- Spread the URL of If You Want To Help, a new blog which is gathering addresses for folks who want to send supplies to Katrina victims.
- From The Light of Reason, an excellent post discussing why people had a hard time leaving New Orleans.
- Jody Wheeler and Constructive Interference both have long, infuriating lists of links to articles about the various ways FEMA has not merely failed to be helpful, but has actively prevented help from reaching people who need it. Choice reading if you’d like to go blind with rage.
- Political Animal quotes a Knight Ridder report which partly explains why FEMA is so incompetent: “In 2000, 40 percent of the top FEMA jobs were held by career workers who rose through the ranks of the agency, including chief of staff. By 2004, that figure was down to less than 19 percent, and the deputy director/chief of staff job is held by a former TV anchor turned political operative.”
- Another “How FEMA was destroyed” article, from alt.weeklies, concisely describes the major ways the Bush administration undercut FEMA and made sure it was incapable of operating efficiently. I think the record supports my belief that the problem isn’t malice; rather, it’s deep, deep idealogical blindness combined with genuine incompetence.
- The Dallas News has a video about pet dogs left behind. Some army folks are trying to save the dogs; but at least one Sheriff’s office is shooting them in the street. Via Bean, who emailed me this link at Kos.
- Also at Political Animal, a horrifying – and well-documented – story of cops using guns to prevent people from escaping New Orleans.
- This very famous libertarian is too stupid to realize that not all thirsty people have $20 to spend on water, no matter how genuine their need. Via Echidne.
[…] Another comic on how we don’t actually know why Trump won. […]
Read the Constructive Interference post. “Blind with rage” is a very apt description, if somewhat insufficient. Accuracy requires “and cursing up a small storm” to be added to the end (no pun intended).
FEMA: Fucked-up Emergency-Mishandling Assholes. Anybody got a better acronym?
I’d like to pimp Making Light. A blog of class, taste, smart people, science fiction, food talk, and poetry in Old English.
Regarding the FEMA workers – I even find the 40% figure to be frighteningly low. Where else could one acquire relevant experience?
The link on the cops forcing people away from their towns, well hardly surprising. Comments were interesting…
Though it is illegal to walk on a public highway, and I can prove that, in this situation, where there’s very little vehicle traffic on the highway, who cares?
As for people in California not getting the “South” that might be true, but California, especially the more east you go from the ocean is no utopia. I’ve heard dozens of stories from people who came here from the South thinking it was better, then they returned back to the South.
Lot of nicknames for this region of the state too.
Not necessarily going back, b/c it was worse, though in some cases I heard that, but why be more isolated in the midst of it, away from families?
” I think the record supports my belief that the problem isn’t malice; rather, it’s deep, deep idealogical blindness combined with genuine incompetenced”
At some point in the law, one drifts over from negligence into recklessness and then into knowing and finally into purposely. I hzard to guess that given the delay was upwards of 4 or 5 days, that at some point they KNEW exactly the results of their failure to act and not only knew it but decided it was operating in their favor.
So, no, it was not negligence towards the end of the first week, it was intentional. Let the punishment, therefore, fit the crime.
I agree with your thought regarding FEMA. It isn’t malice. It’s just Bush-business. He makes decisions based on intuition and emotions, not on such things like CVs, experience, or capability. He probably met Brown when he worked on Bush’s campaign in 2000 and liked him. This just formed the basis for putting him into a position within the administration. Too bad the guy’s an idiot – too bad for NOLA.
On the Unitarian Universalist Association web site (www.uua.org) there’s a very well-written rant about FEMA’s incompetence as well as the race and class issues Katrina raises. My favorite part: “Perfect coordination? I shudder to think that our nation’s delayed and inadequate response to the suffering left in Katrina’s wake might be proudly claimed as a plan.” –Rev. William Sinkford.
That, and Jay Leno’s joke Thursday night about how “FEMA has an urgent statement to make: they believe a hurricane may have hit New Orleans.”
But then, if FEMA were that slow they wouldn’t have been able to hinder other relief efforts. They are the worst type of incompetent: inefficient enough to screw things up royally, but not quite inefficient enough to stay the hell out of the way and let people who know what they’re doing, do it.
Who am I kidding? That six-year-old that led a bunch of other kids to safety is more competent than FEMA.
I wonder if you might also consider soreading this url around.
I think most of us know the story of Jabbar Gibson by now, It’s been discussed here and there in the media, on message boards and, of course, on blogs.
He’s the kid that ‘stole’ a bus in New Orleans and drove 100 people, including small children and the elderly to safety during hurricane Katrina.
You might also remember that when the story first broke there was some talk that Mr Gibson could face criminal charges for the theft of the bus. It was that outrageously petty reaction by officials that first got our attention and made Mr. Gibson’s story stand out among all the others.
Of course the small minded bureaucrat who ( I assume) couldn’t seem to see beyond the fact that a “black kid stole a bus” soon realized it wasn’t good public relations to arrest a hero and that idea was dropped… but still….it’s amazing that it was ever considered at all.
So a few of us who gather at a small BBS decided that we should try to do something for Mr Gibson. Not just because he did the right thing and acted bravely and resourcefully in a bad situation but because… well, because we can’t do something for all the people who acted heroically during Katrina. Mr Gibson has become our symbol.
Please see our petition;
Quote:
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If you think it’s a worthy cause please sign and PLEASE spread the url around to any message board, email or blog that you frequent.
Thanks
Given the choice between defending FEMA and defending price-gouging, may I offer some kind words for the latter? While Stossel revels in being contrarian, he obscures the central idea he means to convey: SCARCITY is the problem; “gouging” is merely a logical consequence.
In the short run, the same number of water bottles exist in the disaster area REGARDLESS of what price is charged for them. The only question is how those bottles get distributed. If the price is $1, the first person to walk into the store will buy them all. If the price is $20, then the first person to walk into the store will be less likely to buy out the entire inventory. But – and this is the point – if the second person to walk into the store doesn’t have $20, then she would not get any water under EITHER scenario.
We rightly feel compassion on the person who lacks both money and water. But that’s no reason to take out our frustrations on the store owner. Neither price controls nor free markets would have helped the poor person. But free markets might help the next person who DOES have $20; in this way, free markets produce better results than price controls.
Are there better policies for allocating scarce water? Almost certainly. But anti-gouging laws are not among them.
By broadening his focus beyond the plight of the poor person who lacks water, Stossel seems appallingly hard-hearted. But upon reflection, I find the facts appalling, not the reasoning.
I’d just like to note that the Light of Reason blog has just posted a going out of business sign, and to ask people to drop Arthur Silber a line and let him know that we appreciate his good writing. I think he suffers from depression, or something like it, and could really use the boost, because he is such a consistently good writer and his blog really is such an outstanding place to go.
Incompetence SO does not cover what FEMA has been doing. My husband was listening to Nina Totenberg on NPR the Friday after the hurricane and told me later that she was sputtering with rage because she could not get anyone at FEMA to grant a D.C. ambulance service a permit to transport critically ill patients from Tulane Univ. hospital to D.C. A whole bunch of people were too afraid to make the humane decision because it wasn’t technically in their job description to do so. They have given civil servants everywhere a bad name.
Thanks for the link, GH, and if any idiot decides to file any charges against Mr. Gibson, just announce when his court day is, and they’ll be a crowd there.
Anna, do you have an email address for Arthur? I am saddened to learn that his voice will be silent for a time.
The email is arthur4801(at)yahoo.com, thanks for your support.
I will be very much interested to see an analysis of FEMA’s response to this disaster as compared to other disasters in the past. I’m also going to be interested to see how that response was affected by the actions (or lack thereof) by local and state authorities, and by the unprecedentedly broad destruction of local infrastructure such as roads, waterways, rail, airstrips, etc. (as opposed to, say, 9/11, where you could drive right up to where the Twin Towers had been). Everybody’s trying to score political points, but in the end an analysis needs to be done. The secondary purpose will be to assess responsibility, but the primary purpose will be to fix planning and communications so that this doesn’t happen again (like when Al-Queda finally manages to slip an atomic or chemical weapon into a shipping container that ends up in the harbor in L.A., Houston, or New York).
Having said that, I’m not real pleased with FEMA. And I’m not at all pleased to see the number of political appointees with no real-world experience in FEMA’s mission. I can actually see the top guy being a political appointee, since his or her job in a Fed agency is often to see that the policies of the Administration are adopted, but the people under them should not be politicized. The boss should be able to have a high-level meeting, say “What happened? What do we need to do? How are we going to do it? O.K., go do it!” and be talking to a group of people who have answers to all those questions and be able to follow through. If most of the other people the director’s talking to are not experienced people, there’s going to be a clusterf**k.
well from my understanding most if not all who were stranded or left behind had no money, so price gouging is irrelavent they didn’t have much if any money anyway,
second you can control supplies without price gouging, sometimes when the store I shop at has very good specials, that only happen occassionally they limit your quantity that you can buy.
that way everyone gets some of that special priced item, especially food. without those with less money not getting any, not that it is a life or death situation, but in NO it was a life and death situation.
so the store owner who normally charges a dollar for water could offer say a quantity of 2 or 3 gallons for 10 dollars. he still would make a nice profit making it worth it to stay open, cause you know what would happen if he didn’t run the store for a few weeks because he was’t able to charge 20 dollars a gallon? he wouldn’t make any money at all.
he would lose money, so better to make a 100 or 200 percent return then none at all. I think it is aweful that they didn’t allow people who volunteered to help in and turned them away, maybe they were afraid they would show them up as incompetent fools and their jobs would of been cut and there would go their benefits and pensions. it was probably about image here and keeping their jobs not about helping those poor starving drowning people, of course it didn’t help them but actually hurt them anyway.
one thing I learned, never turn down help that is needed, unless you can see that the persons involved are con artists or something, other than that don’t turn it down.
maybe they were just so disorganized and worried about getting in trouble then ended up in trouble anyway because they had their prioties messed, unfortunantly it was the people who suffered.
RR