lot more material like that being talked about, including newspaper articles dating to the debate that took place over the last few years regarding whether or not to fund studies of levee improvements.
But setting aside the question of whether, with the benefit of hindsight, more money and effort should have been put into preventing this disaster, the real political peril for Bush lies in the bungled aftermath.
As early as Wednesday, August 31, the actual journalists at Knight-Ridder (the same outfit that was right early on about the flimsy Iraqi WMD intel) were reporting in detail about the extent of the bungling in the federal response: Federal government wasn’t ready for Katrina, disaster experts say.
AP writer Sharon Theimer had a story today (Congress likely to probe Guard response) that contained the following jaw-dropping graph, just one of several fairly shocking factoids the article describes:
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state’s National Guard last Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come from Washington until late Thursday.
Kevn Drum offered some interesting perspective on all this yesterday: Ideology and real life.
One of the things that Hurricane Katrina has done is shine a very bright light on the different worldviews of liberals and conservatives.
Conservatives fundamentally believe in a limited role for the federal government. They believe in downsizing, privatizing, and placing greater reliance on state and local government to provide essential services. It’s easy — too easy — to blame George Bush in hindsight for specific things like cutting the Corps of Engineers budget for the New Orleans district, but the reason this criticism is legitimate is because this wasn’t merely a specific incident. As even some conservatives tacitly admit, it was a direct result of George Bush’s governing ideology.
FEMA was downsized and partially privatized because modern Republican leaders think that’s the right thing to do with federal agencies. Budgets were limited for levee construction and first responder training because Republicans have other priorities. The federal government was slow to respond to Katrina because conservatives believe states should take the lead in looking out for their own needs. George Bush talks endlessly to the cameras about the private sector helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast because that’s the kind thing conservatives believe in.
Liberals, by contrast, believe in a robust role for the federal government. We believe in sharing risk nationwide for local disasters. We believe that only the federal government is big enough to coordinate relief on the scale needed by an event like Katrina, and that strong, well managed agencies like FEMA should take the lead role in making this happen.
Looking in more detail at the history of Bush’s oversight of FEMA, the facts really look quite bad for anyone trying to carve out a safe haven from accountability for him. Some Wikipedia articles I recommend to you for further information:
- Political effects of Hurricane Katrina
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Joe Allbaugh — Bush’s former chief of staff in Texas, and his first appointee to head FEMA. “As director of FEMA, Allbaugh brought about several internal reorganizations of FEMA designed to shrink the agency in size and scope. In particular, the Allbaugh FEMA diminished the Clinton administration‘s organizational emphasis on disaster mitigation.”
- Michael D. Brown — FEMA’s current head.
Brown is an interesting case. He had no prior disaster-recovery experience before being tapped to work under Allbaugh, his former college roommate, and then ascended to the head of the agency when Allbaugh left to work as a lobbyist for Iraq reconstruction firms. According to an article by Brett Arends in today’s Boston Herald (Brown pushed from last job: Horse group: FEMA chief had to be ‘asked to resign’), Brown has a less-than-stellar background:
Brown – formerly an estates and family lawyer – this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.
Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders’ and horse-show organization based in Colorado.
“We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,” explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner’s office. “This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,” she added.
Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.
“He was asked to resign,” Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.
Are you pissed off yet? I think I’m getting pretty close. Some bloggers whose own emotional reactions have gone several steps farther than mine are Cherie Priest (Disjointed thoughts on the socio-economics of disaster) and Steve Gilliard (We told you so).
