Project Katrina

A reporter at U.S. News & World Report recently became Facebook friends with former FEMA director Michael Brown. According to reporter, Brownie is also using his Facebook account to attempt to rewrite the history of his time with the Bush administration:

Fact is, his is an interesting comeback story, and his Facebook page, which you have to sign up for to see, tells it. He’s a long way from President Bush’s disaster plaudit, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job,” but he remembers it well, dubbing it his least favorite quote. He follows that up with this advice: “Don’t always believe what you read. Ask me instead.” Apparently, many are. He had about 85 friends two weeks ago, and with some active marketing, he’s nearly topped 225.

Greg Anrig over at TMPCafe takes McCain (R-AZ) apart:

While touring New Orleans yesterday, John McCain declared the government’s response to the Katrina disaster “terrible and disgraceful” and pledged that it would never happen again. But McCain also demonstrated precisely the mindset that caused FEMA to revert from what both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s had called a model agency back into the turkey farm it had been before the Clinton administration. He said: “Too often, government has its own peculiar way of doing things, following practices that in the private sector would invite financial ruin or worse.” McCain reiterated the talking point of Newt Gingrich and every other purveyor of right-wing sound bites that UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell you where packages are in real time, but FEMA couldn’t even locate its own assets or people.

Hunter at Daily Kos says all that really needs to be said about John McCain’s walking tour of the Ninth War and his shit all stupid comments:

Hurricane Katrina flooded the Lower Ninth Ward and much of the rest of New Orleans at the end of August, 2005. It has thus been over two and a half years since the destruction of the city. Rebuilding remains a slow, difficult process, and it is now a given that a sizable subset of the evacuated population will not return. This is not surprising, as we have yet to even declare whether they will, at any arbitrarily far-off date, have anything to return to.

It seems surprising that an American senator and candidate for the presidency of the United States would, two and a half years, not have a ready opinion on whether or not the wounded city should be rebuilt. Having a plan one way or the other would at the least be something worthy of discussion and debate. Do you want the city to be rebuilt? Fine, then how shall it be accomplished? What role does the government have in this, the largest natural disaster to hit an American city in our lifetimes? Should it help actively? Passively? Not at all?

Or, on the other hand, should the Lower Ninth Ward be abandoned, left to the will of future hurricanes? That seems unlikely, given the interest in repaving the area and making it something different—something classier, something with more malls and different residents—but it seems a notion that at least requires defending, among those that have it. The Lower Ninth is not necessarily the most vulnerable of New Orleans’ many vulnerable parts, and yet discussions of New Orleans (non-)rebuilding efforts always seem to center on it. It has become a symbol of race and class, and an ongoing allegory for America’s will, or lack of will, to heal its own wounds.

The Associated Press reports while McCain (R-AZ) was in New Orleans today he said:

John McCain tured still hurricane-damaged areas of New Orleans and declared that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have immediately landed his plane at the nearest Air Force base.

Let us not forget that the above picture of John McCain with Bush, was taken the morning of the day New Orleans was drowning. Can’t you just sense the urgency in McCain suggesting Bush get to NOLA as soon as possible.

According to CBS News:

McCain says making FEMA an independent agency isn’t the problem. He said there needed to qualified people in the job. “The former head of FEMA was not qualified,” he said. “They haven’t always had a terrible record.”

He also told reporters he was not sure if he would rebuild the lower 9th ward as president.

“That is why we need to go back is to have a conversation about what to do-rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is,” he said.

Ponder what he means by this and why there were no more follow-up questions. Ask yourself if he’d say something like this if the 9th Ward was middle-class, white, and Republican.

This is an incredibly important post from Commonscribe at Daily Kos. There are a number of reasons more than two years after Katrina hit that the rebuilding of New Orleans is not happening. But the primary reason is insurance related. The freaking blood suckers just won’t pay folks that paid their premiums for years, even decades. They’ve come up with every excuse possible, including outright fraud:

The insurance industry doesn’t want you paying too much attention, because what’s happening on the gulf coast will probably be coming soon to a town near you. While the nation’s distracted and insurance reform is now bottled up in the Senate, the industry is once again moving to protect profits at the expense of the rest of us, particularly those living on the gulf. And make no mistake: these are not isolated cases—this is an industry-wide effort.

The latest target? A group of former insurance adjusters turned whistleblowers who are seeking to reinstate their false claims lawsuit against the good hands people at Allstate, the good neighbors at State Farm and no fewer than twelve other insurance companies.

The lawsuit alleges that the industry systematically classified wind damage as flood-related, and pushed those costs onto the federal flood insurance program. The whitleblowers claim to have documented this behavior in hundreds of cases in Louisiana alone.

It’s all part of the growing body of evidence that the industry acted as one to defraud and delay in the wake of the storm, and it follows hard on the heels of the release of the so-called McKinsey documents. These documents are a 150,000+ page cache of material relating to the industry’s outside consultants, McKinsey & Co., that in the 1990’s counseled clients like State Farm and Allstate on ways to reduce claim payments by lowballing policyholders willing to settle quickly and litigating those holding out for more. One document described the strategy as moving “from good hands to boxing gloves.”

These documents have been both the industry’s best and worst kept secret. While lawyers have long known of the documents existence, the companies have gone to great lengths to avoid releasing them. At one point last year, Allstate was paying $10,000 per day in contempt-of-court fines for refusing a Indiana judge’s order to make them public. Contempt of court charges for doing the same thing in Missouri ran to over $4 million.The company finally caved earlier this month, posting the bulk of the documents on its website after it was ordered to stop selling new policies in the state of Florida.

This is not necessarily good news for gulf coast policyholders looking for ammunition to fight Big Insurance. Incredibly, not a single one of those 150,000 pages deals with catastrophic loss claims for things, like, say, hurricanes. And there is no indication the company will be compelled to release any further documents anytime soon.

In the meantime, insurance rates in the gulf have risen by as much as 300%, and Louisiana now has some of the highest premiums in the country. And largely because of this, an American city rots and turns to brownfields, and residents all along the crippled gulf, forgotten by the nation, are left to fend for themselves against a multi-billion dollar industry seeking to protect record profits at all costs. With Washington sitting on the sidelines, private attorneys and state insurance commissioners are understaffed and ill-equipped to stand alone against the insurers; just last month, Louisiana hit Allstate with the largest fine it possibly could for illegally dropping policyholders. The penalty? A relatively insignificant $250,000.

The Gulf Coast Dead Zone is one of the reasons Katrina did as much damage as it did. The Dead Zone is caused by a number of interrelated factors. But regardless of what the exact cause is, each year it is one factor (on multiple levels) that contributes to the eroding the coast of Louisiana. The lost wet lands, totaling hundreds of acres a year, serve as a buffer against large storms. Lets cue a new, or at least an increased factor that will contribute to the growth of “Dead Zone” and lost of yet more wet lands:

The large “dead zone” that grows in the Gulf of Mexico every summer is nothing new. The toxic runoff of nitrogen fertilizer used on conventional crops in the Midwest leads to a huge swathe of sea that is incapable of sustaining life. The nitrogen-rich fertilizer leads to an increase of algae life, which in turn removes oxygen from the water. The end result: a dead zone that typically grows to the size of New Jersey.

Corn is the biggest culprit in creating these environments, and now that the U.S. is looking to biofuels as a solution to its energy needs, the problem’s only getting worse. Bush signed legislation at the end of 2007 that will triple the amount of corn ethanol produced over the next several years.

In the liberal blogsphere Wal-Mart doesn’t get a lot of love. But this post isn’t about if Wal-Mart is generally either “good” or “bad.” That question is far more complex than a simple yes or no (as you’ll see in a few seconds). Instead, as more and more detailed research is released from the academic community we’re finding out a lot of interesting things and as the National Post has reported, some might surprise you.

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer—and remembered as American business’s answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

“A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level,” was Scott’s message to his people. “Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing.”

This extraordinary delegation of authority—essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year— saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart trucks pre-loaded with emergency supplies at regional depots were among the first on the scene wherever refugees were being gathered by officialdom. Their main challenge, in many cases, was running a gauntlet of FEMA officials who didn’t want to let them through. As the president of the brutalized Jefferson Parish put it in a Sept. 4 Meet the Press interview, speaking at the height of nationwide despair over FEMA’s confused response: “If [the U.S.] government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.”

Now if only the executives at Wal-Mart would have shown the intelligence to handle the Deborah Shank affair in a similar manner they could have avoided a ton of bad press.

Update: Steven Horwitz’s report is entitled, Making Hurricane Response More Effective: Lessons From the Private Sector & The Coast Guard During Katrina. You can download it here.

In a report to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee last Thursday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) inspector general said they are more prepared for an emergency situation than it was after Hurricane Katrina, but nowhere near ready for another such catastrophe. So what are they waiting for?