Thanks that's a big help. Question: Could the President or someone else have had the authority to override the Gov in this preparation if it was deemed inadequate? Do they have no choice but to sit back and say 'everyone is gonna die and we can't so a thing about it' when they realize that the Gov is incompetent? These are the arguments I am hearing from people, that they should have stepped in. And no excuses for being left out of the loop or NO officials improperly informing them. One compared it to Enron's President that couldn't claim ignorance. I just want to know the real facts about how this operates so I can have this argument.
The division between the Federal Government and the States is very clear. The only control the Fed has to ensure States met a specific standard is funding. In other words, if you don't meet a Federal Standard, you don't get Federal money. But the Feds cannot just declare a state incompetent and assume control over a state's responsibility. Otherwise, New Orleans would have been under Federal control about 30 years ago. In this case, you will notice that the Feds did not sit back and say "everyone is gonna die". The feds did everything within their authority to get things moving in New Orleans. The simple fact is, everyone didn't die. Americans have this weird idea that after a major American city gets devastated by two natural disasters in a 48 hour period that when the sun comes out, everything will be fine. It won't. People will suffer. People will be hungry. People will be thirsty. People will die. That is why the President was adamant that the city order mandatory evacuations. But the reality of the matter is, the Federal response to this disaster has actually been very good. We are just one week past the disaster and New Orleans is essentially evacuated. Dikes are repaired. Water is being pumped out. And the recovery is moving on.
Americans are ignorant. They don't understand the roles and responsibilities of their own government, and they believe the Hollywood fiction that big things happen quickly and easily. The reality is much different. And we are viewing the reality of the limits of the Federal Government in New Orleans.