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	Bush''s Hurricane Response a Disaster by Robert Scheer / Michael Hiltzik Los Angeles Times   September 5, 2005   "Bush''s Hurricane Response a Disaster", by Michael Hiltzik. (latimes.com)   Nearly five years ago, the Bush administration rode into office bearing its cynicism about government high, like a banner.   It promoted a massive tax cut as a way of "starving the beast" of federal government. President Bush traveled the country telling us that we were overdependent on the government for help with healthcare and retirement. To those wondering what resources might see them into old age, he advised: "a conservative mix of stocks and bonds."   New Orleans is, or should be, the graveyard of the conservative ideology that government is useless. An American city is reduced to Third World desperation as people who own nothing scrounge for necessities in a sea of waste and federal officials offer lame excuses about how their disaster plans would have worked fine had there not been, you know, a disaster. The president, at the head of a global power that can''t get its own troops or supplies off their bases to reach the needful, whines, "The private sector needs to do its part."   This deplorable performance has deep roots. Joe M. Allbaugh, a Bush campaign hack without any crisis management experience who was named director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, disparaged federal disaster assistance as "an oversized entitlement program" before Congress in 2001. The public''s expectations of government in a disaster situation, he said, "may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." He advised stricken communities to rely for help on "faith-based organizations … like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service."   If Allbaugh were not an amateur, he would have known that communities, "faith-based organizations" and the private sector become overwhelmed by disasters more modest than this one. In a crisis the federal government should be the first responder, not the last, to take charge, not wait to be asked.   Cynicism on such a scale is self-perpetuating. Determined to portray government as little but an intrusion into people''s lives, this gang made it irrelevant to hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina — thus giving them, and us, good reason to be cynical after all.   The federal officials assigned to New Orleans have displayed an appalling combination of arrogance and ignorance. Thursday evening on NPR, I heard Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who oversees FEMA, dismiss reports of thousands of refugees trapped at the New Orleans convention center for days without sustenance. He called the reports, in so many words, "rumors and anecdotes."   Informed that an NPR reporter had been on the scene, he sniffed, "I can''t argue with you about what your reporter tells you." Later, his staff called back to say that he had "received a report confirming the situation" and that he was now "working tirelessly" to get food to the location.   At a news conference that day, FEMA Director Michael Brown, Allbaugh''s successor and college chum, attributed the death toll in New Orleans "to people who did not heed evacuation warnings." Insensitive to the truth that many of the stranded had no way of responding to the warnings — no money, no transport out of the city and nowhere to go — he blamed them for having failed to prepare any better than, well, the federal government.   He also described security in the city, where snipers were firing on rescue boats and a mob beat back police trying to impose order at the convention center, as "pretty darn good." The image of lawlessness, he said, was fomented by those willing to "stick a camera" in front of "bad people."   The Bush administration is not alone in having ignored pleas to improve the hurricane and flood defenses of New Orleans. But it bears sole responsibility for a crisis response that has been fairly labeled a national disgrace. FEMA drafted an action plan for a New Orleans flood: pre-position food, supplies and hospital ships for immediate deployment in the aftermath. Brown and Chertoff failed to implement it adequately, pleading that no one could have anticipated a disaster that had in fact been anticipated by engineers, geographers and political leaders for decades. As I write, the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort remains moored in Baltimore, not to arrive off New Orleans until the end of this week.   President Bush will surely feel the consequences of his dereliction. Every policy of his administration will be viewed through the prism of the debacle of New Orleans. The pursuit of a personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein, supported by manipulated intelligence, has sucked billions out of the treasury and removed more than 30% of Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard members from their homes, so they must watch the disaster unfold from half a world away instead of assisting their own communities. Tax cuts for the wealthy have been financed by budget cuts for disaster preparedness and other crucial programs. Four years of anti-terrorism planning have failed to produce a competent system for mitigating a metropolitan cataclysm — one that, on the ground, is indistinguishable from the effects of the terrorist attack we''ve supposedly been girding for since 9/11.   Then there''s Bush''s sustained assault on social insurance programs such as Social Security, safety nets that are to be replaced by the slogan "You''re on your own."   New Orleans is not a local calamity; it belongs to us all, not least because it signals what to expect from this administration. If a major earthquake strikes Los Angeles or San Francisco, will President Bush wait to respond until he can conclude his vacation, as he did last week? Will his appointees express surprise at an eventuality that "no one could have predicted"?   Probably. George W. Bush is known for never admitting his mistakes. Consequently, he never learns from his mistakes. The chances are dismal that he will learn from this one. We''re on our own.   September 6, 2005   "Rotten fruit of the Reagan Revolution", by Robert Scheer.   What the world has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.   Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina''s destruction grew longer with each hour''s grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.   Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans'' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt''s New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long''s ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.   Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub flooded New Orleans "Lake George."   None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life. Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government policies that aid only poor brown and black people — even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared.   For decades we have seen social services that benefit everyone — education, community policing, public health, environmental protections and infrastructure repair, emergency services — in steady, steep decline in the face of tax cuts and rising military spending. But it is a false savings; it will certainly cost exponentially more to save New Orleans than it would have to protect it in the first place.   And, although the wealthy can soften the blow of this national decline by sending their kids to private school, building walls around their communities and checking into distant hotels in the face of approaching calamities, others, like the 150,000 people living below the poverty line in the Katrina damage area — one-third of whom are elderly — are left exposed.   Watching on television the stark vulnerability of a permanent underclass of African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos is terrifying. It should be remembered, however, that even when hurricanes are not threatening their lives and sanity, they live in rotting housing complexes, attend embarrassingly ill-equipped public schools and, lacking adequate police protection, are frequently terrorized by unemployed, uneducated young men.   In fact, rather than an anomaly, the public suffering of these desperate Americans is a symbol for a nation that is becoming progressively poorer under the leadership of the party of Big Business. As Katrina was making its devastating landfall, the U.S. Census Bureau released new figures that show that since 1999, the income of the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7% in inflation-adjusted dollars. Last year alone, 1.1 million were added to the 36 million already on the poverty rolls.   For those who have trouble with statistics, here''s the shorthand: The rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting, in the ripe populist language of Louisiana''s legendary Long, the shaft.   These are people who have long since been abandoned to their fate. Despite the deep religiosity of the Gulf States and the United States in general, it is the gods of greed that seem to rule. Case in point: The crucial New Orleans marshland that absorbs excess water during storms has been greatly denuded by rampant commercial development allowed by a deregulation-crazy culture that favors a quick buck over long-term community benefits.   Given all this, it is no surprise that leaders, from the White House on down, haven''t done right by the people of New Orleans and the rest of the region, before and after what insurance companies insultingly call an "act of God."   Fact is, most of them, and especially our president, just don''t care about the people who can''t afford to attend political fundraisers or pay for high-priced lobbyists. No, these folks are supposed to be cruising on the rising tide of a booming, unregulated economy that "floats all boats." They were left floating all right.
	Can Bush survive Nature's Fury? by Gordon Adams, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Baltimore Sun / The Independent / The Guardian USA   08 September 2005   "After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go", by Gordon Adams. (The Baltimore Sun)   The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office.   When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.   When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is repeatedly cut by an administration that seems determined to undermine the public responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that the infrastructure could not survive a major storm, it seems clear someone is playing politics with the public trust.   When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the administration to leave town.   When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.   When FEMA officials cannot figure out that there are thousands stranded at the New Orleans convention center - where people died and were starving - and fussed ineffectively about the same problems in the Superdome, they should be fired, not praised, as the president praised FEMA Director Michael Brown in New Orleans last week.   When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.   When repeated studies of New Orleans make it clear that tens of thousands of people would be unable to evacuate the city in case of a flood, lacking both money and transportation, but FEMA makes no effort before the storm to commandeer buses and move them to safety, it is time for someone to be given his walking papers.   When the president makes Sen. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula, Miss., the poster child for rebuilding while hundreds of thousands are bereft of housing, jobs, electricity and security, he betrays a careless insensitivity that should banish him from office.   When the president of the United States points the finger away from the lame response of his administration to Katrina and tries to finger local officials in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., as the culprits, he betrays the unwillingness of this administration to speak truth and hold itself accountable. As in the case of the miserable execution of policy in Iraq, Mr. Bush and Karl Rove always have some excuse for failure other than their own misjudgments.   We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.   They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.   It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.   (Gordon Adams, is director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University).   September 6, 2005   "Can Bush survive Nature's Fury", by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. (The Independent)   Teflon helped Bill Clinton slide out of disasters. George Bush seems coated with armour plating: dense, dull and impenetrable. Terrorists hurl fire and bombs; political opponents let fly insults and derision; Bush's own incompetence bombards him with boomerangs. Most recently, Cindy Sheehan has assailed the President with a mother's tears, which might have found a way to corrode his breastplate or trickle through the chinks. Yet Bush carries on, battered but essentially undamaged.   Armour, however, is no protection against flood. Disasters usually distract critics, silence malcontents, flatter leaders, and improve presidents' ratings. Not this time. Katrina could be the storm that finally scatters Bush's strangely tenacious following.   It is not just that he has handled the crisis badly. His first response was a bemused look, reminiscent of his mental paralysis at the news of 9/11. He then committed a terrible blunder, telling disaster victims to "take personal responsibility". The individualist message was miscalculated, offensive to the altruism that disasters always ignite. Next, the President seemed to think that it was more important to stop the looting than to save lives. His gaffes don't end. In storm-torn Biloxi, he referred two distraught women, who collapsed in his arms, to the Salvation Army shelter.   Not even Canute could stop the waves, and the ludicrous inadequacy of the coastal defences was a long-standing scandal that the region's state authorities, not just the Federal Government, had neglected. But the victims grew angry because of the slowness of the President's response, the inadequacy of federal funding, the shameful facts of federal agencies' indifference to warnings, and the helplessness of the Government in the face of growing chaos and suffering. Bush became a new Nero, fiddling while New Orleans flooded.   The terrible truth is now out: the Government cut flood prevention funds to pay for war. So far, the question hasn't been asked, but you can see it between the lines in the press and sense it trembling on millions of lips: if the Government can find money and manpower for Baghdad, why not for Biloxi? On Friday, five days after the disaster, Congress voted $US10 billion ($A13 billion) of relief aid. Nobody around the Gulf Coast feels grateful. "Not before time," they say.   Countless unbiased journalists have reported how non-government agencies, charitable institutions, and philanthropic individuals took care of Katrina's victims, while the authorities' efforts seemed invisible - as if the whole operation were a gruesome exercise in privatisation. It took five days for the circling helicopters to rescue survivors, five days for the National Guard to arrive with food and water for those stranded in New Orleans. Americans are bound to make a so far unspoken, but glaringly obvious, comparison with the resolve the Government shows when it tackles the President's real priorities: war, power, petroleum, environmental profligacy.   For deeper reasons, the present crisis is particularly challenging for Bush. Like his counterparts in al-Qaeda, Bush is a fundamentalist, with beliefs undisciplined by science or reason. The more he bangs on about prayers for the victims of disaster, the more he invites the obvious ripostes. On the one hand, hostile fanatics claim Katrina was a ray from God's zapper, shot to immobilise a limb of the Great Satan. On the other, the secularists sneer with the usual taunt in the face of disasters: "Where is God?"   The President is not theologically supple enough to answer effectively. Maybe this is why he looks bemused: is he still sure of having his God's approval?   Under the "yah boo" exchanges of religious and irreligious zealotry lurks a serious issue. Bush has staked his reputation on eco-scepticism. He doesn't believe in global warming. He shelves environmental projects. He despises Kyoto. He dismisses predictions that nature's revenge will swamp human arrogance. After Katrina, Bush's appraisals of environmental threats look worthless.   Bad news for the disaster victims is bad news for the President. And the bad news keeps coming. After days immured in the foetid refuge of the Superdome in New Orleans, thousands of hungry, filthy, critically dehydrated, penniless, virtually shirtless refugees - most of whom were black - were stranded for hours in buses that the police turned away from an overcrowded emergency camp in Houston.   In the foul, corpse-strewn, sewer-like streets of New Orleans, the crisis has entered a new phase. The psychology of altruism has evaporated. To begin with, it was "women and children first". Now it's "every man for himself", in a horrifying caricature of Bush's philosophy of individualism. Looters kill for the spoils of catastrophe, as predatory as the roaming alligators that have come in from the wetlands. Estimated numbers of dead keep rising.   A second disaster looms: the long-term health of people who have been dehydrated, starved, deprived of medication, and marooned in cities that have become insanitary swamps. By Friday, the relief effort was just beginning to look organised - but the horror stories and recriminations will drive the successes out of the news. They multiply hourly: abandoned prison inmates leaping to their deaths after days without water; doctors overcome by the stench in hospitals where the lavatories can't be flushed; hundreds dying, while waiting for a rescue vessel that is anchored in red tape.   The rest of America has rallied. Despite the Lone Ranger rhetoric of freedom, amazing reserves of solidarity bind US society. It starts with neighbourliness, swells into civic pride, and becomes patriotism. My university opened its classes to students displaced from the Gulf Coast, helping to lead a similar movement around the nation. Schools where refugees have taken shelter have done the same. Disaster relief has become a national, rather than a federal, effort. The Government is outdone, engulfed and isolated by a wave of sympathy for fellow citizens in distress.   Regional authorities in the Mississippi Delta who failed to foresee the tragedy are, for the moment, escaping most of the resentment. Governor Hailey Barber of Mississippi disarmingly confesses failure while wanting to make up for it. People believe Barber when he promises that "we're gonna hitch up our britches". Bush, meanwhile, keeps promising a better future, when what the victims want is present relief. His uneasy optimism seems reflected in the gleaming eyes of fat-cat friends, prowling for prospective reconstruction contracts.   When the terrorists struck on 9/11, Bush could make any number of mistakes, and still gain in popularity, because there were aliens on hand to hate. This time Bush cannot rail against God or, with his environmental record, make an enemy of nature. He cannot bomb the sea or invade the wind. God and nature are on the same side, and they no longer look like America's coalition partners. Even in the context of a natural occurrence, where there is no real enemy, people still need to hate and long for vengeance. Slowly, inexorably, with a chilling uniformity, the accusing gazes are focusing on the White House.   (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto lectures at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and is visiting professor of global environmental history at Queen Mary College, London).   September 6, 2005   "Disaster lays bare America's dark side", by Jonathan Freedland. (the Guardian)   The water flows in and the water flows out, washing away all that once lay on the surface - and revealing what lies beneath. So it is with all floods in all places, but now it is America that stands exposed. And neither America nor the world likes what it sees.   The first revelation was not spoken in words, but written on the faces of those left behind. Television viewers from Brussels to Bangalore could not help but notice it, and Americans from Buffalo to Bakersfield could not deny it. The women pleading for their lives in handwritten signs, the children clinging to tree branches, the prisoners herded on to a jail roof — they were overwhelmingly black.   This will not be news to most Americans. They know that a racial divide still haunts their country, as it has from its very founding. Like a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, race is America's fatal flaw, the weakness that so often brings it low.   Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, could see the danger. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," he wrote in 1785, reflecting on the crime that was slavery. "His justice cannot sleep forever."   Time and again, America has been forced to wake up to the racial injustice that has been its historic curse. It was the source of a civil war in the 19th century and of repeated battles through the 20th. From the desegregation and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s to the Los Angeles riots and even the O.J. Simpson trial of the 1990s, America has undergone periodic reminders that it is in the relationship between black and white that it has failed to honour its own, animating ideals.   Katrina has rammed home that message once more, with lacerating force. White Americans, who regarded New Orleans as a kind of playground, a place to enjoy the carnal pleasures of music, food, drink and more, have learned things about that city — and therefore their society — that they would probably have preferred not to know. They have discovered that it was mainly white folks who lived on the higher, safer ground, while poorer, black families had to huddle in the cheaper, low-lying housing — that race, in other words, determined who got hit.   They have also learned that 35 per cent of black households in the area did not have a car. Or that the staff and guests of the Hyatt Hotel were evacuated first, while the rest, the mainly poor and black, were at the back of the queue. Or that 28 per cent of the people of New Orleans live in poverty and that 84 per cent of those are black. Or that some people in that city were so poor they did not have the money even to catch a bus out of town — that race, in other words, determined who got left behind.   Most Americans want to believe that kind of inequality belongs in the past, in the school textbooks. But Katrina has shaken them from that delusion.   They have had to face another painful truth. Their Government has proved itself incompetent. Yes, it could act quickly once it had decided to act — but it idled for days. This disastrous performance will surely saddle the remainder of George Bush's presidency, just as the botched Desert One rescue of American hostages from the besieged US embassy in Tehran hobbled that of Jimmy Carter.   But the shock may do more than shift perceptions of the current administration. For 25 years, the dominant US ideology has been to shrink the state. "Government is not the solution to our problem," declared Ronald Reagan. "Government is the problem." That defined the limits for state activism thereafter. After decades of energetic government programs, from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s, the state was compelled to retreat. Taxes would go down and the government would do less.   Mr Bush personifies that ideology with more vigour than anyone since Reagan. Yet now, after Katrina, the national mood might alter. Americans have seen where small government leads. The authorities in Louisiana, including the military, pleaded long ago with Washington to reinforce the levees. The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $US105 million ($A137 million): the White House gave them $US40 million.   It is conceivable that Americans will now call a halt to their quarter-century experiment in limited government — and the neglected infrastructure that has entailed. There are some tasks, they may conclude, which neither individuals nor private companies can do alone — and evacuating tens of thousands of people from a drowning city is one of them.   Yesterday The New York Times' resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, wondered if there could now be a "progressive resurgence". There is a precedent. After an earlier Louisiana disaster, the flood of 1927, there was public outrage that not a single federal dollar had gone to feed or shelter the victims: the army had even demanded reimbursement from the Red Cross for the use of its tents. From now on, the public resolved, the federal government would have to protect the vulnerable. That shift paved the way for the activism of Franklin Roosevelt and all that followed. Nearly 80 years on, history might be about to repeat itself.   Finally, America will have to get over the shock of seeing itself in a new, unflattering light. It is not just the lawlessness, violence and gun culture that has been on show in New Orleans. It is also that America likes to think of itself as the "indispensable nation", the strongest, richest, most capable country on earth.   That belief had already taken a few blows. The vulnerability exposed on 9/11 was one. The struggle in Iraq — where America has become a Gulliver, tied down — is another. But now the giant has been hit again, its weak spot exposed. When corpses float in the streets for five days, the indispensable nation looks like a society that cannot take care of its own. When Sri Lanka offers to send emergency aid, the humiliation is complete.   That could lead to a shift in priorities, a sense that too much energy was diverted to Iraq and Afghanistan. It could even see the US retreating from the world.   But don't count on it. In the 1970s, US confidence was also shaken — by defeat in Vietnam, by the serial failure (and worse) of government institutions. What followed, after the interval of the Carter presidency, was a period of gung-ho bullishness that became the Reagan era. It may look battered — but only a fool would count America out.
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