Republicat Lessons We Will Learn from New Orleans

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

This is a symptom of the idea that government can't do anything well, so it doesn't matter who's in any position.

I've been thinking about this very thing. When someone who doesn't believe in government is in charge he can go in one of two directions, make it fail or force it to be as effective as it can be by being skeptical of its capacity. Bush took the easy failure route with FEMA after a lot of bold talk about the effectiveness of the Homeland Security Department. That is not a great mix. Add to it the civil liberties we've handed over to make the department more effective and it starts smelling like the old Soviet Block, tons of power wielded by fools.

[Elspode]

Quoting UT's quote of a WaPo story: "Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

Although its impact cannot even be remotely compared to the Katrina/FEMA debacle, Missouri has experienced something similar. In our fair state, the Governor gets to decide who shall operate (and therefore profit from) the extremely valuable Fee Agent License Bureaus, where those of us who have no easy access to one of the very few State operated locations must go to get our vehicle licenses. Our freshman governor, Mel Blunt, whom I've ranted about before on The Cellar, has made a special groovy major fuck of it on his watch.

He has given many bureaus over to patrons who have absolutely *no* fucking clue about what to do with them, to the extent that many perfectly functional offices were closed (and remained closed for months) while the new owners tried to figure out what to do with them. In another spectacularly ballsy move, Blunt also closed License Bureaus that were *operated by the State of Missouri*, sold off their equipment assets at pennies on the dollar to the new Fee Agents, and allowed them to reopen those Bureaus as private Fee Agent locations. According to all reports, service, speed and accuracy of these *government mandated transactions* has gone right through the goddamn floor, becoming virtually impossible in many locations.

It helps if you understand that these Fee Agent offices are not bid for. There are no requirements or qualifications to be a Fee Agent. It is purely and simply a political plum that our State's highest elected official gets to dole out to his supporters. Folks, such patronage is dishonest at best, and apparently outright dangerous at worst, if you look at the case of all the losers heading up FEMA in a time of actual crisis. Oh, yeah...It was okay when they were sitting back holding press conferences, weariing nice suits and collecting fat paychecks for having done nothing more than knowing what to kiss and when, but now that they need to do an important and life-critical job, all they can do is point fingers and try to figure out a way to hang the blame on the people in the afflicted region.

As to the Left wanting to make political hay out of this...don't think for a moment that the Right wouldn't be just as quick and twice as righteous about it if the situation was reversed. In the end, the Right will come up with a game plan completely laying this at the feet of the Democrats, the Clinton Presidency, etc, and their little sycophants will praise Jesus and line up to spout the party line.

It would be the same if the Left was in power, too.

[Undertoad]

We know there are many things a government can't do well and many things it can't do at all. So when we as human beings say that something should be done by government, we should also specify whether it's the rare late-60s NASA or the more common modern DMV handling things.

And at the top, the talented people should go on the NASA projects and the paper shufflers should go to the DMV projects.

[Happy Monkey]

And people who think that government does nothing well should be kept away from all government projects.

[Undertoad]

David Brooks NYT

The New Orleans emergency preparedness plan offers a precise communications strategy, so all city residents will know exactly where to go in times of crisis. It recommends that two traffic control officers be placed at each key intersection. It recommends busing the thousands of residents unable to evacuate themselves to staging areas prestocked with food.

In short, the plan was so beautiful, it's too bad reality destroyed it. The plan's authors were not stupid or venal. They are doubtless good public servants who worked in agencies set up to prepare for this storm. And yet their elaborate plan crumbled under the weight of the actual disaster.

But of course this illustrates the paradox at the heart of the Katrina disaster, which is that we really need government in times like this, but government is extremely limited in what it can effectively do.

Katrina was the most anticipated natural disaster in American history, and still government managed to fail at every level.

For the brutal fact is, government tends toward bureaucracy, which means elaborate paper flow but ineffective action. Government depends on planning, but planners can never really anticipate the inevitable complexity of events. And American government is inevitably divided and power is inevitably devolved.

For example, the Army Corps of Engineers had plenty of money (Louisiana received more than any other state), but that spending was carved up into little pork barrel projects. There were ample troops nearby to maintain order, but they were divided between federal and state authorities and constrained by regulations.

This preparedness plan is government as it really is. It reminds us that canning Michael Brown or appointing some tough response czar will not change the endemic failures at the heart of this institutional collapse.

So of course we need limited but energetic government. But liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America's faith in big government.

[Undertoad]

Resumes of FEMA's 10 regional directors. About half seem unqualified.

David Brooks has got his facts wrong on the army corps of engineers and the amount of funding they had. There are excerpts from documents stating just how woefully unfunded the corps of engineers were, and the pleas of Louisiana officials on other threads in the Current Events forum.

This was a failure of a government which took little interest in domestic matters and used tax payer dollars for a highly expensive foreign war that we had no business getting ourselves into, as stated by no one less than General Colin Powell, himself.

Brooks overlooks that one teensy little fact.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

And people who think that government does nothing well should be kept away from all government projects.

.., while people who believe government can do anything should never write legislation.

[Happy Monkey]

So I drew a quick political cartoon... Apologies for the complete off-the-cuff art quality.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/happymonkey/42888074/" title="Photo Sharing" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/29/42888074_05aa5518fa.jpg" width="500" height="484" alt="Political Cartoon" /></a>

[bluecuracao]

Ha ha ha, that's cute.

[Happy Monkey]

Whaddaya know? Bush may have already trumped my cartoon!

President Bush said Tuesday that ``I take responsibility'' for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and said the disaster raised broader questions about the government's ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks.

``Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,'' Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.

``To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility,'' Bush said.

We'll see what form this responsibility takes.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Whaddaya know? Bush may have already trumped my cartoon!

We'll see what form this responsibility takes.

I'm still holding my breath from Reno taking responsiblity for Waco, so maybe somebody else cold cover this one.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Whaddaya know? Bush may have already trumped my cartoon!

We'll see what form this responsibility takes.

Not a very impressive form.

[glatt]

Here's the original article cited in the article HM posted. Unfortunately, neither article has the Justice Dept. e-mail in it's entirety reproduced. It would be nice to see the date of the e-mail, and if it came after Bush's taking responsibility.

I have no problem with an independent inquiry looking into all the possible causes that led to this disaster, including this one, but this looks like a coordinated smear campaign against environmental groups in order to shift blame away from the Bush admin.

[Elspode]

Chances are, *if* an environmental group had impeded levee work on New Orleans, they'd just say, "Duh...turning the area back into marshland is exactly what we had in mind. Looks like a helluva good start from our vantage point."

Did Greenpeace somehow reroute the money appropriated for levee work to other uses, then?