Katrina anniversary: Hezbollah is better at reconstruction than the Bush administration

1. On the anniversary of Katrina: why Hezbollah does what Bush wouldn't (from Lenin’s tomb -- leninology.blogspot.com)

The Katrina dossier undoubtedly needs updating, but looking through it, it stands up well as an account of the racist, barbaric criminality of the Bush administration, the local Democratic establishment, the police and practically every relevant institution of the American state. Far from being merely incompetence or cruel indifference during a natural disaster, it was a shocking crime perpetrated on the poor. Not merely underfunding and poor planning: they had a plan, but it didn't include helping the poor. Not merely neglect, but the conscious blockading of the city, the refusal of aid, and the eventual imposition of martial law. Not merely the inability to house 'refugees', but the deliberate use of the situation to impose a plan for turning New Orleans into a Disneyland for rich yuppies.

How's it looking now? Here’s the news from sfbayview.com:
Ten months after Katrina: Gutting New Orleans -- by Bill Quigley

We are still finding dead bodies. Ten days ago, workers cleaning a house in New Orleans found a body of a man who died in the flood. He is the 23rd person found dead from the storm since March.

Over 200,000 people have not yet made it back to New Orleans. Vacant houses stretch mile after mile, neighborhood after neighborhood. Thousands of buildings remain marked with brown ribbons where floodwaters settled. Of the thousands of homes and businesses in eastern New Orleans, 13 percent have been re-connected to electricity.

The mass displacement of people has left New Orleans older, whiter and more affluent. African Americans, children and the poor have not made it back – primarily because of severe shortages of affordable housing.

Thousands of homes remain just as they were when the floodwaters receded – ghost-like houses with open doors, upturned furniture, and walls covered with growing mold.

Not a single dollar of federal housing repair or home reconstruction money has made it to New Orleans yet. Tens of thousands are waiting. Many wait because a full third of homeowners in the New Orleans area had no flood insurance. Others wait because the levees surrounding New Orleans are not yet as strong as they were before Katrina and fear re-building until flood protection is more likely. Fights over the federal housing money still loom because Louisiana refuses to clearly state a commitment to direct 50 percent of the billions to low and moderate income families.

Meanwhile, 70,000 families in Louisiana live in 240-square-foot FEMA trailers – three on my friend’s street. As homeowners, their trailer is in front of their own battered home. Renters are not so fortunate and are placed in gravel strewn FEMA-villes across the state. With rents skyrocketing, thousands have moved into houses without electricity.

Meanwhile, privatization of public services continues to accelerate.

Public education in New Orleans is mostly demolished and what remains is being privatized. The city is now the nation’s laboratory for charter schools – publicly funded schools run by private bodies. Before Katrina the local elected school board had control over 115 schools – they now control 4. The majority of the remaining schools are now charters.

The metro area public schools will get $213 million less next school year in state money because tens of thousands of public school students were displaced last year. At the same time, the federal government announced a special allocation of $23.9 million which can only be used for charter schools in Louisiana. The teachers union, the largest in the state, has been told there will be no collective bargaining because, as one board member stated, “I think we all realize the world has changed around us.”

Public housing has been boarded up and fenced off as HUD announced plans to demolish 5,000 apartments – despite the greatest shortage of affordable housing in the region’s history. HUD plans to let private companies develop the sites. In the meantime, the 4,000 families locked out since Katrina are not allowed to return.

The broken city water system is losing about 85 million gallons of water in leaks every day. That is not a typo, 85 million gallons of water a day, at a cost of $200,000 a day, are still leaking out of the system even after over 17,000 leaks have been plugged. Michelle Krupa of the Times-Picayune reports that the city pumps 135 million gallons a day through 80 miles of pipe in order for 50 million gallons to be used. We are losing more than we are using; the repair bill is estimated to be $1 billion – money the city does not have.

Public healthcare is in crisis. Our big public hospital has remained closed, and there are no serious plans to reopen it. A neighbor with cancer who has no car was told that she has to go 68 miles away to the closest public hospital for her chemotherapy.

Mental health may be worse. In the crumbling city and in the shelters of the displaced, depression and worse reign. Despite a suicide rate triple what it was a year ago, we have lost half of our psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health care workers, the New York Times reports.

Nevertheless, some commentators in the US have noticed, resentfully, that Hezbollah is assiduously reconstructing the destroyed areas of Lebanon. Big difference? While Hezbollah is a movement rooted in poor communities, the Bush administration is a government of rich sociopaths dedicated to a massive transfer of wealth to the capitalist class, particularly that sector most allied to it. That's going quite well, by the way. I mentioned before that wages had continually failed to keep up with inflation for the last six years. Latest reports show that the median wage has declined by 2 per cent since 2003, while UBS, the investment bank, describes the current period as "the golden era of profitability". Profit rates are still well below those that obtained during the long postwar boom: it is doubtful whether the structural imbalances in the US economy will allow it to recover to those peaks, especially given the growing likelihood of another recession, but Bush is doing his best to ensure that the growing crisis is paid for by American workers and not their bosses.


2. Bob Schieffer on Katrina: Hezbollah more efficient than Bush admin

On Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer rips the Bush administration by suggesting that Hezbollah's effort to help war victims is more effective than Bush's ability to help Katrina victims.

Transcript:

"Arrogance is galling enough, but it was the next story by [CBS news correspondent] Allen Pizzey that really set me off. He reported that Hezbollah agents are on the streets of Southern Lebanon handing out U.S. dollars to people whose homes were bombed out.

“One year after Katrina and we can't figure out how to get money to people who lost their homes in New Orleans, we're still not sure if it can survive another hurricane but a terrorist group has figured out how to get American money to the homeless in Lebanon?

“Talk about threats to national security – how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it can't get out of its own way?

“That's what scares me."


3. Year After Katrina, Bush Still Fights for 9/11 Image -- by SHERYL GAY STOLBERG (from NY Times)

When the nation records the legacy of George W. Bush, 43rd president and self-described compassionate conservative, two competing images will help tell the tale.

The first is of Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, bullhorn in hand, feet planted firmly in the rubble of the twin towers. The second is of him aboard Air Force One, on his way from Crawford, Tex., to Washington, peering out the window at the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina thousands of feet below.

If the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina called into question the president’s competence, that Air Force One snapshot, coupled with wrenching scenes on the ground of victims who were largely poor and black, called into question something equally important to Mr. Bush: his compassion.

A year later, he has yet to recover on either front.

Mr. Bush has prodded Congress to approve tens of billions of dollars for rebuilding and victim assistance, delivered a much-publicized fence-mending speech to the N.A.A.C.P. and made repeated trips to the Gulf Coast, where he plans to observe the anniversary of the storm Monday and Tuesday. Yet his public persona remains that of wartime president — the man standing in the Manhattan rubble — flying by as desperate and vulnerable Americans suffered.

His approval ratings have never rebounded from their post-hurricane plummet. A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this month found that 51 percent of those surveyed disapproved of the way Mr. Bush had responded to the needs of hurricane victims, a figure statistically no different from last September, when 48 percent disapproved.

“This is a real black mark on his administration, and it’s going to stay with him for a long time,” said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “It will be in every textbook.”

The White House says it has allocated $110 billion toward rebuilding and victim assistance; of that, $44 billion has been spent. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has provided more than $6 billion directly to nearly 950,000 victims for temporary housing, the most money ever provided by the agency for a single natural disaster.

But Mr. Bush is not getting much credit. The poll found Americans critical about the pace of recovery and lacking full confidence in the government. Thirty-nine percent described themselves as dissatisfied with progress in the region, and an additional 11 percent said they were angry. Fifty-six percent had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in the government’s ability to respond to another natural disaster; 44 percent had little or no confidence at all.

The storm is generating a powerful undercurrent in this year’s midterm elections as well, as Democrats invoke it as a catchphrase for what they regard as mismanagement on a number of issues, including the war in Iraq and the economy. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who runs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said his candidates mentioned the storm at every turn.

“I might argue that this was the worst thing that’s happened to George Bush in the whole six years of his presidency,” Mr. Schumer said. “It was a perception-altering event. People had questioned his ideology. People had even questioned his intelligence. But before this, average people rarely questioned his competence or his caring.”

One year later, Democrats are not the only ones raising questions. In follow-up interviews to the Times/CBS News poll, Republicans and independents also expressed lingering doubts about Mr. Bush, using language suggesting that their memories of the storm and his handling of it remained fresh and deep.

“Bush did nothing for the people,” said one Republican, Joseph Ippolito, 75, a retired highway superintendent from Bayville, N.J. “Bush didn’t have the proper people in office to take care of Katrina. The whole administration is wacky — and I voted twice for him.”

White House officials and leading Republicans, while defending the president’s record, are not surprised by the anger.

Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, said the White House was well aware that New Orleans residents “are skeptical about our commitment,” and that many Americans blamed Mr. Bush for their fellow citizens’ suffering. But Mr. Bartlett said the president would ultimately be judged on how the Gulf Coast was rebuilt and how the government handled the next crisis — a theme echoed by Senator Susan Collins , Republican of Maine, the chairwoman of the Senate committee charged with overseeing the recovery.

“If we have another devastating hurricane and the response is markedly more efficient, more compassionate,” Ms. Collins said, “then I think people will say, ‘Well, they learned.’ ”

But the senator said the damage to the president’s image would be difficult to undo.

“Unfortunately, it may be hard to erase the regrettable photo of him on Air Force One looking down at the destruction and devastation below,” she said. “That’s a searing and very unfortunate image that doesn’t reflect the president’s compassion.”

When Mr. Bush stood last September in Jackson Square, in the darkened city of New Orleans, and declared that Americans had “a duty to confront this poverty with bold action,” religious and civil rights leaders saw it as a hopeful turning point. Suddenly, a president who had defined himself as the lead prosecutor in the war on terror was turning his attention to jobs, housing and education for the poor, in language that evoked memories of the 1960’s.

Today, those same leaders are discouraged and critical.

“Here was an opportunity for a new conversation on race and class and poverty, and they blew it,” said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, a Bush supporter who runs a coalition that represents mainly black churches. “It’s not even just President Bush. Here was an opportunity for Republicans and conservatives in general to make a moral and intellectual case for a positive policy agenda for the black poor, and they did not advance it.”

Yet the mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, who had been critical of the president, publicly praised him in his re-election victory speech in May, thanking Mr. Bush for “delivering for the citizens of New Orleans.”

Others who have worked with the president on the recovery, including prominent Democrats like Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Donna Brazile, a political strategist who spent 2000 trying to defeat Mr. Bush as campaign manager for Vice President Al Gore , say they do not doubt his sincerity or commitment.

Ms. Brazile, a New Orleans native who serves on a state recovery task force, describes the president as “very much engaged” and praises him for prodding Congress to spend more money on levee rebuilding.

“I said to him, ‘You’ll be a hero if you commit to rebuilding those levees,’ ” she said, recounting their first meeting last December. “I have to give him credit. Two weeks later, we got the additional money.”

But Ms. Landrieu calls the administration “slow and reluctant.” She sees Mr. Bush as being distracted by the war in Iraq and says he has fallen short on the one task he cannot delegate: using the power of the presidency to grab the nation’s attention.

“I understand that there have been many distractions and many important priorities for the nation — the war in Iraq, the unrest in the Mideast — but the president has not maintained the bully pulpit on Katrina,” she said, adding, “He does it so intermittently, I wonder if we are on his mind.”

Some members of the public wonder as well.

“I find that the concentration of the president is on the Middle East crisis and not on what’s at home,” said Carlton DeCosta, a 33-year-old Navy veteran from Patchogue, N.Y., who said he considered himself an independent, in a follow-up interview to the Times/CBS News poll. “When the president addresses the country it has nothing to do with Katrina, nothing to do with the rebuilding.”

But Mary Lou Ackley, a 69-year-old homemaker from Elmira, N.Y., who said she voted Republican, said state and local agencies bore responsibility for the pace of rebuilding. “I don’t think the president sits there and does the pencil work,” Ms. Ackley said, adding, “He’s got a lot more to do than just direct Louisiana and their hurricanes.”

As the midterm elections approach, analysts say dissatisfaction with the administration’s handling of the hurricane could prompt the Republican faithful to stay home.

Professor Thurber, the American University scholar, says the competence issue will be central to history’s assessment of the president. Mr. Bartlett, the White House counselor, predicts historians will soften their criticism “if people see a better and more vibrant Gulf Coast emerge from this tragedy.”

With the rebuilding expected to continue long after Mr. Bush leaves office, Senator Landrieu says he still has a chance.

“I think there’s an opportunity for him to make this a real legacy of his presidency,” she said. “There’s still time to have people say he did a good job and he rose to the occasion. He’s writing the story himself.”

(Megan Thee and Marina Stefan contributed reporting from New York for this article.)


4. Return to the Scene of the Crime -- by Frank Rich (from NY Times)

President Bush travels to the Gulf Coast this week, ostensibly to mark the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Everyone knows his real mission: to try to make us forget the first anniversary of the downfall of his presidency.

As they used to say in the French Quarter, bonne chance! The ineptitude bared by the storm - no planning for a widely predicted catastrophe, no attempt to secure a city besieged by looting, no strategy for anything except spin - is indelible. New Orleans was Iraq redux with an all-American cast. The discrepancy between Mr. Bush's "heckuva job" shtick and the reality on the ground induced a Cronkite-in-Vietnam epiphany for news anchors. At long last they and the country demanded answers to the questions about the administration's competence that had been soft-pedaled two years earlier when the war first went south.

What's amazing on Katrina's first anniversary is how little Mr. Bush seems aware of this change in the political weather. He's still in a bubble. At last week's White House press conference, he sounded as petulant as Tom Cruise on the "Today" show when Matt Lauer challenged him about his boorish criticism of Brooke Shields. Asked what Iraq had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush testily responded, "Nothing," adding that "nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks." Like the emasculated movie star, the president is still so infatuated with his own myth that he believes the public will buy such nonsense.

As the rest of the world knows, the White House connived 24/7 to pound in the suggestion that Saddam ordered the attacks on 9/11. "The Bush administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq war to Sept. 11," Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton write in "Without Precedent," their new account of their stewardship of the 9/11 commission. The nonexistent Qaeda-Saddam tie-in was as much a selling point for the war as the nonexistent W.M.D. The salesmanship was so merciless that half the country was brainwashed into believing that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis.

To achieve this feat, Dick Cheney spent two years publicly hyping a "pretty well confirmed" (translation: unconfirmed) pre-9/11 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and a Saddam intelligence officer, continuing to do so long after this specious theory had been discredited. Mr. Bush's strategy was to histrionically stir 9/11 and Iraq into the same sentence whenever possible, before the invasion and after. Typical was his May 1, 2003, oration declaring the end of "major combat operations." After noting that "the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001," he added: "With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got." To paraphrase the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, this was tantamount to saying that the Japanese attacked us on Dec. 7, 1941, and war with Mexico is what they got.

Were it not so tragic, Mr. Bush's claim that he had never suggested a connection between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq would be as ludicrous as Bill Clinton's doomed effort to draw a distinction between sex and oral sex. The tragedy is that the country ever believed Mr. Bush, particularly those Americans who were moved to enlist because of 9/11 and instead ended up fighting a war that the president now concedes had "nothing" to do with the 9/11 attacks.

A representative and poignant example, brought to light by The Los Angeles Times, is Patrick R. McCaffrey, a Silicon Valley auto-body-shop manager with two children who joined the California National Guard one month after 9/11. He was eager to do his bit for homeland security by helping protect the Shasta Dam or Golden Gate Bridge. Instead he was sent to Iraq, where he was killed in 2004. In a replay of the Pentagon subterfuge surrounding the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, another post-9/11 enlistee betrayed by his countr?, Mr. McCaffrey's death was at first officially attributed to an ambush by insurgents. Only after two years of investigation did the Army finally concede that his killers were actually the Iraqi security forces he was helping to train.

"He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there," his mother, Nadia McCaffrey, told the paper. Last week's belated presidential admission that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on America that inspired Patrick McCaffrey's service was implicitly an admission that he and many like him died in Iraq for nothing as well.

Mr. Bush's press-conference disavowalof his habitual efforts to connect 9/11 to Saddam will be rolled back by the White House soon enough. When the fifth anniversary of 9/11 arrives in two weeks, you can bet that the president will once again invoke the Qaeda attacks to justify the Iraq war, especially now that we are adding troops (through the involuntary call-up of reservists) rather than subtracting any. The new propaganda strategy will be right out of Lewis Carroll: If we leave the country that had nothing to do with 9/11, then 9/11 will happen again.

But before we get to that White House P.R. offensive, there is next week's Katrina show. It has its work cut out for it. A year after the storm, the reconstruction of New Orleans echoes our reconstruction of Baghdad. A "truth squad" of House Democrats has cataloged the "waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement" in $8.75 billion worth of contracts, most of which were awarded noncompetitively. Only 60 percent of the city has electricity. Half of the hospitals and three-quarters of the child-care centers remain closed. Violent crime is on the rise. Less than half of the population has returned.

How do you pretty up this picture? As an opening act, Mr. Bush met on Wednesday with Rockey Vaccarella, a Katrina survivor who with much publicity drove a "replica" of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington to seek an audience with the president. No Cindy Sheehan bum's rush for him. Mr. Bush granted his wish and paraded him before the press. That was enough to distract the visitor from his professed message to dramatize the unfinished job on the Gulf. Instead Mr. Vaccarella effusively thanked the president for "the millions of FEMA trailers" complete with air-conditioning and TV. "You know, I wish you had another four years, man," he said. "If we had this president for another four years, I think we'd be great."

The CNN White House correspondent, Ed Henry, loved it. "Hollywood couldn't have scripted this any better, a gritty guy named Rockey slugging it out, trying to realize his dream and getting that dream realized against all odds," he said. He didn't ask how this particular Rockey, a fast-food manager who lost everything a year ago, financed this mission or so effortlessly pulled it off. It was up to bloggers and Democrats to report shortly thereafter that Mr. Vaccarella had run as a Republican candidate for the St. Bernard Parish commission in 1999. It was up to Iris Hageney of Gretna, La., to complain on the Times-Picayune Web site that the episode was "a huge embarrassment" that would encourage Americans to "forget the numerous people who still don't have trailers or at least one with electricity or water."

That is certainly the White House game plan as it looks toward the president's two-day return to the scene of the crime. Just as it brought huge generators to floodlight Mr. Bush's prime-time recovery speech in Jackson Square a year ago - and then yanked the plug as soon as he was done - so it will stop at little to bathe this anniversary in the rosiest possible glow.

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, "The Great Deluge," is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. "I don't think anybody's getting the Bush strategy," he said when we talked last week. "The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate - the inaction is the action." As he sees it, the admini?tration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans's opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees ("Only Band-Aids have been put on them"), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. "Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains," Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. "The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state."

Perhaps. But with no plan for salvaging either of the catastrophes on his watch, this president can no sooner recover his credibility by putting on an elaborate show of sermonizing and spin this week than Mr. Cruise could levitate his image by jumping up and down on Oprah's couch. While the White House's latest screenplay may have been conceived as "Mission Accomplished II," what we're likely to see play out in New Orleans won't even be a patch on "Mission: Impossible III."