FEMA F***s Up

“Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management. Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.”

- Joe Allbaugh, Bush's first choice as the head of FEMA, to Congress in May 2001.

Writing in The Hill today, Josh Marshall supplies the above quote as part of a roundup of TPM stories relating to FEMA under Bush's (mis)management. ICH provides this list of FEMA links:

FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations

FEMA turns away experienced firefighters

FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks

FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel

FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food

FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans

FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid

FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board

FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck

FEMA turns away generators

FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"

That last one is real -- not satire but straight from FEMA's website.

FEMA has also been telling reporters not to show dead bodies on TV, but many reporters are wondering why FEMA is concerned about this at a time when it (theoretically) has a lot of other things to do. After all, the US press is renowned for its self-censorship (they didn't film the bodies jumping from the WTC, for example). If anyone is going to issue such media directives, why FEMA?

And just in: FEMA is reversing their plan (announced by Brown himself just yesterday) to issue $2000 debit cards to Katrina survivors. Maybe that's because right-wing chat shows suggest the survivors will only spend it on crack anyway:

The New Orleans "welfare riff-raff" have "hit the jackpot" and are going to get new houses and cars and "we" will all have to pay for "their" windfall. Now "they" are going to be bringing their "crime" to decent cities.

New Orleans was the biggest "welfare city" dependent on government handouts. Most of kids are from welfare mothers. We all saw pictures of "able-bodied" young men refusing to help save people, and instead looting.

"These people" are all so dependent on big government that they won't even get in a boat when their houses are flooding.

"Government bureaucracy" was the cause of the delays in getting help to people, and this all shows why we need to make people less "dependent" on government and more self-reliant.

And, of course, much of the problem was that Bush "had to beg" the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans to let the Federal government help, and they refused because they wanted to hang on to their power. But the good governors of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida wanted to help their people and asked Bush for help before the storm. This was repeated endlessly...

And it's a lie, of course.

The $2000 debit card flip-flop comes at a time when the purchasing limit for an individual transaction for US federal employees with government-issued credit cards goes up from $15,000 to $250,000. That's right - a fed with credit can now spend a quarter million dollars in one hit (presumably they won't spend it all on crack. Most of the are white, after all...)

AT WFC, Molly Ivins also has some idea of how FEMA's Michael "Brownie" Brown got his nickname. But AmericaBlog has the real inside scoop on Brown's qualifications:

Embattled FEMA head Mike Brown insists he is well-qualified to lead the nation's disaster response agency - though he spent his time before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency probing whether a breeder was performing liposuction on a horse's rear end.

To quote Hunter at Kos:

Performing liposuction on a horse's rear end? You know, I think we may have just found the one bit of previous job experience that would qualify someone to join the Bush administration.

Also steaming is John Chuckman at The Smirking Chimp:

If he is alive, Osama bin Laden surely is enjoying some hearty laughter. Nothing he could imagine, short of the virtually-impossible task of obtaining a tactical nuclear weapon and detonating it in an American city, compares to the damage just inflicted upon the United States by its own President. Ten thousand dead is the estimate of New Orleans' mayor. A morticians' emergency measures organization is ready for forty thousand corpses. We won't know for weeks, maybe months, as attics, basements, sewers, canals, and dumpsters are searched. The economic damage is nothing less than colossal.

Columnist Paul Krugman repeated Monday, September 5, a Chicago Tribune report that the U.S.S. Bataan, a military ship with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds, and the machinery to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, sat off the Gulf Coast since Monday (August 29, when Katrina struck) without any patients.

On September 2, Krugman repeated the following from an editorial in Biloxi, Mississippi's Sun Herald: "On Wednesday, reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!

Chuckman compares the New Orleans disaster with recent floods in Germany, where the government's prompt and efficient response was totally to be expected. And Reuters has details of Canadian rescue workers reaching a flooded New Orleans suburb five days before the US military or FEMA rescue teams.

Now compare all that with the new UN Human Development Report, with statistical proof that parts of the USA are on a par with the Third World. The USA's great problem today is that the whole economy has been built around the military industrial sector since WWII, and the government has become increasingly idealogical throughout the Cold War (which, even though they "won", they are reluctant to abandon). So the New Orleans disaster is rooted in both political and economic issues, and nobody seems in much of a hurry to do anything about either of them.