Project Katrina

Our Traditional Media has done a terrible job covering the real reason behind the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. But Harry Shearer, via the Huffington Post, has done his best to explain that the flood never had to happen. It was the direct fault of the Federal Government and specifically the Army Corp of Engineers. Period.

This is why Harry has for years called the aftermath of Katrina the Federal Flood. How he highlights what nobody else seems to want to write about,

This July was good to New Orleans. No major storms nearby, and a wealth of visitors packing the streets, clubs, restaurants. The Essence Music Festival, the big cocktail convention (seriously), then an international classical piano competition (ditto), and the SCLC’s national convention–compared to last July, when the streets were empty, the resettled part of the city was thriving and vibrant.

August brings a different mood. In Friday’s Times-Picayune, we learn that the Army Corps of Engineers is now scrambling—the paper’s word—to reinforce a crucial floodwall abutting a neighborhood that suffered disastrous flooding three years ago. Apparently, the Corps—which “concluded” on its own that Congress hadn’t authorized it to build a new, stronger, more deeply anchored floodwall before completing so-called 100-year flood protection in 2011—has realized the floodwall is far more vulnerable than it had thought.

More disturbing is the fact that the problem is the elevation figures the Corps used, right after Katrina, in calculating what was needed to strengthen the existing wall. They were “culled” from the original floodwall design plans. It’s been well established by the independent forensic investigations into the Katrina disaster that the Corps had a bad habit of using old, outdated elevation figures in the original design of the failed structures. So why “cull” those after the disaster proved them so disastrously wrong?

Combined with the continued reports of water leaking and puddling in backyards on the supposedly protected side of the 17th St. Canal—reports the Corps is still scrambling (my word) to explain—New Orleans is once again forced to ask: is this the best America can do?

After Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) purchased more than $85M worth of basic supplies for storm victims. For more than two years, until last month FEMA let the supplies sit in warehouses at a cost of $1M/year.

During that two year period local government officials and non-profit relief organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi made repeated public pleas for donations of the exact sort of items FEMA had already purchased and were even stored locally.

That these supplies people have needed for years just sat in warehouses until mid-June of this year is bad enough, but FEMA was able to find a way to make this story even more sad and depressing the way only George Bush’s administration can.

The supplies (GSA now says it is only $18.5M—we can’t count) called Living Kits included towels, shirts, pants, shoes, coffee makers, pillowcases, dinnerware, blankets, pots and pans, buckets, and cleaning supplies. You know the stuff people need to live when they have lost everything and are living in trailers.

So FEMA kept all its stuff under lock and key because as a spokesperson told CNN:

We were not notified that there was a great need for this particular property.

Really, no great need! You have got to be fucking joking. I guess somebody needed to put together a Bush-style post-Katrina DVD for our national emergency agency so they were aware close to 250,000 folks are still living in FEMA provided trailers and housing.

So in June of this year with a single stroke of a pen, FEMA officials declared all the goods purchased for Katrina victims surplus and developed a plan to distribute them to other federal and state government agencies (including prisons).

But before they shipped off all the supplies (121 truckloads) they of course sent a representative out to state and local agencies, non-profit aid organizations, and churches just to double check that there wasn’t a need.

Well not really, I just made that up! That would be logical. Not only didn’t they sent anybody out for a face-to-face meeting, they didn’t even place one phone call or send a single e-mail on this topic.

When the Congressional delegations from Louisiana and Mississippi found out this shocking information from a CNN investigative story they went ballistic (video of the story here). Of course FEMA officials expressed, as you might expect, outrage, cause after nearly three years of rank incompetence and untold billions in waste and fraud how could something like this happen on their watch?

And since the Bush Administration officials have fake outrage down to an art form they of course promised a full investigation, meaning they will wait until the scandal disappears from the headlines before throwing some low-level bureaucrat under the bus.

But that was not enough for Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. They requested FEMA:

Come and tell the committee how such a debacle could occur, and in the process, what are they going to do to assure Congress and the taxpaying public that it will never happen again.

Last Thursday in a pretty rare joint congressional hearing of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees officials from FEMA and the General Services Administration (GSA) got it from both sides of the aisle (some of the audio is here).

During the hearing Eric Smith, FEMA’s assistant administrator for logistics management kept to the same tired talking points when pressed on why the supplies were not distributed to folks that needed them:

They were returned to us after they were not used from different areas—Mississippi, Louisiana.

Landrieu said to Smith:

FEMA never told state officials or relief agencies involved in recovery efforts that the Living Kits meant to resettle hurricane survivors were still available. How can people ask for something they don’t know exists?

Smith’s response was mind-numbing:

They have to have a need. If they have bona fide need, it’s their responsibility to pass that need on.

Where have we heard this before? Maybe on Monday, August 29th 2005 when Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco called Bush, as more than 1,100 Americans were literally starting to drown and said:

Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got!

But days, weeks, and even months later she’d be blamed by the White House cause she didn’t say exactly what she wanted/needed. I guess in almost three years we still have not got this not so little problem figured out.

You see Mr. Smith when you have pictures like the above, and there are hundreds more like it, even one where a family wrote in duct tape on their roof:

We are Americans, please help, some can’t swim.

When you endure something like what happened as the lead agency that is supposed to ensure it doesn’t in fact happen, more fucking lame excuses almost three years after the fact just don’t cut it.

But thankfully Landrieu also would have none of his BS:

It’s like if a house was on fire. If the fire department operated the same way FEMA does, we would have to call the fire department and specifically request the hose, the pressurized water, the truck, the firefighters and the ladder, all before FEMA would acknowledge that they should send this equipment to help.

After the Congressional hearing a CNN reporter caught up with Smith and asked what mistakes were made? His response:

We did not really make any mistakes. Could things have been done better? Yes of course, but we followed our procedures.

To date only a couple truck loads of the supplies have been returned to Louisiana. None to Mississippi. But rest assured, FEMA told the committee they are still cataloguing what supplies it has left and they’ll report back to the committee. But they do admit at least 90,000 of the Living Kits have already been distributed (they don’t like to say, “given away”).

I’ve already used enough words and I just don’t really know what else to say other than I am ashamed as an America this has all happened as I was a taxpaying adult. What have we become?

I just want to end with a little quote from a BBC show I love called Top Gear. I’ve been watching it since 2005 and I can’t ever recall them ever making a single political statement. They just drive the fastest cars in the world really, really fast.

They’ve only been to the US for one show. A challenge to drive from Miami to New Orleans. They got off the road right before they hit New Orleans in 2006 and had this to say (extended video here):

Finally though we made it. And my word were we in for a shock. We’d seen on the news what Hurricane Katrina had done. But seeing the devastation for real was truly astonishing.

Every house, I’ve been driving now for what 15 miles, and there isn’t a pavement there isn’t a building there isn’t anything that isn’t smashed. It is such a vast scale of destruction.

It had been a year since Katrina had blown through and we sort of assumed that the wealthiest nation on earth would have fixed it.

But we were wrong.

How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing this is here?

Some nights I don’t sleep well. I just wonder what they’d say today almost three years later!

As I’ve written about before (and here) Republicans and White House officials keep lying about the fact that there were no oil spills caused by Hurricane Katrina and Rita in an effort to convince the American public that more off-shore drilling is both a good idea and environmentally safe. Now we have Samuel Bodman, the head of the Department of Energy (DoE), the one man in the United States that should know the facts, lying to our faces that no oil spills or rigs were damaged by Katrina and Rita. It boggles the mind.

This is a statement by Stan Collier in a NYT article today, who was the officer in charge of a Swift in Vietnam. In a nutshell “Swift Boat” vets want to reclaim the name “Swift Boat,” folks that served with honor in Vietnam and not the verb it now is to smear somebody in a political campaign.

Tristero at Hullabaloo sums up the “real” issue better then I could:

Indeed we all have, whether or not we ever saw a Swift Boat. But this is what movement conservatives do with emotionally weighty situations or actions. They demean everyone involved.

In Schiavo, they took one of the worst moral dilemmas a family has to face—a decision which clearly must be private and for which definite legal guidelines are established—and put the family and the country through hell in the most cynical fashion imaginable, running roughshod over the Constitution for no reason whatsoever except to make the point that they had the power to do it. They took Katrina—where the fault was clearly an incompetent federal government, i.e. the Bush administration—and blamed the victims for their own suffering, even while they were still up to their necks in sewage. They characterized the tortures endured at Abu Ghraib as mere schoolboy pranks, demeaning the suffering of numerous totally innocent men, women, and children.

And they regularly demean the achievements of heroes, dismissing or laughing at them when they don’t like their politics and dragging everyone into the mud in their desperate, psychotic propensity to do anything and everything to gain power. name “Swift Boat” or what he was, folks that served with honor in Vietnam and not the verb it now is to smear sombody.

This is just a flat out smack down from Daily Kos related to the differences between how McCain and Obama have responded to the floods that are devastating communities all around me:

Disaster struck the midwest last week as flood waters shattered previous records, drowning crops and putting tens of thousands of people out of their homes. The full effects of the flood will be felt nationwide as gas prices could increase another 15% and food prices could increase another 25-30%. No doubt, this would be a serious issue for an aspiring presidential candidate. Obama answered the call this weekend, touring the hard hit areas, rolling up his sleeves to fill sandbags, and taking action with local leaders.

Obama’s camp also began putting out an urgent, nationwide plea to help flood victims—making it the front page headline on his website:

And how did John McCain react? He was busy rolling up his sleeves—filling up moneybags at a California “finance event.” For all the talk about Republicans disliking California and “west coast values”, they sure do spend a lot of time at California fundraisers. You may recall that while New Orleans drowned, GWB and McCain were miles away, sharing a little cake between friends. In a sad case of deja vu, McCain is once again nowhere to be found. What was featured on John McCain’s website over the weekend? John McCain, of course. So, how about today? Is there a serious focus on the growing tragedy of the floods? Nope, back to the alleged former Clinton supporter on the front page. A small flood donation button does appear, after scrolling a bit, right after the plea for McCain donations and the request that you add five “friends” for McCain. Apparently, adding more names to McCain’s fundraising email list takes priority over a flooded midwest and a country about to be smacked with even higher prices on everything from gas to milk and bread. And despite the fact that McCain’s team has thus far tried to mimic every aspect of Obama’s website and logo, they don’t feel the need to mimic his compassion and leadership in a time of dire need.

And even now, as the midwest continues to flood, McCain is hopping back and forth between Texas fundraisers. Mr. Moneybags doesn’t seem to have time for flood victims in the next few days. According to his campaign schedule, McCain is going to be very busy getting to know GWB’s oil and energy friends in Texas.

Actions and pass performance often are powerful factors in determing future actions. We ought to all keep the above in mind when we vote in November.

Smintheus at Daily Kos has a flat out smack down of John McCain as it relates to New Orleans and using it again and again as a cheap political prop.

Yesterday evening John McCain gave a speech near New Orleans with the goal of seizing Barack Obama’s limelight and grabbing some of the mantle of ‘change’ for himself.

The Republican nominee-in-waiting plans to draw contrasts with Obama on a range of issues and argue that the Democrat offers the wrong kind of change while he offers the right kind. An advertising campaign is expected to reinforce that message in the coming weeks.

Many have commented about the obnoxious message and the equally unpleasant manner in which McCain delivered that message. Some have also pointed out how the episode highlights McCain’s lack of judgment; it was an act of hybris to ask voters to compare his own negative and ad hominem speech to Obama’s gracious and positive one on the very day the latter clinched his party’s nomination.

The cringe-worthy material is so abundant however that few have noted the stunning hypocrisy on McCain’s part. John McCain has a stark record of ignoring NOLA and opposing substantive disaster-relief legislation for two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina - right up until the spring of this year. And yet it is New Orleans that he chooses to use as his backdrop when he wishes to portray himself as the true candidate of “change”.

The fact that McCain is traveling to the Gulf Coast in an attempt to portray himself as an agent of change is a mark of how little he can actually point to in that regard. Where else could he possibly camp out to connect himself to ‘change’? On the front lawn of one of the handful of his lobbyist/campaign staffers whom he dumped in haste when reporters started asking about illegal activities?

Who can forget McCain’s indifference to the disaster as it unfolded? Appearing on Face the Nation the day before Katrina struck, he said nothing about the looming emergency. Then McCain yucked it up with Bush in Arizona even while the Gulf Coast was getting lashed. When he did get around to commenting, three days later, his office issued a tepid press release.

For the next half year, as Jonathan Stein documented, McCain was either absent from or in active opposition to substantive efforts to aid Katrina victims.

Though McCain issued a statement the next week calling on Congress to make sacrifices in order to fund recovery efforts, he was quoted in The New Leader on September 1 cautioning against over-spending in support of Katrina’s victims. “We also have to be concerned about future generations of Americans,” he said. “We’re going to end up with the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country.”

That attitude was borne out in McCain’s actions and votes. Forty Senators and 100 members of Congress visited New Orleans before he did; he finally got there in March 2006.

During that period McCain wasn’t just failing to show leadership on the issue. Along with most other Republicans, he dug his heels in against spending serious money to help Americans in desperate need (contrast that with his free-spending ways on Iraq). McCain voted against extending unemployment benefits to Katrina victims up to 52 weeks, and against extending Medicaid benefits up to five months. He even voted twice against establishing an independent commission to examine the governmental response to Katrina. In May of 2006, little over a month after visiting NOLA for the first time, McCain also voted against the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill that had $28 billion for hurricane relief.

With a speech that failed on just about every level, on the facts, on the visuals, and even on the reaction from the media arm of the Republican Party (that would be FOX Noise), it almost seems like there is nothing left to mock about Tuesday’s speech by John McCain (R-AZ), but there is one little thing worth mentioning.

McCain began by saying:

Good evening from the great city of New Orleans.

Uhhh, no not so much. McCain’s speech was giving from Kenner, a city about 15 miles outside of New Orleans. Admittedly this is a minor mistake, compared to for instance, not knowing the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, and it didn’t seem to bother his electrified crowd of a couple dozen. It would be like me being in the Hilton in Gaithersburg, Maryland and saying I was speaking to you from the “great city of Washington, DC.

If you are going to use New Orleans and Hurricane as a “political prop” then at least get some of the most basic facts right, like what fucking city you are in.

For all the anger I have with a lot of our elected leaders, it’s nothing compared to my utter contempt for John McCain (R-AZ). I don’t know if he’s been a millionaire living inside a bubble for so long inside the Beltway that it makes him completely fucking tone deaf to the experiences of others or if he’s just a world class dick, but it takes a superhuman level of gall for him to go to NOLA, which hasn’t even come close to full recovered and say this:

The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again. I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas. Like others before him, he seems to think government is the answer to every problem; that government should take our resources and make our decisions for us. That type of change doesn’t trust Americans to know what is right or what is in their own best interests. It’s the attitude of politicians who are sure of themselves but have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people. That attitude created the unresponsive bureaucracies of big government in the first place. And that’s not change we can believe in.

Dude, you may be old as dirt and have decades of DC experience, but that is what makes this statement all the more amazing. You voted for bill after bill, decade after decade while you were in Congress that underfunded the levees. Did not listen to report after report about the potential problems. Why in the world would we think you’d all the sudden “get it” if you are President?

Since he is going to use NOLA as a political prop, lets us not forget where he was and what he was doing the morning of August 29, 2005 as the citizens of that city drowned.

From the department of I can’t make this shit up:

“Either they are isolated or callous,” Bush told CBS News radio in an interview. “There’s no telling how many people have lost their lives as a result of the slow response.”

He said the “world ought to be angry and condemn” the junta, which has been widely condemned for stalling the disaster relief effort.

I am pretty sure much of the world was thinking the same thing as New Orleans drowned and people in the Convention Center and Super Dome waited days and day for help.