Political MoJo

Accountability Moment

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| Fri Sep. 9, 2005 10:45 AM PDT

That John Dickerson essay mentioned below proved quite prescient: FEMA chief Michael Brown is "being removed from his role managing Katrina relief efforts," but not, you know, actually fired.

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Human Waste

Fri Sep. 9, 2005 8:14 AM PDT

The latest edition of the Bonehead Compendium is up, this week focusing exclusively on the tragedy of Katrina and the federal mismanagement it has exposed:

It now appears that when presented with some 1400 firefighters and paramedics from around the country and who possessed expertise in search and rescue and hazmat operations, FEMA saw fit to assign this regiment of life-saving men and women to wander around the devastated regions of the south and hand out information fliers to already rescued hurricane victims. But within this frustrating waste of human capital an even more egregious abuse of these good people occurred. As Bush made his way to New Orleans for some priceless footage of him hugging black people, FEMA had 50 of these firefighters flown to Louisiana to walk around with the President while he toured the wreckage.
Maybe the government figures rescue and cleanup personnel have been overcommitted to operations since, as former first lady Barbara Bush so tactfully stated this week of the underprivileged victims, the hurricane "is working very well for them."

Who's Fired?

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| Fri Sep. 9, 2005 12:06 AM PDT

Slate's John Dickerson is making a lot of sense in his piece on Michael Brown, the FEMA chief who has borne the brunt of the blame for the Bush administration's slow response to Katrina. Dickerson suggests that Brown: a) probably wasn't the head guy responsible for the mess; b) will serve as a convenient lightning rod to deflect blame away from those who were responsible; and c) probably won't be fired, no matter how loudly the media calls for his head:

If Brown hasn't yet packed up his "me" wall, it may be because of his political utility as a scapegoat. As a focal point of public rage, Brown remains useful to Bush as a fall guy. But can we really believe that ultimate blame for the rescue debacle resides in a man who ended his memo to Chertoff asking for assistance with a simpering plaudit: "Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities." Someone who had to write that memo wasn't powerful enough in the first place to have caused the system to fail at the federal, state, and local levels.

Of course, Washington has seen this piñata phenomenon before: the controversial government figure who walks upright while the steady drumbeat of damaging details heralds his inevitable undoing....

What's different in this administration is how seriously Bush '43 takes loyalty—and how much he resents the consensus view of the permanent government in Washington. When the elites start calling for a firing, the president usually rescues his top aides and allies from the delusion and upset of public limbo. That's why past diagnoses of terminal conditions have so often been wrong. Washington wise men have declared Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finished many times. They were certain Dick Cheney would never be kept on the ticket in 2004. It was a widespread assumption that John Bolton would never make it to the United Nations.

Bush has often privately told those under fire that such noises from the chattering class are actually a sign that "they must be doing something right." To send the same message in public, he takes the wounded on a stroll before the cameras.

That seems about right. Besides, Michael Brown has $51.8 billion worth of federal relief money to dole out friends, allies, and major Bush donors in the coming days. Why would the White House fire him? He's certainly going to do a heck of a job.

Equipment requested by Governor Blanco nearly a week ago still hasn't arrived

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| Thu Sep. 8, 2005 7:52 PM PDT

On September 2, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco asked George W. Bush for portable radios that would enable emergency personnel to communicate with one another. She also asked for 175 generators and for emergency crews to restore communication towers. None of these things has ever arrived in Louisiana.

FEMA officials say they are "checking on the status of the request," and FEMA director Michael Brown is assuring Blanco that what she has requested is on the way.

This afternoon, on the way home from our evacutation site, I heard a sympathetic radio station host listen to a caller who was outraged that Blanco had "failed Louisiana." His real reason for calling, it turned out, was to tell everyone how much better things would have gone if Blanco's opponent for the governorship, right-wing extremist Bobby Jindal, had been elected governor.

This is the way it is going to go: Take the focus off of the White House and put it on Governor Blanco, who has been begging for help since we first learned that Katrina was heading toward New Orleans. Followers of Bush will believe anything rather than believe that he hired a failed two-bit executive to direct the nation's disaster relief operations, then spewed embarrassing cliches when he learned that huge parts of Louisiana and Mississippi were destroyed, and that thousands were either homeless or dead.

Katrina and Section 8

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| Thu Sep. 8, 2005 1:32 PM PDT

Alex Tabarrok suggests expanding the Section 8 housing voucher program to assist the newly homeless victims of New Orleans—allowing them to take advantage of the historically high vacancy rate among rental units in the area. It's a fantastic idea, and much easier than building public housing. One quick policy note, though: landlords are not at all required to accept Section 8 tenants, and in recent years the market price for rental units has exceeded the "Fair Market Price" bestowed on the vouchers. In other words, the voucher recipients could still be priced out of the local rental market (or landlords may just choose not to accept them). Plus, Congress would be handing out vouchers to Katrina victims ahead of many families that have been waiting in "line" for years—which is obviously understandable, but could still cause a bit of resentment or political bickering. Otherwise, though, it's really a good idea.

Meanwhile, large natural disasters aren't the only time that people need places to live, and Katrina would offer a good excuse for restoring the deep cuts made to the Section 8 program in last year's budget. It's not likely, but who knows?

New at Mother Jones

—By

| Thu Sep. 8, 2005 1:26 PM PDT

Choose to Make a Difference
By Arthur I. Blaustein
The disaster in New Orleans makes at least one thing clear -- the importance of serving our communities and being there for one another.

Whoopsi Gras
Cartoon By Mark Fiore
It's a carnival of ineptitude! Come join the parade!

Surviving New Orleans
By David Enders
Residents still stranded in the city -- many of them poor, many of them minorities -- find ways to scrape by.

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Wishful Thinking

—By

| Thu Sep. 8, 2005 1:14 PM PDT

Garance Franke-Ruta thinks the White House's public relations campaign in the wake of Katrina has proved a total flop. Indeed, it really has. What between rounding up firemen to use as photo props, to disrupting the relief effort with presidential visits, this hasn't been the perfectly stage-managed presidency we've come to know over the years. The president has always been a disaster, but never this obvious of a disaster.

On the other hand, I'm not sure any of these blunders will necessarily hurt Bush politically—or his minions for that matter—in the long run. In the early days of 9/11, remember, Bush reacted embarrassingly: from sitting around poking through "The Pet Goat" to hiding up on Air Force One the first day, and all but disappearing for a brief while after that. But he came back with his bullhorn speech and people soon forgot about the early gaffes. As Mark Schmitt argued yesterday, a lot of people needed to believe that the president knew what he was doing, needed to believe that he was the very picture of boldness and resolution, and so they did.

The same thing will likely happen with Katrina. That early photo of Bush strumming Nero-like while New Orleans sunk will soon fade from memory, and the president will have a whole year, or more, to direct "relief efforts" and make sure the GOP gets full credit for rebuilding New Orleans, regardless of what problems ensue. Conservatives angry at the president today will soon find an excuse to fall back in line behind their guy. The press, meanwhile, will remember once again how to kowtow. And so on. The expectation that the White House has completely bungled the post-hurricane P.R. game and will now somehow collapse under its own weight seems, I think, like an overly-complacent assumption.

Lessons from Oil for Food

Thu Sep. 8, 2005 11:48 AM PDT

The final independent audit report on the UN's Oil for Food program was released yesterday—Abu Aardvark has a summary. The report found that Benon Sevan, the administrator in charge, was incompetent and likely corrupt. Secretary General Kofi Annan, meanwhile, gets some heat for his poor oversight, but the inquiry doesn't find enough evidence to definitively tie him to his son Kojo's shady dealings.

Saddam Hussein's regime did skim off a fair bit of money by manipulating Oil for Food—but only about one-seventh as much as it did through outright smuggling, most of which was done through American allies, especially Turkey and Jordan. (And the United States prevented the UN subcommittee responsible for monitoring abuses from dealing with this matter.) And in the case of Oil for Food contract abuses, as the saying goes, it takes two to tango. At the insistence of the United States, Iraq was allowed to designate the contractors with which it wanted to do business. If the companies chosen were willing to be corrupt, well, that's their fault too

Right-wing commentators have relished using the Oil for Food investigation as an anti-U.N. battering ram. But the program, troubled as it was, undoubtedly saved many, many lives. Those concerned about alleviating suffering under sanctions regimes shouldn't immediately discard Oil for Food as model for future attempts. If, as a consequence of the Iraq mess, the US becomes more averse to intervening militarrily, sanctions will again become a major foreign policy tool. Finding ways to lessen their impact on the citizens of targeted nations is too important a goal to give up on.

The Genocide That Keeps Giving

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| Thu Sep. 8, 2005 10:55 AM PDT

In other disaster news, longtime Sudan observer Eric Reeves notes that African Union forces to Darfur haven't been able to do much to stop the ongoing genocide and instability there. As predicted by, you know, just about everyone. At this point, only a "dramatic intervention," as Reeves put it, would put a halt to the killing. The International Crisis Group has recommended a NATO "bridging force" in Sudan, to help the AU disarm the janjaweed militias and create humanitarian corridors, but not a single international leader has even made so much as a nod in their direction. (Even the ICG's proposal, the boldest thus far, vastly underestimates the number of troops needed to stop the genocide, but as with most international reports, they tried to craft something as politically palatable as humanly possible.)

Unfortunately, the United States has probably done more than any other country to put pressure on the Khartoum government—and the U.S., mind you, has forged cooperative ties with the NIF for counterterrorism purposes, which tells you all you need to know about the extra-tepid response from Europe, Africa, and other Arab countries. But with Katrina putting a brand new hole in the U.S. budget, with Sudanese oil being more important than ever—so much for the possibility of sanctions on Sudan, right?—and with Iraq souring the American public's taste for any more foreign adventures, the Darfur genocide will very likely rage on unaddressed until there's no one left to kill. Meanwhile, it looks like Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has drawn all the proper lessons from the West's silence on Darfur and decided that he too can probably get away with an organized mass murder project of his own. Future genocidaires of the world take note.

UPDATE: Speaking of Darfur, Eugene Oregon's post on media silence deserves a look. Between last August and this August there's been an eight-fold decrease in the number of newspaper stories devoted to the genocide in Sudan, despite the fact that the situation isn't really improving at all (except insofar as there are somewhat fewer people to kill these days). And forget about TV: Peter Jennings and ABC devoted 18 minutes to Darfur in all of 2004, and they were ahead of the other two networks by a vast, vast margin.

Cover-Up Time

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| Thu Sep. 8, 2005 10:03 AM PDT

Oh good. Congress is planning to engineer a bipartisan cover-up of the failures surrounding Katrina. Really, this should be thrilling. (Technically, Harry Reid's right: "An investigation of the Republican administration by a Republican-controlled Congress is like having a pitcher call his own balls and strikes." Good metaphor. Does this mean they won't send a pliant Democrat up to co-chair the thing—maybe Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) can reprise his role as Senate stooge?) One can pretty safely assume that FEMA head Michael Brown will take the fall, and George W. Bush will get off scotch-free--he's just the president after all, not like he's responsible for anything. One can also assume, though, that the frenzied porkmasters sitting in the House and Senate won't bother taking a hard look at their own rather significant role in the New Orleans debacle, as reported today by Michael Grunwald in the Washington Post:

In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.

For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast.

Louisiana has had some mighty politicians in its day, including Democratic "deal-maker" John Breaux, and all of them have steered an impressive amount of money towards Corps projects in their state. But much of that money went towards the sort of largely useless projects, like building a new lock to accommodate barge traffic that wasn't actually increasing, that have a lot of flash and garner voters, rather than to tedious projects shoring up New Orleans' hurricane defense and flood control systems. Given that Louisiana's politicians have, historically, tended to be mostly Democrats, it seems likely that the bipartisan cover-up will point a righteous finger or two their way. But that won't solve the systemic issues here—namely, that the Army Corps of Engineers is being funded in a largely frivolous manner—with a civil works budget controlled by congressional "earmarks"—that certainly helps politicians get re-elected, but leaves people, quite obviously, in danger.

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