Captain Future's Log

New Orleans Christmas: Heroes and Villians

"Amid ruins, volunteers are emerging as heroes" is the headline of the story by Anne Rochell Konigsmark and Rick Hampson in USA TODAY. It begins:

In his 67 years, Howard Peterson had never seen a Mennonite. But 11 days before Christmas he stood in the ruins of his kitchen, watching a crew of them gut and clean his flood-ravaged house.

Peterson and his wife couldn't afford to pay a contractor several thousand dollars to gut the one-story house, which sat in water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina inundated the working-class Gentilly district. So Peterson, who looks too frail to do spring cleaning, began trying to clear out the house himself. Then the Mennonites came by and offered a hand.

"I can't thank them enough," he says. But he also wonders when the professionals - city, state and federal agencies - will do their part. "They should be trying to repair the city."

The story highlights a number of NGO's (non-governmental organizations, including those we know of as charities) that are doing vital work that the government is not. In one sense, it is a perfect holiday story, about the willingness to help and can-do spirit of the people, rather than the impersonal government.

The Gulf Coast in general and New Orleans in particular have at times felt abandoned by the American government. But they haven't been abandoned by Americans, who have volunteered by the thousands to clear out houses, collect trash, fight mold, cover roofs, feed the hungry, tend to the sick and help in any way they can.

Partly because politicians continue to dither, bicker and accuse, non-governmental organizations - "NGOs" ranging from large, non-profit agencies to church youth groups - are emerging as heroes of the recovery effort.

Habitat for Humanity, whose Operation Home Delivery has been building houses across the nation for shipment to the Gulf Coast, received an 85% "positive" rating for its post-hurricane work in a national Harris Poll released in November. FEMA, in contrast, got a 72% "negative" rating.

In New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward, FEMA is so unpopular that its workers have been heckled and threatened. Some stopped wearing anything that identifies their agency.

Why are these organizations succeeding where government agencies are failing? The article says this:

Past crises generally have established the limits of non-government action; private charity proved insufficient to cope with the Great Depression, for example. This crisis seems to have a different lesson: Volunteers, outsiders and amateurs can help fill a void created by what Amy Liu, an urban policy expert at the Brookings Institution, calls "a lack of leadership across all levels of government."

"There's a general sense that the charitable sector has the touch needed, a better feel for the communities affected," says Paul Light, a New York University government analyst.

The article cites these reasons:

• Government lost the public's confidence after the hurricane and will have a hard time regaining it. "That leaves the non-profits," says Tiziana Dearing of Harvard's Hauser Center for Non-profit Organizations.

• The disaster's scope stretches even well-functioning government agencies, inviting involvement by NGOs that normally focus on the neediest victims - the poor and elderly.

• Lacking government's power, money and size, non-profits often are more sensitive to people's needs. "We listen before we do anything," King says.

• NGOs are relatively nimble - an important asset if, as seems likely, the Gulf Coast will recover a block or a neighborhood at a time. "It's easier for light-footed individuals to move things forward than a government bureaucracy," says Greta Gladney, a community activist whose home in the Lower 9th Ward has been rehabbed by ACORN volunteers.

All of this is probably true. But the article and its analysis leave out other important points. Government agencies like FEMA have been effective in the past. Why aren't they now? A great deal of responsibility for that must be borne by the Bush administration, and earlier Republican administrations, that bled dry the funding for public services conducted by or organized by government---by directly cutting budgets of federal agencies and programs, and by indirectly bleeding state and local governments.

Why did they do this? The "philosophy" as stated was that government is inefficient, but private enterprise has the incentive of efficiency to keep costs down and get the job done, because their profits depend on it.

Certainly the bled dry government agencies have largely failed, especially FEMA and the monstrous money-eating disaster called Homeland Security, where the corporate model meant "branding" the agency was more important than actually addressing its mission and tasks, as a Washington Post series is revealing.

But the real story here is the failure of private contractors in New Orleans to do anything but pig out on fat no-bid government contracts, leaving the real work to non-profits.

It's the same lesson as Iraq, where much of what the military used to do is being ineptly and expensively done by private contractors, who operate above the law (sound familiar?) and at least some of whom are stealing American taxpayers blind.

It isn't government that has failed New Orleans. It's the Bush government, and its policy of rewarding its corporate pals. It's privatization and the corporate model to do the public's business that has failed.