The Blue Voice

«Home | Next: Things will have to be different»

Monday, September 12, 2005

Katrina, terrorism and the Republican Party's notion of government

The performance of the Bush administration during the Katrina crisis has been appalling. This should be as much of a wake-up call for the country as 9/11 was.

Indeed, what both events tell us is very similar in an important sense. We need to be prepared for catastrophic events, both predictable (hurricanes, floods) and completely surprising (terrorist attacks, earthquakes). And by "we", I mean all levels of government.

I've been following the politics of Katrina, and I looked at some of the Republican positions in an earlier post on how the reliable Republican hack Victor Davis Hanson views Katrina. With the authoritarian-minded Republican Party dominating national politics and possessing an impressive echo chamber from FOX News to the Moonie Times and OxyContin radio and beyond, it's almost impossible to talk about the event without considering the partisan politics of it.

Knight-Ridder took a look at the responses of various levels of government in a long news analysis which seems to me to have succeeded as well as anyone could expect in looking at the situation apart from partisan positions: Katrina: Failure at every turn 09/11/05.

The municipal government of New Orleans can be faulted for not having provided for basic emergency communications needs, like batteries for the satellite phones that quickly became critical resources for first responders. It may be that the city government could also have done more to use available vehicles to get poor residents out of the city earlier.

But here we quickly start to see how a city's individual resources are limited in such a catastrophic event. For one thing, first responders can handle an event as large as the 9/11 attacks in New York. But even in that case, there were problems with the emergency communications which probably cost many police and firefighters their lives. First responders have only a limited capacity, even with maximum preparation, to respond to a sudden, catastrophic citywide even like the breaking of the levees.

And the issue of where to take the evacuees/refugees/whatever-we-call-them once you get them out of the city is just not one the city can solve on its own. The evacuation plan that was put into effect did get many residents out of the flooded areas to the Superdome and the convention center. It's what happened afterwards that saw the system breaking down completely.

The Knight-Ridder analysis questions whether the governors of both Mississippi and Louisiana made adequate preparations with their respective National Guards:

Both [Mississippi's Republican Gov. Haley] Barbour and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, also seemed not to understand the size of the storm headed their way when they issued their first National Guard call-ups - Barbour, on Friday night, and Blanco, on Saturday morning.

Barbour summoned only about 1,000 troops initially, according to Mississippi National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Tim Powell, and placed another 600 on standby. That number was consistent with what the state had needed 36 years earlier after Camille, but it was inadequate given the gambling-fueled boom that had brought tens of thousands of new residents to the coast.

Blanco's contingent was larger, 4,000, but it was dwarfed by the more than 30,000 that eventually would be summoned to help.

This is not to minimize the effects of having something like a third of National Guard troops of both those states in Iraq. The National Guard is a critical part of the nation's emergency-response infrastructure. And not only were many of them not available in one of the greatest natural disasters in US history. Their ability to maintain the necessary levels of troops is in great danger thanks to the way the Pentagon has used them in the Iraq War.

The local and state responses had their problems. I don't know many of the details, but some of the reporting indicated that Alabama local and state emergency procedures functioned much better. Alabama was not so hard-hit, but the effects were quite serious there. I'll be curious to hear more about the Alabama experience.

But the current Republican Party line that uses the mistakes and failures of the local and state governments to try to duck responsibility and accountability for the failures of FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security and Dear Leader Bush, is just one more disgraceful example of the Republicans trying to scam the public. Anna Badkhen, analyzing the response, quoted Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff taking that position. She then writes:

But emergency operations experts point out that when President Bush declared Louisiana and Mississippi federal disaster areas on Aug. 29, the federal government by law assumed responsibility for rescue and relief efforts.

"The moment the president declared a federal disaster, it became a federal responsibility," Jane Bullock, a former chief of staff at FEMA, said in an interview with CBS News last week. Bullock also pointed out that local and state officials had appealed to the federal government for help days before Katrina struck. (Hurricane
Katrina: Relief Effort - Response Like Second Disaster San Francisco
Chronicle 09/11/05.)

Anyone who has followed this event (in this case, maybe even people who followed it only on FOX News) have all seen many tragic example failure of the federal government in this situation.

One of the most striking to me was the story of how FEMA assembled experienced firefighters from all over the country the critical weekend after the levees broke, then sent them to Atlanta for a full day of routine and largely unnecessary classroom training, and then planned only for them to hand out pamphlets. A team of 50 of them were finally flown to Louisiana on that Monday. "The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas." (Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA by Lisa Rosetta Salt Lake City Tribune 09/06/05.)

The story of international aid that has been coming in is one that seems to be to have gotten less prominence than its significance deserves. Unfortunately, the Bush administration hasn't made the best use of that, either.

A C-130 cargo plane with supplies that include a water purification system has been on a runway in Sweden since Monday [Sept. 5], awaiting clearance from U.S. officials to fly to the United States even as health experts warned of disease spreading in the fetid waters saturating New Orleans. (Anna Badkhen, cited above)

Germany also had shipments of food ready to send to the evacuees. The US wouldn't allow them to be delivered, saying it was because of concerns about BSE (mad-cow disease). But the German press is reporting that Pentagon sources have said the real reason was that the administration thought it would be embarrassing publicity for them. (USA stoppen Hilfslieferung aus Deutschland (SÃ¼ddeutsche Zeitung - Munich 12.09.05)

The Bush administration requested certain kinds of aid from Spain, which they were prepared to give. I haven't heard about any of those deliveries being refused.

Germany and Spain also supported an administration request that oil be released from European strategic reserves to reduce the short-term effects from Katrina on the oil market and gas prices.

This would be the same Germany and Spain that our Republican war lovers have beenvilifyingg with enthusiasm because they declined to follow Dear Leader's directions on the Iraq War.

Emergency response and the necessary of effective government

I don't think any of us should kid ourselves about what a serious failure this is. If anything, the United States' ability to respond to a catastrophic event, initiated by terrorists or otherwise, is worse than it was on 9/11/01. The Bush administration hadn't had four years at that time to decimate FEMA. As Larry Johnson writes (my emphasis):

The crisis response to a hurricane is the same as a response to a terrorist attack. Restoration or services, remediation, and humanitarian help are the same regardless of whether it is man made or nature made. The biggest problems in any response are always the same--chain of command (i.e., figuring out who is in charge) and communication. It is inexcusable for the Bush Administration officials to claim they had no way of anticipating this disaster or planning for it. At least they've been consistent. We now know that the failure to plan for the aftermath in Iraq was but a precursor of things to come at home.

Hopefully this debacle will inspire the Republican controlled House and Senate to get off their ass and demand the Bush Administration explain how it will respond if terrorists detonate a nuclear device in the harbor of New York City or Los Angeles. We don't know if or when such a tragedy will happen, but we do know it is something that could happen and that we should be prepared to handle. (Katrina as a terrorist response TPM Cafe 09/02/05)

And this is very much the kind of result we can expect from the Bush brand of conservatism. Michael Lind in his 2003 Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics wrote of Bush's philosophy (if we can call it that) of government (my emphasis):

What distinguished Bush from his father and Reagan was not his free-market economic agenda. After all, conservatives of various persuasions, along with libertarians who rejected conservative social views, supported the large tax cut enacted by Congress in 2001, as well as the Bush administration's support for the partial privatization of Social Security and school choice. But these familiar issues of the conservative/libertarian right were not what gave the Bush brand of conservatism its unique flavor. Although Bush's ancestors were Northeastern, the culture that shaped him was made in Texas - a culture that combines Protestant fundamentalism and Southern militarism with an approach to economics that favors primitive commodity capitalist enterprises like cotton and oil production over high-tech manufacturing and scientific R&D. For generations, this synthesis has retarded the social and economic progress of Texas. Now, thanks to rural over-representation in the electoral college, the alliance of the country church and the country club had captured Washington, D.C.

George W. Bush was not the first Texan to be elected president, nor the first conservative to be elected president. But he was the first Texan conservative to be elected president.

Since the book was written in 2003, the word "elected" in the last paragraph should have had quotation marks around it, but we'll let that pass for now.

Although Lind may get overimaginative in his analysis in parts of the book, he makes a valuable analysis of how Bush's approach to government has been shaped by the Southern conservative political tradition and by the Bush dynasty's close ties to the oil industry. And those attitudes result in a low priority to having competent, adequately funded government services. After Katrina, that is not just anabstractt concept. That kind of approach to government has real consequences for real people's lives.

The 2000 platform of the Texas Republican Party said:

Civil Defense - America had a strong, grassroots-based civilian defense system with county level volunteers and local leadership from the World War I era until the establishment of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Now local civil defense coordinators have been replaced with federally-controlled emergency management coordinators. The priority has changed from "defending" the citizens in an emergency to "managing" the citizens. The Party supports the restoration of our civil defense system. A non-partisan effort should be made to organize communication and emergency response training for citizens to assist in times of emergency, and the local county government should appoint a civilian defense coordinator. Elected county officials should be in charge of decisions affecting the local community. (Anne-Marie Slaughter, Texas Republicans on FEMA, TPM Cafe 09/10/05)

The party obviously got what it wanted under the Bush administration. Of course, 9/11 changed everything. But apparently not that.

Tankwoman posted earlier on the danger that the contracts to be let with federal funds for the reconstruction of New Orleans will be as shameless an affair as the contracting for Iraq's reconstruction. Lind provides a very useful description of the Bush dynasty's brand of crony capitalism that makes the likelihood of such an outcome very high:

The critique of crony capitalism should not be confused with the familiar critique of the corruption of democratic politics by "special interests." Crony capitalism is by far the greater threat to both democracy and the market economy. Special-interest corruption is usually taken to mean the illegitimate influence in politics of businesses and whole industries that are perfectly legitimate in their own sphere of society, the market economy. If Thomas Edison buys a U.S. senator, at least Edison does so with money he earned legitimately by inventing the light bulb and making other contributions to civilization. And democracy will survive, as not all senators are for sale. Crony capitalism refers to something else: the creation, by politically connected individuals, of a simulacrum of a corporation or a facsimile of an entire business sector. While ordinary special-interest corruption preserves the distinct identity of the politician (the bought) and the businessman (the buyer), in a regime of crony capitalism, the distinction between the private sector and the public sector all but disappears. Indeed, in such a society the private business sector is not an independent, rule-governed realm of its own, but merely a subordinate fiefdom of the political and social elite.

Despite the martial rhetoric and nationalistic posturing of which the Bush Republicans are so fond, their brand of crony-capitalist government does not put the safety of Americans as its top priority. Not in foreign policy, not in emergency management.

posted at 7:50:00 PM by Bruce Miller

| +Save/Share | |