New Orleans, Sept. 7. AP photo

Infections Kill 3 after Katrina

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
[Excerpts]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three people have died from bacterial infections in Gulf states after Hurricane Katrina, and tests confirm that the water flooding New Orleans is a stew of sewage-borne bacteria, federal officials said on Wednesday.

A fourth person in the Gulf region is suspected to be infected with Vibrio vulnificus, a common marine bacteria, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Julie Gerberding told reporters, citing reports from state health officials in Mississippi and Texas.

"This does not represent an outbreak," Gerberding told a news conference. "It does not spread from person to person."

And tests of the waters flooding New Orleans show it is, as expected, loaded with raw sewage.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson said all the tests of waters in flooded residential areas of New Orleans exceeded by at least 10 times the safe levels of
E. coli'. E. Coli and other so-called coliform bacteria, found in the human gut and used as an indicator of sewage contamination. They also have high levels of lead.

"Right now in the shelters where most of the people are located we have seen sporadic reports of gastrointestinal illness," Gerberding said. The conditions are specially ripe, she said, for norovirus, a type of virus that includes the Norwalk virus that occasionally causes outbreaks on cruise ships. "Norovirus is not generally life-threatening," said Gerberding. But stressed and fragile refugees will be especially vulnerable, she said.

Another concern is the mental health of refugees, National Institute of Mental Health Director Dr. Thomas Insel said. Simple measures can ensure that the immense stress of losing homes, livelihoods and loved ones does not turn into something more serious, he said.

"For the vast, vast majority of people the word is resilience here. Most people will recover completely."

(Additional reporting by Adam Tanner in Houston)

Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street

By DAN BARRY The New York Times [Excerpts]

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.
Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Survivors reunited in Atlanta. AP photo

U.S. Offers Katrina Survivors $2,000 Each

By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent
[Excerpts:]

WASHINGTON - Dispossessed victims of Hurricane Katrina will receive debit cards good for $2,000 to spend on clothing and other immediate needs, the Bush administration announced Wednesday, working to recast a relief effort drawing scant praise from Republicans and scathing criticism from top congressional Democrats.

President Bush is "oblivious, in denial, dangerous," when it comes to the plight of the storm's victims, charged House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. Her Senate counterpart, Sen. Harry Reid pointedly whether the chief executive impeded relief efforts by remaining at his Texas ranch last week while the storm churned toward the Gulf Coast.

White House, spokesman Scott McClellan defended Bush from Democratic attacks but conceded, "There are ongoing problems on the ground, and that's why we're working to address those issues."

The administration formally asked Congress for $51.8 billion in relief and recovery expenses in addition to $10.5 billion already approved, calling it the latest installment, but not the last. "We will in fact need substantially more" money, said budget director Josh Bolten, estimating the money would cover expenses for "a few weeks."

Bolten said about half of the newly requested funds would take the form of direct aid to individuals, and the administration said that included an estimated 320,000 of the $2,000 debit cards at a cost of $640 million.

The federal government produced a seemingly endless stream of reminders of the devastation wrought by the storm as it battered the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida.

Congressional Budget Office reported to congressional leaders that national employment could be reduced by 400,000 in the coming months, with a cut in economic growth of as much as a full percentage point.

The report said that Katrina's impact was likely to be "significant but not overwhelming" to the overall U.S. economy, especially if energy production along the Gulf Coast returns to pre-hurricane levels quickly.

With polls showing Bush's approval ratings at low levels, Democrats seemed more emboldened to criticize him than at any time since he won a new term and they lost seats in 2004. They sought to use the events to question the appointment of John Roberts as chief justice and call on the GOP to put off a looming deficit-reduction package.

"We have just had a massive disaster," said Sen. Kent Conrad. "This is not a time to be cutting services to the most needy among us."

Referring to large numbers of poor and black New Orleans residents who were dispossessed by the storm, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, said earlier in the week the disaster underscored "the glaring economic disparities facing our citizens."

Top Democrats expressed unhappiness at the announced congressional investigation, to be run by a panel comprised of more Republicans than Democrats. The committee "is not truly bipartisan ... cannot write legislation, and will not have bipartisan subpoena power," Pelosi said.

In a letter to one Republican, Reid pressed for a wide-ranging investigation and asked: "How much time did the president spend dealing with this emerging crisis while he was on vacation? Did the fact that he was outside of Washington, D.C., have any effect on the federal government's response?"

McClellan brushed aside Reid's suggestion, saying the senator would not have engaged in "such personal attacks" if he were aware of Bush's efforts both before and after the storm.

Pelosi, speaking at a news conference, said Brown had "absolutely no credentials" when Bush picked him to run FEMA.

She related that she urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Brown.

"He said, 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said.

"I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'"

"Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added.

75 young survivors added to the elementary school in
Zachary, Louisiana. These children not identified
but are both locals and survivors. AP photo.

Caring True Professional Alerted Bush, Others

As the Bush spin machine tried to sow doubts that the Bush administration was made aware of Katrina's deadly potential in a timely fashion, this story published in a Florida newspaper the day after Katrina struck should make clear that at least one caring professional made sure the right people knew. The failure to act on that knowledge is on their heads.

Here are excerpts from that story, which ran under the headline "For forecasting chief, no joy in being right/Max Mayfield strives for accuracy, but worries about complacency."

The story was written by Tamara Lush, Times Staff Writer.

MIAMI - About an hour after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center were running on adrenaline and sugar. Few had slept much in recent days, if at all.

Director Max Mayfield's eyes were puffy, his voice slightly cracked from giving interviews to media outlets around the world.

"I don't even know what day it is," said Mayfield.

Mayfield and the team of forecasters in Miami had just achieved the near-impossible.
At 11 p.m. Friday, more than two days before Katrina reached land, the hurricane specialists said the hurricane would make landfall in the bayous of Louisiana, east of New Orleans. They pinpointed a town called Buras as the most likely place it would strike.

They were off by 18 miles. In the business of hurricane prediction, that's laser-beam accuracy.

"A superb forecast," Mayfield said.

It was not something to celebrate; any happiness gave way to melancholy.

"I hate to be bragging about that when there are people killed," he said.

On Saturday night, Mayfield was so worried about Hurricane Katrina that he called the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi and the mayor of New Orleans. On Sunday, he even talked about the force of Katrina during a video conference call to President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

"I just wanted to be able to go to sleep that night knowing that I did all I could do," Mayfield said.

FEMA Wants No Photos of Dead

From Reuters: September 7, 2005 NEW ORLEANS — The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected journalists' requests to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims. An agency spokeswoman said space was needed on the rescue boats. "We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

Brian Williams of NBC in his blog described an NBC news crew being prevented from taping a National Guard unit at a fire in New Orleans. He added: At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told.

There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

Captain Future's Log

Perception is not always reality


“Perception is reality” is the mantra of imagery advisors like Frank Luntz, and the bread and butter of political operatives like Karl Rove. They’ve prospered by their fidelity to this guiding principle.

It is in a sense a corollary of their major guiding principle which can be expressed as “Politics is real, governing is illusion.”

But Katrina has created realities that cannot be managed by spinning or repackaging perception. This is one of its sobering lessons for us all.

The Bush political machine worked its electoral magic by stage managing events, creating photo op imagery, and “re-framing” issues through the skillful manipulation of media.

They formulate a single perspective in a few words, and make sure it is endlessly repeated by their officials and party minions, so that it inevitably gets on the air and in print, and their faithful followers take it up on talk radio and in their blogs. They also feed the media with the novelty it needs, like the “new faces” and sensational assertions in the “Swift Boat” ads.

But having attained their goal through these and other means---that is, they got elected and re-elected---they have attempted to govern guided by these principles, to further their political goals and reward their friends. They have been pretty successful at this. They weathered storm after storm that easily could have brought them down. Until Katrina.

Katrina was real, and its effects are real, and will continue to be very real for a very long time. The lack of adequate federal response is real, and had real effects. Right now they are attempting to spin their way out of their responsibility. But attempting to manage perception is also at least partly why they failed.

Consider some of what we know about FEMA and its response to Katrina, and to earlier storms. The first FEMA director under Bush was Joe M. Allbaugh, a former Bush campaign manager. Before he left, he hired Mike Brown as his deputy. Brown had been his college roommate, had run his unsuccessful electoral campaign, and had just left---or been forced out of—his position with the International Arabian Horse Association, where he apparently organized horse shows.

Brown’s Chief of Staff, Patrick Rhode, planned events for the Bush White House, and did advance work for the Bush campaign. His deputy was a media strategist for the campaign, and before that the marketing director for a software company.

None of them had emergency management experience. Both of Brown’s key aides were essentially public relations specialists. Both of the directors had been political functionaries and Brown seems to have spent 11 years putting on shows with dumb animals, another qualification for political work.

Brown defended himself by pointing to other disasters he and his predecessor had successfully managed at FEMA. Yet their most conspicuous success seems to have been political.

An article in Perrspectives, which dubs FEMA the Federal Election Management Agency, reinterates the swift and massive response to four hurricanes in Florida just preceding the 2004 presidential election.

The article also cites hearings by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs which revealed how generous Brown was with government relief funds, paying for home and car repairs in areas the hurricanes barely touched, and picking up the tab for over 300 funerals, more than twice the number of deaths attributed to the hurricanes.

In other words, some portion of $31 million in emergency relief payouts were political. They were up close and personal advertising, not with the goal of alleviating suffering but creating the perception that GW Bush was a good president, and Florida voters should show their gratitude at the polls.

Using relief fund for political purposes is hardly new, but add it to FEMA’s emphasis in Katrina, and managing perception appears to be not an adjunct but the major purpose of the Bush “relief efforts.”

Here are a few reported examples, which can be found in the past few days posts here at Dreaming Up Daily: Brown's orders to convey a positive image of the government's response when he belatedly ordered some on the scene, the misuse of trained firefighters as P.R. reps and photo op props for Bush, and now FEMA's attempt to prevent reporters from showing corpses lying in the streets and floating in the water.

None of this completely explains why FEMA was so late and so slow in its response, but it suggests that perception was an important consideration. This might help account for FEMA’s many documented refusals of help from Amtrak, the U.S. Navy, various corporations and individuals and so on, that would take them into the zone of destruction.

After all, it worked in Iraq. This administration has to some degree successfully managed perceptions of the Iraq war by limiting access to the war zone, forbidding the photographing of soldiers who died there, limiting access to prisoners at Guantanamo and fighting hard to prevent new photos and video from prisons in Iraq from becoming public.

But reporters were more easily able to get to the Katrina zone on their own, and some had family there. FEMA could not manage their perceptions, when they were staring at the reality.

Now America and the world have seen the stark reality of this disgraceful catastrophe. The spin is back in high gear, but the sobering reality continues to be seen and heard, and will be for some time to come.

This is a lesson for everyone who is engaged in politics, to understand that good governance is the goal, not political advantage. We must value a candidate’s qualifications and capabilities to govern as well as the candidate’s electability.

That balance has eroded in recent years, but a catastrophe like Katrina may restore it in the minds of voters.

It is a lesson for those who habitually see reality chiefly through the lens of political perception, debating about message and re-framing and all the other tools of political perception management.

There is truly a sense in which perception creates reality, by being taken as an accurate reflection of reality. But we have also learned that managing perception does not always change reality. Sometimes reality has to be faced and dealt with, and managing the perception of it must be a secondary consideration, if it is considered at all.

Perspective

Cronyism Trumps Governance

from an article

by Sidney Blumenthal, in salon [excerpts, with emphasis added:]

The Bush administration's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina stands as the pluperfect case study of the Republican Party's theory and practice of government. For decades conservatives have funded think tanks, filled libraries and conducted political campaigns to promote the idea of limited government. Now, in New Orleans, the theory has been tested. The floodwaters have rolled over the rhetoric.

Under Bush, government has been "limited" only in certain weak spots, like levees, while in other spots it has vastly expanded into a behemoth subsisting on the greatest deficit spending in our history. State and local governments have not been empowered, but rendered impotent, in the face of circumstances beyond their means in which they have desperately requested federal intervention. Experienced professionals in government have been forced out, tried-and-true policies discarded, expert research ignored, and cronies elevated to senior management.

Before Katrina, the Republican theory received its most apposite formulation by a prominent lobbyist and close advisor to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, who said about government that he wanted to "drown it in the bathtub." In relation to the waters that surround it, New Orleans has been described as a bathtub, and it has served as the bathtub for Norquist's wish.

Only two people in the light of recent events have had the daring to articulate a defense of the Republican idea of government. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, asked about rebuilding New Orleans, volunteered: "It doesn't make sense to me." He elaborated: "I think federal insurance and everything that goes along with it ... we ought to take a second look at that."

The second defender was Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency…,. On Sept. 1, Brown stated: "Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well."

Even as the floodwaters poured into New Orleans, unimpeded by any federal effort to stanch the flow, the White House mustered a tightly coordinated rapid response of political damage control. Karl Rove assumed emergency management powers. The strategy was to dampen any criticism of the president, rally the Republican base, and cast blame on the mayor of New Orleans and governor of Louisiana, both Democrats. It was a classic Bush ploy against the backdrop of crisis. The object was to polarize the nation along partisan lines as swiftly as possible. While policy collapsed, politics reigned. Once again, Bush the divider, not the uniter, emerged.

Yet others operated off-message, casting aspersions on the hurricane's victims. The president's mother, Barbara Bush, interviewed on American Public Media's "Marketplace" program," said of the displaced from Louisiana who are temporarily housed in Houston's Astrodome, "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them."

And Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., suggested that the residents of New Orleans who failed to escape the flood should be punished. "I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving."

The White House sought to turn back the rising tide of anger among blacks by deputizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. A week after the hurricane, Rice mounted the pulpit at a black church in Whistler, Ala. "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time," she preached, "if we just wait."

An anatomy of cronyism

President Clinton appointed James Lee Witt as the [FEMA] director, the first one ever to have had experience in the field. Witt reinvented the agency, setting high professional standards and efficiently dealing with disasters.

FEMA's success as a showcase federal agency made it an inviting target for the incoming Bush team. Allbaugh, Bush's former campaign manager, became the new director, and he immediately began to dismantle the professional staff, privatize many functions and degrade its operations.

After Allbaugh retired from FEMA in 2003, handing over the agency to his deputy and college roommate, Brown, he set up a lucrative lobbying firm, the Allbaugh Co., which mounts "legislative and regulatory campaigns" for its corporate clients, according its Web site. After the Iraq war, Allbaugh established New Bridge Strategies to facilitate business for contractors there. He also created Diligence, a firm to provide security to private companies operating in Iraq. Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and now governor of Mississippi, helped Allbaugh start all his ventures through his lobbying and law firm, Barbour Griffith and Rogers.

Indeed, the entire Allbaugh complex is housed at Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Ed Rogers, Barbour's partner, has become a vice president of Diligence. Diane Allbaugh, Allbaugh's wife, went to work at Barbour Griffith and Rogers. And Neil Bush, the president's brother, received $60,000 as a consultant to New Bridge Strategies.

On Sept. 1, the Pentagon announced the award of a major contract for repair of damaged naval facilities on the Gulf Coast to Halliburton, the firm whose former CEO is Vice President Dick Cheney and whose chief lobbyist is Joe Allbaugh.

Hurricane Katrina is the anti-9/11 in its divisive political effect, its unearthing of underlying domestic problems, and its disorienting impact on the president and his administration. Yet, in other ways, the failure of government before the hurricane struck is reminiscent of the failures leading into 9/11. The demotion of FEMA resembles the demotion of counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. In both cases, the administration ignored clear warnings.

In a conversation with a former diplomat with decades of experience, I raised these parallels. But the Bush administration response evoked something else for him. "It reminds me of Africa," he said. "Governments that prey on their people."

New Orleans, Sept. 6. About 60% of the city still flooded.
AP photo.

The Next Shock

from The Guardian story, Damage exposure will 'wake America up'
by David Fickling, Mark Oliver and agencies

The devastation that will be revealed by Hurricane Katrina's receding floodwaters will bring fresh shock to the US, the mayor of New Orleans warned today.

Ray Nagin estimated that it would take three weeks to drain the water, and said he did not know how many bodies the process would reveal. Officials fear that up to 10,000 people may have died.

"It's going to be awful and it's going to wake the nation up again," Mr Nagin said. He estimated that it would take several more weeks to clear the debris and a further two months to reconnect electricity in the urban area.

The draining of New Orleans today began with the plugging of one of the biggest gaps in its levee system, through which floodwaters surged to cover around 80% of the city.

Once the floodwaters have been drained, emergency teams expect to find toxic waste, rotting matter and dead bodies, and officials spent yesterday removing the last remaining survivors before the grimmer tasks of the operation began.

"There are no jobs. There are no homes to go to, no hotels to go to, there is absolutely nothing here," deputy police chief Warren Riley said. "We advise people that this city has been destroyed ... it has completely been destroyed."

Swollen bodies floated in the streets, and authorities are worried that hundreds more victims could be dead inside homes in New Orleans.

The Jefferson Parish president, Aaron Broussard, told CBS news that government would have to be held accountable for what had happened.

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before congress today," he said.

"Take whatever idiot they have at the top, give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

survivors in the land of plenty; New Orleans. AP photo.

The Larger Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

excerpted from the New York Times

The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.
It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans.

The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.

But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.

If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.

Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.

Under Mr. Bush, the national infant mortality rate has risen for the first time since 1958.

The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.

So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. Nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. On immunizations, the U.S. ranks 84th for measles and 89th for polio.

So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that may be politically feasible.

Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

Among the hazards in New Orleans: fires and no water pressure;
floating oil and leaking gas. AP photo.

The real costs of a culture of greed

By Robert Scheer Excerpted from the Los Angeles Times

WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States. Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame.

The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans. Yet the problem is much deeper.

For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.

Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of protecting us at home.

Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub flooded New Orleans "Lake George." None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life.

Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government policies that aid only poor brown and black people — even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared.

For decades we have seen social services that benefit everyone — education, community policing, public health, environmental protections and infrastructure repair, emergency services — in steady, steep decline in the face of tax cuts and rising military spending. But it is a false savings; it will certainly cost exponentially more to save New Orleans than it would have to protect it in the first place.

Watching on television the stark vulnerability of a permanent underclass of African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos is terrifying. It should be remembered, however, that even when hurricanes are not threatening their lives and sanity, they live in rotting housing complexes, attend embarrassingly ill-equipped public schools and, lacking adequate police protection, are frequently terrorized by unemployed, uneducated young men. In fact, rather than an anomaly, the public suffering of these desperate Americans is a symbol for a nation that is becoming progressively poorer under the leadership of the party of Big Business.

As Katrina was making its devastating landfall, the U.S. Census Bureau released new figures that show that since 1999, the income of the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7% in inflation-adjusted dollars. Last year alone, 1.1 million were added to the 36 million already on the poverty rolls.

For those who have trouble with statistics, here's the shorthand: The rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting, in the ripe populist language of Louisiana's legendary Long, the shaft.

These are people who have long since been abandoned to their fate. Despite the deep religiosity of the Gulf States and the United States in general, it is the gods of greed that seem to rule.

Given all this, it is no surprise that leaders, from the White House on down, haven't done right by the people of New Orleans and the rest of the region, before and after what insurance companies insultingly call an "act of God." Fact is, most of them, and especially our president, just don't care about the people who can't afford to attend political fundraisers or pay for high-priced lobbyists. No, these folks are supposed to be cruising on the rising tide of a booming, unregulated economy that "floats all boats." They were left floating all right.

Volunteer in Baltimore readies shelter for Katrina survivors.
AP photo.

You'd Do the Same for Me

People are helping. What's clear so far about the Katrina catastrophe is that people all across America and the world were ready and willing to help, and once they were given the chance, they are helping.

Now in the area are search and rescue teams from Oakland, CA and scientists from the Bay Area testing the water in flooded New Orleans to see what health problems may yet arise. There are National Guard troops from West Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as well as nearby states.

US neighbors are responding. Canada sent the HMCS Athabascan from Halifax. Mexico is sending medical teams. Cuba has offered 1100 doctors. The UN is organizing a world response.

Survivors are being welcomed into homes in cities and towns all over America. Baton Rouge has doubled in population, so have some Misssippi towns, and Houston and Dallas are taking thousands. But other places, like Des Moines, Iowa and Charlotte, North Carolina; Los Angeles, Phoenix, Baltimore and Chicago, are welcoming survivors and planning for short-term and long-term care.

Civilization is nothing more and nothing less than a society's commitment to certain values, reflected in its philosophies, institutions and actions, renewed and extended continually.

The world saw civilization break down in the Katrina zone, though this breakdown was caused by a criminal lack of committment and action in Washington, and perhaps elsewhere.

Now civilization is reasserting itself with the principal civic value, which can't be expressed any better than in the phrase, "You'd do the same for me."

HMCS Athabascan leaves Halifax, Canada for relief work
in New Orleans AP photo

Aboard rescue ship USS Tortuga. AP photo.

Top FEMA Deputies Know P.R., Not Emergency Management

from Think Progress:

If Bush were to fire FEMA director Mike Brown the agency would be run by the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff. (See the FEMA organizational chart).

The Chief of Staff is a guy named Patrick Rhode. He planned events for President Bush’s campaign. Rhode has no emergency management experience whatsoever. From Rhode’s official bio:

His first position with the Bush Administration was as special assistant to the President and deputy director of National Advance Operations, a position he assumed in January 2001. Previously, Mr. Rhode served as deputy director of National Advance Operations for the George W. Bush Presidential Campaign, in Austin, Texas.

The Deputy Chief of Staff is Scott Morris. He was a press flak for Bush’s presidential campaign. Previously, he worked for the company that produced Bush’s campaign commercials. He also has no emergency management experience. From Morris’s official bio:

Mr. Morris was also the marketing director for the world’s leading provider of e-business applications software in California, and worked for Maverick Media in Austin, Texas as a media strategist for the George W. Bush for President primary campaign and the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign.

These guys make Brown look qualified. And that’s no small feat.

Mexico Red Cross Center prepares
supplies for Katrina zone. AP photo

FEMA chief waited until after storm hit

TED BRIDIS Associated Press (from San Jose Mercury-News)

WASHINGTON - The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the region - and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.

Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, PA
who thought he was going to Atlanta to be sent to fight
fires in New Orleans

FEMA Holds Back Firefighters, Finally Uses Them As Props for Bush

Excerpts from a story by Lisa Rosetta: The Salt Lake Tribune

ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA. On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for "austere conditions." Many of them came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.

"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."

Also of concern to some of the firefighters is the cost borne by their municipalities in the wake of their absence. Cities are picking up the tab to fill the firefighters' vacancies while they work 30 days for the federal government.

"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

Salvation outside a South Carolina survivor center. AP photo. 

FEMA: Florida Election Management Agency

From Perspectives.

Mel Brooks once said, "it's good to be king." Well when it comes to hurricanes, it's even better being the President's brother. Especially in a vital swing state. In an election year.

Louisiana's Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco is learning that the hard way. While her state suffered through a disastrous, disorganized and delayed response to Katrina from FEMA and the Bush administration, Florida governor Jeb Bush had no such problems as his state weathered four hurricanes in 2004.

There is no mystery to this discrepancy, as GovExec.com wrote in "How FEMA Delivered Florida for Bush" on November 3rd, 2004, literally the day after the President won reelection:

Now that President Bush has won Florida in his 2004 re-election bid, he may want to draft a letter of appreciation to Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Seldom has any federal agency had the opportunity to so directly and uniquely alter the course of a presidential election, and seldom has any agency delivered for a president as FEMA did in Florida this fall.

FEMA's preparation, performance and questionable largesse during the four 2004 Florida hurricanes stands in stark contrast with its abysmal failure in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. While severe, the four Florida hurricanes (Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne) caused under 100 deaths and $22 billion in damage, a fraction of Katrina's destructive force. Yet FEMA's proactive role and President Bush's timely and personal involvement in Florida bear no relation to 2005:

Hurricane Charley in August 2004 saw FEMA, National Guard troops, relief supplies and President Bush on stand by before the storm even made landfall. As the St. Petersburg Times reported on August 17th, 2004, "Governor Jeb Bush sought federal help Friday while Charley was still in the Gulf of Mexico. President Bush approved the aid about an hour after the hurricane made landfall."

Cargo planes flew FEMA supplies supplies from a Georgia Air Force base to a staging area in Lakeland, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had stockpiled 11 truckloads of water and 14 truckloads of ice. Guy Daines, the former Pinellas County director of emergency services, was pleased and impressed with the rapid response of the National Guard and the delivery of pre-positioned supplies, stating "It amazed me how they got over 4,000 National Guard troops in there that quick. Rather than sit there and react, they are trying to get a jump-start on everything."

FEMA again prepositioned personnel, supplies, and equipment for the Frances, which struck in the first week of September. A FEMA press release offered a laundry list descriptio of preparations for Frances. 30,000 tarps, 100 truckloads of water and 100 truckloads of ice were already in place. Emergency medical teams and four urban search and rescue teams were already in place.

By September 6, 900,000 Meals Ready to Eat (MRE's) were stockpiled in Jacksonville. President Bush himself got into the act, distributing ice to Florida hurricane victims with brother Jeb.

This performance was repeated for Ivan and Jeanne, which hit two and three weeks later, respectively. Again, FEMA was in place with food, ice, water, and financial aid in advance of the arrival of the storms. By September 29, FEMA was providing detailed daily updates on its relief eforts, including over $360 million in aid to individuals. This assistance was augmented by the IRS, which granted tax relief for Florida hurricane victims.

Large and timely federal recovery funding was never an issue for the Florida Four. Congress passed $13 billion in recovery spending for the 2004 hurricanes, the bulk of which went to Florida. By August of 2005, $5.6 billion had been spent.

Whether that money had been spent wisely by FEMA director Michael Brown is another subject altogether. On May 18, 2005, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held hearings about waste and corruption in the Florida programs. In a session titled, "FEMA’s Response to the 2004 Florida Hurricanes: A Disaster for Taxpayers?,"

Senators Collins, Nelson and others grilled Michael Brown over his agency's largesse to residents of Florida. Florida Senator Nelson detailed numerous frauds perpetrated by Brown at FEMA. This featured over $31 million in payouts, including paying for home and car repairs, in Miami-Dade County, which had been virtually unaffected by the storms. More morose, FEMA managed to pay the costs of over 300 funerals statewide, even though medical examiners attributed only 123 to the hurricanes.

The rest, as they say, is history. Bush carried Florida over John Kerry by a surprisingly comfortable margin. As GovExec noted after election day, 2004:

"Bush later made a handful of other Florida visits to review storm-related damage, but the story on the ground was not Bush's hand-holding. Rather, it was FEMA's performance. It's impossible to know just how much of an effect FEMA had on the Florida vote...Even so, in a closely contested state where hundreds of thousands of voters suffered storm-related losses, it's equally hard to imagine that they didn't notice the agency's outreach."

As for Louisiana Governor Blanco, she shouldn't expect the Jeb treatment any time soon. In fact, portraying her and other state local officials as the bogeymen in the Katrina disaster is essential to the White House's strategy for Bush's political survival.

UPDATE (9/6): AP is reporting that FEMA Chief Mike Brown "waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the region — and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents." And yet, "Brownie" seems to enjoy job security.

Animals still stranded in New Orleans; survivors often
forced to leave pets behind.

First Person

They Believed They Were Sent There to Die

On her Tuesday show, Oprah Winfrey and others reported from New Orleans, Houston, and Mississippi. It's hard to say why---perhaps because Oprah is black, and someone every black person knows about and feels they know, perhaps because many of the reporters were actors, and they are open to their feelings of the moment and able to express them--but this was a very intimate hour, and because of that, more shocking and moving than most TV reports.

A doctor--an Oprah regular--reported from the New Orleans airport, where a triage center and makeshift hospital and morgue were operating. Ambulances were lined up for two miles. People were in lines to been seen for days. But the most shocking observation he made was that individuals who were judged too ill to be helped were placed in the morgue while still alive.

Early in the hour, Oprah reacted to hearing that in the chaos (and, as she discovered, the near total darkness) of the Superdome, not only was their violence and death but that babies were raped. This was first mentioned by the Chief of Police, but later confirmed by someone who had been confined there. Gangs were said to have linked up and fomented violence inside, while battling with police.

A different view of gang activity at the Convention Center is found in the following first person account. It is entirely possible that both accounts are true.

This is an account written by Lisa Moore but given by Denise Moore. It was published in the French newspaper, Liberation, and this is excerpted from a version posted here on dkos.

According to Liberation, "the Moore family is large and long established Creole Catholic family in New Orleans. The Moores are musicians - Deacon John (Moore) is the most famous one of them - professors, nurses... Their houses are now submerged by flooding, and most of them have lost everything following Katrina's passage. Lisa Moore, editor (Redbone press), has collected the testimony of her 43 year-old cousin, Denise Moore, once an education counselor, now a refugee in Baton Rouge. Here is her tale of a dive into Hell:

"she described it as the scariest time in her life. 3 of the rooms in the apartment (there are only 4) caved in. ceilings caved in, walls caved in. she huddled under a mattress in the hall. she thought she would die from either the storm or a heart attack. after the storm passed, she went back to Baptist to seek shelter (this was Monday). it was also scary at Baptist; the electricity was out, they were running on generators, there was no air conditioning.

Tuesday the levees broke, and water began rising. they moved patients upstairs, saw boats pass by on what used to be streets. they were told that they would be evacuated, that buses were coming. then they were told they would have to walk to the nearest intersection, Napoleon and S. Claiborne, to await the buses. they waded out in hip-deep water, only to stand at the intersection, on the neutral ground (what y'all call the median) for 3 1/2 hours. the buses came and took them to the Ernest Memorial Convention Center. (yes, the convention center you've all seen on TV.)

Denise said she thought she was in hell. they werethere for 2 days, with no water, no food. no shelter. Denise, her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years old), and 2-year-old grandniece. when they arrived, there were already thousands of people there. they were told that buses were coming. police drove by, windows rolled up, thumbs up signs. national guard trucks rolled by, completely empty, soldiers with guns cocked and aimed at them. nobody stopped to drop off water. a helicopter dropped a load of water, but all the bottles exploded on impact due to the height ofthe helicopter.

the first day (Wednesday) 4 people died next to her. the second day (Thursday) 6 people died next to her. Denise told me the people around her all thought they had been sent there to die. again, nobody stopped. the only buses that came were full; they dropped off more and more people, but nobody was being picked up and taken away. they found out that those being dropped off had been rescued from rooftops and attics; they got off the buses delirious from lack of water and food. completely dehydrated. the crowd tried to keep them all in one area; Denise said the new arrivals had mostly lost their minds. they had gone crazy.

inside the convention center, the place was one huge bathroom. in order to shit, you had to stand in other people's shit. the floors were black and slick with shit. most people stayed outside because the smell was so bad. but outside wasn't much better: between the heat, the humidity, the lack of water, the old and very young dying from dehydration... and there was no place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk. they slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass.

Denise said yes, there were young men with guns there. but they organized the crowd. they went to Canal Street and "looted," and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. when the police rolled down windows and yelled out "the buses are coming," the young men with guns organized the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back. just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first.

Denise said the fights she saw between the young men with guns were fist fights. she saw them put their guns down and fight rather than shoot up the crowd. but she said that there were a handful of people shot in the convention center; their bodies were left inside, along with other dead babies and old people.

Denise said the people thought there were being sent there to die. lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. cops passing by, speeding off. national guard rolling by with guns aimed at them. and yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all. she saw a young man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit; he crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot him in the back. in front of the whole crowd. she saw many groups of people decide that they were going to walk across the bridge to the west bank, and those same groups would return, saying that they were met at the top of the bridge by armed police ordering them to turn around, that they weren't allowed to leave.

So they all believed they were sent there to die."

The ordeal is lasting. An evacuee
at Houston Astrodome. AP photo