The Blue State

2 Years Later and New Orleans is Still a Mess. Tomorrow Will be the 2 Year Anniversary of Katrina

Two years after hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there are still so manypeople without homes. Robert Greenwald has a new video and message  abouthurricane Katrina, and what you can do to help.

Below is quoted from an email sent by Jamiah Adams and Paris Marron of BraveNew Foundation

Tomorrow marks the two year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and still thereare tens of thousands of families without homes. 30,000 families are scatteredacross the country in FEMA apartments, 13,000 are in trailers, and hardly any ofthe 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt. To sharesome of these people?s stories, we have put together a short film, "Whenthe Saints Go Marching In."

During the making of this video, we heard the heartbreaking stories of goodpeople unable to return home. We have heard the story of the Aguilar family wholost their home to the storm and only received $4,000 in payments from theirinsurance company. We have met Mr. Washington, an 87-year-old man and formercarpenter, who owned three homes prior to the storm. He is still living in aFEMA trailer today. And we've met Julie, who could have returned to her job andnormal life, if the government had opened up the public housing units that shehad lived in prior to the storm

When the Saints go Marching in.org is a site dedicated to helping the victims of Katrina.

'Two years after Katrina and thousands are still w/o homes'

 

I don't understand how some of our politicians sleep at night, knowing theconditions others are in...and not only in New Orleans, but throughout Our Country.

You can sign a petition HERE for Senator Dodd.

We, the undersigned, urge the United States Senate to pass Senator Dodd's Gulf Coast Recovery Bill of 2007 (S1668) to assist the Gulf Coast region in rebuilding the infrastructure lost after the Katrina and Rita disasters.

Passage of this bill is an important step towards returning the Gulf Coast residents to their homes.

The signing of the petition consists of Name, email and Zip Code.

 

A Walk Down Memory Lane with Michael Chertoff

With the news that Michael Chertoff may be Bush's top choice to replaceAlbert Gonazales, I thought it would be appropriate to post this video of his(what I believe to be) incompetence. So sit back and watch the show, then askyourself "is this the guy that deserves or is qualified to be the next AttorneyGeneral  of The United States"? I'm sure if he is chosen, the petitions will start flying again (hopefully).

Tim Russert exposed the lies that came from the administration after Katrina

Vermont official slams Chertoff's terror threat speculation

Many of us were left scratching our heads when Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff said he had "a gut feeling" that where would be a terror attack on US soil this summer.  Just days after the comment, Kerry Sleeper became the first Homeland Security official to denounce Chertoff's fear-mongering:

"The statement of the secretary, "a gutfeeling," and putting that out to unnecessarily concern people, isirresponsible," he told Channel 3. "We want to make timely, accurateinformed, reasonable decisions about protecting our citizens in thiscountry."

Kerry Sleeper is the Public Safety Commissioner in Vermont -- the highest ranking Homeland Security official in that state.  Sleeper and other local officials nationwide have had a difficult time coming up with the budget money to pay for all the unfunded federal mandates.

Tip of the cap to Sleeper for standing up to Chertoff.  It takes a lot of courage for a sitting department official to publicly challenge his national superior.  I would like to see that kind of courage in the Justice Department.

Homeland Security means more than just preventing terrorism

The traditional media often has the tendency of using the phrase "homeland security" one-dimensionally to refer only to terrorist-related precautions.  But as most Americans would agree, homeland security is about a lot more than just preventing violent extremists from harming our civilians.  To have a truly secure homeland, we need crime-free neighborhoods, we need clean air so we can breathe easier, we need economic stability for the middle class and we also need an efficient emergency response system in place.  Last year, hurricane Katrina taught us that we have a long way to go in terms of preparing for natural disasters.

When it comes to emergency response immediately following disasters, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) illustrated how we are too one-dimensional in our approach to homeland security.

GovExec.com outlines the new GAO report:

  One of the reports (GAO-06-618)called for greater cooperation among all levels of government when thenext disaster strikes, more thorough testing of operational strategies,and improved and continuous communication from federal entities down.

"Leadership in the form of legal authorities, roles andresponsibilities, and lines of authority at all levels of governmentmust be clearly defined, effectively communicated, and well understoodin order to facilitate rapid and effective decision-making," the reportnoted.

In other words, we need greater communication and transparency so that each agency knows exactly what its role is.  It goes on:

Comptroller General David M. Walker in a Wednesdayevent unveiling the reports criticized DHS' National Response Plan forhandling disasters. He said the guidelines used in the response toHurricane Katrina were geared more toward a terrorist attack than anatural disaster and left states and local entities ill-prepared tomeet their responsibilities. That plan has since been updated, but the changes remain untested, according to GAO's report.

Again, terrorism is not the only part of homeland security.  We need to be ready for natural disasters as well.

The GAO released yet another report -- this time on Katrina -- saying that taxpayer money going to rebuild the Gulf Coast must be accounted for:

  A second report (GAO-06-834)published Wednesday called for better disclosure of federalexpenditures from Katrina. "FEMA does not have a mechanism to report onthe financial activity of the agencies performing work on its behalf,"the report stated.

That report also recommended that theOffice of Management and Budget improve the transparency surroundinghurricane-related funds. GAO reported that $88 billion has beenappropriated to 23 different agencies for recovery efforts, but thereis no centralized database with information on how those funds havebeen spent.

In other words, we have a long way to go in terms of being fully prepared for the next disaster, whenever it happens.  Many Americans would like to see the same amount of energy that is currently being spent on politicizing 9/11 to go towards putting together a national task force of doctors, geologists, scientists and other disaster experts to advise our government how to fulfill its obligation of protecting its citizens when the unthinkable happens.

The USA Today also has an article about the GAO report in Thursday's newspaper.

Chertoff not off easy after all

There is a bill before Congress that would dispose of FEMA and create an entirely new cabinet level agency for disaster planning and management.  While that might be a step in the right direction, the sheer incompetence and lack of organization during hurricane Katrina went beyond FEMA.  FEMA is currently under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security.  But of course, with Michael Brown as the scapegoat for the Administration's disorganization last fall, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff seems to have survived without a political scratch.

Maybe not after all.  A report just released this morning by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) charges the Department of Homeland Security with potential credit card fraud.  The Wednesday edition of the New York Times has the details:

Flat-bottomed rescue boats at double the retail price, $68,500 worthof unused dog booties, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth ofcomputers that somehow disappeared and a $227 beer brewing kit.    

Theseare just a few of the questionable purchases that Congressionalauditors have found by digging through half a year of credit cardrecords from the Homeland Security Department, including records for the months immediately after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year.

Theaudit, by the Government Accountability Office, which is due to bereleased Wednesday, concluded that the credit card misuse couldprobably have been avoided had the department completed a long-plannedrulebook for its more than 9,000 employees who spent $420 million lastyear using government-issued credit cards.

Instead, “due to alack of leadership” at the department, the draft manual has never beenfinished, creating accounting weaknesses that “leave D.H.S. highlyvulnerable to fraudulent, improper and abusive activity,” the auditsays.

The result is that in the five months examined, theinvestigators found that 45 percent of purchases did not haveappropriate preauthorization by supervisors and that 63 percent did notinclude documentation stating whether the goods or services had beenreceived.

But that's only the half of it.  A number of DHS employees might soon be charged with theft:

More than 100 laptop computers and a dozen boats also bought byHomeland Security Department employees following the storm are missing,the investigators found.

Just wondering, how do you lose a boat?

And according to the Austin-American Statesman, the GAO also reported that the DHS spent taxpayer money buying iPods.  The Hartford Courant says there were 54 iPods bought, totaling $7,000.

Back in 1980, the Reagan Revolution was based on the premise that government should be thought of as the problem, not the solution.  Three Republican administrations later, that ideology has lived up to its rhetoric.  Government has been made the problem.  And now the Republicans think the answer is to cut government even more.  So how do you like that ideology?

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Other blogs writing about this issue: Democratic Underground, Copeland Institute for Lower Learning, Rebuilding a City,  Kenneth in the (212), Hasta Los Gatos Quieren Zapatos.

Thursday Editorial: The buck stops with incompetent micro-managers, not FEMA employees

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill want the agency of FEMA to be eliminated because it represents a "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy," said a Senate panel today.

Conservative Democratic Senator from Connecticut Joseph Lieberman provided what many progressives would consider a once in a lifetime criticism of the Administration:

"For Hurricane Katrina, the president failed to provide criticalleadership when it was most needed, and that contributed to a grosslyineffective federal response."

But if that is true, why is the agency itself at fault?  If the President, Michael Chertoff, Michael Brown and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin fumbled the response, why should the burden fall on all of FEMA?  Most Americans agree that the poor response was a result of the incompetent individuals at the top, not the hard-working relief workers at FEMA that weren't given the resources to do their job.  That is like not giving our military soldiers body armor and deflecting blame away from the people at the very top.

If anything, the poor hurricane Katrina response actually proves that giving your bureaucracy proper resources, as opposed to relying on a bunch of micro-managers that don't know what they are doing, is the most effective system to get the job done.  Remember that FEMA was under the umbrella of Michael Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security.  Had FEMA been its own agency and able to directly lobby Congress for money without the oversight of Chertoff's abroad-first budgetary mentality, then maybe the rescue effort would have been more organized. 

The whole notion that dissolving FEMA is the answer to the problem is preposterous, at best.  Why should a small handful of inept, egotistical micro-managers get the pleasure of knowing that their actions caused Congress to bring down an entire agency and temporarily cost thousands of government workers their jobs?  The buck should never stop with the workers, because they don't make the bureaucratic decisions that impact millions of Americans.  But the buck should stop with the President, and result in the firing of Michael Chertoff.