Shallow FEMA Showing
Reflects GOP Viewpoint

By William Finucane

Tight-jawed, steely eyed, sure as he has ever been about anything and everything, American President George W. Bush looked his people straight in the pupils and told them he was combining all of the domestic security services into one huge agency. This would give America a seamless fabric of national safety, he declared.

Brilliant, absolutely breathtaking, or so he and the GOP hoped, since this was their feel-good but quickly calculated response to 9/11 back shortly after that attack on American soil.

Now the federal agencies, Mr. Bush and the GOP explained, would be combined under one umbrella organization, the Homeland Security group, sounding a bit like a combination of Germany’s Fatherland concepts and a mid-western insurance company’s marketing credo, perhaps based out of Omaha.

Relax everyone, we have put together a system which will protect the nation from other nations and also, incidentally and at the same time, from natural disasters here at home. Insurance for everyone.

It’s good to feel safe, protected, and the GOP is adept at playing that tune.

But it is questionable whether America is safer in international affairs, since the GOP has inadvertently or through its obtuseness turned the domestication and democratization of Iraq into a terrorist training ground.

Also, by turning away from the legitimate attack on Al Queda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan, the Republicans have essentially allowed Osama bin Laden to become more than a terrorist leader; he and his organization are now icons of Islamic radical fundamentalism. The result of which is that Bin Laden’s relatively small organization has been transformed into a cult-like, worldwide phenomenon where Muslim radicals can seek to follow its example and its credo, learning from examples in the media and from the details provided by the Internet.

Of course the Bush Administration, and the Republicans in Congress, had full access to solid American intelligence that warned of this potential result from a divergence away from the attack on Bin Laden and the Taliban, but all such insight was ignored, apparently in the ideological belief that capturing Iraq would provide a platform for easy oil and welcome American military bases.

As everyone now knows, the international policies were folly of the first order.

But how about the domestic Homeland Security policies and their effectiveness?

Michael D. Brown is the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. He was handpicked by Republican President George W. Bush. When Hurricane Katrina washed away New Orleans and destroyed coastal towns in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, during one of the deadliest, costliest and cruel storms in American history, FEMA Director Brown was clueless.

It took days to mobilize FEMA. People died.

Yes, it was an unprecedented storm. Yes, everybody was under the gun. Yes, communications were out. Yes, chaos ruled. Of course, it is because of fear of such national catastrophe’s that America has a nation-wide organization such as FEMA.

The idea is that this is exactly, precisely, where FEMA takes over, calms people down – including mayors and governors – and steps in and restores order. But not this time! This time nothing happened. No one took the leadership role.

Mr. Brown and the FEMA organization were supposed to seize the reigns, mobilize national resources, and support and relieve local and state officials in their emergency efforts.

He was supposed to do this in the name of the American president, giving citizens the feeling the federal government was right with them, pants hiked up to the knees, pulling full bore for their overall welfare. Didn’t happen. Mr. Bush ‘recreated’ in Texas and Mr. Brown waited and pondered what to do.

Nothing even remotely similar to such an activist government scenario took place for four endless days.

People died. Others lost homes, businesses and health. They did not know where to go, what to do. And many were put in situations where they had little option but to degrade themselves in public simply by the demands of common biology. Everyone ultimately must have to relieve him or herself, and when there are no working facilities and no provisions for an alternative, chaos will prevail. Where were the ‘Portal-Potties,’ and other facilities that FEMA might have provided?

While FEMA and Mr. Brown and Mr. Bush and his administration were asleep, local police and sheriffs, and possibly even some local national guard troops (though that has been reported but not confirmed) ordered people not to cross bridges into dry parts of the city, or try to reach potential escape routes through adjacent areas, and those so ordered back to New Orleans began to believe the stories that the police were stopping black people from entering white neighborhoods.

‘Oh, that’s not true,’ some said.

But when one has no food, no water and no dry clothes, when another mini-ecological problem is created every time one relieves one’s self, when there is no television, radio or electricity, when the only food is what you take from a store to stay alive – such stories of bigotry look more than plausible.

Which meant that such experiences take on the characteristics of truth. Such reactions and suspicions were left for too long and because of that they have become too strong to whisk aside.

Of course if there had been a swift, strong showing of FEMA in any of the first four days, all of this would have been mitigated.

But no, such issues would not disappear, because no help was provided.

Katrina was huge and hit the one city in America that stands under water level, saved only from drowning by levees. Levees that collapsed. And they did so in part because President Bush rejected more money for them in recent federal budgets. Mistake number one.

Finally, after the media had filled the airwaves will illustrations of the FEMA and GOP failure; Brown went South and took control. But therein laid his problem; because by that point he was incapable of controlling anything.

Why?

Well, it might have something to do with having no inkling what to do.

Brown was a political appointment.

He gave President Bush help in his election, and the president ultimately promoted him to the head of FEMA; all evidence points to the fact that FEMA could not have been lower on the Bush Administration totem pole, therefore promoting a political flunkey to its leadership role didn’t matter much to a GOP whose policies are dedicated to reducing federal programs aimed at providing services to the public.

The GOP philosophy, amply stated in all sorts of forums, makes it clear that every individual should or must fend for him or herself, and if such citizens cannot do so, it is not the government’s responsibility to provide help other than the most basic services under the most extreme circumstances.

So, here is Michael Brown, the main man in charge of such extreme disasters, and his background shows that after apparently being unable to function effectively as a lawyer, he became a top official with the International Arabian Horse Association. Brown must have asserted that he had horse sense; literally. But once again it seems he had no scrap of serious knowledge about that job either, and as a result he was released from his position and was therefore available when his GOP friends thought he might be useful in the Republican campaigns for Mr. Bush, who seems to value loyalty a good deal more than qualifications.

But did Mr. Brown have any qualifications for his current post? No, he did not.

Yet as noted, that fact didn’t deter the Bush Administration, which seems to base its evaluation of personnel on loyalty to G.W. Bush and the GOP in general above skill and competence. President Bush first said that "Brownie" was "doing a great job," but saw soon enough that his political pal was fouler to New Orleans than the putrid water in the streets. Ah, a serious political problem. Mr. Bush didn’t want to directly confirm Browns incompetence by taking direct action against him, especially after his congratulatory remark, so he had the head of the overall Homeland Security agency reassign Brown.

That was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital city, Brown, Chertoff and Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad W. Allen faced the press and said the Coast Guard would take over the aid in the New Orleans area and Brown would go back to Washington to take care of other matters.

Reporters asked if Brown was to be considered somehow taken off the firing line, or censured or whatever, but Chertoff simply gnashed his teeth and wouldn’t answer the question. Brown, standing beside Chertoff, was not allowed to say anything. So, that should fool the public, eh?

The GOP claims Brown is really needed in Washington, and his boss makes that announcement while he himself stays in New Orleans. And Brown, whose presence is so dramatically needed elsewhere, is not permitted to say a single word about the whole process. Does any of that sound strange?

Administration spin experts tried all sorts of tricky moves; they said the whole trouble with Katrina was that the press got it all wrong and made it too small a deal at first. After all, the GOP first says it can’t trust or relay on the press, and attacks it vehemently, but then when its convenient faults the press for not waking them up.

Damn. Should have known the press would do that again. Happens all the time with Bush stories, or so the GOP would like everyone to believe, even though stories critical of Mr. Bush don’t hold even the smallest candle to the media spotlights that blitzed the presidency of Democrat William J. Clinton, usually if not always orchestrated by the Republicans and carried with little questioning by the bulk of the GOP owned and controlled public media..

Ah, but this time it was the media that caused the chaos, GOP stalwarts said as they were casting about to find ways of deflecting blame. The ‘liberal media’ is always tearing down the president, and this time it was the old ‘hide the hurricane’ ploy.

The problem is, however, that the United States is at war with terrorists who have already invaded and killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. And America has lost thousands more in overseas fighting. Further, the nation seems always under the threat of unthinkable terrorist acts, together with the never-ending risk of inevitable natural catastrophes. Given those realities, the president and the GOP rearranged American defenses at home and declared they were making America safer by doing it.

But neither Mr. Bush or his Republicans in Congress accomplished that goal.

In fact, President Bush has made safety seem like an awfully thin tissue; the current example of Mr. Bush naming an election helper to a crucial spot in the FEMA organization is profound.

In translation it is simple: The country’s safety officer is a patronage hack.

Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to have been thinking of national safety, of lives threatened, of private property destroyed. No, those were not on the agenda. On the agenda was payback for political help. And why elevate Mr. Brown to head FEMA, after all in the final analysis it is a social services agency providing help for common citizens? Perhaps the answer is simple: FEMA was a low priority for the GOP.

That FEMA was clearly a low priority for the GOP, whose members on the overall continually indicate a belief that human worth is equated with financial success, and lately with religious convictions.

But now it is very much the time for pointing fingers.

The hard fact is that Michael Brown is another Bush debacle.

And this time, at home, it mirrored GOP policies abroad; that is, it cost lives and diminished American power and prestige in the eyes of the world.