In the days immediately after Katrina flooded New Orleans and wiped away most of the Mississippi coast and parts of Alabama's, the BushCo people were fond of saying we shouldn't play the "blame game." George W. Bush said there would be plenty of time for politicizing the disaster later on. So are ya ready, George, ya bastard?
There is no question that Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco and various local and state government entities in Louisiana made mistakes before, during and after the storm, and could have done some things better. This comes as no surprise. Who can look back on a crisis, even one of far smaller proportions, and not say in hindsght they might have done this or that differently? Nagin and Blanco and the rest were there, on the ground, dealing with the details, facing the suffering and destruction head-on, and playing the cards they were dealt. They did the best they could do with the limited resources they had available. They
tried to take care of the people.
It has been said over and over that Nagin and the city had no plan to evacuate the tens of thousands of residents who had no way to get out on their own, but they did have a plan, and they executed that plan. The plan for such a monumental task involved rounding up as many people as they could and getting them to the Superdome and the Convention Center on city buses, and this they did. The rest of the plan relied on FEMA to coordinate and provide relief from that point forward, including food, water, healthcare and evacuation. This was a reasonable plan, with reasonable prospects for success - if FEMA had done their job.
You need to remember that New Orleans is a poor city. Many cities suffered a deterioration of their tax base when desegregation led to white flight, but New Orleans may have suffered more than most. The collapse of the oil and shipping businesses in the 1980s worsened this erosion and left New Orleans with little more than tourism and convention hosting - and, lately, gambling - for their economic base. Yet even a much wealthier city than New Orleans would have had a hard time coping with a disaster the magnitude of Katrina.
This is why the state and the city were relying on FEMA and Homeland Security to do their job. They fully expected, and had every right to expect, the Federal government to bring their vast resources to bear on the crisis, and in this situation, it was only the Federal government that had the resources to make things better.
We all know what happened, and we know they did not not make it better, and not in a timely manner. People suffered who did not have to suffer, and people died who should not have died. That was the immediate aftermath. A year later, local indecision and lack of leadership have coupled with Federal foot-dragging and neglect and cronyism to leave a city with vast tracts of property still in ruins.
This is exactly how they planned it.
By "they," I mean the Feds, the BushCo people. This is what they wanted to have happen. This is the necessary and forseeable consequence of governance by those who do not believe in governance, who reject community and sharing and people taking care of each other. This is what happens when people who want to drown government in the bathtub get what they want.
The Bush administration and Congress cut funding for the Army Corps of Engineers three years in a row. In the third year the cut was 44%. The Corps kept developing their plan to reinforce the levees, often on their own time, but they no longer had the money to implement that plan. The Bush administration removed FEMA from a cabinet-level position and stuck it in Homeland Security, under another of their cronies, who proceded to eviscerate the agency. They made yet another crony head of the weakened FEMA. The Bush administration promised billions for rebuilding, most of which still has not been delivered. You look at my diary showing New Orleans on August 3, 2006, and tell me if you think any of that money has been spent in the Ninth Ward. The Ninth Ward, where the home ownership rate is 60 percent but there's no electricity - yea, verily, the "ownership society" in full flower...
George Bush's job since day one of his reign has been to provide the facade that lets people believe this government really does care about taking care of the people's business. Katrina made it painfully clear to a great many people that it is only a facade. We can never let this happen again. We as a nation are better than this. We need to make November 7 the beginning of the end of this sham government.