DLR'sCock
09-03-2005, 07:29 PM
Domestic Affairs
By Stirling Newberry
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 03 September 2005
There will be millions of words written on Hurricane Katrina, and billions of dollars spent. Already, documentation has come to light on how inept planning combined with a criminally negligent ignoring of clear warnings about the possibility of a major disaster along the Gulf Coast. People, even people who are staunch Republicans, have criticized how Bush's response as being out of touch. Many have criticized how the mobilization was slow to muster.
What is clear is that the massive reorganization of the Federal Government to produce the "Department of Homeland Security" was, and is, a dismal failure. In the wake of 9/11, the clearest mandate that the government had was to protect the mainland of America from disaster, and to speed the return to normalcy. New York City has wrangled over reconstruction, and designs for the replacement to the World Trade Center have come and gone amid acrimony. Already in New Orleans and the South the forest of fingers has appeared to place blame.
The reality is that an entire theory of government was put to the test by Katrina, and it has failed miserably. For 25 years America has gotten by by "taking bigger risks." That's code for buying lottery tickets with the insurance money. It was a short term gamble that by shaving down preparedness, America would have more money to spend, and live better. The bill for this has come due in installments. September 11th was the first such installment, and the long jobs drought recovery the second. Katrina is the third, and there is no end in sight to them.
But criticizing what has been is far less important than facing what needs to be in the future. September 11th and Katrina are not the only major disasters to befall America, merely the ones that concentrated their fury in the shortest space of time. We have had major floods along the Mississippi, a long drought in California. Our infrastructure is growing old and brittle, fragile to blows that once it could have taken.
In the short term, the government is going to have to find a way to shift funds, some of them sunk into pork barrel patronage projects, to the desperate needs of rebuilding Louisiana and Mississippi. However, at this same moment, it is time for a serious discussion about what to do with the massive train wreck that is the Department of Homeland Security.
As it stands it is a huge collection of agencies, many of them grossly under-funded and manned by individuals who are manifestly incompetent. Not since the Hoover Administration have so many done so little after spending so much. FEMA's director spent Wednesday and Thursday saying he could not have known about a disaster that, on the day after the storm, he boasted of being prepared for. The director of the agency has been unable to engage in the most basic task of organizing relief, rescue and reinforcements. The truth is that the agency was created to give Congress someone to question and blame for 9/11. It was created as part of Fox News America, to wave flags and intone to the public how terrorists were out to get them, and produce pretty, shiny, candy-like graphics about the threat level.
But the reality is that there is a need for a department of the government that is tasked with reconstruction after disaster is over. Let us take the recent transportation bill - which was essentially a long list of incumbent protection programs, thrown together without vision, good order, or oversight. Instead of having a plan, it was naked stimulus designed to hit the ground in time for the 2006 elections.
While Congress will always be interested in bringing home the bacon, there is a clear need for someone to prevent it from being an incoherent hog call which becomes slop for political contributors. Glowering threats of veto are ineffective when there isn't a representative or senator that won't vote for jobs in his district or state.
The first clear step that must be taken is an overhaul of the Department of Homeland Security, before failure becomes welded into its basic culture. Either that, or it should be dismantled and its functions spread into the Department of Justice and the Department of Commerce. The whole point was that coordination would bring benefits. America has seen what happened was simply dumping ladles of alphabet soup into one large bucket. Congress created Homeland Security for the purpose of holding hearings; well, hearings need to be held, and accountability needs to be exercised. FEMA needs to be revitalized, and there needs to be a means for coordinating disaster response.
There is little need to argue for this change - the warnings from Federal agencies were blatantly ignored, for example this one from the National Hurricane Center:
"In virtually every coastal city from Texas to Maine, the present Tropical Prediction Center Director (Max Mayfield) and former National Hurricane Center Directors have stated that the United States is building toward its next hurricane disaster. The population growth and low hurricane experience levels indicated in Hebert et al. (1984), together with updated statistics presented by Jarrell et al. (1992) form the basis for their statements. The areas along the United States Gulf and Atlantic coasts where most of this country's hurricane related fatalities have occurred are also now experiencing the country's most significant growth in population. This situation, in combination with continued building along the coast, will lead to serious problems for many areas in hurricanes. Because it is likely that people will always be attracted to live along the shoreline, a solution to the problem lies in education and preparedness as well as long-term policy and planning."
"The message to coastal residents is this: Become familiar with what hurricanes can do, and when a hurricane threatens your area, increase your chances of survival by moving away from the water until the hurricane has passed! Unless this message is clearly understood by coastal residents through a thorough and continuing preparedness effort, disastrous loss of life is inevitable in the future."
The same document notes that a Category 4 hurricane hit New Orleans in 1915, in addition to Audrey in 1957, and Camille, a category 5 storm that landed in 1969. New Orleans had a near miss with Georges in 1998, a storm that weakened suddenly before reaching land. In 2002, Daniel Zwerdling wrote on the topic, after a 2001 report listed a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the most likely disasters to occur.
Forewarned is forearmed, but only if the government has hand eye coordination.
But there is still a need for a department with a broader vision, which will be able to create a coherent road map for maintaining, improving and restoring America's public capital. A department that can function as a direct channel for localities to the Federal government, and engage in the kind of analysis that will prevent government by stampede of incumbents looking to have Uncle Sam make a big contribution to their re-election campaign. Fortunately, America has a department that is partially tasked with this: the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In 1997, Congress authorized a study to be done on upgrading the levees in New Orleans; it has $100,000/yr allocated to it. That means, effectively, that one person is working on it, a move that, as events have shown, was penny wise and pound - no, make that ton - foolish. The list of other protection and improvement projects waiting to even be looked at is quite long. Some manage to get slipped into legislation, for example flood abatement along the Merrimack River in New England, while others languish, all without regard to their priority.
What should be done is that HUD's mission should be broadened, and it should be renamed the Department of Domestic Affairs. Its secretary should be charged with being the "Ambassador to America." This department should reach out beyond the cities, and create plans that make the capital investments made by the Departments of Transportation, Commerce, Education, Energy and Labor into a single road map to the future. In times such as these, its should have a reconstruction finance arm to supply credit to businesses seeking to return, be able to grant default protection, and the host of other activities designed to return people to work as quickly as possible. It should have a broader mandate, and one of its primary functions should be to do for domestic capital expenditure what the Office of Management and Budget does for money - create plans and projections that will allow informed decisions to be made, and the trade offs examined in the light of day.
Because America's economy is becoming more interdependent with every passing year, there needs to be a National Community Initiative that will find ways of binding together the needs of distant cities and towns, which, nonetheless, are linked together. A hurricane in New Orleans caused gasoline prices to shoot up everywhere, and that is only an obvious example. Either this, or we risk our infrastructure becoming a spaghetti of stands, with no one knowing whether they all fit together or not, or what needs to be done to make sure that they work effectively.
These two measures - turning the Department of Homeland Security into a Home office that takes all threats to daily life seriously, and creating a Department of Domestic Affairs that will prevent the Congress from simply spattering concrete all over the country - are urgent needs. Far more urgent than creating the next budget-busting set of revenue reductions for the wealthy.
I promised before to turn to Reaganomics, though sadly, it will be a bit too late in at least one way. In an email to me two weeks ago, Jude Wanniski, most famous for coining the term "Supply-Side Economics," challenged me to write a comprehensive outline of my ideas. He said he did not have time to wait for my book. It turns out that this was, indeed the case, because he died suddenly a few days ago. In the end he rejected what he called the "macho foreign policy" of the Bush executive, even as he held to his economic convictions. I will be addressing that paradox next, so long as there are no disasters that intervene.
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By Stirling Newberry
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 03 September 2005
There will be millions of words written on Hurricane Katrina, and billions of dollars spent. Already, documentation has come to light on how inept planning combined with a criminally negligent ignoring of clear warnings about the possibility of a major disaster along the Gulf Coast. People, even people who are staunch Republicans, have criticized how Bush's response as being out of touch. Many have criticized how the mobilization was slow to muster.
What is clear is that the massive reorganization of the Federal Government to produce the "Department of Homeland Security" was, and is, a dismal failure. In the wake of 9/11, the clearest mandate that the government had was to protect the mainland of America from disaster, and to speed the return to normalcy. New York City has wrangled over reconstruction, and designs for the replacement to the World Trade Center have come and gone amid acrimony. Already in New Orleans and the South the forest of fingers has appeared to place blame.
The reality is that an entire theory of government was put to the test by Katrina, and it has failed miserably. For 25 years America has gotten by by "taking bigger risks." That's code for buying lottery tickets with the insurance money. It was a short term gamble that by shaving down preparedness, America would have more money to spend, and live better. The bill for this has come due in installments. September 11th was the first such installment, and the long jobs drought recovery the second. Katrina is the third, and there is no end in sight to them.
But criticizing what has been is far less important than facing what needs to be in the future. September 11th and Katrina are not the only major disasters to befall America, merely the ones that concentrated their fury in the shortest space of time. We have had major floods along the Mississippi, a long drought in California. Our infrastructure is growing old and brittle, fragile to blows that once it could have taken.
In the short term, the government is going to have to find a way to shift funds, some of them sunk into pork barrel patronage projects, to the desperate needs of rebuilding Louisiana and Mississippi. However, at this same moment, it is time for a serious discussion about what to do with the massive train wreck that is the Department of Homeland Security.
As it stands it is a huge collection of agencies, many of them grossly under-funded and manned by individuals who are manifestly incompetent. Not since the Hoover Administration have so many done so little after spending so much. FEMA's director spent Wednesday and Thursday saying he could not have known about a disaster that, on the day after the storm, he boasted of being prepared for. The director of the agency has been unable to engage in the most basic task of organizing relief, rescue and reinforcements. The truth is that the agency was created to give Congress someone to question and blame for 9/11. It was created as part of Fox News America, to wave flags and intone to the public how terrorists were out to get them, and produce pretty, shiny, candy-like graphics about the threat level.
But the reality is that there is a need for a department of the government that is tasked with reconstruction after disaster is over. Let us take the recent transportation bill - which was essentially a long list of incumbent protection programs, thrown together without vision, good order, or oversight. Instead of having a plan, it was naked stimulus designed to hit the ground in time for the 2006 elections.
While Congress will always be interested in bringing home the bacon, there is a clear need for someone to prevent it from being an incoherent hog call which becomes slop for political contributors. Glowering threats of veto are ineffective when there isn't a representative or senator that won't vote for jobs in his district or state.
The first clear step that must be taken is an overhaul of the Department of Homeland Security, before failure becomes welded into its basic culture. Either that, or it should be dismantled and its functions spread into the Department of Justice and the Department of Commerce. The whole point was that coordination would bring benefits. America has seen what happened was simply dumping ladles of alphabet soup into one large bucket. Congress created Homeland Security for the purpose of holding hearings; well, hearings need to be held, and accountability needs to be exercised. FEMA needs to be revitalized, and there needs to be a means for coordinating disaster response.
There is little need to argue for this change - the warnings from Federal agencies were blatantly ignored, for example this one from the National Hurricane Center:
"In virtually every coastal city from Texas to Maine, the present Tropical Prediction Center Director (Max Mayfield) and former National Hurricane Center Directors have stated that the United States is building toward its next hurricane disaster. The population growth and low hurricane experience levels indicated in Hebert et al. (1984), together with updated statistics presented by Jarrell et al. (1992) form the basis for their statements. The areas along the United States Gulf and Atlantic coasts where most of this country's hurricane related fatalities have occurred are also now experiencing the country's most significant growth in population. This situation, in combination with continued building along the coast, will lead to serious problems for many areas in hurricanes. Because it is likely that people will always be attracted to live along the shoreline, a solution to the problem lies in education and preparedness as well as long-term policy and planning."
"The message to coastal residents is this: Become familiar with what hurricanes can do, and when a hurricane threatens your area, increase your chances of survival by moving away from the water until the hurricane has passed! Unless this message is clearly understood by coastal residents through a thorough and continuing preparedness effort, disastrous loss of life is inevitable in the future."
The same document notes that a Category 4 hurricane hit New Orleans in 1915, in addition to Audrey in 1957, and Camille, a category 5 storm that landed in 1969. New Orleans had a near miss with Georges in 1998, a storm that weakened suddenly before reaching land. In 2002, Daniel Zwerdling wrote on the topic, after a 2001 report listed a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the most likely disasters to occur.
Forewarned is forearmed, but only if the government has hand eye coordination.
But there is still a need for a department with a broader vision, which will be able to create a coherent road map for maintaining, improving and restoring America's public capital. A department that can function as a direct channel for localities to the Federal government, and engage in the kind of analysis that will prevent government by stampede of incumbents looking to have Uncle Sam make a big contribution to their re-election campaign. Fortunately, America has a department that is partially tasked with this: the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In 1997, Congress authorized a study to be done on upgrading the levees in New Orleans; it has $100,000/yr allocated to it. That means, effectively, that one person is working on it, a move that, as events have shown, was penny wise and pound - no, make that ton - foolish. The list of other protection and improvement projects waiting to even be looked at is quite long. Some manage to get slipped into legislation, for example flood abatement along the Merrimack River in New England, while others languish, all without regard to their priority.
What should be done is that HUD's mission should be broadened, and it should be renamed the Department of Domestic Affairs. Its secretary should be charged with being the "Ambassador to America." This department should reach out beyond the cities, and create plans that make the capital investments made by the Departments of Transportation, Commerce, Education, Energy and Labor into a single road map to the future. In times such as these, its should have a reconstruction finance arm to supply credit to businesses seeking to return, be able to grant default protection, and the host of other activities designed to return people to work as quickly as possible. It should have a broader mandate, and one of its primary functions should be to do for domestic capital expenditure what the Office of Management and Budget does for money - create plans and projections that will allow informed decisions to be made, and the trade offs examined in the light of day.
Because America's economy is becoming more interdependent with every passing year, there needs to be a National Community Initiative that will find ways of binding together the needs of distant cities and towns, which, nonetheless, are linked together. A hurricane in New Orleans caused gasoline prices to shoot up everywhere, and that is only an obvious example. Either this, or we risk our infrastructure becoming a spaghetti of stands, with no one knowing whether they all fit together or not, or what needs to be done to make sure that they work effectively.
These two measures - turning the Department of Homeland Security into a Home office that takes all threats to daily life seriously, and creating a Department of Domestic Affairs that will prevent the Congress from simply spattering concrete all over the country - are urgent needs. Far more urgent than creating the next budget-busting set of revenue reductions for the wealthy.
I promised before to turn to Reaganomics, though sadly, it will be a bit too late in at least one way. In an email to me two weeks ago, Jude Wanniski, most famous for coining the term "Supply-Side Economics," challenged me to write a comprehensive outline of my ideas. He said he did not have time to wait for my book. It turns out that this was, indeed the case, because he died suddenly a few days ago. In the end he rejected what he called the "macho foreign policy" of the Bush executive, even as he held to his economic convictions. I will be addressing that paradox next, so long as there are no disasters that intervene.
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