View from the Mountain

Why can't we get there from here?

Jennifer Moses has another excellent article, "Losing Hope in Louisiana," in today's Washington Post.  You might think we have a new day dawning with government stepping up to its responsibility.  It seems the majority wants government to act responsibly.  It just doesn't seem we can get there from here.

Jennifer paints a picture that confirms what many have suspected.  Things still aren't working well for the Hurricane Katrina victims.  To a large extent as Jennifer points out, the media focus has moved on, but that doesn't mean the problems are fixed or that FEMA is actually getting the job done.

But if you go down to the shelters, wait in one of the blocks-long social services lines, or drive out to any of the many churches where evacuees sleep in pews...

You'll hear mothers complain that a shelter is no place to school -- let alone raise -- a child. And you'll hear one horror story after another about how FEMA has denied evacuees any financial assistance, accused applicants of fraud, lost their case numbers...

The picture that Jennifer Moses paints is one that should worry us all.  In her last article, article, "Why Baton Rouge Is Still Bush Country" she pretty well sums up why we can't get past the problem of government inaction.

It doesn't help any that the Democrats haven't been able to speak plainly in decades. Because if under George W. Bush the Republican Party has become heartless, the Democratic Party has become spineless.

What really gets me as it does many others is the disconnect between what is being said by government officials and what is being actually done by our government.  Paul Krugman explains the whole theory in his recent NY Times article, "Will Bush Deliver?" (paid subscription required)

One of their "new rules for radicals" is "Don't just do something, stand there." ...

For example, the public strongly supports a higher minimum wage, but conservatives have nonetheless managed to cut that wage in real terms by not raising it in the face of inflation.

Right now, the public strongly supports a major reconstruction effort, so that's what Mr. Bush had to promise. But as the TV cameras focus on other places and other issues, will the administration pay a heavy political price for a reconstruction that starts slowly and gradually peters out? The New York experience suggests that it won't.

So the new theory is tell the people what they want to hear but don't worry about the consequences of not following through with your commitments.  I actually believe we're getting to a flash point where both ends of the spectrum are beginning to understand the problem.  David Brooks' article, "As Parties Grow Weary, Time for an Insurgency," is a good example of the growing consensus that our political system just isn't working.

After a while, you get sick of the DeLays of the right and the Deans of the left. After a while, you tire of the current Republicans, who lack a coherent governing philosophy, and the current Democrats, who are completely bereft of ideas. After a while you begin to wonder: Did I really get engaged in politics so I could spend months arguing about the confirmation of Harriet Miers, the John Major of American jurisprudence?

We now have a government who seems to be committed not to the welfare of the public, but to making certain that people come to believe government is always ineffective.  Paul Krugman goes on to explain what is happening in his article, "Miserable By Design."

So here's the key to understanding post-Katrina policy: Mr. Bush can't avoid helping Katrina's victims, but he doesn't want to legitimize institutions that help the needy, like the housing voucher program. As a result, his administration refuses to use those institutions, even when they are the best way to provide victims with aid. More generally, the administration is trying to treat Katrina's victims as harshly as the political realities allow, so as not to create a precedent for other aid efforts.

As the misery of the hurricane's survivors goes on, remember this: to a large extent, they are miserable by design.

It's really sad that our government has come to this. The key to understanding our government is that we have people in government who don't believe in government serving the people.   What they believe in is absolute loyalty to those who they have gotten elected and to doing whatever is necessary to keep them in power. I've already written at length on this in, "Where change has to come from," "Accountability for Katrina, not 'finger pointing'," and "McCainism."

We must be close to everyone figuring out that we need people who believe in doing the right thing for all the people, not just those in power.  After all Cal Thomas has come forward with this statement in his article, "Presidential poll pain."

President Bush's bubble contributes to declining poll numbers.

    What should he do? First, he should replace those on his staff who seem to care more about him than they do about policy. If the policies are right and benefit the people, the approval and admiration will follow. But "loyalty tests" and "my president, right or wrong" is not policy. It is hero-worship and it can only blind people to policy objectives.

    Nothing would fire up the country more (short of winning the war in Iraq and finding Osama bin Laden) than a crusade to liberate us from the grip of oil-producing nations that hate us and use our money to spread terrorism.

Even Cal Thomas is close to connecting the dots about what is wrong with our government. 

As the quote from President Kennedy that Cal Thomas uses in his article says,  "we can do better."

Government help for Katrina victims

Our government absolutely has to step up to the plate and help the Gulf Coast rebuild.  However, I somehow get the feeling that this whole thing is being set up as a no questions asked "spend as much money as we need" to fix it program.

Today I ran across this article from the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required).

When President Bush announced last Thursday that the feds would take a lead role in the reconstruction of New Orleans, he in effect established a new $200 billion federal line of credit. To put that $200 billion in perspective, we could give every one of the 500,000 families displaced by Katrina a check for $400,000, and they could each build a beach front home virtually anywhere in America.

This flood of money comes on the heels of a massive domestic spending build-up in progress well before Katrina traveled its ruinous path. Federal spending, not counting the war in Iraq, was growing by 7% this year, which came atop the 30% hike over Mr. Bush's first term. Republicans were already being ridiculed as the Grand Old Spending Party by taxpayer groups.

As much as I would like a beach house, I don't think I want the federal government to buy me or anyone else one.  We have to help the victims of the hurricanes, but we have to do it in a way that won't bankrupt the country.  In spite of owning the printing presses for money, there is a limit to how much we can spend before some serious dislocations start to take place.  I'm not an economist but this kind of spending binge on top of tax cuts cannot be sustained.

David Brooks wrote the following in the NY Times on September 18.

On Thursday, President Bush went to New Orleans and gave the second most important domestic policy speech of his life. Politically it was a masterpiece, proof that if the president levels with the American people and admits mistakes, it pays off.

But in policy terms, the speech pushed the journey toward Bushian conservatism into high gear. The Gulf Coast will be a laboratory for the Bushian vision of energetic but not domineering government.

I've already penned a couple of posts in response to David Brooks.  They're at my Justmypolitics blog.

Somehow when the top procurement official in the White House, David H. Safavian, has just been arrested according to the Washington Post, I'm a little leery of the oversight on the spending of $200B.  We can't exactly trust Congress to not waste money these days after their less than sterling effort on the  transportation bill,  "Road Bill Reflects The Power Of Pork."

After all there have been more than a few questions about the spending on the war in Iraq and the number of bids awarded without competition.

Of course that's not holding up things in Washington.  An article in the Houston paper states "Auditors investigate Katrina contracts."  Even CNN has an article, "Firms with White House ties get Katrina contracts."

I was pretty suspicious when I got up this morning.  Reading  Doonesbury (September 26) confirmed it. I read that Duke was pulling up stakes in Iraq and following Halliburton to New Orleans.  Duke always has a nose for easy money.

Hopefully we can get the Gulf Coast rebuilt without our country going broke or Duke getting too rich.

A sobering view of government

It's hard to find any rays of light in the Katrina disaster.

Yet it has created a healthy debate on our government and what it is expected to do.  Many believe that one the key roles of the federal government is to help whenever local and state officials can't muster enough resources to help themselves.

This seems to be a logical role for government, yet there are many who believe that helping yourself is the only real way to build an "ownership" society.

The problem as always is that people see things filtered through their own reality.  It's hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes and image not owning a car, or even worse not having enough money to buy gasoline for your care.  The most ironic thing is that the very people who believe in individualism and boot strapping one's self to success who are the ones who have just demonstrated more clearly than ever that it isn't what you can do that can get you that high paying job, it's who you know or even better who was your college roommate.

As is often the case a view from afar pretty well sums up the situation.  This quote is from the article, "Soldiers rescue the politicians" which was published today in the Toronto Star. (free registration required)

The problem would seem to run deeper — to the type of people now serving in government.

The growing importance of ideology has meant that well-rounded pragmatists have been squeezed out of the U.S. political process, replaced by ideologues and party loyalists whose main attribute is not what they have done, but what they believe.Brown was not the head of FEMA because of his expertise in emergency relief, but because he was a friend of former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who was George Bush's campaign manager in 2000. Prior to joining FEMA in 2002, Brown had served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association for a decade. And among his subordinates at FEMA, one was a veteran of the 2000 Bush campaign and another had worked in the White House in 2001 planning presidential trips

     "These guys kind of have a deer-in-the-headlights look; they haven't been through this kind of thing and it shows," commented Paul Light, director of the Centre for Public Service at the Brookings Institution.The politicians were no better at providing leadership. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco was almost invisible, Mayor Nagin colourful but ineffective — his police force just melted — and the president strangely disengaged and rhetorically inept.

Interestingly, E.J. Dionne in today's Washington Post, calls Katrina, the "End of the Bush Era."

And so the Bush Era ended definitively on Sept. 2, the day Bush first toured the Gulf Coast States after Hurricane Katrina. There was no magic moment with a bullhorn. The utter failure of federal relief efforts had by then penetrated the country's consciousness. Yesterday's resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown put an exclamation point on the failure.

There are a couple of results that are surprising to me in all the recent polls.  First if you go to the Pew Research Center website, you will that 67% of people believe that President Bush could have done more.  Yet when you dig down in the article some of the data is very disconcerting.

Fully 85% of Democrats and 71% of independents think the president could have done more to get aid to hurricane victims flowing more quickly. Republicans, on balance, feel the president did all he could to get relief efforts going..

Of course it gets even worse. 

Roughly three-quarters of Democrats (76%) rate the federal government's efforts in this area as only fair or poor. Most Republicans (63%) give the federal government positive marks for its response to the hurricane.

This must be the came group that measures things by ideology not facts.  I think the challenge is to understand that many leaders, including the president were out of the loop. This is from Newsweek.

Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

There obviously are people who believe that governments (city, state, & federal) have done well in this crisis, but I have to wonder where they are getting their news and if they know which end is up.

Accountability for Katrina, not "finger pointing"

I really want to hope that a new day is dawning for our country.  So many people are appalled at the way that government ineptitude at all levels has increased the human suffering brought on by Katrina that just maybe, we the people can come away from this tragedy with a renewed commitment that things must change.

None of this is the childish finger pointing that administration officials want to discredit while they have their political operatives try to point the finger at others.   What seems to be happening is that people want to hold the government at all levels accountable for their mistakes.  This is what good government is all about.  It's doesn't focus on republican or democrat, it focuses on competence. 

The sad thing is that many currently in our government got there on a platform that basically said that government is incompetent and we should replace many governmental functions with private industry.  Unfortunately that has been taken as a signal for companies to line up at the public trough.  I have seen much government outsourcing, some of it is good, but much of it is not more efficient than what it replaced except that now someone is making a profit on what was once a government service.

In a sense by their lack of confidence in government and their incompetent appointees they have created a self-fulfilling promise.  Again this isn't a party issue, it's a system issue.  At some point all of the attacking government to get into office becomes real.  Government gets attacked and often is emasculated.

As government comes under siege, the best people often leave since they are unwilling to work for people who don't believe in their organization's mission.  It's a classic organizational story where the people brought in to save the organization end up destroying it.

What I have seen is a reinvigorated press and a public out pouring of help. I don't know how long the press will be able to survive the professional spin control groups, but we can always hope that the US press now has an effective backbone which will serve out republic well.  This morning in the Toronto Star (free registration required) in an article, "U.S. must examine its soul," had this to say.

This is not how America sees itself — on its knees, in chaos, floundering in an emergency.

This is not how Americans want the rest of the world to see them — inefficient and ignoble, unable to save the lives of children and senior citizens, barely able to control mayhem in the streets of a drowned city, cops turning tail, troops sitting on their duff because they lacked orders to intercede, the governor squabbling with Washington over who would assert authority over the National Guard, tens of thousands of impoverished blacks sleeping and defecating in the streets, reduced to feral creatures, violence and crime following in the wake of the hurricane.

So much moral authority lost in a matter of days by a superpower that aspires to such lofty ideals and a panoramic vision. How can the U.S. impose order in distant and belligerent lands when it can't contain and tidy up a big hurricane's thumping in the Mississippi delta? And, more sordidly even than the finger pointing in Katrina's wake, is the political posturing and partisanship that it has engendered.

Unfortunately the article in the Star is right.  Amazingly, the National Weather Service, one of the few federal agencies to get their job done right in this tragedy has come under attack for political gain. I was dismayed by this morning's article in the Washington Post (free registration required), "Some GOP Legislators Hit Jarring Notes in Addressing Katrina."

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Santorum was drawing a second round of fire, this time for saying the National Weather Service's forecasts and warnings about Katrina's path were "not sufficient." .....

In fact, many people think the Weather Service got the Katrina prediction exactly right. They include GOP Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.), who chairs the Senate Commerce subcommittee on disaster prediction and prevention. He issued a statement headlined "DeMint Gives National Weather Service 'A' Grade for Katrina Prediction."

Santorum, long at odds with the federal agency, is pushing a bill that would require it to surrender some of its duties to private businesses, some of them located in his state.

So let's take the one of the agencies that did their job and hand their functions and dollars off to what I can only assume is a weather forecasting service in Pennsylvania.

Then there is the very distressing news that the President has enacted a special rule that will allow contractors repairing Katrina's damage to pay lower wages.  The CNN Money article has this to say.

President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

I'm sure Haliburton which has some contracts to clean up Katrina's damage at military bases will be pleased at the potential enhancement to the bottom line.

Then there is the very disturbing article in the Nashua Telegraph, "White House in full finger-pointing mode."

And importantly – but inaccurately – a highly placed but anonymous Bush official passed along a dollop of damage control that was published, unfiltered by fact-checking, by The Washington Post: “As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.”...

But wait. One reason the “senior Bush official” sought anonymity was that his damage-control assertion was flat-out false.

On Aug. 26, Louisiana’s governor signed a declaration of a state of emergency.

So have we seen this pattern of behavior before.  Misinformation in spades seems to be the currency of everyone in government.  It seems that this tactic will only confuse the uninformed. You have to wonder if this group will ever figure out that that our government isn't exactly their friend and vote for competence instead of vague "values."

Former FEMA officials flatly reject the Bush Team’s effort to shift the blame to state and local officials for the federal government’s late action and non-action in Louisiana.

“They can’t do that,” Jane Bullock, who had a 22-year career at FEMA, told the Los Angeles Times, referring to Bush administration attempts to shift responsibility to state and local officials. “The moment the president declared a federal disaster, it became a federal responsibility. ... The federal government took ownership over the response.”

That response certainly wasn't adequate by any means, and it's not like the problems at FEMA or the flooding in New Orleans should come as a surprise.  According to the LA Times, Congress was warned about the FEMA problems.

More than a year before the hurricane hit New Orleans, the head of a labor union representing FEMA workers sent a letter to members of Congress charging that "emergency managers at FEMA have been supplanted on the job by politically connected contractors and by novice employees with little background or knowledge" of disaster management.

"As … professionalism diminishes, FEMA is gradually losing its ability to function and to help disaster victims," the letter said.

Last night we saw a special on NBC which pointed to plenty of warnings in official circles about the potential for disaster. There was  a more general warning to the population which came  in a special in the Time Picayune in 2002.  It was very accurate in predicting what actually happened with Katrina.

Before the foxes in Congress start investigating the problem in the chicken coop,  we all need to acknowledge that they bear much of the long term blame for this problem. If it isn't them, it's the system that has developed around their "in office for life" poltical careers.   While the Corp of Engineers knew the levees needed improving, they were all too willing to accommodate the "elected" representatives who held their budget strings.

The problem is that the bulk of the Corps's budget goes for projects far less important than preventing floods in New Orleans. And if the investigators want to find who's responsible, they don't have to leave Capitol Hill.

Most of the Corps's budget consists of what are lovingly known on appropriations committees as earmarks: money allocated specifically for members' pet projects. Many of these projects flunk the Corps's own cost-benefit analysis or haven't been analyzed at all. Many are jobs that Corps officials don't even consider part of their mission, like building sewage plants, purifying drinking water or maintaining lakeside picnic tables.

As the article in the NY Times which had the above quote suggests, the findings of a Congressional investigation are pretty easy to guess.

Would Congressional investigators focus on these pork-barrel projects? I would guess not. My daring prediction is they would make two discoveries. First, that mistakes were made by many people outside Congress. Second, that more money must be spent on flood protection throughout America.

So in the end,  I have to wonder if we have met the enemy and it is the government that was created by those who didn't believe in government.  I'm not one to miss a great quote and this one comes from Newt Gingrich in the Financial Times.

“If we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?”

I guess the question for us all, is will it be business and politics as usual or will Katrina mark a turning point and lead to a better country for us all, rich, middle class, and poor?

I think it is time for some accountability at all levels of government to start the ball rolling on what can be a renewed emphasis on government for the people. The revolution away from a government controlled by special interests could be just as far reaching as our original American Revolution.

 

Where change has to come from

Politicians are drawn to disaster, just as butterflies are drawn to butterfly bushes.  Just before I took this picture I watched butterflies fighting over the best branches just as our political leaders jockey for those prime television spots where they can ooze false empathy for the victims of the disaster.

Katrina was a huge natural disaster.  While on the surface it might appear that an event with this many missteps at so many levels of government would lead to some accountability in government, it's not likely to happen.  It's just not in the nature of the government to fix itself.  If we sit back and wait for government to investigate itself, we are going to be disappointed.

The problem with our government is not the one or two bad eggs who might get their hands slapped for incompetence.  We're way beyond that.  We have  a system which rewards politicians, companies, and special interests that know how to play the game.  And to them it is a game with huge rewards. 

The hope that Jim Hoagland expressed in his article, "Katrina's Global Lessons," is nothing more than a pipe dream.

This is the moment for the president to show the humility he once promised to bring to America's world leadership, but which he largely abandoned once in office.

Politicians don't change their stripes.  They may cover them, but they're the same animal under the stage makeup.  Actually the real problem isn't even the politicians.  They are what they are, or perhaps more correctly what the system has permitted them to become.

If we're really looking for a place for the blame to rest, it is the people who continue to put the same politicians into office year after year without looking beyond their shallow and transparent promises which are often little more than lies with sugar coating.  We've become an electorate that doesn't even know how to vote for its best interests.

If you sit in your comfortable home and think that our government's response at any level, recently or over the years has been adequate in preparing for Katrina or in providing immediate help afterwards, you are deluding yourself.

Changing the system will demand that we break the close bonds between government and the sleazy companies who have become parasites draining the wealth of our nation.  There are many good people in government and in the corporate world, but there are also many at high levels in public service who are there only to get rich once they leave government and join the corporate world. The influence that they can weld over others still in government is one of the most corrupting influences that we face in changing the system that could destroy the America that has brought so much good to the world.

We are in desperate need of intelligent, hardworking people willing to be public servants.  We must have leaders who can change the direction of our country away from a government designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. We need a government for all the people, with fairness for the rich and the poor. 

Katrina's Global Lessons