Media Matters by Jamison Foser
News outlets downplay Bush administration’s failure to prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina

So when Bush told ABC’s Diane Sawyer during an exclusive interview (video here) that nobody could have “anticipated the breach of the levees,” surely she challenged him on his claim? Surely she said, “Wait a minute, Mr. President: the Army Corps of Engineers wanted more money to prevent exactly that. They must have anticipated something. The New Orleans Times-Picayune concluded yesterday that ‘No one can say they didn’t see it coming.’ A former Republican congressman who headed the Corps of Engineers in your own administration lost his job after he publicly criticized your efforts to cut the Corps’ budget. How can you say nobody saw this coming?”

But instead, Sawyer simply moved on to her next question….

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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush team tries to pin blame on local officials

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday September 5, 2005
The Guardian

Bush administration officials yesterday blamed state and local officials for the delays in bringing relief to New Orleans, as the president struggled to fend off the most serious political crisis of his presidency.

His top officials continued to be pilloried on television talk shows by liberals and conservatives alike, but the White House began to show signs of an evolving strategy to prevent the relief fiasco from eclipsing the president’s second term. …

Mr Bush was castigated for saying on Wednesday: “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees”. It was pointed out that there had been a string of investigations and reports in recent years which had predicted the disaster almost exactly.

Nevertheless, administration officials stuck to the line yesterday. In a string of television interviews, Michael Chertoff, the head of the homeland security department, called the situation an “ultra-catastrophe”, as if the hurricane and flood were unrelated events. “That ‘perfect storm’ of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody’s foresight,” he said. …

The depth of America’s polarisation could prove a bulwark preventing Mr Bush’s political support from collapsing altogether. A poll by the Washington Post and ABC News on Friday night, showed that, of those questioned, 46% approved of the way the president had handled the relief efforts while 47% disapproved.

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In Disaster’s Aftermath, the Buck Stops at the President’s Desk – Los Angeles Times

The really scary thing is that few potential threats have been anticipated or studied as extensively as a devastating New Orleans flood. Last week, Bush said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” But a chorus of experts warned for years that storm surges after a hurricane could overflow the levees, and produce the same result as the actual breach that occurred: disastrous flooding in the city.

In 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency identified a major New Orleans flood as one of the three most likely catastrophic disasters threatening the nation. The New Orleans Times-Picayune detailed the risks in a comprehensive investigative series in 2002. Last summer, Louisiana State University Hurricane Center participated in the “Hurricane Pam Exercise” — a Category 3 simulation — and concluded that more than a million residents would be forced to evacuate, and that as many as 300,000 others would be trapped in the city.

Beyond these prior warnings, Katrina, of course, was tracked for days before it hit the Gulf Coast [mjh: Katrina’s path predicted by science (not religion)]. If the local, state and federal governments were unprepared to fully cope with a disaster that had been so widely discussed and examined, and which announced its arrival so far in advance, it seems not only prudent but urgent to ask how ready we are to cope with another major terrorist strike. Presumably Al Qaeda won’t provide as much advance warning as Katrina.

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t r u t h o u t – Paul Krugman | A Can’t-Do Government

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. “The New Orleans hurricane scenario,” The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, “may be the deadliest of all.” It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.

So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability. …

After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. “The corps,” an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, “never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security – coming at the same time as federal tax cuts – was the reason for the strain.”

In 2002 the corps’ chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration’s proposed cuts in the corps’ budget, including flood-control spending.

Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA’s effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.

Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: “I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared.” …

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

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t r u t h o u t – Molly Ivins | Why New Orleans Is in Deep Water

This is a column for everyone in the path of Hurricane Katrina who ever said, “I’m sorry, I’m just not interested in politics,” or, “There’s nothing I can do about it,” or, “Eh, they’re all crooks anyway.” …

But in addition to long-range consequences of long-term policies like letting the Corps of Engineers try to build a better river than God, there are real short-term consequences, as well. It is a fact that the Clinton administration set some tough policies on wetlands, and it is a fact that the Bush administration repealed those policies – ordering federal agencies to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands.

Last year, four environmental groups cooperated on a joint report showing the Bush administration’s policies had allowed developers to drain thousands of acres of wetlands.

Does this mean we should blame President Bush for the fact that New Orleans is underwater? No, but it means we can blame Bush when a Category 3 or Category 2 hurricane puts New Orleans under. At this point, it is a matter of making a bad situation worse, of failing to observe the First Rule of Holes (when you’re in one, stop digging).

Had a storm the size of Katrina just had the grace to hold off for a while, it’s quite likely no one would even remember what the Bush administration did two months ago. The national press corps has the attention span of a gnat, and trying to get anyone in Washington to remember longer than a year ago is like asking them what happened in Iznik, Turkey, in A.D. 325.

Just plain political bad luck that, in June, Bush took his little ax and chopped $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. As was reported in New Orleans CityBusiness at the time, that meant “major hurricane and flood projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now.” …

This, friends, is why we need to pay attention to government policies, not political personalities, and to know whereon we vote. It is about our lives.

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The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

THE WHITE HOUSE UNDER WATER

ABQjournal: Venezuela’s Chavez Avoids Class War By Sergio Pareja, Law Professor

“But what is Chavez doing that you hate so much?” I asked. “What, specifically, are his governing policies?” The answers I received, while purely anecdotal, were telling. In general, the wealthy criticize his taxes and social programs, many of which are remarkably similar to U.S. social programs.

I discovered that, for the first time in Venezuela’s history, the government is truly enforcing its tax laws. What does this mean from a leader who claims to be a “21st century socialist”? I asked my cousin, a successful orthopedic surgeon, what he now must pay in income taxes under Chavez. “10 percent to 15 percent of my income,” was the response — not quite the wealth redistribution I’d envisioned.

I also learned that one of the biggest complaints about Chavez is that he has raised the national minimum wage from about $25 a week to about $40 a week. For live-in household servants, the rate increased from about $15 a week to about $25 a week.

To put this in context, this is what it costs to have somebody work for you from before sunrise until after dinner. Servants cook, clean, do laundry, watch your children, and basically do anything you ask them to do.

What else has Chavez done? In exchange for oil to Cuba, Castro has sent teams of Cuban physicians to Venezuela. Chavez then sends them into poor neighborhoods to provide free health care for people who have never seen a doctor in their lives.

In addition, he has built vocational schools in poor neighborhoods so poor people can learn skills that will allow them to earn more. The wealthy view this as raising the cost of labor.

What else has Chavez done? The Chavez government uses its oil wealth to hire workers to engage in public works projects, such as fixing potholes in roads, keeping parks clean, and improving public buildings. For example, the government is building the first-ever public subway system in Valencia. People of means complain that “only poor people will use it.”

The government also has started a housing program for the poor through which the government works with builders to build livable, low-cost housing. It works with banks to provide long-term, low-interest loans to home buyers.

The feeling I got in Venezuela last month is that people with money still have money. I saw an abundance of new expensive cars on the road. One of my uncles continues to build and run high- rise apartments and hotels at a healthy profit.

I saw a complete freedom to speak out against the government, with daily newspaper articles and songs on the radio calling for Chavez’s ouster. It made me question our freedom here in the United States. With so many people here opposed to the war in Iraq, and with some brilliant anti-war songs being written, why haven’t I heard even one of those songs on the radio?

I am painfully aware that Chavez may ultimately turn out to be a cruel and corrupt dictator. That has been the history of Venezuela, and it certainly could happen again.

However, by giving a voice to the poor, Chavez also may have prevented a bloody class war. I have seen that Venezuelan war coming for years.

It is an embarrassment that our secretary of state doesn’t see, or won’t admit to seeing, any of the good that Chavez has done. It’s also an embarrassment that the founder of the largest Christian political organization in this country would call for Chavez’s assassination.

Sergio Pareja teaches at the University of New Mexico School of Law.

In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

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I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart’s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what’s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

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I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400 million. I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, the Wall Street Journal has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right-wing editorials. The Journal’s PBS broadcast is just as homogenous –- right- wingers talking to each other.

From Free Press : Bill Moyers’ speech to the National Conference for Media Reform

Bush and Katrina:
A time for action, not aloofness” href=”http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=59884″>The Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News – 03-Sep-05 – Bush and Katrina:
A time for action, not aloofness

A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource to rescue the stranded, find and bury the dead, and keep the survivors fed, clothed, sheltered and free of disease. …

[Showing] a diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster and economic uncertainty.

Wow, people are surprised by Bush’s diffident detachment? mjh

When Government Is ‘Good’
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, September 2, 2005; Page A29

The sight of rescue workers, the police and the Coast Guard, governors, mayors, and federal officials struggling desperately with the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina brings to mind Cohen’s Law: “Government is the enemy until you need a friend.”

Bill Cohen, the former defense secretary, minted the phrase nine years ago when he was a Republican senator from Maine. He was speaking then of a plane crash and the public’s hankering for more effective safety regulation. Cohen’s point was that government-bashing is easy in good times for those doing just fine. But when disaster strikes, many turn around and ask why government didn’t do more to prevent a catastrophe — or why it wasn’t doing more to relieve its effects. …

Yet this is a moment in which individual acts of charity and courage, though laudable and absolutely necessary, cannot be enough. It is a time when government is morally obligated to be competent, prepared, innovative, flexible, well-financed — in short, smart enough and, yes, big enough to undertake an enormous task. Not only personal lives but also public things must be put back together.

|| RedState.org Katrina: The Political Hurricane
By: Tim Saler

Democrats want to play politics over the carnage, destruction, and devastation in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They are using the bodies of those who lost their lives in this tragedy as a rhetorical platform from which to attack the President and everything he stands for. Republicans don’t want to fight about this issue, but when Democrats start firing, we have no choice but to oblige them in their desire for political combat.

The lack of speedy response to this disaster can be summed up simply as this: after decades of Democrats reinforcing the domination of this country by the federal government, we now have a situation where state and local governments no longer have the motivation nor the funding or equipment necessary to take care of the own problems. Many left-wingers are using this disaster as an example of how small government has failed the American people and must be replaced with a gargantuan, overbearing federal government presence to solve all of our problems. If anything, this disaster is the ultimate failure of federal power.

We do not need a larger federal government to solve our problems. We do not need a larger, heavier, and more expensive federal government to go clean up the disaster area in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. We need a smaller government, a more nimble government. We need a federal government that works in conjunction with state and local governments rather than displacing them and instilling in them a mental condition by which they are helpless in the face of crisis. The President shouldn’t need to be in Louisiana right now for Louisiana to be able to take care of its own business.

After decades of Democrats attempting to utterly destroy the federal system of government on which this country was founded, people like Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin freeze in the face of disaster. They no longer do what they need to do at the state and local level to help their citizens. Instead, they look for the federal government to come step in and save them. The federal government as our great American mommy has utterly and completely failed us.

The solution is not to make it bigger and stronger, but to put it back in its place and give states and local governments their constitutionally-defined power to take care of their own business. We will never know the number of lives that could have been saved if only we had respected the right and ability of states and local governments to do their job.

The Politburo Diktat » Blog Archive » Bloggers on Hurricane Katrina

raptor Says:
September 2nd, 2005 at 11:58 am

I have been checking blogs,both left and right.
Overwhemlinglly the left are showing themselves(agin)to be cold-hearted,selfserving bastards.The right are(agin)overwhelminglly showing thier compassion and willingness to help.