Did FEMA intentionally create a crises in New Orleans?

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Did FEMA intentionally slow and/or disrupt aid to New Orleans to make an ideological point that government is incompetent and should be scaled back?

Paul Krugman New York Times op/ed

In my last column, I asked whether the Bush administration had destroyed FEMA's effectiveness. Now we know the answer.

Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.

when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale.

But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?

The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05krugman.html

New York Tines news article

"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."

Some federal officials said uncertainty over who was in charge had contributed to delays in providing aid and imposing order, and officials in Louisiana complained that Washington disaster officials had blocked some aid efforts.

Ms. Bottcher was one of several officials yesterday who said she believed FEMA had interfered with the delivery of aid, including offers from the mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, and the governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson

Far from deferring to state or local officials, FEMA asserted its authority and made things worse, Mr. Broussard complained on "Meet the Press."
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, Mr. Broussard said.

But Mayor Nagin said the root of the breakdown was the failure of the federal government to deliver relief supplies and personnel quickly.
"They kept promising and saying things would happen," he said. "I was getting excited and telling people that. They kept making promises and promises."

New York Times

CNN article

Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, dropped his head and cried on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''
``The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, `Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, `And yeah, Momma, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday' - and she drowned Friday night. She drowned on Friday night,'' Broussard said.
``Nobody's coming to get her, nobody's coming to get her. The secretary's promise, everybody's promise. They've had press conferences - I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sakes, shut up and send us somebody.''

CNN

New York Times

Dr. Ross Judice, chief medical officer for a large ambulance company, recounted how on Tuesday, unable to find out when helicopters would land to pick up critically ill patients at the Superdome, he walked outside and discovered that two helicopters, donated by an oil services company, had been waiting in the parking lot.

New York Times

In New Orleans' Garden District, a woman's body lay at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street - a business area with antique shops on the edge of blighted housing. The body had been there since at least Wednesday. As days passed, people covered the corpse with blankets or plastic.
By Sunday, a short wall of bricks had been built around the body, holding down a plastic tarpaulin. On it, someone had spray-painted a cross and the words, ``Here lies Vera. God help us.''

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I mentioned on another thread and I will repeat that this seems to have, by design or accident, turned into an exercise in how to have the feds take over an entire urban area.

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Hmmm. I think it's more likely to be incompetence than anything purposeful, and don't think Krugman is saying it was purposeful.

Pretty damned incompetent, though. (Read the Krugman op-ed this morning, goggled at the Bataan information -- and it's apparently not an isolated incident.)

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Krugmans point was that many of the ideologues in the Bush administration have argued for years that government is incompetent and should be reduced through tax cuts reduced authority etc. Is the behavior of FEMA, as documented in the news articles, designed to reinforce that argument?

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What's your opinion, Acquiunk? My knee jerk reaction is to reject the idea as too preposterous to consider, but I'm willing to listen to anything you have to say.

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I personally think that the Bush administration created a non functional system assuming that its general ineptitude would make their ideological point. I do not think they anticipated something like New Orleans (although they should have) and their handy work resulted in the present crises. The examples offered in my original post are too egregious to have been anything other than intentional. This country is not that incompetent.

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I somehow doubt that any of this was intentional. Part of the problem is that, since 9/11, FEMA and every other Federal relief agency has had to knuckle under Homeland Security. As a result, FEMA has become what the old Civil Defense organization was -- a ctach-as-catch-can organization mostly devoted to smelling out "moles" and repelling a foreign attack. We're right back at the early days of the Cold War as far as our defense mentality is concerned. We're prepared to fight phantom terrorists but not natural disasters any more.

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I have a casual acquintance with some of this. I have sister who is in flood plane mangament and was one of the state emergancy planing people responsable for St Charlse County St Louis during the floods of 1993. She works with FEMA constantly and the crisis in New Orleans raises about the normal bumbling of the Federal Government . In fact in many areas the Feds can be quite good. What is going on now is out of the ordinary.

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double post

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FEMA Chief Sent Help Only When Storm Ended

WASHINGTON (AP) - The top U.S. disaster official waited hours after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast before he proposed to his boss sending at least 1,000 Homeland Security workers into the region to support rescuers, internal documents show.

Acknowledging that such a move would take two days, Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29.

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.''

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 resign.

CNN link

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Incompetent - for sure.

Purposeful - I doubt it. Republicans, like Democrats, for some time now have given up on the idea of small government. Monster budgets, monster spending and monster expansion.

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forget budgets and politics...it's now a MILITARY exercise. How efficiently can we bring an entire urban area under martial law?

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Editorial New York Times
It's Not a 'Blame Game'
Published: September 7, 2005

Mrs. Clinton has also proposed pulling FEMA out of the Homeland Security Department and restoring its cabinet-level status. That is premature. The current setup makes sense, at least in theory. The nation should not have to support two different bureaucracies for dealing with sudden disasters.

Before throwing the system into chaos again, an investigation should determine whether the problem lies in the structure or in execution. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal showed how the Bush administration had systematically stripped power and money from FEMA, which had been painfully rebuilt under President Bill Clinton but had long been a target of Republican "small government" ideologues. The Journal said state officials had been warning Washington - as recently as July 27 - that the homeland secretary, Michael Chertoff, was planning further disastrous cuts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07wed1.html?hp

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blueveinedthrobber wrote:

forget budgets and politics...it's now a MILITARY exercise. How efficiently can we bring an entire urban area under martial law?

Bear, I'm tempted to agree with that reading of the situation, except for one thing. If this really is an exercise in how to take over a major urban area by militray force, this excercise, too, is woefully incompetent. I mean, if that was the intent, then paratroopers should have been on Bourbon Street on day 1, not a week late in arriving. That much of a delay would have given us revolutionaries all kinds of time to set up a withering defense. And while I'm ready to say all kinds of nasty things about the US military, 'incompetent' doesn't spring readily to mind.

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Editorial New York Times
Advance Men in Charge
Published: September 9, 2005

Surely there are loyal Republicans among the 50 directors of state emergency services. But President Bush chose to make FEMA a dumping ground for unqualified cronies - a sure sign that he wanted to hasten the degradation of an agency that conservative Republicans have long considered an evil of big government. Katrina has proved that federal disaster help is vital, and that Mr. Brown and his team of advance men can't do the job. What America needs are federal disaster relief people who actually know something about disaster relief.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/opinion/09fri1.html

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I DO think it was purposeful, but on a couple of levels.

First, I think it was a purposeful degredation of the disaster relief responsibilities at the federal level over the past several years. The purpose, IMO, was to follow the republican vision of smaller federal government, AND shift more responsibility onto the states.

As we saw with the first, second and third rounds of federal tax cuts, states, facing huge deficits from the cuts in federal money, had to raise taxes at the state level. Many were caught off guard and had to play catch-up. Since the federal government is allowed to run deficits and most states are not, there was a financial crisis at the state level early on. Then, we stopped hearing about it, so either the states recovered sufficiently to cover the missing federal funds, or they are unable to meet the needs of citizens. I haven't heard the stats to say which scenario is correct. But, I see the tax cuts as an attempt to shift responsibility to the states, and playing into that is the cry from the federal level now about the responibility of citizen safety and disaster relief being foremost at the state level so don't blame us.

Second, I think it was purposeful on the political level. The Mississippi Governor has evidently received exemplory service from FEMA. He's not complaining, and each visit from a dignitary of the federal government seems to be Missiissippi first. Bush, Rice, Cheney all stopped in Mississippi first from the reports I've seen, and New Orleans last.

With a republican governor who was a two term national chair of the RNC getting assistance before a Democrat governor of Louisiana, I don't see how it can just be "chance" that Mississippi is being treated better.

Another thought: Louisiana has 9 electoral votes that historically go to republican presidents. But their local government and Representatives / Senators are heavily Democrats. A shake up in the population in combination with heavy criticism of the Democratic Governors response to this catastrophe might do wonders for assuring a couple more republican seats in DC.

I'm not saying that was a "stratergy" at the front of their mindswhen FEMA held back in LA, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came up as part of the republican "trifecta" meetings afterwards.

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Another point I meant to make regarding purposely downsizing government and shifting responsibility is that a major tactic from day one of this administration has been to push "Faith Based" organizations to care for the indigent, sick, and now disaster survivors.

I guess their thinking is that if they aren't involved in doing anything for the citizens of this country, they can't be blamed.

But, that brings up another contradiction. Bush ran his first campaign on returning honesty and dignity to the White House. Republicans were supposed to be the party of responsibility, and had (still do) blasted Clinton for not taking responsibility for his actions, his failure to stop Bin Laden and a host of other things.

The current administration has not taken responsibility for ANYTHING. EVER! Bush has not been held accountable for one single thing that he has screwed up. No matter what the situation, no matter how severe or how many die, he absolutely does not have the ability to say "I'm sorry" or in any way take responsibility. It's always someone elses fault.

At the same time, he and the republican party / Bush followers expects everyone else, from the governor of Louisiana, Mayor of New Orleans, all the way down to the people that "chose to stay" to take personal responsibility for their actions or lack of.

So, while the main ideology of the current administration is to shrink the federal government, forcing "personal responsibility" upon states, charities and individuals, Bush and his administration fail to hold themselves to the same standard.

Finally, remember Bush's constant mantra re:"Love thy neighbor? That's another part of the equation. Help your neighbor 'cause we won't is how that translates.

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Did FEMA intentionally create a crises in New Orleans?

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