Hi. Please think of these three articles as archival, and save them. They offer a powerful overview of what went wrong and why and some views of what is to be done. These are politically 'progressive,' but I would have passed on more conservative POVs, if received. So far, none, but I'll pass on the best of any sent to me. I must say the ideology is not confined to this regime or Republicans, though it is certainly extremist therein. Thanks to Portside for these - their subscription info is at the bottom. Ed
Katrina's Victims Of Ideology by Isaiah J. Poole TomPaine.com - August 29, 2006 http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/29/_katrinas_victims_of_ideology.php [Isaiah J. Poole is the executive editor of TomPaine.com.] On Monday, the eve of the first anniversary of Katrina making landfall on the Gulf Coast, the "Message: I Care" tour of Bush the younger began in Biloxi, Miss. "Laura and I really care for the people whose lives have been affected," Bush said. "We understand the trauma, and we thank you for your determination." The problem with Bush's statement of caring--as the people of New Orleans, where he travels today, know all too well--is that regardless of what may be in his heart, President Bush believes in a set of policies-- indeed, an ideology of government--that is not capable of a caring response to a national human tragedy. A report released today by the Campaign for America's Future lays out the case in graphic terms. The report chronicles the three conservative failures of Katrina--the failure to prepare, the failure to respond and the failure to rebuild. "Behind all the failures," the report concludes, "is a failed promise." The report goes on to say: In the wreckage of New Orleans, President Bush seemed to discover the problems of entrenched poverty in America. He promised not just to rebuild New Orleans but to address the problems behind the ruin. It was a promise written on the wind. Since Katrina, the White House has advanced not a single program to redress poverty. Worse, it has pushed through appropriations that cut food stamps, Medicaid, and Pell Grants designed to help capable youth rise beyond their backgrounds. Katrina offered an opportunity to rebuild a city on a model of high road development--high wage, low waste, efficient use of energy--rather than "race to the bottom" capitalism. The opportunity is lost, not because of natural disaster, but because of catastrophic conservatism and its scorn for government purpose Bush 43 governs under the considerable shadow of conservative icon Ronald Reagan, who famously said in his 2001 inauguration speech , "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Bush 43's inept embrace of Reagan's maxim has resulted in the literally deadly combination of negligent government and record government debt. The negligence continues to hamper the effort to repair New Orleans and other Katrina-damaged communities. The debt, a product of the billions poured into the Iraq misadventure and wrongheaded tax cuts, drains capital-- both financial and political--away from housing, education and other pressing needs. But, perhaps most importantly, the conservative ideology that says we are not each others' keeper--and yet applauds as government fiercely defends the interests of those who have the most--has brought us to where we are today: To a Gulf Coast where the old inequities of race and class have been amplified in the year since the storm. It is that ideology, it is worth recalling, that helped drive the key decision to downgrade the Federal Emergency Management Agency from a highly praised, Cabinet-level organization to a backwater operation buried inside the labyrinthine Department of Homeland Security. It is an ideology that valued cronyism over expertise and put the dubiously qualified Michael D. Brown in charge. It is an ideology that put property rights and commercial prerogatives over wetlands protection in the Mississippi Delta, which led to the removal of many of the natural barriers that would protect New Orleans from the full force of a hurricane. It is an ideology that also drove many of the short- sighted funding decisions about levee construction in the years before Katrina struck--for many conservatives only grudgingly support federal infrastructure investment--and which today continues to value what is cheap over what is right. Today, hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents are still displaced; unemployment in New Orleans, at 7.2 percent, is higher than it was before the hurricane struck; and redevelopment in historically working-class neighborhoods lags far behind that of wealthier areas. The Bush administration's zeal to build an "ownership society" has helped some property owners rebuild their homes, but as the Campaign for America's Future report puts it, New Orleans reconstruction now "resembles a government-subsidized gentrification plan that rebuilds the classic, historic and poor sections of town with new homes that former residents can't afford." And yet, an administration that is so parsimonious in the face of requests for aid to the poor appears almost nonchalant in the face of the continuing waste of billions of taxpayer dollars on such items as thousands of unused FEMA trailers in Hope, Ark., and other holding areas. The administration's apparent unbridled faith in the private sector, its persistent cronyism and its resistance to vigorous oversight has dominated the government response to Katrina. One result, according to a report this month by House Government Operations Committee ranking member Henry A. Waxman, D- Calif., has been the awarding of $8.75 billion worth of "problem contracts" in which there is evidence of waste, fraud or mismanagement. It is true that the failures of the Hurricane Katrina recovery are not the fault of only one branch of government or of one party. But what is clear is that entrusting the reins of government to an administration which holds in utter contempt the very notion of government as a protector of the public welfare is folly. The Bush administration's inner circle of advisors still includes Grover Norquist, the never-met- a-tax-cut-I-didn't-like crusader who famously pledged to fight to get government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Conservatism, it should now be plain to see, is not the answer to the problem; conservatism is the problem. In the face of the economic as well as national security issues we face, the urgent task is to make government better, so that it can be for all people an effective instrument to heal the wounds of the Gulf Coast and strengthen the health of the nation. *** Hurricane Expert Threatened For Pre-Katrina Warnings by Greg Palast <http://www.gregpalast.com> A Greg Palast special investigation for Democracy Now! Monday, August 28. From New Orleans. DON'T blame the Lady. Katrina killed no one in this town. In fact, Katrina missed the city completely, going wide to the east. It wasn't the hurricane that drowned, suffocated, de- hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week. The killing was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with faulty levees. Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White House. Here's the story you haven't been told. And the man who revealed it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell it. Van Heerden isn't the typical whistleblower I usually deal with. This is no minor player. He's the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. He's the top banana in the field -- no one knew more about how to save New Orleans from a hurricane's devastation. And no one was a bigger target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the information. Here's what happened. Right after Katrina swamped the city, I called Washington to get a copy of the evacuation plan. Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: no one can find it. That's real bad. Here's the key thing about a successful emergency evacuation plan: you have to have copies of it. Lots of copies -- in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first responder. Secret evacuation plans don't work. I know, I worked on the hurricane evacuation plan for Long Island New York, an elaborate multi-volume dossier. Specifically, I'm talking about the plan that was written, or supposed to have been written two years ago by a company called, "Innovative Emergency Management." Weird thing about IEM, their founder Madhu Beriwal, had no known experience in hurricane evacuations. She did, however, have a lot of experience in donating to Republicans. IEM and FEMA did begin a draft of a plan. The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars. Apparently, the IEM/FEMA crew didn't know that 127,000 people in the city didn't have cars. But Dr. van Heerden knew that. It was his calculation. LSU knew where these no-car people were -- they mapped it -- and how to get them out. Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn't touch it. Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden's position. This official now works for IEM. So I asked him what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor. "Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That's the bottom line." The professor, who'd been talking to me in technicalities, changed to a somber tone. "They're still finding corpses." Van Heerden is supposed to keep his mouth shut. He won't. The deaths weigh on him. "I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down." Van Heerden had other disturbing news. The Hurricane Center's computer models showed the federal government had built the levees around the city a foot-and-a-half too short. After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been "overtopped" for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the levees would have held, and the city would have been saved. He had taken the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush's doorstep. "I myself briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House." The response: the university's trustees threatened his job. While in Baton Rouge, I dropped in on the headquarters of IEM, the evacuation contractors. The assistant to the CEO insisted they had "a lot of experience with evacuation" -- but couldn't name a single city they'd planned for when they got the Big Easy contract. And still, they couldn't produce the plan. An IEM press release in June 2004 boasted legendary expert James Lee Witt as a member of their team. That was impressive. It was also a lie. In fact, Witt had nothing to do with it. When I asked IEM point blank if Witt's name was used as a fraudulent hook to get the contract, their spokeswoman said, weirdly, "We'll get back to you on that." Back at LSU, van Heerden astonished me with the most serious charge of all. While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would drown. Van Heerden said, "FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o'clock that the levees had breached... They took video. By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew ...I was at the State Emergency Operations Center." Because the hurricane had missed the city that Monday night, evacuation effectively stopped, assuming the city had survived. It's been a full year now, and 73,000 New Orleanians remain in FEMA trailers and another 200,000, more than half the city's former residents, remain in temporary refuges. "The City That Care Forgot" -- that's their official slogan -- lost a higher percentage of homes than Berlin lost in World War II. It would be more accurate to call it, "The City That Bush Forgot." Should they come home? Rebuild? Is it safe? Team Bush assures them there's nothing to worry about: FEMA won't respond to van Heerden's revelations. However, the Bush Administration has hired a consulting firm to fix the failed evacuation plan. The contractor? A Baton Rouge company named "Innovative Emergency Management." IEM. You can download this special investigative report at www.DemocracyNow.org. It was presented on Monday's show. *** * We will not forget Dear MoveOn member, One year ago today Hurricane Katrina made landfall. For many of us, it was a moment of clarity: "this is what government looks like when it's run by people who don't believe in it." A year later, dead bodies are still lying in abandoned homes, garbage has yet to be collected from New Orleans streets and countless residents have no home, temporary or permanent. But instead of addressing the continuing disaster, the administration is on a public relations blitz to rewrite history. There are two things we can do together to help make sure that America remembers Katrina. 1. Watch "When the Levees Broke" on HBO. <http://www.moveon.org/r?r=2033&id=8613-558097-RnYGbGU0y9X4MgNVDCwK6w&t=1> Spike Lee has put together a beautiful documentary that captures the full experience of Katrina in a gripping and powerful way - you don't want to miss it. It's screening on HBO tonight and all this month, and since a lot of folks who want to see it don't have HBO, ColorofChange is encouraging folks to watch together. If you can help someone who doesn't have HBO see it click here. <http://www.moveon.org/r?r=2032&id=8613-558097-RnYGbGU0y9X4MgNVDCwK6w&t=2> And if you don't have HBO, you may be able to find folks hosting screenings here. <http://civ.moveon.org/event/events/index.html?action_id=48&id=8613-558097-RnYGbGU0y9X4MgNVDCwK6w&t=3> 2. Write a letter to the editor. The administration's media tour is designed to whitewash the government's terrible response to this disaster. Let's not let them get away with it. The opinion pages are the most popular pages in the newspaper - if they're flooded with our letters, we can help shape public opinion. (There are some talking points below.) Click here to get started. As progressives, we don't believe in a sink or swim nation - we believe we're all in this together. And Katrina's a terrible reminder of why that basic idea is so important. Together, let's make sure it doesn't happen again. Thanks for all you do, Nita, Justin, Eli, Ilyse and the MoveOn.org Civic Action Team Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 P.S. Here are some points to help with your letter, but you can find more here: http://civic.moveon.org/lte/?lte_campaign_id=64&id=8613-558097-RnYGbGU0y9X4MgNVDCwK6w&t=5 * Katrina shows that the Bush administration is unable to keep us safe. The failed response and the fact that things got as bad as they did in the days following Katrina showed all of us that 4 years after 9/11, the government still can't keep us safe. * Katrina reminds us that poverty in America is real. President Bush vowed then to learn from Katrina and renew a commitment to fight poverty in America. This is promise he has either broken or forgotten. * Katrina underscores the need for change in America. During Katrina, the people who needed the government most were the ones who were forgotten. As progressives, we believe we're all in this together. Katrina's aftermath was a terrible reminder of why that basic idea is so important. And here are the documentary links again: * Set up a screening: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=2032&id=8613-558097-RnYGbGU0y9X4MgNVDCwK6w&t=6 * Attend a screening: http://civic.moveon.org/event/events/index.html?action_id=48&id=8613-558097-RnYGbGU0y9X4MgNVDCwK6w&t=7 * Learn more about the documentary http://www.moveon.org/r?r=2033&id=8613-558097-RnYGbGU0y9X4MgNVDCwK6w&t=8 --- portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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