archived: 4 - 10 Sep, 2005 Back Next
UPDATED: September 6, 2005
COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM?
Barbara Bush:
'So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this --this is working very well for them.'
PHOTO OP PRESIDENT
It is Karl Rove damage control at its very best? Having been besieged by critical publicity, Rove has Bush trying to catch up to the media curve to stem the tide of public anger over the administration’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina:
U.S. Senator
Mary Landrieu, D-La., issued
the following statement (emphasis
added) . . . regarding
her call yesterday for President Bush to appoint a cabinet-level official to
oversee Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts within 24 hours.
Sen. Landrieu said:
“Yesterday, I was hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the
regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new understanding for
the magnitude of the suffering and for the abject failures of the current
Federal Emergency Management Agency. 24 hours later, the President has yet to
answer my call for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA,
now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by the task at
hand.
“I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available
to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the
aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims – far
more efficiently than buses – FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine,
communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in,
only to be ignored by the agency.
“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street
levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I
believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of
this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less
than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily
prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately
needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of
equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the
Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better
from their national government.
In Mississippi, a German television (news clip in German with translation below) witnessed even more Rovarian spin tactics:
Two minutes ago the President drove past in his convoy. But what has happened in Biloxi all day long is truly unbelievable. Suddenly recovery units appeared, suddenly bulldozers were there, those hadn't been seen here all the days before, and this in an area, in which it really wouldn't be necessary to do a big clean up, because far and wide nobody lives here anymore, the people are more inland in the city. The President travels with a press baggage [big crew]. This press baggage got very beautiful pictures which are supposed to say, that the President was here and help is on the way, too. The extent of the natural disaster shocked me, but the extent of the staging is shocking me at least the same way. With that back to Hamburg.
Bush’s actions belie the promise he made to Americans running for President (Republican National Convention Aug 3, 2000):
To lead this nation to a responsibility era, a president himself must be responsible. And so, when I put my hand on the bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me god. For me, gaining this office is not the ambition of a lifetime, but it is the opportunity of a lifetime. And I will make the most of it.
ANOTHER CITY FALLS
New Orleans is not the only city Bush lost in the past week. In Iraq, Bush loses another city:
Abu Musab Zarqawi's foreign-led Al Qaeda in Iraq took open control of a key western town at the Syrian border, deploying its guerrilla fighters in the streets and flying Zarqawi's black banner from rooftops, tribal leaders and other residents in the city and surrounding villages said.
A sign newly posted at the entrance of Qaim declared, "Welcome to the Islamic Kingdom of Qaim." A statement posted in mosques described Qaim as an "Islamic kingdom liberated from the occupation."
Zarqawi's fighters were killing officials and civilians seen as government-allied or anti-Islamic, witnesses, residents and others said. On Sunday, the bullet-riddled body of a woman lay in a street of Qaim. A sign left on her corpse declared, "A prostitute who was punished."
Zarqawi's fighters had shot to death nine men in public executions in the city center since the weekend, accusing the men of being spies and collaborators for U.S. forces, said Sheikh Nawaf Mahallawi, a leader of a Sunni Arab tribe, the Albu Mahal, that had battled the foreign fighters. – Washington Post
Mission accomplished?
_____________________________________________
INDIFFERENCE
“The President said an hour ago that the Gulf Coast looks like it has been obliterated by a weapon. It has. Indifference is a weapon of mass destruction.”
Rep. Dennis Kucinich
September 2, 2005
HUBRIS AND WAR
Human hubris and Bush’s war in Iraq combined in the flooding of New Orleans.
MARK FISCHETTI, in a New York Times op/ed entitled They Saw It Coming carefully documents how unrestrained growth and development along the Mississippi River and alteration of nature’s natural pattern of flooding exposed New Orleans to destruction. Fischetti builds a compelling case that the failure to adequately address the known dangers represents a failure at every level of government beginning before Bush’s administration. Bush is not responsible for all of these failures.
Bush’s war in Iraq IS responsible for depleting funds designated to engineer protection for New Orleans. Editor and Publisher catalogs the cause and effect of Bush’s war on New Orleans:
When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars. . . .
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said."
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."
Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
Grover Norquist, one of the principal architects of radical Republican economic policy, once quipped:
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." – The Nation
For New Orleans the Republican bathtub was full of human beings.
And, the Republicans continue the drowning. An Assistant Secretary of the Army was fired by Rumsfeld just last week for disagreeing with Bush’s budget. More precisely, the Assistant Secretary was fired for questioning cuts in the Army Corps of Engineers in testimony before Congress:
Parker said Bush's proposal to provide the Army Corps of Engineers with approximately $4 billion -- down about 10 percent -- was not the right number. The corps had requested more than $6 billion. The assistant secretary told lawmakers that the cuts would mean canceling $190 million in already contracted projects.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, the committee's chairman, called the decision to let Parker go "a serious mistake."
"Assistant Secretary Parker came before the Budget Committee and answered questions put to him honestly and directly," Conrad said. "That is precisely his responsibility in our constitutional system. – CNN
Perhaps honesty before Congress is a constitutional responsibility in the America we know – but not in the bathtub drowning of government envisioned by the Bush Republicans.
Last Update: 03/27/2006