There is something about those awful California fires and our government’s response and President Bush’s response that is bugging me. I’ve isolated the problem. It is two words long. New Orleans.
Our government’s response to the fires has been basically in line with what citizens should expect. It was swift, it was thorough and it promises to continue as the painful and trying rebuilding moves forward. It is in line with how the government responded in 9/11′s aftermath in New York.
I’m glad he went out there. I’m glad he consoled some people. The pictures are very nice. 
That is what continues to trouble me about New Orleans and Katrina. Not only was our government’s failure historically horrific, it continues to this day.
Read what noted history professor Douglas Brinkley wrote on Katrina’s 2nd anniversary:
Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I’ve seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.
They arrive in the city’s Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.
After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in place, toiling in a surreal vacuum.
Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city’s long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn’t President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government’s participation in the rebuilding?
And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?
Eventually, the volunteers’ altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They’ve been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can’t be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I’ve concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.
I don’t want to believe that it is all about money and race but the Bush administration is making it harder and harder to come to any other conclusion. This administration’s days are numbered. There is little it can do. History will judge this administration one of the worst ever. It is simply a matter of its position. There are, however, things that can be done. Showing up in San Diego was terrific Mr. President but how about going back to that city in Louisiana…. you know, this one you were looking at while it flooded:
posted October 27, 2007 at 5:45 am
Most of the areas of San Diego that are burning tend to vote Republican.
Maybe it’s not race — maybe — but it’s certainly politics.
(And I cringed to see that awful picture of our “compassionate conservative” President thousands of feet safely above one of America’s worst-ever nightmares.)
posted October 27, 2007 at 6:00 am
I am tired of hearing about NOLA. Why do people expect the government to take care of them at all? It is not the governments job to rebuild peoples houses… it is the homeowners, they don’t have enough money? Did they have insurance? Just seems like people need to start taking care of themselves. People talk about limiting government, but really they want to limit the parts they don’t benefit from… time to wake up David. Government isn’t supposed to be compassionate or provide for the poor… it is time the poor and those who care about the poor to do what they want to do in order to make things better.
posted October 27, 2007 at 6:11 am
The major fallacy of the New Orleans debacle is that all of the people left homeless were the welfare “poor”, waiting for government handouts, when in actuality, most were middle to lower middle class workers, many working in service and medical industry jobs, who WERE, unfortunately, beholden to insurance companies who failed to live up to their obligations.
Many kept the hotels and casinos operating so that the upper middle and wealthy among us could continue to party on in New Orleans, oblivious of the ones who provided their clean beds, their room service, and their medical services should they need their bedpans or wastebaskets cleaned if they suddenly needed hospitalization.
Many of the areas where these faceless people lived are now being bought up by developers, anxious to make further profits off of those less than deserving folks.
So, no…government may not be supposed to provide for the poor, or even be compassionate, but they are supposed to level the playing field just a bit.
posted October 27, 2007 at 9:00 am
John,
Listen to Maxcat. He is telling the truth, not the spin sent out by conservative media. And I am so sorry Americans still dealing with devastation 2 years after the fact is hard on you. It is so frustrating for you, I know.
As to the post, please don’t send President Bush here. He just messes up the traffic and speaks a lot of hollow words that means NOTHING. He doesn’t care about the Gulf South. I actually laughed out loud when I heard his sound bite to the people of California saying how the government of the US is there to support them. Those poor fire victims have no idea the misery they are about to experience.
posted October 27, 2007 at 10:16 am
They were the welfare poor huh? Few things make me angrier than the self righteous attempts of those who would pretend the poor do not exist and if they do – it is their fault. Apparently we carry no responsibiity at all
Try making rent, food and utilities on 800 dollars a month, because that is just about what you bring home on a minimum wage job. Then add the complications of childcare, clothing, and medical care. You can of course get a 2nd or even 3rd job. that’ll lose you any medical care. or time with your children. Then when your kids begin hanging out with those you would rather they didn’t know, well, you’re nt there anyway. You must be a lax parent, trying to bring in enough to feed everybody. Secondary economies grow in such an atmosphere. All kinds of secondary economies including those that might not be quite legal. Police and people such as you – often see them as less than human – their desperation as grasping. Perhaps you can explain the gentile manner in which they might be poor to suit your sensibilities. then lets add – for good measure – a concentrated effort to make sure their education is minimal and a very concentrated effort to make sure the young men have no hope whatsoever. You can create a magnificent system that feeds lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and prison systems and you can pretend that these young men are the enemy. then you can take the truly broken and dangerous among them and create a sort of legal theater as we decide, slowly and painstakingly, whether they should die. No doubt in my mind that some can never live among us again, but we really love thinking of their misery.
We even have TV shows on every single night to reinforce our derision for both the poor and the broken. It is a slow reinforcement. Took 25 years to take us from a fairly compassionate people with a tendency toward vengeance to a vengeful people bent on denying our compassion.
This administration has done more than ignore the poor. they have hung them out to dry. And there has been a gleefulness about it that turns my stomach.
I do not believe those who are conservative about social programs are bad people, but they have allowed themselves to be sucked into the vacuum of “they deserve it” and “we deserve more”. None of us deserves anything. We are given grace and sometimes. that grace comes by way of the kindness we display towards the ‘undeserving”. Oh, I think Jesus would have a lot to say about all this.”
posted October 27, 2007 at 10:54 am
I was dismayed and then disgusted by the president’s comments in his news conference from California. His back-handed slap at Louisiana leadership, was a pitiful attempt to excuse and cover-up his own administration’s sorry handling of the Katrina disaster. As Larry commented above — maybe (this time) it’s not race, but rather politics (Republican southern Calif. counties.) Though probably not typical, a telling moment occurred in the wildfire coverage when one man lamented that, with his home gone, he’d have to live in his vacation house for a while. That anyone’s home is destroyed by fire (or water) is a traumatic event, and I feel grat sadness and empathy for them (rich or poor) but the contrast between Katrina and the wildfires is too great to go unnoticed.
posted October 27, 2007 at 1:45 pm
>>I don’t want to believe that it is all about money and race but the Bush administration is making it harder and harder to come to any other conclusion.
It isn’t strictly about money and race – if poor and middle-class blacks voted Republican, Bush would have been all over NO after the flooding.
posted October 28, 2007 at 3:22 am
Maxkitty,
I am neither poor nor black and the President left me to die in New Orleans after the levees failed because they were built wrong by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
I am a tax-paying American refugee from that crime. He denied the Governor troops unless she allowed him to nationalize the entire state. Give me a break. Please do not defend that draft dodger or his draft dodging administration.
David,
Thank you for such a good post and I appreciate hearing you keep this tragedy in the news.
May I recommend the book “Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein, which illustrates where this country has gone.
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
And this group is the best word I have found on the levee failures.
http://levees.org/
posted October 28, 2007 at 8:56 am
Lest we forget Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the government (1st Bush) wasn’t there for that one either.
Nor for Huricanes Charlie, Wilma, Jeane and Francis. Florida has been beaten down these last four years from 8 huricanes. Is it our fault we live in huricane alley? I lived here for 35 years and never have seen weather like this.
Finally after Governor Jeb Bush left office we got Charlie Christ who went to Washington this year lobbying for a national policy on catastrophic insurance. He was laughed at by the Washington Bureacrats. One laughs until the crisis hits your city, then you cry. I learned along time ago as a South Floridian that the government is not coming. And it’s just plain sad and makes me angry.
posted October 28, 2007 at 9:39 am
To the comment about how it is not the governments job to help.
That would make sense – IF the republican congress and this president hadn’t voted to send millions of tax-payer dollars to the oil companies to develop new oil resources – the SAME year those companies posted record profits. Not just for their industry, but for ANY industry! How about when the government bailed out various airlines? Did you protest then? How about the millions to billions of dollars they award on no-bid contracts to business owners who give big contributions to various Republican campaigns (Blackwater ring a bell?). Then there is passing a law making people unable to use bankruptcy laws to get out from under crushing debt with rates that just 30 years ago would have been ruled as USUARY in many states. And do it in the name of making the middle class fiscal responsible. All the while, running up a deficit that my great-grandchildren will be paying off.
So yes, let’s help out those businesses, CEO’s and owners who through their own greed and mis-judgements run their business into the ground and ruin the lives of the people who depended on them for a living. That’s make the rich even richer by giving them the money that those horrible unresponsbile, lazy poor and middle class people payed in taxes. That’s make it so that indentured servitued to credit card companies is all but in the open. But those who do the messy work – the ones who make barely enough to keep food on the table and the lights on (and that by working 2-3 jobs) – that’s just kick them when they’re down and claim that the government owes them nothing.
Sorry – but I just can’t buy the whole ‘we’re the responsible ones’ ‘We’re the values voters’ or ‘I believe in compassionate conservatism’, when I see stuff like this coming from so many people who NEVER hold their government responsible for such obvious hypocrisy.
URGH!