Molly Ivans

    Thursday 01 September 2005

    Austin, Texas - Like many of you who love New Orleans, I find myself taking short mental walks there today, turning a familiar corner, glimpsing a favorite scene, square or vista. And worrying about the beloved friends and the city, and how they are now.

    To use a fine Southern word, it's tacky to start playing the blame game before the dead are even counted. It is not too soon, however, to make a point that needs to be hammered home again and again, and that is that government policies have real consequences in people's lives.

    This is not just politics or blaming for political advantage. This is about the real consequences of what governments do and do not do about their responsibilities. And about who winds up paying the price for those policies.

    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.

    Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my life, nothing I can do about any of it. Look around you this morning. I suppose the National Rifle Association would argue, Government policies don't kill people, hurricanes kill people. Actually, hurricanes plus government policies kill people.

    One of the main reasons New Orleans is so vulnerable to hurricanes is the gradual disappearance of the wetlands on the Gulf Coast that once stood as a natural buffer between the city and storms coming in from the water. The disappearance of those wetlands does not have the name of a political party or a particular administration attached to it. No one wants to play, The Democrats did it, or, It's all Reagan's fault. Many environmentalists will tell you more than a century's interference with the natural flow of the Mississippi is the root cause of the problem, cutting off the movement of alluvial soil to the river's delta.

    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fact that the Clinton administration set some tough policies on wetlands, and it is a fact that the Bush administration repealed those policies - ordering federal agencies to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands.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.

    The commander of the corps' New Orleans district also immediately instituted a hiring freeze and canceled the annual corps picnic.

    Our friends at the Center for American Progress note the Office of Technology Assessment used to produce forward-thinking plans such as Floods: A National Policy Concern and A Framework for Flood Hazards Management. Unfortunately, the office was targeted by Newt Gingrich and the Republican right, and gutted years ago.

    In fact, there is now a governmentwide movement away from basing policy on science, expertise and professionalism, and in favor of choices based on ideology. If you're wondering what the ideological position on flood management might be, look at the pictures of New Orleans - it seems to consist of gutting the programs that do anything.

    Unfortunately, the war in Iraq is directly related to the devastation left by the hurricane. About 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is now serving in Iraq, where four out of every 10 soldiers are guardsmen. Recruiting for the Guard is also down significantly because people are afraid of being sent to Iraq if they join, leaving the Guard even more short-handed.

    The Louisiana National Guard also notes that dozens of its high-water vehicles, Humvees, refuelers and generators have also been sent abroad. (I hate to be picky, but why do they need high-water vehicles in Iraq?)

    This, in turn, goes back to the original policy decision to go into Iraq without enough soldiers and the subsequent failure to admit that mistake and to rectify it by instituting a draft.

    The levees of New Orleans, two of which are now broken and flooding the city, were also victims of Iraq war spending. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, said on June 8, 2004, It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq.

    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.

• Molly Ivans - gt

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    Friday 09 September 2005

    George W. Bush has come up with his worst idea since he decided to have the military investigate torture by the military at Abu Ghraib prison. He, George W. personally, plans to investigate to find out what went right and what went wrong in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

    It's hard to guess where Bush will look first, but maybe he should start with the appointment of Brownie to head FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. Brownie is Michael Brown, who was appointed by some president.

    At the time, Brownie was deputy director of the agency under Joe Allbaugh - because he was Joe Allbaugh's college roommate, you see, and Allbaugh was Bush's campaign manager in 2000, you see, which made both of them qualified to manage disasters.

    The FEMA press release announcing Brownie's appointment started with his other obvious qualification, From 1991 to 2001, Brown was the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. It's unclear whether Brownie was fired or resigned from the organization in the wake of financial mismanagement and lawsuits.

    Hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Brown wrote his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, to ask permission to send 1,000 FEMA employees to the scene to support rescuers and to convey a positive image about the government's response. Brownie said he expected the workers to be there two days later. This apparently inspired Bush's comment, Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.

    FEMA was once considered one of our better federal agencies (those in the government-is-the-enemy camp may not believe this, but some government agencies are actually known for effective performance). Exactly why the right-wing Republicans chose to make FEMA a political football was never clear - but at any rate, going back to the Reagan administration, conservatives have been hacking away at FEMA. They mostly just under-funded it, one of their favorite tactics, unless a hurricane hit Florida just before an election. Sorry to sound boringly partisan, but that is the record, and the Clinton administration did work hard at rebuilding the agency.

    So now those on the liberal side are saying: See, that's what happens when you starve government in order to give rich folks tax cuts. Government agencies can't do the jobs they were set up to do.

    Silly liberals see this as vindication that they have been right all along. But the Bush administration officials are in full blame-shifting mode: First, they announced repeatedly they don't want to play the blame game. Then, they start blaming everybody else.

    According to The New York Times, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, White House communications director, began a campaign this weekend to blame local and state officials. The woefully inadequate response, said sources close to the White House, was the fault of bureaucratic obstacles from state and local officials.

    The bottom line is they're playing the race card. As many of you have noted, it IS a racial issue that poor people suffer most in any natural or economic disaster. Because Katrina hit the Deep South, a great many of the poor people affected are black, especially in New Orleans - both hit hardest and majority black to begin with.

    I'm not sure what to say about a cable news station that plays a loop of black looters over and over - about 20 seconds of actual footage, replayed for four minutes, while the voiceover dwells on the looting problem. Obviously, there are some looters in New Orleans and elsewhere, and equally obviously, there are lots of people who were without food or water for days.

    The exhausted and desperate black mayor of New Orleans begged for help in an interview late last week. They're feeding the public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying down here, Mayor Ray Nagin said, talking about the feds. It's politics, man, and they are playing games. ...

    Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here! They're not here! It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamned crisis in the history of this country. People are dying.

    The mayor was in tears. I heard two nice, white American ladies deploring this interview. Well! He should remember there might be children listening! Children still without food and water. What happens to people when they talk about race? Of course, most of us don't actually talk about race any more, we refer to it only indirectly, we talk those people.

    Watch carefully, listen carefully - minority groups have always been blamed after natural disasters, since the days when the Hungarians were supposed to have cut the fingers off bodies to get the gold rings in the wake of the Johnstown Flood. Dirty Bohunks.