Here's the best damn article on the Katrina fuck-up I've read (and believe me, I've read them all)

AFTER THE FLOOD

The government just killed thousands of its citizens. What happened and what are we going to do about it?

By Tim Marchman

It's taken a week for people to even begin to realize the nightmare that's befallen New Orleans. As an event unto itself, it is orders of magnitude worse than 9/11. This is the destruction of a city--its remains left abandoned to the weakest, the poorest and a handful of predators. Thousands of New Orleanians were killed by their government last week.

America has long hated its cities. You could write a plausible cultural history of this nation simply by registering the ways in which we have dreamed of abandoning and destroying them. At the heart of Hollywood's Reagan-era nightmares of urban apocalypse (The Warriors, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, etc.) was a kind of resigned fatalism, the idea on the part of those who love cities that those who could would eventually flee, leaving behind only victims and killers. Last week New Orleans conducted an evacuation straight out of one of those movies eager to do away with preliminaries and get to dystopia.

What would under the best of circumstances have been among the worst national catastrophes since the Union marched on Atlanta was made infinitely worse by the indifference, callousness, stupidity and incompetence of the government, which failed completely at every level.

The most immediate failures were those of the New Orleans and Louisiana governments, which managed to surpass the low expectations of those familiar with a political culture best summed up by former congressman Billy Tauzin when he said some time ago that "Half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment."

From the incomprehensible decision to conduct a laissez-faire evacuation even while shutting down buses, trains and planes (there was no reason not to at least try to use every bus, car and train at hand to evacuate those too old, poor or sick to leave on their own before the storm hit) to the partial devolution of the nation's most corrupt police department into an armed gang to the complete inability of elected officials to establish control over the dozens of competing agencies swarming Baton Rouge, the failures of local government in the crucial time before, during and just after the hurricane did incalculable harm.

This can't be entirely pinned, as the administration and its contemptible partisans would like, on the local officials who happen to have been in power last week. The problems date back generations, and are partly endemic to the city's relation to the wider region. New Orleans' famed culture--its restaurants, jazz clubs, beautiful colonial mansions and surprisingly vibrant arts scene--is basically irrelevant to its economy, which is based almost entirely on the addictive and destructive profit centers of tourism, conventions and gambling (the dysfunction trifecta), with a bit of spillover from the region's energy economy.

These are among the most ruinous industries any city can have--apart from the crime problems associated with them, they actively discourage the development of any responsible professional class with an interest in the civic health of the city as a whole, and strongly encourage politicos to simply keep the areas of interest to outsiders relatively clean and safe and leave the rest to rot. And it’s not as if any politician could simply decide to diversify the city economy. This has been New Orleans’ historical role, situated as it is among the endless spans of the Bible Belt, places all too happy to centralize their conventions and whoring in one Catholic city while keeping their own Protestant downtowns clean. Anyone with any familiarity with the parts of New Orleans off the tourist map knows the result: Ghettos compared to which the worst parts of East New York and Bushwick look like Park Slope, and corruption to make Chicago look like one of those New England towns where people get together once a month to decide how much money to spend on stop signs. When KKK leader David Duke ran for governor, he was actually the reform candidate. The other fellow, who thankfully won, ended up earning a 10-year prison sentence in a bribery scandal. The New Orleans police department is notoriously the worst in any major city; 50 of its officers were convicted of crimes including rape and murder during the 1990s. Judges, councilmen and mayors have been for sale in New Orleans as long as anyone can remember, and the results of such government are as ugly as this country gets.

At the time of the most recent census, nearly a fifth of New Orleans households were headed by single women with children under 18--nearly twice the national average. 21% of households subsisted on less than $10,000 a year. 43% of children under five were living in poverty. 47% of schools were, by the state’s own standards, academically unacceptable, and another 27% were on ‘academic warning.’ 27% of households had no vehicle--nearly three times the prevailing national rate. On and on it goes. The frequent comparisons of New Orleans to a Third World city made after Katrina hit are inappropriate only in that they imply that it wasn’t a Third World city before the hurricane for the city’s overwhelmingly black underclass.

This is the city that federal officials now claim they thought would take care of itself if it were struck by a hurricane carrying the force of a full-scale nuclear attack.

Whatever criticisms can be made of local government, the catastrophic ineptitude and misjudgment of the federal government, and above all President Bush, were more criminal in every morally meaningful sense.

We’re putting aside the stupid and partisan argument that lives could have been saved had we not committed billions of dollars and thousands of Guardsmen to Iraq. This is just saying that the nation can never go to war, no matter the cause. (It also lets Bush off the hook too easy; the problem wasn’t a lack of soldiers or equipment, but an unwillingness to deploy them long after it was clear they were needed, which is if anything even worse.) And while it’s true that the administration ignored clear warnings about New Orleans’ physical vulnerability, the inadequacy of the levees dates back many decades, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, and cannot be fairly laid at Bush’s feet.

That still leaves a series of calamitous decisions that led to the preventable deaths of God only knows how many weak, defenseless Americans.

The first and by far most important of these, clearly rooted in a literally incomprehensible inability to appreciate the scope of the impending catastrophe, was the failure to immediately order the mass mobilization of the National Guard and whatever other military assets were needed prior to the storm and prepare them for immediate deployment. Arguments that this could not have been done, or that the feds could not have known it would be necessary, are idiotic. Active-duty military units like the 82nd Airborne are ready to deploy on 18 hours notice; National Guard units--which are under dual state and federal control, and could thus have been mobilized had Bush given the order--take longer, but three days before the storm hit, every hurricane expert in the country was predicting that a Category 5 hurricane would directly strike New Orleans. The claim of Mike Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency--a patronage hire with no previous experience in any sort of emergency management!--that no one knew what was coming is absurd on its face. ‘Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation--not to say it wasn’t going to be bad, but that the water would drain away fairly quickly,’ he said, demonstrating not only his ignorance of the fact that every single hurricane expert was in fact predicting a storm much worse than the one that actually hit, but his apparent belief that water can drain uphill from below sea level. Transport planes filled with supplies and thousands of troops prepared to distribute them in an orderly fashion and kill anyone attempting to interfere should have been filling the skies over New Orleans by the time the levees broke. It says more about the present administration than it does about the people of New Orleans that no more than a few hundred monsters with guns were allowed to terrorize all the others remaining in a nearly-destroyed city.

Why were unmanned drones not deployed to assess the damage and scout out survivors? Why were the Air Force’s palette-lift aircraft, which don’t need to land, not delivering food, medicine and water Tuesday, if not sooner? Why were armed men not defending the defenseless? Not because they weren’t ready, but because, they weren’t given the authority to do so. The words of Northern Command’s Lt. Commander Sean Kelley to the BBC are worth quoting at length:

‘NorthCom started planning before the storm even hit. We were ready for the storm when it hit FloridaÖ. So what we did was we activated what we call defense coordinating officers to work with the state to say okay, what do you think you’ll need, and we set up staging bases that could be started. We had the USS Baton sailing almost behind the hurricane so that after the hurricane made landfall its search and rescue helicopters would be available almost immediately. So we had things ready. The only caveat is, we have to wait until the President authorizes us to do so. The laws of the United States say that the military can’t just act in this fashion, we have to wait for the President to give us permission.’

That permission, of course, didn’t come until it was far too late. Lost in the melodramatic coverage of marauding blacks was the logistical triumph of Northern Command and the Coast Guard once they were allowed to act. NorthCom evacuated 20,000 people from the Convention Center in 24 hours. The Coast Guard evacuated 50,000 people, saving something like twice as many lives as it had in the previous 50 years. Still, there can be no defense of the performance of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. This goes directly to the president. He put worthless cronies and party apparatchiks every bit as mediocre as he is, rather than competent professionals, in charge of agencies whose work means the difference between life and death for people who are suffering. He rearranged those agencies without any clear purpose and to no evident end. When seemingly every single person with the least idea of what they were talking about said this had merely created chaos and bureaucratic warfare instead of the desired efficiency, meaningfully weakening our ability to respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters, he mouthed platitudes about ‘making our nation stronger,’ and his courtiers claimed his critics were guilty of ‘pre-9/11 thinking,’ as if Al-Qaeda’s attack had obviated the need for accountability and purpose in government.

These were failures of planning, imagination and foresight, not those of resources. As one Conservative said to us two days after the storm hit, ‘the president is an ordinary man.’

And one spoiled by 9/11, where competent and professional locals helped keep a much smaller-scale catastrophe from devolving. Sadly, the scene in New Orleans is what he and his flunkies should have been prepared for. And they weren’t. Nor were they able to process the most basic information about the crisis. Following widespread reports of refugees living like animals at the Convention Center, including video footage aired all day Thursday on CNN and MSNBC, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, replied to a question about them with the bizarre claim that ‘I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention Center who don’t have food and water.’ By then he may have been the only adult in America not to have heard the reports.

Brown, meanwhile, blamed the survivors, the vast majority of whom were either too poor or too weak or simply too unlucky to get out of the city ahead of the storm: ‘People who did not heed the advance warnings,’ Brown told CNN. ‘I don’t make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.’ These are the men the president put in charge of defending ‘the homeland’--which he has, as he has reminded us again and again and again, made the highest priority of his presidency. Even if the hurricane just dropped down on New Orleans without having been covered 24/7 for days on CNN, troops still could have been in by Wednesday morning at the absolute latest. That they were not--that the New York National Guard, for instance, was not asked to mobilize until Friday--comes down to sheer, unforgivable negligence on the part of Bush and his officials. We disagree with those who claim that the orders were not given because the victims of the storm were poor and black, but we understand why they think this is so. It is probably less frightening to think the president acted with malicious racism than it is to think that he simply didn’t appreciate the scope of the disaster, and of his powers and responsibilities.

But to focus on Bush’s personal failings as a leader--to dwell on how he played a guitar as people drowned, or the unbelievable hubris of his photo-op leadership, or his complete inability to call for meaningful, shared national sacrifice in response to a tragedy of biblical scale--is to miss something more important. These are not the failings of one man. In the reaction to this disaster we see the worst elements of the Republican Party writ large--an obscene combination of incompetence, contempt for informed opinion (some might say reality) and a mad, corrupt libertarianism that assumes things will simply take care of themselves without the interference of government.

Northern Command stood by helplessly awaiting permission to attend the desperate and dying for the same reasons the American military was ordered to stand by as Baghdad was destroyed. Anyone who still fails to understand why Iraqis who are neither Ba’athists nor Al-Qaeda sympathizers have taken up arms has only to draw the line between New Orleans and the Iraqi capital. In the one case as in the other, conservatives who attempt to excuse the inexcusable only heap shame on themselves. This is criminal negligence, and there must be accountability.

Nearly as revolting as the failures of the government are those of the press. We don’t at all discount the heroic work of the many brave reporters who revealed the harrowing plight of the thousands trapped in the Convention Center and the besieged hospitals to the world. But the overwhelming focus on stories of looting, on sensationalistic claims that the entire city was underwater, on worthless political hacks slapping one another on the back. The breakdown in social order was a crucial element of the story. But our experience and sources both tell us that the overwhelming majority of those labeled ‘looters’ were decent, ordinary people gathering up basic supplies. Much of the press treated them as a seething, faceless black mob rather than as people doing what anyone would do to survive. The failure to distinguish between the handful of super-predators who took advantage of a lawless, drowning city and the great many black people without food and water is stunning, if not surprising coming as it did from a national media whose members were visibly disappointed when it appeared that Katrina had lost power and no longer appeared as though it would devastate the city.

Their hysteria had life-and-death consequences, as when bus drivers refused to enter the city even under armed guard, apparently fearful that ten-foot tall Negroes would kill them for sport.

In fact, what most impresses us about the situation in New Orleans is the relative lack of chaos. People at the Convention Center set up impromptu morgues, distributed what food and water there was, and lined up women, children and the elderly both in a failed effort to shame the buses that passed them heedlessly by into stopping and to ensure that when the buses did finally stop that the weakest would be the first on the buses. While these black people died for the want of water and basic medicines, George Bush traveled to Mississippi to express thanks that the loathsome segregationist Trent Lott would be able to rebuild his destroyed home.

While children and old people baked in the sun, while people stricken with AIDS, cancer and other conditions subsisted on fruit punch, the wealthy, overwhelmingly white guests of posh hotels evacuated in buses and SUVS--in many cases packing their luggage into space that could have been used for people looking to evacuate. While black men pleaded to be allowed up onto an overpass from which food and water were being dropped on a crowd of desperate people to carry the supplies to the needy, they were held back at gunpoint by armed American soldiers, and could only watch as the supplies were destroyed as they hit the ground. To claim that race was not a factor is something far worse than naivete.

At this writing, people have barely begun to understand the scope of this disaster. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, are dead. Hundreds of thousands are without jobs, homes or insurance, with no way to meet their basic needs. Untold history from the place where America’s most brilliant contributions to world culture were born has simply been destroyed. Our most important port has been destroyed, backing up shipping along the Mississippi all the way through the agricultural heartland as far north as Minnesota. A quarter of the country’s gas refineries are gone, and an energy crisis of historically unprecedented scale is still possible. Billions of gallons of toxic water filled with decomposing bodies, raw sewage, gas and oil and industrial waste will have to be pumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

There’s one at least relatively happy note for the city, which we’ll close on. New Orleans will be rebuilt, and it has an opportunity to reinvent itself as the first American city of the 21st century. This is an unprecedented chance to create something new and vital, to sow equality where there has been segregation, democracy where there has been corruption, and beauty where there has been ugliness. New York let such an opportunity pass by as Bloomberg, afraid of Giuliani’s large shadow over downtown, threw his energies into an idiotic plan to bring a football team to the West Side. Four years later nothing has been accomplished, and the moment has passed. Let’s hope New Orleans can do better; it’s no exaggeration to say it may as well have been struck with nuclear weapons, and it deserves the chance to rebuild into a city worthy of its best legacy. For once, here’s hoping the south will rise again.
(From NY Press.)