It's no secret that the Bush Administration values politics and press
opportunities over policy. But the dichotomy between the White House media
campaign marking the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the harsh
reality Gulf Coast residents have been facing these past 12 months is
unconscionable. President Bush has devoted more time and preparation to this
public relations blitz than to helping the people of the Gulf
Coast.
While the President pats himself on the back and touts his
Administration's appalling performance, thousands of families are still waiting
for FEMA trailers. The incompetence, mishandling, and shear opportunistic greed
that has occurred under the President's watch has been stunning - with $2
billion of the $19 billion spent by FEMA having been wasted on fraud and abuse.
But even as families continue to wait for temporary housing, the locks on as
many as 118,000 trailers used by Gulf Coast hurricane victims have to be
replaced because they could be opened by multiple keys. Tests have also revealed
that 94 percent of FEMA trailers tested have hazardous levels of formaldehyde
gas, a respiratory irritant and carcinogen. When it comes to the health,
security and protection of the American people, negligence and failure have no
place.
House Democrats have been examining many of the Administration's
failures affecting our Gulf Coast citizens. As everyone who lives there and has
volunteered or visited already knows, in order to rate the Administration's
performance, there needs to be a grade lower than "F." Last week, House
Democrats formed a Waste, Fraud and Abuse Truth Squad, chaired by Congressmen
Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Dennis Cardoza (D-CA). They will conduct oversight of
the Bush Administration's handling of taxpayer dollars, giving the Golden Drain
Award to those who fail to provide meaningful oversight or hold the
Administration accountable despite documented instances of waste, fraud and
abuse.
Last week, the Truth Squad released a detailed report
highlighting the financial mishandling and corruption that has marred the
recovery process, dedicating the first Golden Drain Award to the President's
Hurricane Katrina contract process. You can read the full report here and you
may be interested in some of the other reports House Democrats have issued
recently on Katrina:
Housing - Democratic Members of
the House Financial Services Committee, led by Senior Democratic Member Barney
Frank (D-MA), released a report detailing the Bush Administration's housing
failures in the year since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita seriously damaged the
Gulf Coast region. This report demonstrates the Bush Administration's failed
response to the housing needs caused by Katrina, which includes the legendary
failures of FEMA, the indifference of HUD (the federal agency responsible for
housing policy) to the crisis, woefully inadequate requests for housing
reconstruction funds, and opposition to numerous Congressional efforts to
provide affordable rental housing for working families. The conclusion is
inescapable: the Bush Administration's response to the housing crisis spawned by
Hurricane Katrina has been an abject failure.
Read
more >>
Education - One year after Hurricane
Katrina devastated the greater New Orleans area, local schools and colleges
still have not received the leadership and resources they need from the federal
government to truly recover, according to a new report released by Congressman
George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the
Workforce Committee.
Read
more >>
Small Business - Nearly an entire year
after Katrina first touched down in the Gulf Coast, small business owners
continue to struggle. A report released by Senior Democratic Member Nydia
Velazquez (D-NY) and Democrats on the House Small Business Committee found that
80 percent of the loans that were approved have still not been put in the hands
of Gulf Coast small business owners. In addition, the evaluation also reported
that a year later the Bush Administration has failed to take adequate steps to
address the myriad of issues which ultimately led to a failed response last year
- raising serious concern for hurricane victims this year.
Read
more >>
Homeland Security - A new report
issued by the Democratic Members on the Homeland Security Committee, led by
Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), finds that the nation is not much more
prepared to effectively protect our communities and respond to catastrophic
emergencies. The report, "One Year Later: Katrina's Waste," further develops
several significant contracting questions raised late last week by Democratic
colleagues on the Government Reform Committee. In addition, the report urges
Congress to address the institutional failures and poor emergency financial
controls that continue to leave America vulnerable.
Read
more >>
Federal Government Response - Senate
Democratic Leader Reid and I released "Broken Promises: The Republican Response
to Katrina," detailing the failed response in the almost one year since
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast. The hurricanes showed the
American people that even so long after 9/11, the government is still not
prepared to protect them. The report makes clear the disastrous effects
incompetence and mismanagement continue to have on Gulf Coast residents. As the
Bush Administration seeks to trumpet its "accomplishments" in the year since
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, this report makes clear how much work remains to be
done.
Read
more >>These reports should serve as a reminder to President
Bush that a photo op on the South Lawn of the White House is not going to help
the tens of thousands of survivors who are still waiting for housing aid, for
their schools and hospitals to re-open, for electricity to come back on in their
homes and businesses, and for safe drinking water. The President promised a plan
for the region, but all there is to show for it are 10,000 empty, unused
trailers in an airfield in Arkansas. I will be traveling to the Gulf Coast
today, as will many House Democrats, not to smile or pretend we're doing all we
can, but to listen firsthand to residents about what Congress needs to do. As
survivors are rebuilding their lives, House Democrats will work to rebuild trust
and faith that the federal government is truly working for the people of the
Gulf Coast region.
Americans deserve more than no bid contracts, bureaucratic
inefficiencies and a too little, too late PR campaign. One year later, the Gulf
Coast continues to need the financial, health care, education, housing and small
business support that they deserve to turn devastated neighborhoods into
thriving communities. And we still need an independent commission, modeled after
the 9/11 Commission, to find out what exactly went wrong, why it went wrong, and
how to fix it.
I can even give a hint about where the biggest problem is.
Start at the top. ++
With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina tomorrow, as so many
Americans remember the horrifying images of the disaster, the people of New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast will be dealing with reality they face today - that
in a lot of neighborhoods it looks like a hurricane hit a week ago, not a year
ago.
Over the past year, in my listening sessions in Wisconsin, I have
heard from so many people upset with the federal government's response to
Katrina and their emotional pleas to not forget about the people who lost their
homes, their communities and their way of life.
On a trip to New Orleans
in July, the painful realities about life were everywhere - abandoned
businesses, and homes and neighborhoods that were totally destroyed by the
hurricane and its aftermath. The challenge of rebuilding is enormous. But what's
even tougher is trying to rebuild in a way that helps everyone come back, not
just people with access to lots of resources and lots of different options.
There are so many ways that Gulf Coast communities still need help -
creating jobs, rebuilding the school systems, and gutting damaged homes so that
they can be rebuilt. But when you see those blocks and blocks of neighborhoods
that were destroyed - with no sign of reconstruction - it's clear just how much
help the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast need to find affordable
housing.
Housing has to be affordable so that the Gulf Coast can get back
to work. So many of the people who are the lifeblood of the tourism industry -
like hotel and restaurant workers - want to call New Orleans home again, but
they can't move back if they can't afford any place to live.
It's a testament to the strength of these communities that so many
people want to come back, at every income level. You can't do that if you were
working a minimum wage job that doesn't exist anymore, and you were renting an
apartment that ended up engulfed in flood water.
There are a lot of
barriers to moving back for homeowners, but it's also tough for Gulf Coast
citizens who were renting when the hurricane hit. In the year since the
hurricane struck, rents in the Gulf Coast region have skyrocketed, which makes
it even more difficult for low income renters to return to their homes. With a
significant percentage of renters in the New Orleans area before Katrina, we
need to ensure that the housing assistance in the Gulf Coast is aimed at helping
renters, as well as homeowners, rebuild their lives.
We've got to do
something to help displaced residents - particularly low-income people - who
want to move back to New Orleans. I have put together a few different ideas into
one bill, building on really good work on housing issues by some of my
colleagues in the Senate. It doesn't tackle every problem, but it will help
address some of the tough housing issues facing New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
It includes housing vouchers to help make rents affordable for the lowest income
people and families. It also makes housing like the Katrina Cottages - which are
more like homes, and less like trailers - more available to those who want them.
There have been a lot of problems with the FEMA trailers, so it's important to
give people the option of living in a more permanent home. And finally it allows
HUD to handle temporary rental assistance programs from here on out, instead of
FEMA, which isn't equipped to handle housing issues like these for the long
haul.
When I posted
here
after a trip to the Gulf Coast in July, I talked about the challenge of
rebuilding a society in a way that includes the region's most vulnerable
populations. Almost a year after the levees broke, the idea of returning is
still out of reach for a lot of people, especially for people struggling to make
it paycheck to paycheck.
A year after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane
Rita, there is so much that we can still do - and that Congress can do -- to
help the Gulf Coast recover. Looking ahead, we've got to reform the Army Corps
of Engineers, which built the levees in the first place, to prevent this kind of
tragedy from happening again. I'm really pleased that the Senate passed several
Army Corps reform measures I wrote with Senator John McCain. But we also have to
focus on the here and now -- what people are facing on the Gulf Coast today. As
we look at the images of the hurricanes a year later, and we remember what
people went through, we also have to recognize how far we have to go, and
rededicate ourselves to helping the people of the Gulf Coast make it home again.
**Update:
in response to a blogger comment that it
was the levee's that created Katrina.
I agree with DSB's comment
that the poorly constructed levee system contributed to the massive flooding New
Orleans endured following Hurricane Katrina. I have been working for years,
along with Sen. John McCain, to ensure certain Army Corps of Engineer projects,
including the levees, undergo independent peer review. Earlier this summer, I
offered an amendment with Senator McCain and others to the Water Resources
Development Act to require independent peer review of future Army Corps of
Engineers projects that are costly, controversial, or critical to public safety.
The amendment, which passed on a bipartisan vote, draws on the lessons of
Hurricane Katrina and over ten years of government reports looking into the Army
Corps. But we're still not in the clear. Our provision is in danger of being
stripped out during the House-Senate negotiation process. I urge you to continue
to make your voices heard on this issue. It would be irresponsible for Congress
to sit by and allow a system that contributed to the failure of the levees to
remain unchanged. ++
~ From Barack Obama and
MoveOn
Just after Hurricane Katrina hit, MoveOn members
and others stepped up to provide a roof, a bed and hope to more than 30,000
evacuees as part of MoveOn's Hurricane Housing effort.
Today, we're launching our new book—It Takes A Nation: How Strangers
Became Family—which tells the stories of the families involved. It's a beautiful
book, featuring amazing and moving first-person interviews with Katrina evacuees
and the donors who took them in, and evocative photos of the folks involved and
the aftermath of the flood. Senator Barack Obama wrote the forward—and a note to
all of you about it, below.
To commemorate Katrina, we're donating every
cent of the profits to the progressive group ACORN, which is working to protect
evacuees' rights and rebuild New Orleans right. If you donate $20 today to help
Katrina relief efforts, we'll send you a copy of It Takes a Nation (which
retails for $25) for free.
You can learn more about the book, check out
some of the photos and interviews, and make a donation, at:
https://civic.moveon.org/ittakesanation/book.html?id=8606-1297879-CnZxTHGYlWRDwzYu15KuiA&t=3
Here's that message from Senator Obama:
Dear MoveOn
member,
This week marks the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina,
one of the greatest natural disasters to ever strike our shores. The images of
Katrina are still seared in our minds one year later: mothers holding their
babies above water, seniors slumped in wheelchairs, and bodies floating down
American streets. We vowed then, and still vow today, that we'll never forget.
One of greatest tragedies of Katrina is that our government failed
us. The people who are supposed to be there for us when the chips are down
failed and forgot the hundreds of thousands of people who needed them the
most—and left them to fend for themselves.
Out of all the sadness
and despair, we were reminded of one immutable fact: America is great because
Americans are good at heart. That's what Hurricane Housing was all
about.
It Takes a Nation is the story of Hurricane Housing, and I
was honored to write the forward. This collection shows everyday heroes at work
and reminds us that the strength of our nation is not our government, but our
fellow Americans. It Takes a Nation is a story of hope.
One year
later and we're still hearing about survivors pleading with the government for
trailers and food stamps. Today, many have already forgotten the tragedy—and how
Americans stepped up in the face of massive government failure to take care of
each other. The news cycle moved on, but those affected didn't have that
luxury.
Hurricane Housing was about more than just donating a roof,
the MoveOn community in cities across the country came together to provide jobs,
clothing, and healthcare for complete strangers. Out of the disaster, lasting
friendships, new levels of understanding, and new families were
formed.
From the beginning, the idea that has been at the center of
the American experience is that amid a melting pot of races and backgrounds and
beliefs, we still feel a responsibility toward each other. That out of many, we
are one.
It's what brought together white and black, rich and poor
to march together and fight together for civil rights. It's what's caused
soldier after soldier to risk their lives to save those people they never met.
And it's what sent Americans from all over the country deep into the waters of
New Orleans, willing to do whatever it takes to pull their neighbors to safety.
And that's what It Takes A Nation is all about.
Thanks for all you
do,
Senator Barack Obama
++
Hurricane expert threatened for pre-Katrina
warningsGreg Palast
Monday, August 28
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=27493&mode=nested&order=0DON'T
blame the Lady. Katrina killed no one in this town. In fact, Katrina missed the
city completely, going wide to the east.
It wasn't the hurricane that
drowned, suffocated, de-hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week. The killing
was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with
faulty levees. Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering
and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White
House.
Here's the story you haven't been told. And the man who revealed
it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell
it.
Van Heerden isn't the typical whistleblower I usually deal with. This
is no minor player. He's the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University
Hurricane Center. He's the top banana in the field -- no one knew more about how
to save New Orleans from a hurricane's devastation. And no one was a bigger
target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the
information.
Here's what happened. Right after Katrina swamped the city,
I called Washington to get a copy of the evacuation plan.
Funny thing
about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can
find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood.
Whatever: No one can find it.
That's real bad. Here's the key thing about
a successful emergency evacuation plan: you have to have copies of it. Lots of
copies -- in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first
responder. Secret evacuation plans don't work.
I know, I worked on the
hurricane evacuation plan for Long Island New York, an elaborate multi-volume
dossier.
Specifically, I'm talking about the plan that was written, or
supposed to have been written two years ago by a company called, "Innovative
Emergency Management."
Weird thing about IEM, their founder Madhu
Beriwal, had no known experience in hurricane evacuations. She did, however,
have a lot of experience in donating to Republicans.
IEM and FEMA did
begin a draft of a plan. The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in
the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars. Apparently, the
IEM/FEMA crew didn't know that 127,000 people in the city didn't have cars. But
Dr. van Heerden knew that. It was his calculation. LSU knew where these no-car
people were -- they mapped it -- and how to get them out.
Dr. van Heerden
offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn't touch it. Then, a state
official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van
Heerden's position. This official now works for IEM.
So I asked him what
happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them
elderly and most of them poor.
"Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That's
the bottom line." The professor, who'd been talking to me in technicalities,
changed to a somber tone. "They're still finding corpses."
Van Heerden is
supposed to keep his mouth shut. He won't. The deaths weigh on him. "I wasn't
going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."
Van
Heerden had other disturbing news. The Hurricane Center's computer models showed
the federal government had built the levees around the city a foot-and-a-half
too short.
After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and
found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been
"overtopped" for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the
levees would have held, and the city would have been saved.
He had taken
the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush's doorstep. "I myself
briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House." The response:
the university's trustees threatened his job.
While in Baton Rouge, I
dropped in on the headquarters of IEM, the evacuation contractors. The assistant
to the CEO insisted they had "a lot of experience with evacuation" -- but
couldn't name a single city they'd planned for when they got the Big Easy
contract. And still, they couldn't produce the plan.
An IEM press release
in June 2004 boasted legendary expert James Lee Witt as a member of their team.
That was impressive. It was also a lie. In fact, Witt had nothing to do with it.
When I asked IEM point blank if Witt's name was used as a fraudulent hook to get
the contract, their spokeswoman said, weirdly, "We'll get back to you on
that."
Back at LSU, van Heerden astonished me with the most serious
charge of all. While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White
House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst
and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would
drown.
Van Heerden said, "FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o'clock that the
levees had breached... They took video. By midnight on Monday the White House
knew. But none of us knew ...I was at the State Emergency Operations Center."
Because the hurricane had missed the city that Monday night, evacuation
effectively stopped, assuming the city had survived.
It's been a full
year now, and 73,000 New Orleanians remain in FEMA trailers and another 200,000,
more than half the city's former residents, remain in temporary refuges. "The
City That Care Forgot" -- that's their official slogan -- lost a higher
percentage of homes than Berlin lost in World War II. It would be more accurate
to call it, "The City That Bush Forgot."
Should they come home? Rebuild?
Is it safe? Team Bush assures them there's nothing to worry about: FEMA won't
respond to van Heerden's revelations. However, the Bush Administration has hired
a consulting firm to fix the failed evacuation plan. The contractor? A Baton
Rouge company named "Innovative Emergency Management." IEM.
Watch this
special investigative report about Katrina on Democracy Now! You can
download it at
DemocracyNow.org. ++
After the Storm
Peter
Rothberg
Monday, August 28, 2006 by The Nation
A collection of links and things to
do
What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have
to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it
does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy
will never go out as long as there's one candle in your hand.
~ Bill
Moyers
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