Day: September 5, 2005

Count us among Americans who yearn for the days, not so long ago, when James Lee Witt was the man our country turned to handle operations on the ground in times of crisis.

Witt served as served as FEMA director in the Clinton Administration, and handled 348 national crises with extreme competence.

Consider this: Of all the scandals trumped up by the Republicans during the Clinton era, not one was related to how those 348 disasters were handled.

Yesterday, after he was named as Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s liaison with FEMA, Witt was interviewed live by Rita Cosby on MSNBC. The full transcript follows, but here are the salient points:

I‘ve talked to emergency managers across this country, and firefighters across this country, and they told me … “You know what,” they said, “what [the Bush Administration has] done to FEMA is like driving [a stake in the] heart in emergency management in this country.”

[You] cannot expect a federal agency, like FEMA, to be able to fulfill its role and its responsibility to the American people [when] you take away the resources and … a lot of the funding. [You] have to work every day, every month, every week, to be able to make sure you partner with state and local emergency management, firefighters, to be able to respond together.

And if you don‘t plan, prepare, and exercise together, then you – it‘s difficult to respond together.

The mitigation prevention program in FEMA was a strong program. When we reorganized FEMA, we put in a division for mitigation prevention, working with state and local government, to minimize risk. It is almost null and void now…

While it is a hopeful sign that Witt is handling the situation for the state Louisiana, his presence on the scene is a constant reminder of how inadequate the federal team has been in fulfilling it’s responsibilities. We can only hope that they are able to turn the situation in the Gulf Coast around before there is another major disaster.

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As we have been saying, the blame game about who is responsible for the disaster in New Orleans is a fictional construct invented by the White House message machine. Josh Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo outlines key facts about the responsibility of the federal government to deal with disasters like Hurricane Katrina:

Now, it seems to me there are three points that make sense to raise with all this data.

The first is the importance of keeping an eye on the big picture and that is the fact that this whole conversation we’re having now is not about substance, but procedural niceties, excuses which is it is beyond shameful for an American president to invoke in such a circumstance. We don’t live in the 19th century. All you really needed was a subscription to basic cable to know almost all of the relevant details (at least relevant to know what sort of assistance was needed) about what was happening late last week. The president and his advisors want to duck responsibility by claiming, in so many words, that the Louisiana authorities didn’t fill out the right forms. So what they’re trying to pull is something like a DMV nightmare on steroids.

Second, as long as the White House wants to play this game, there are various invocations of federal statutes in this proclamations. And we’d need a lawyer with relevant experience to pick apart whether the right sections and powers were invoked.

Third — and this is key — even on its own terms, the White House’s claims seem false on their face. The plain English of this documents shows that states of emergency had been declared on both the state and federal level before the hurricane hit and that at the state’s request the president had given FEMA plenary powers to “identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.”

“We found it absolutely incredible that the authorities had no way to get there for four or five days, that they didn’t go in and help these people, and we made it in a two-wheel-drive Hyundai.”

— Duke University student Hans Buder, who with college friends Sonny Byrd and David Hankla, drove to New Orleans late last week, posed as journalists to slip inside the hurricane-soaked city twice, and evacuated seven people who weren’t receiving help from authorities.

“Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That’s my question. [Those who stayed behind] didn’t have any place to go.

“They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do — they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.”

— Anne Rice

The first barrage in the White House campaign to revise reality about the administration’s failure to respond to last week’s hurricane disaster is to float the idea that there is a “blame game” going on between federal and local officials, or rather, between Republicans in Washington and Democrats in Louisiana. They’re going to have trouble blaming the hobbling of FEMA on the Democrats however, in light of these facts:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency once speedily delivered food, water, shelter and medical care to disaster areas, and paid to quickly rebuild damaged roads and schools and get businesses and people back on their feet. Like a commercial insurance firm setting safety standards to prevent future problems, it also underwrote efforts to get cities and states to reduce risks ahead of time and plan for what they would do if calamity struck.

But in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, FEMA lost its Cabinet-level status as it was folded into the giant new Department of Homeland Security. And in recent years it has suffered budget cuts, the elimination or reduction of key programs and an exodus of experienced staffers.

The agency’s core budget, which includes disaster preparedness and mitigation, has been cut each year since it was absorbed by the Homeland Security Department in 2003. Depending on what the final numbers end up being for next fiscal year, the cuts will have been between about 2% and 18%.

The agency’s staff has been reduced by 500 positions to 4,735. Among the results, FEMA has had to cut one of its three emergency management teams, which are charged with overseeing relief efforts in a disaster. Where it once had “red,” “white” and “blue” teams, it now has only red and white.

Three out of every four dollars the agency provides in local preparedness and first-responder grants go to terrorism-related activities, even though a recent Government Accountability Office report quotes local officials as saying what they really need is money to prepare for natural disasters and accidents.

Predictably, the Bush message-meisters are launching a trademark hardball, all-politics-all-the-time campaign to rewrite the events of last week to so that the administration’s worst week becomes someone else’s fault, and someone else’s problem.

The first wave of the campaign is a discussion generated about a “blame game” between federal and local officials. This is bogus. There is no blame game. The buck stops at the top – or at least it used to in this great country.

There are Republicans in the Congress who are leery of the Rove method as it is being applied to the administration’s failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and their aides have leaked information about the White House rewriting reality campaign to the MSM:

Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

It orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.

The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. It began late last week after Congressional Republicans called White House officials to register alarm about what they saw as a feeble response by Mr. Bush to the hurricane, according to Republican Congressional aides.

Team Rove uses three tactics for changing reality:

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