FanaFanaBoBana, FeeFiBoBana

[drlogic]

It's da' blaaaaaaame.....Game...............

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As former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial told Russert, the disaster in New Orleans was "foreseeable."

In fact, New Orleans has long known that such a disaster could take place if a major hurricane hit the city.

The municipality even prepared its own "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan."

The plan makes it evident that New Orleans knew that evacuation of the civilian population was the primary responsibility of the city – not the federal government.

The city plan acknowledges its responsibility in the document:

As established by the City of New Orleans Charter, the government has jurisdiction and responsibility in disaster response. City government shall coordinate its efforts through the Office of Emergency Preparedness.

The city document also makes clear that decisions involving a proper and orderly evacuation lie with the governor, mayor and local authorities. Nowhere is the president or federal government even mentioned:

The authority to order the evacuation of residents threatened by an approaching hurricane is conferred to the Governor by Louisiana Statute. The Governor is granted the power to direct and compel the evacuation of all or part of the population from a stricken or threatened area within the State, if he deems this action necessary for the preservation of life or other disaster mitigation, response or recovery. The same power to order an evacuation conferred upon the Governor is also delegated to each political subdivision of the State by Executive Order. This authority empowers the chief elected official of New Orleans, the Mayor of New Orleans, to order the evacuation of the parish residents threatened by an approaching hurricane.

It is clear the city also recognized that it would need to move large portions of its population, and it would need to prepare for such an eventuality:

The City of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Those evacuated will be directed to temporary sheltering and feeding facilities as needed. When specific routes of progress are required, evacuees will be directed to those routes. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed. ...

Evacuation procedures for small scale and localized evacuations are conducted per the SOPs of the New Orleans Fire Department and the New Orleans Police Department. However, due to the sheer size and number of persons to be evacuated, should a major tropical weather system or other catastrophic event threaten or impact the area, specifically directed long range planning and coordination of resources and responsibilities efforts must be undertaken. [You can read New Orleans' Emergency Plan for hurricanes at its Web site: http://www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46&tabid=26]

The city's plan also specifically called for the use of city-owned buses and school buses to evacuate the population. These were apparently never deployed, though the Parish of Plaquemines just south of the city evacuated its population using school buses.

The plan, written well before Katrina was even a teardrop in God's eye, was obviously never heeded or implemented by local leaders.

But why should the New Orleans mayor and Governor Blanco take responsibility when they can blame George Bush and the Republicans in Washington?

With congressional elections fast approaching, Democrats who are out of power in every branch of the federal government know they need to change the tide quickly.

They have apparently seized on the Katrina disaster to harm the president politically.

Criticism of the federal government's response is fair and warranted. But putting full responsibility for this disaster on the Bush administration is way over the top.

Primary responsibility for this disaster remains with local officials like Nagin and Blanco, not President Bush.

[drlogic]

September 6, 2005

The Blame Game

Shouldering the blame for Katrina’s destruction

by Jennifer Heyne

Private Papers

Last Thursday, CNN declared that “New Orleans resembles a war zone.†But quite frankly I would rather be in a war zone than the Superdome. At least, there might be some fleeting chance of logical rules of engagement, of knowing where and who the enemy is. The Superdome’s bands of roaming thugs gave America a rare look into a world where civilization’s thin veneer disappeared — where killing, rape, and plunder seemed to have no explicable cause, and citizens were as readily stripped of their possessions as their dignity, prompting newspapers, in their only accurate assessment of this entire disaster, to call it a “surreal†catastrophe.

As if the material tragedy of Katrina wasn’t enough, the blame-George-Bush cult blew in full force fresh from the August Crawford Ranch storm around Cindy Sheehan. A San Francisco Chronicle headline recently announced “Congress likely to probe delay,†parroting New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin who declared “They [the national government] don’t have a clue what’s going on down here,†as he joined other officials criticizing the purported slow response to the Katrina crisis

The first declaration of the newspaper was fully expected, as our open-minded presses seek to pander to the angst of the Bush-haters cult. But the second accusation comes from a most unfortunate source: the mayor of New Orleans himself.

Let’s consider the obligations of the mayor of the city:

A great part of downtown New Orleans sits below water level. Maintaining levees is the first obligation of the mayor and his consorts. So the problem runs deeper than the current accusation that the Federal government, after providing hundreds of millions in recent aid, was cutting funds to the city’s public works. Every city mayor or manager knows that when the Feds don’t come up with funds for the civic safety net, then you look to the state and local agencies to ensure the survival of the city. Billions of dollars in casinos and mega-sports complexes are no investment for a municipality, if millions are not first spent to the levees behind them.

And when those life-saving levees broke, Mayor Nagin must have known whose fault it was. He resides, after all, next to a lake higher than his city. Before stooping to accuse a national government for not getting troops to his flooded downtown fast enough — as though there were easy access possible with bridges collapsed and the city under water, and as though there weren’t already rescue teams converging, doing the best they could given the failure of the mayor’s prior priorities, his flooded infrastructure, and his inadequate evacuation — a mayor of any character would take rather than dish out the blame.

Barring his ability to maintain the levees, Nagin should have at least taken responsibility for evacuating his city, or have provided safe zones for those who lacked the resources to escape the flooding. New Orleans’ slum residents, almost all of whom are among the quarter of the city’s population who live in dire poverty, surely were hardly surprised their mayor is back to the blame game. The Big Easy is long infamous for government fraud, bribery and racketeering. In fact, the city officials and departments have been the target of an FBI probe for the last decade to curb corruption. In March 2005, Louis M. Reigel III, the head of the regional FBI office charged with cleaning up Louisiana, retired from his position alleging that the conditions in the state were improving, with cooperation from the governor and other government officials. But businesses weren’t as forthright or confident, which was not odd given the 10% to 20% bite that organized crime was purportedly skimming off the top of contracts as the price of operating in the city.

Finally, the mayor should have had a read on the pulse of his own city — specifically its crime rate and festering pockets of lawlessness, especially in the downtown district. So, when officials started to fill the Superdome with thousands of panicky refugees from the slums of New Orleans — people who due to health or poverty could not or would not leave the city — the mayor should have considered that he would have needed an extraordinary police presence, plus whatever troops the state government could send just to prevent what often happens on a lesser scale on a Saturday night in New Orleans.

In short, Mayor Nagin is a perfect example of the our generation’s wider culture of blame that has fostered the careers and lined the pockets of many public officials — but heretofore usually been confined to well-publicized public officials outside the U.S. in Third World countries, who pilfer millions from their own states and automatically blame the U.S. for any shortcomings. For example, it is odd, even now, how we talk so easily about how Arafat personally skimmed $900 million off the top of Western aid given to the Palestinian Authority, which doesn’t include the millions he made from kickbacks or the millions more squandered by his associates. We can only fault ourselves since blame is the perquisite for no-strings-attached largess, and without it the guilt-ridden will not continue to hand out.

New Orleans reveals a true moral crisis in America: weak public officials deflecting their own responsibility, as more confident thugs rule in the streets. Apparently America has devolved from a “buck stops here†culture, where public officials stand up to shoulder responsibility, to a tribe of “blame himâ€: so censure George Bush and you can turn attention from your own administrative failings.

As our newspapers call for a rush-to-judgment castigation of the national government — the subtext of which is merely part of the now four-year-old litany that funds should not be going to the war in Iraq — perhaps they instead should be calling for the investigation of the Mayor and his government that should have been the focus of New Orleans’ malaise, well before and hopefully long after Katrina.

So there are two problems that transcend New Orleans and indeed are global. We live in an unusual time in which the mainstream press is obsessed not with improving the instrument of government or national security, but for partisan purposes is enmeshed in a banal battle to vindicate their earlier criticism of the war in Iraq. Secondly, the therapeutic press gives license to this culture of blame that pacifies all sorts of angry constituents without ever addressing why they are angry in the first place. The fiasco in New Orleans has simply become a microcosm of a larger world-wide pandemic of an abdication of responsibility, in which few governments admit culpability for their own inept and fraudulent actions. Why should they when they know that the American media will only help them perfect this already near perfect excuse?

The cleanup of New Orleans has a long way to go. Unfortunately, it took Katrina to show us how damaged the city was well before the storm and flood — and perhaps to give everyone involved a chance at a fresh start. Let’s get it right this time.

[obby]

Dr. Logic, you actualy sound educated. I like that!

God forbid they the libs actually try and and help. It's easier to blame than to actually resolve. Thank God they are a dieing breed.