President Bush sent Congress a request for $51.8 billion in additional hurricane relief yesterday, raising Katrina's cost to the federal government to $62.3 billion so far, easily a record for domestic disaster relief.
This damage did not come as a surprise. For years the need to improve and upgrade the flood defense was well known, but grossly underfunded. It does make one wonder if we had spent that 100 Million dollars on Levee work, that Bush cut out of the Budget, would it have made a difference (funds cut to help pay for his tax cuts for the rich and his war in Iraq).
In addition it has been announced that:
Republican leaders moved to try to contain the political fallout from Katrina, forming a joint House-Senate review committee of senior lawmakers who will investigate the government's preparation and initial response to the catastrophe.
A full blown white-wash is coming up now. A republican congress investigating a republican president that they are fully in bed with is a laughable concept. The information demonstrating the failures in function of FEMA are clear to see, but I expect they will try to force the focus elsewhere. I fear they will ignore any new information that comes out. They should look at and consider why the focus and primary concern of FEMA, as directed by this administration, was not on natural disaster response, but terrorism. Both are important, but natural disasters are far more common, and have the potential to be far more deadly. So you have to ask, what impact this change of focus may have had in the response in the Gulf.
Not only did the Bush administration slash funding for natural-disaster planning this year, the state directors charged, Homeland Security acting under a directive signed by the president has geared almost all planning exercises with the states to responding to hypothetical terror attacks such as radioactive dirty bombs or anthrax attacks rather than far more common, and costly, disasters such as hurricanes, tornados and floods.
Internal Homeland Security documents obtained by NEWSWEEK lend support to the state directors complaints. Out of 15 all hazards disaster-planning scenarios approved by DHS and the White House Homeland Security Council last May, only three involved natural disasters, one document shows.
This administration has made a series of missteps that have resulted in hundreds, if not thousands of deaths. If it were a private citizen they would face criminal charges, a corporation would be in court.
With the Bush administration, it will be Medals of freedom for all.
1 comment:
These concerns touch upon the central dilemma that governmental officials face every day concerning the proper allocation of resources. In this case the allocation in question is between preparedness for natural disasters and preparedenss for terrorism. What is missing from this discussion is any serious attempt to recognize that the federal government has both a Constititutional and congressional
mandate to prepare for terrorist incidents which fall within the area of national security, while it has only a congressional mandate to prepared for natural disasters. There is no inherent federal responsibility to prepare for or respond to natural disasters. This responsbility is purely and simply a Congressional invention, created largely to provide resources for the voters back home in the event of natural disasters, the consequences of which are usually made much worse by Congressional policies that lead to massive increases in vulnerabilities to such disasters. Only the Federal government can lead the nation in preparing for terrorist attacks. In this era of very limited federal resources it is the hight of folly to continue to insist that the federal government has a responsibility to bail out (no pun intended) locals and states who allow their citizens to move into or remain in harm's way while neglecting their own constitutional responsibilites to protect their citizens. In natural disasters the federal government ought to be the responder of last resort, since in the case of terrorism it must bear the burden of national preparedness.
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