43 Outdoes 41, Again [barfer]

Sunday :: Sep 11, 2005

43 Outdoes 41, Again

George W Bush wanted to avenge the disrepect his father received at the hands of the American people. And even more, he wanted to outdo his dad. Dubya was never going to wear the label "wimp" nor was he going to let someone like Saddam thumb his nose at the Bushes. Yet as with the runup to the war with Iraq, the disastrous reaction to the deadly hurricanes tie these two administrations together and people are noticing the eerie similarities.

George HW Bush was not taken down by his role as Commander in Chief in the execution of the first war against Saddam as after his successful rout of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, he had extraordinarily high poll numbers. Rather, he was undone by Hurricane Andrew which stripped the American public of any expectation that he was a competent leader. With Papa Bush, Hurricane Andrew exposed the bankruptcy of the Republican claims to good governance and fortunately for the American public, it came before the election in 1992.

His son has been bolder, taking the war into Baghdad, and luckier, obtaining the big prize: a second term, yet the problems that plague this dynasty are striking and the Bushes' reactions are telling about their reigns.

And now, one thing that is clear, Dubya has been recreating his father's administration biggest failures. In fact, outdoing his dad, Dubya has succeeded in making FEMA even more a symbol of the worst of Republicans which will haunt the nation for a very long time. (After all, Americans can now see that this is a Party that disregards ordinary Americans suffering and delights in promoting the festering hatred that would rather have the poor and helpless die than let them into their communities.)

Hurricane Andrew, 1992: Rarely had the failure of the federal government been so apparent and so acute. On August 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew leveled a 50-mile swath across southern Florida, leaving nearly 200,000 residents homeless and 1.3 million without electricity. Food, clean water, shelter, and medical assistance were scarce. Yet, for the first three days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for coordinating federal disaster relief, was nowhere to be found. And when FEMA did finally arrive, its incompetence further delayed relief efforts. Food and water distribution centers couldn't meet the overwhelming need; lines literally stretched for miles. Mobile hospitals arrived late. In everything it did, FEMA appeared to live up to the description once given to it by South Carolina Sen. Ernest Hollings: "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever known."

Under Dubya, we see it could be genetic, because the same complaints and the same bureaucratic delays were evident again. Republicans sure hate bureaucracies when they interfer with bizness, but can't seem to get enough of it if it concerns helping regular Americans.

Andrew: One of the most maddening problems with FEMA, the critics said, was the constant bureaucratic delay. FEMA workers would routinely hold up vital aid requests because the proper forms were not filled out or certain signatures had not been included. "If we had asked for a certain resource this way we could have gotten it," said Kate Hale, director of the Dade County Emergency Services of her experience after Hurricane Andrew, "but FEMA would say that we hadn't framed the question properly.... FEMA's employees appeared to be terrified at making a mistake, so they'd rather do nothing than make a mistake because a mistake could cost them their career."

Katrina: Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard's statement is to the point: "Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today. So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

FEMA was not just bureaucratic, but led by incompetent political cronies.

Andrew: The red tape was aggravated by old-fashioned incompetence. FEMA was, in the words of former advisory board member and defense analyst Lawrence Korb, a "political dumping ground," a backwater reserved for political contributors or friends with no experience in emergency management. President Bush, for example, appointed Wallace Stickney, head of New Hampshire's Department of Transportation, to lead FEMA. Stickney's only apparent qualification for the post was that he was a close friend and former next door neighbor of Bush Chief of Staff John Sununu. Throughout his time there, Stickney was nearly invisible, except for regular trips to Capitol Hill to defend the agency against its many critics.

Because FEMA had 10 times the proportion of political appointees of most other government agencies, the poorly chosen Bush appointees had a profound effect on the performance of the agency. Sam Jones, the mayor of Franklin, Louisiana, says he was shocked to find that the damage assessors sent to his town a week after Hurricane Andrew had no disaster experience whatsoever. "They were political appointees, members of county Republican parties hired on an as-needed basis.... They were terribly inexperienced."

Katrina: But nothing can restore FEMA's full functionality so long as the agency's incompetent director, Michael Brown, remains at the helm. Brown, a patronage appointee with no previous disaster management experience, embarrassed himself last year with his attempts to justify FEMA's waste of more than $31 million in hurricane relief given to areas not affected by a hurricane. After a South Florida Sun-Sentinel investigation exposed the waste, the newspaper called for Brown to be fired. It now repeats that call.

This year Brown embarrassed the whole country. Three days after Katrina struck, he admitted to being surprised to learn that thousands of people were suffering without food or water in New Orleans' convention center. This from the man who was supposed to be in charge of federal relief efforts.

Brown is in over his head. If FEMA is ever to become effective again, his dismissal must be the first step.

For both father and son, the compromised agency expected the states to manage the crisis and ask for help if they found they needed more than they could do themselves. Yet, in the face of the deadly hurricanes local and state agencies were overwhelmed before even knowing what to ask for.

Andrew: FEMA saw its main responsibility as distributing federal loans and grants to help rebuild an area after a disaster. It would not issue direct aid to a state--or even prepare to deliver aid--until it was given a specific request by the governor. That may seem reasonable--why give help that isn't asked for?--but, as Hurricane Andrew made clear, this wholly reactive interpretation of the agency's role was at the root of many of its difficulties.

In Florida, the hurricane so overwhelmed state officials that they didn't even know what had happened, let alone what help they needed. Initially, Andrew was expected to hit Miami. But when the hurricane hit 20 miles south of the city the morning of August 24, most Floridians breathed a sigh of relief. "The storm surges were not as bad as anticipated," said one spokesperson for Governor Lawton Chiles. One National Guard major issued this report the day after the hurricane: "Florida has not requested any support from other states or federal agencies, nor do we project a need."

Florida was slow to realize its own dire straits because many of its emergency workers were among the storm's victims. Half of the members of the Dade County Police and Fire Departments had lost their homes. Most of the area's fire and police stations were destroyed. Like their fellow southern Floridians, disaster management workers were looking for food, water, shelter, and medical care. The state was unable to issue specific requests for aid because it had no one available to assess the damage.

Katrina: Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana, interviews with dozens of officials show.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed. Leaders in Louisiana and New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always exactly sure what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington would provide rapid and considerable aid, federal officials, weighing legalities and logistics, proceeded at a deliberate pace.

...But Richard A. Falkenrath, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush White House, said the chief federal failure was not anticipating that the city and state would be so compromised. He said the response exposed "false advertising" about how the government has been transformed four years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

...FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts - buses, food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for specific requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you don't have time to ask for each round of ammunition that you need," complained Colonel Ebbert, the city's emergency operations director.

Telephone and cellphone service died, and throughout the crisis the state's special emergency communications system was either overloaded or knocked out. As a result, officials were unable to fully inventory the damage or clearly identify the assistance they required from the federal government. "If you do not know what your needs are, I can't request to FEMA what I need," said Colonel Doran, of the state office of homeland security.

One thing that is clear is that Bush Sr was a more pragmatic man and willing to admit that it was necessary to "change course" in the face of the unrelenting crisis. When it was clear FEMA was unable to handle the damage and even further that the state didn't realize how serious the problem was, Bush Sr demanded that something more needed to be done.

Andrew: Finally, as the full extent of the damage--and the lack of federal action--prompted heavy criticism, President Bush circumvented FEMA and formed a hurricane task force led by Secretary of Transportation Andrew Card. Card and the task force flew down to Florida to assess the damage. As the Department of Transportation airplane passed over southern Florida, the members of the task force were stunned by the extent of the damage. "This eerie silence came over the plane as we flew over mile after mile of pure devastation," remembers Shelley Longmuir, the task force's chief of staff. "You got the feeling that you were no longer in the United States, but in some far away, mystical place because there were none of the reference points of civilization.... It looked like Beirut."

FEMA would have seen as much--had it bothered to look. Because of its reactive posture, it had never sent a team of damage assessors to survey the wreckage. Not until Card and the task force flew to Florida did the federal government have a true sense of the storm's impact.

Upon landing, Card met Chiles in the Miami airport to offer federal aid. Chiles initially declined, saying that Florida could handle the emergency. It is more likely that the governor did not want to have to pay the required 10 percent of the recovery costs. Unlike the FEMA officials who took Chiles at his word, Card insisted that the damage was beyond Florida's response capabilities, and pressed Chiles to accept massive federal aid to be delivered by a large U.S. Army presence.

After some pushing, Chiles eventually agreed. That day, Bush signed the order to send in Army troops to build shelters and provide food and medical care to the victims of the storm. The next day 3,500 troops were in southern Florida, the first of 17,000 that would eventually serve. Almost immediately, Hale says, the situation changed. "The first thing that happened was the morale improved the minute that people felt they weren't alone, they weren't abandoned.... You could just see people find the strength to go one more day when they were at the point of collapse."

Katrina: As New Orleans descended into near-anarchy, the White House considered sending active-duty troops to impose order. The Pentagon was not eager to have combat troops take on a domestic lawkeeping role. "The way it's arranged under our Constitution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted at a news briefing last week, "state and local officials are the first responders."

Pentagon, White House and Justice officials debated for two days whether the president should seize control of the relief mission from Governor Blanco. But they worried about the political fallout of stepping on the state's authority, according to the officials involved in the discussions. They ultimately rejected the idea and instead decided to try to speed the arrival of National Guard forces, including many trained as military police.

Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, explained that decision in an interview this week. "Could we have physically moved combat forces into an American city, without the governor's consent, for purposes of using those forces - untrained at that point in law enforcement - for law enforcement duties? Yes."

But, he asked, "Would you have wanted that on your conscience?"

For some of those on the ground, those discussions in Washington seemed remote. Before the city calmed down six days after the storm, both Mayor Nagin and Colonel Ebbert lashed out. Governor Blanco almost mocked the words of assurance federal relief officials had offered. "It was like, 'they are coming, they are coming, they are coming, they are coming,' " she said in an interview. "It was all in route. Everything was in motion."

One more similarity in the way the two Bush's handled their hurricane crises: they both decided to suspend the prevailing wage laws in light of the disaster. When faced with the massive cleanup and reconstruction needs of the damaged communities, the Bushes have perfected the goal of enriching their crony friends on the backs of the unfortunate victims who they believe should be happy to have any work at all. Besides which, if you have to pay workers prevailing wages, Halliburton's profits and Joe Allbaugh's friends winnings would be smaller than Bush thinks is seemly.

For Americans, Dubya has once more proved that the Bush administrations could be clueless, incompetent and could care less about the domestic problems facing Americans until it affected their poll numbers.

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