It's about competence.
I just had an argument with one of my (now apparently six!) readers about whether a more forward-looking, streamlined, competent governmental response to Katrina really could have made things better or whether the disaster was bigger than even the most competent government reaction or foresight could have mitigated.
His answer: no; New Orleans residents were just powerless in the face of nature and there's nothing the various levels of government could have really done to evacuate them. What we've just witnessed is a correction to American infallibility, not a reminder of what happens when a certain political class lets effective government languish. My answer: yes, a functional, competent government could have done plenty to alleviate the suffering both before and after the flood and it's an absolute atrocity that they didn't.
The conversation left me with one major conclusion: despite my readership's collective belief that I'm the right winger in my political discussion circle, it's become apparent that I'm in fact the starry-eyed liberal, at least in the family. So I refer my reader to other, less utopian, sources of argument than myself, specifically to the blog Respectful of Otters where they've done a great job of keeping up with the various micro-failures of the federal and state response to Katrina, particularly the failure to respond and give the OK to private and semi-public entities who lined up to help and awaited orders. I'm cribbing this directly, so all kudos goes to Rivka et al.
One hundred surgeons and paramedics sat idle in a superbly outfitted mobile hospital in rural Mississippi last Monday, because of red-tape:
"The bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here," he said. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles away "is just mind-boggling," he said.
The Chicago Tribute reported that while people trapped in the Convention Center had no water and those in the Superdome were rationed to a pint a day, the USS Bataan waited for federal orders just offshore:
The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.
The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.
But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.
National Guard units offered by other states were held up until late Thursday (the 1rst) night because of paperwork not signed in Washington.
Federal caches of fire-fighting equipment designed to be shipped anywhere in less than 12 hours remained unshipped six days after the storm because hurricane-ravaged governors had not made formal requests for them.
The American Ambulance Association wanted to send 300 ambulances from Florida, but got shuffled between agencies, ending up with FEMA, and, as of last Sunday, couldn't get cleared.
And here's a a predictable bit from the same WaPo article:
By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on terrorism, the Government Accountability Office noted in a July report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6 billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for the current fiscal year, funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664 million.
New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."
And finally, this story:
Several Wisconsin charter bus companies signed on with FEMA soon after the disaster hit but as of September 2 were still waiting for a call back regarding financial reimbursement, a destination and an approved route, at which point some citizens took charge of contacting state governments and arranging the bus trips.
As Rivka puts it:
"Properly harnessed, this impulse to be useful could have created the greatest rescue and relief effort the world has ever seen. If FEMA had facilitated and directed - or even allowed - the spontaneous direct help offered to Katrina survivors, thousands of lives might have been saved and untold amounts of suffering might have been prevented."
There's a meta-issue here. Liberalism isn't about supporting "big government", massive redistribution, state control of everything, chucking money around and/or protesting war on principle. It's not even about saving people from themselves (though I may have argued otherwise before). It's mainly about taking government seriously as the representative of the people who chose it. That is, expecting government, and the people who run it, to be accountable; to take itself, and its responsibilities, seriously rather than using its various agencies as repositories for campaign hacks in the offseason. Government is made up of the organized representatives of the people. But it's not just the soul of the mob: it ought to be able to provide a channel for the best of people and stop up the flows of the worst of people. It can't be a whole lot better or a whole lot worse than the parameters set out by its population, unless it ceases to be representative of society and hence democratic. (That's the mistake made by people on the left that leads me not to consider myself "on the left".) But there's a lot of room to manoeuver within those paramaters.
That's, to me, what it means to be a liberal. And I believe the current US government is unrepresentative of its society. In very concrete ways, it failed to stop the worst of people -- either by stopping the looting after it started or, better yet, by altering the conditions that led to despair and violence -- and, as detailed above, it failed to encourage and promote the best of people. It failed at this because the people took it over five years ago at the federal level don't really see things the way I do. They just hope bad things won't happen, but if they do happen, then, as National Review put it sarcastically on their cover this week, that's "your government at work" -- a failure by nature, unable to even rise to the best of its citizens. To the extent the organized right in the US believe in anything, they believe in militaristic nationalism: warding off terrorists at home and chasing them around abroad. And maybe they're doing a bang-up job of that domestically. But terrorism isn't everything. And faced with a non-terrorist disaster, they've just given us a perfect picture of the worst in America: callous fatalism about what's possible; a failure to plan for all contingencies; aggressive self-protecting spin in the face of criticism; total, effective, carelessness for the less fortunate.
I really have trouble believing my reader honestly thinks this is the natural, inalterable order of things, that this is the best a first world country can do by its citizens. *Update: Actually, I had written some harsher things in conclusion about how anyone who thought this way ought to vote Libertarian since they wouldn't waste your tax-dollars on useless government, but another reader emailed me to say this sounded very harsh, and I know that all my readers are good Democrats, or the Canadian equivalents, and maybe I shouldn't blog when I'm all worked up about politics and ideology. I love you all, especially those who let me go on and on about the history of the Atari Democrats over dishes when I'm home.
His answer: no; New Orleans residents were just powerless in the face of nature and there's nothing the various levels of government could have really done to evacuate them. What we've just witnessed is a correction to American infallibility, not a reminder of what happens when a certain political class lets effective government languish. My answer: yes, a functional, competent government could have done plenty to alleviate the suffering both before and after the flood and it's an absolute atrocity that they didn't.
The conversation left me with one major conclusion: despite my readership's collective belief that I'm the right winger in my political discussion circle, it's become apparent that I'm in fact the starry-eyed liberal, at least in the family. So I refer my reader to other, less utopian, sources of argument than myself, specifically to the blog Respectful of Otters where they've done a great job of keeping up with the various micro-failures of the federal and state response to Katrina, particularly the failure to respond and give the OK to private and semi-public entities who lined up to help and awaited orders. I'm cribbing this directly, so all kudos goes to Rivka et al.
One hundred surgeons and paramedics sat idle in a superbly outfitted mobile hospital in rural Mississippi last Monday, because of red-tape:
"The bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here," he said. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles away "is just mind-boggling," he said.
The Chicago Tribute reported that while people trapped in the Convention Center had no water and those in the Superdome were rationed to a pint a day, the USS Bataan waited for federal orders just offshore:
The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.
The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.
But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.
National Guard units offered by other states were held up until late Thursday (the 1rst) night because of paperwork not signed in Washington.
Federal caches of fire-fighting equipment designed to be shipped anywhere in less than 12 hours remained unshipped six days after the storm because hurricane-ravaged governors had not made formal requests for them.
The American Ambulance Association wanted to send 300 ambulances from Florida, but got shuffled between agencies, ending up with FEMA, and, as of last Sunday, couldn't get cleared.
And here's a a predictable bit from the same WaPo article:
By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on terrorism, the Government Accountability Office noted in a July report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6 billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for the current fiscal year, funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664 million.
New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."
And finally, this story:
Several Wisconsin charter bus companies signed on with FEMA soon after the disaster hit but as of September 2 were still waiting for a call back regarding financial reimbursement, a destination and an approved route, at which point some citizens took charge of contacting state governments and arranging the bus trips.
As Rivka puts it:
"Properly harnessed, this impulse to be useful could have created the greatest rescue and relief effort the world has ever seen. If FEMA had facilitated and directed - or even allowed - the spontaneous direct help offered to Katrina survivors, thousands of lives might have been saved and untold amounts of suffering might have been prevented."
There's a meta-issue here. Liberalism isn't about supporting "big government", massive redistribution, state control of everything, chucking money around and/or protesting war on principle. It's not even about saving people from themselves (though I may have argued otherwise before). It's mainly about taking government seriously as the representative of the people who chose it. That is, expecting government, and the people who run it, to be accountable; to take itself, and its responsibilities, seriously rather than using its various agencies as repositories for campaign hacks in the offseason. Government is made up of the organized representatives of the people. But it's not just the soul of the mob: it ought to be able to provide a channel for the best of people and stop up the flows of the worst of people. It can't be a whole lot better or a whole lot worse than the parameters set out by its population, unless it ceases to be representative of society and hence democratic. (That's the mistake made by people on the left that leads me not to consider myself "on the left".) But there's a lot of room to manoeuver within those paramaters.
That's, to me, what it means to be a liberal. And I believe the current US government is unrepresentative of its society. In very concrete ways, it failed to stop the worst of people -- either by stopping the looting after it started or, better yet, by altering the conditions that led to despair and violence -- and, as detailed above, it failed to encourage and promote the best of people. It failed at this because the people took it over five years ago at the federal level don't really see things the way I do. They just hope bad things won't happen, but if they do happen, then, as National Review put it sarcastically on their cover this week, that's "your government at work" -- a failure by nature, unable to even rise to the best of its citizens. To the extent the organized right in the US believe in anything, they believe in militaristic nationalism: warding off terrorists at home and chasing them around abroad. And maybe they're doing a bang-up job of that domestically. But terrorism isn't everything. And faced with a non-terrorist disaster, they've just given us a perfect picture of the worst in America: callous fatalism about what's possible; a failure to plan for all contingencies; aggressive self-protecting spin in the face of criticism; total, effective, carelessness for the less fortunate.
I really have trouble believing my reader honestly thinks this is the natural, inalterable order of things, that this is the best a first world country can do by its citizens. *Update: Actually, I had written some harsher things in conclusion about how anyone who thought this way ought to vote Libertarian since they wouldn't waste your tax-dollars on useless government, but another reader emailed me to say this sounded very harsh, and I know that all my readers are good Democrats, or the Canadian equivalents, and maybe I shouldn't blog when I'm all worked up about politics and ideology. I love you all, especially those who let me go on and on about the history of the Atari Democrats over dishes when I'm home.
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