by Linda Beale
The natural disaster brought on by Hurricane Katrina has been magnified by a manmade disaster of enormous proportions. All of the local, state and national emergency officials bear some responsibility, but the brunt of the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of three men: George W. Bush, commander in chief and President, Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, and Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For his part, Bush claimed that "nobody could foresee that the levees would break." Yet the three worst case disasters predicted by FEMA even before 9/11 were--a terrorist strike in New York, a hurricane with levee breaks in New Orleans, and an earthquake in California. Chertoff and Brown, the two men Bush appointed to head the agencies most responsible for the federal handling of emergenices, had little relevant background training or experience. Yet Homeland Security is the agency at the heart of the federal response to emergencies.
Their response to the Gulf Coast disaster was incompetent--lack of coordination, harmful decisions, blatant discrimination, and more concern with PR than with helping victims. Five hours after Katrina had struck the Gulf, Brown sent a memo to Chertoff asking for 1000 volunteers to aid in the disaster area. This story about the memo shows how clueless the head of the emergency response agency was. It talks of a near catastrophe, but doesn't impart a real sense of urgency--Brown thought the 1000 volunteers could have a day to be trained and then a day to travel to the area. An additional few thousand would be needed, he thought, in seven days! This was the first response to the problem--a scattering of teams had been put in place before the storm, but not in any numbers and without the appropriate manpower and supplies to back them up. (Trent Lott finally got items for MIssissippi by calling Bush and having Bush issue a direct order to have Atlanta supplies moved to Mississippi.) As the CNN commentators noted in discussing the breaking news of the memo on September 5, one of the tasks that Brown foresaw for the 1000 volunteers was to make sure that the FEMA image was appropriately positive.
In New Orleans, FEMA was more of a burden than a help in the first hours and days of the storm. It should have functioned as the key coordinator of the many different rescue efforts. It should have been the face of the strong federal presence, necessary in any disaster of this magnitude. Instead, FEMA officials offered excuses for why they couldn't get into the city and why they had to wait for supplies and for the National Guard (also several days late in being sent). FEMA officials claimed that it could not get into New Orleans, yet 13 Wal-Mart trucks loaded with food and water and many media trucks were able to get in and out relatively easily. Three Wal-Mart trucks loaded with water were turned away, and FEMA cut local communication lines, according to Andre Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, on Meet the Press. Apparently, FEMA and Homeland Security also sent some rescuers--the Red Cross and the Salvation Army-- away during the first few days after the storm. The reason given: if aid were provided to people still in the city, they might decide to stay there longer. Read an account at this interesting blog.
Another newscast described a Naval hospital ship with 600 beds that happened to be in the area right off New Orleans. It waited for orders to take patients for several days, but those orders never came through. Buses came to help evacuate the people stranded in inhumane conditions in the SuperDome and Convention Center in New Orleans, and FEMA turned them away. Michael Brown, FEMA director, claimed that widespread "unexpected" flooding kept rescuers out of the city. Washington Post, Sept. 2, 2005, at A01. Yet three college students, interviewed on Tuesday night on Aaron Brown's CCN news program, talked about the ease with which they entered New Orleans and helped evacuate people, while they saw empty buses being turned away. As I write this, I am listening to CNN, where they report that federal officials are now saying that it wasn't so bad in the SuperDome as the media shots made it appear: it appears that we should not think that living in urine, feces, and with dead bodies decomposing, in stifling heat and without food and water, and not knowing where loved ones are or indeed if they are safe, is really so bad.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration failed to acknowledge the depth of the disaster. Bush, in fact, was still on his extended 5-week vacation in Crawford, Texas, which he did not cut short on Saturday or even Sunday when it was clear that a cataclysmic hurricane would hit the Gulf Coast area. Even after the hurricane hit, after the levees broke, after thousands of mostly poor, mostly black, essentially defenseless people, many of them elderly and many of them sick, were left to fend for themselves in the Convention Center and the SuperDome, Bush stayed away. He didn't order the flag flown at half mast to honor the dead of New Orleans and Biloxi and Gulfport. (When the flag was lowered for Rehnquist on Saturday, at least one media outlet reported that it was being flown at halfmast for Rehnquist and the Katrina victims. An afterthought, at best.) Bush didn't end his vacation till Thursday, and didn't visit the disaster area in person until Friday.
On his first visit to the Gulf disaster area, Bush created photo opportunities, where the now-regular routine of pre-screening people allowed into Bush events applied even to Katrina victims! In Mississippi, Bush even joked about the ease with which things could be restored, noting that Trent Lott had lost one of his homes but that Bush expected to be resting on Lott's new porch in no time. The man who liked to think of himself as "a War President" was now revealed to all as the Clueless President. A quick return visit was staged to repair the damage. Laura Bush did a photo op with a Republican congressman at a shelter in Lafayette, well outside the city, to demonstrate how well the federal response was going: according to this entry on the Daily Kos, the event shut down the normal functioning of the shelter for quite a while. Barbara Bush, the former First Lady, accompanied her husband on a tour of facilities in Houston and gave her evaluation on American Public Media's Marketplace, as reported also here, as follows. (Remember that most of the evacuees are poor and black and note the former First Lady's use of the term "scary" and the implication that the victims of this disaster are somehow getting an especially good deal out of their evacuation to Texas.)
"What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. 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 (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this disaster is the callous disregard of some people towards those who have suffered terrible loss of loved ones, pets, homes and cherished memories, as well as disrupted jobs and lives and uncertain futures. The Agape Press, a relatively mainstream Christian website, has an article about "God's mercy in the aftermath of Katrina." One pastor suggests that God used the hurricane to purge wickedness from the city: he praises God that now the city is "abortion free" "Mardi Gras free", and "free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion." "God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there and now we're going to start over again."
From the inept federal coordination of disaster response to the uncaring pastoral response, this catastrophe has revealed deep flaws in American institutions. Our government exists so that we the people can do through the government those things that are too large for each of us to do individually.
We must hold the Bush Administration accountable for this flawed response. Bush has repeatedly asked Americans to vote for him because he promises to be better at protecting us than the Democrats. What Katrina has shown is that the only thing he protects us from is the truth itself. We have to ask now why one-third of the regional National Guard units were in Iraq instead of here at home where they could assist in this catastrophe as they were trained to do. We have to ask why many rescue workers were given air conditioned tents set up on bases while the poor and the homeless were left without water for days. Why weren't nearby military bases ready and waiting to create safe tent cities for the evacuees? Why, in a country that claims to have set aside racism long ago, were the desperate thousands in the Convention Center and SuperDome left in squalor while buses passed them to pick up 700 tourists from the Hyatt Hotel, as told in this story on Yahoo! News? Just what value system said that the mostly white mostly well-off tourists' lives had higher priority than the mostly black, mostly poor native New Orleans evacuees' lives? Could not Mr. Bush recognize the outrage we would feel when he said on Friday to his incompetent head of FEMA, the former Arabian Horse Association commissioner who failed to coordinate any kind of acceptable federal response to this overwhelming national emergency, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" as reported in this Washington Post story?
And we have to ask the deeper questions as well. Why have Congress and the Bush administration provided tax cuts that benefit most the people making the most! Why have they talked about giving the wealthy even more in tax cuts, when at the same time they are talking about paying for those tax cuts by cutting millions from the medicare, food stamps, and other benefit programs that help the poor? Why was FEMA cut back and reduced to a minor agency in Chertoff's Homeland Security empire, when it is the most important first response agency for protecting American people? Why were the funds for reinforcing the levees and dealing with a known and predicted danger not forthcoming? Read this Washington Post story, or this report on Tim Johnson Watch, and ask: Why did Congress cut the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee projects to shreds, while providing more money in the energy and transportation bills for wealthy oil companies and bridges to nowhere in Alaska? Why did the White House lobby against a plan to spend just $1 billion over 4 years to rebuild wetlands to serve as a buffer to hurricanes? Was Bush protecting the people of Louisiana by using that money instead for tax cuts for the wealthy and the $60 billion a year cost of his war of choice in Iraq? Why have the Republicans, humming their mantra of "less government, more privatization," cut back government agencies so that they are ill-equiped to deal with the very disasters that epitomize the reason people band together to form governments?
It's time for ordinary Americans to tell Mr. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress that we've had ENOUGH! Enough tax cuts for the wealthy. Enough neglect of the poor and the hungry. Enough of war and occupation that perversely increase our risks of suffering a terrorist attack. Enough of government for the big corporations and their wealthy owners. It's time to fire Brown and Chertoff and put our money to work to make this a better country for everyone, rich and poor, black and white, old and young. Let's remake America in the image of the America we know we can be--a caring country with open arms and equal opportunity for all.
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