T-shirt idea
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| I survived |
| The Great N'awlins |
| Lack-Vacuation |
Posted on 09/19/2005 8:16:27 AM PDT by Irontank
If a private-sector employee performed as badly as the federal, state, and local governments performed before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, he would be summarily fired. But the governments will claim their budgets were too small and proceed to extract more money from the taxpayers. That’s how the political world works. And it’s part of the reason that governments perform as miserably as they do.
Hurricane Katrina should finally disabuse people of the idea that government exists to take care of them, especially the most vulnerable. That self-serving promise was never credible. Do we need more evidence that it was a fraud? With guardians like these, who needs enemies?
Government at one level or another dominated every hurricane-related service on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and in New Orleans. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for decades has managed the levees and other forms of flood protection. Governments continually gave assurances that it had plans to deal with a major storm before and after it made landfall. Doubts were often voiced by the newspapers and weather experts, who warned that the agencies were not prepared, that the levees would not contain the water, and that many casualties would result. But the politicians told the residents otherwise, and the residents believed them, having been taught to trust their “leaders.” When the emergency systems failed under the force of Katrina and thousands of people were abandoned, we all got a rude awakening.
This time the self-aggrandizing politicians and bureaucrats must not get away with their lame excuses. They are responsible for many needless deaths and much property destruction. We all should be outraged.
A private company that had built those levees and made those assurances would have hell to pay. It would be facing bankruptcy and its officers lawsuits for gross negligence or even criminal indictments. The prospect of such consequences tends to deter private harmful conduct. But government personnel are effectively immune from such consequences. They don’t risk their own capital. Accountability is nonexistent. There are likely to be no dismissals, much less indictments.
The problem is not only the people who run the agencies. It is in the nature of bureaucracy, which gets its money through coercive taxation, does not receive market feedback from consumers and insurance companies, and never faces bankruptcy. Cynics love to denigrate private businesses as putting profits before people, but it was Wal-Mart and Home Depot that were getting the goods to desperate people (when government agents weren’t impeding them) while FEMA was still recovering from the shock that the levees failed.
The words “Army Corps” and “boondoggle” have long gone together naturally. The Washington Post reported that “over the five years of President Bush’s administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion.... But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state’s congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate.” It quoted Pam Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association in New Orleans: “Our politicians never cared half as much about protecting us as they cared about pork.” As the Post emphasized, “In fact, more than any other federal agency, the Corps is controlled by Congress; its $4.7 billion civil works budget consists almost entirely of ‘earmarks’ inserted by individual legislators.”
But it is not only the Corps that failed. It’s FEMA and that monstrosity the Department of Homeland Security. It’s President Bush and his outrageous war in Iraq, which has diverted precious resources for a fool’s errand. It’s also the state and local governments. All can be condemned for the same offense: They took on solemn tasks, made people dependent on them, precluded private alternatives — and then failed miserably. That is government in all its glory.
Very accurate.
Very true, and terribly sad.
Private enterprise is always more capable than the government and people had better be prepared to take care of themselves if a disaster hits because the gov won't be ther e to hold their hand.
MS Blank-o and MR. Nagin were also thinking, "If we move all those people out and the hurricane is a bust, those people will remember that on the comming election days and besides the convention trade will take us to the woodshed. We just can't take that risk."
Conflation of a lot of libertarian gripes.
In the end (if you got that far in the article), it's all Bush's fault.
Sheesh.
But the governments will claim their budgets were too small and proceed to extract more money from the taxpayers. That’s how the political world works. And it’s part of the reason that governments perform as miserably as they do.
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It distills down to NO ACCOUNTABILITY.
If only.
Not to excuse governmental inefficiency, but anyone who works in corporate American sees the same sort of CYA bureaucratic mentality in operation every day, and knows at the higher up in the orginization it's encountered, the less the chance it be punished and the greater the chance it will be rewarded.
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| I survived |
| The Great N'awlins |
| Lack-Vacuation |
That definitely needed your correction. I get so tired of the mantra, "there's plenty of blame to go around." The federal gov has been lumped in with the incompetent boobs in LA so long that people now believe somehow the feds should share the blame. I heard it said best by Tammy Bruce on FoxNews this morning. The only thing the federal gov did wrong was in not anticipating the level of incompetence of the officials in state and local gov of LA.
It’s President Bush and his outrageous war in Iraq, which has diverted precious resources for a fool’s errand.
They have that need to add that one sentence to make SURE you understand that they are NOT the same thing as a Conservative.
That great point is worth repeating. Clinton implies that FEMA should have evacuated the poor people from NO beforehand. That simply is not FEMA's job or jurisdiction. It is like saying that an insurance company erred in not putting out the house fire sooner, or that judges should do a better job of catching criminals.
The libs seem to be suggesting that Bush should have sent in the 82nd airborne before the levees broke, and should have made those soldiers do the job of the police who deserted, the bus drivers who fail to show up on even a sunny day (according to Mary Landrieu), as well as the jobs of the Mayor and the Governor.
Of course, if Bush had done that, he would have been impeached and convicted, even with the Republicans in control of the House and Senate.
And then the author flushes his credibility into the sewer.
He should have put this moronic comment up front; then I wouldn't have wasted any time reading his drivel.
Absolutely true! There is a key difference, though. In corporate America, you can only cover up until your company is broke--then, you go out of business.
For example, when George Bush wants to look good, he can dedicate two hundred billion dollars to the task. The world's biggest companies could only spend a couple billion, and that's only if they're willing to liquidate their assets to spend for personal PR. Long before they're done liquidating, stockholders will notice something and start selling... their bond rating will be downgraded... the board of directors will start demanding blood...
So while humans are equally evil everywhere, the ones that don't have, oh, say the United States Army and oh, maybe the IRS at their disposal, can at most waste a few million dollars on CYA before it starts to catch up to them. There's no limit what Bush can spend on CYA, because it never gets old to say, "You're right! I'm sorry! FEMA was under-funded by some other President, and I didn't act quite quickly enough... so would fifty billion or so make it better? I knew it would! Don't forget to vote!"
Spot on!
Mostly true...moreover, the President should have come out and said "I have no Constitutional authority to spend federal money and resources on hurricane relief in New Orleans." Where blame can be placed on the federal government is in its control and maintenance (or lack thereof) of the levees (also done without Constitutional authority BTW...although few people seem to care about such trivial matters as the Constitution anymore).
It was water coming through the broken levees...not the rainwater coming from hurricane itself that was the source of the disaster
Something that has bothered me all along is why DID President Bush accept the blame? Why didn't he just say he had no authority? It makes no sense to me, but maybe I'm just being niave.
If you heard his statement, it was "too the extent the federal government was to blame...."
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