Category Archives: Katrina

Guilt column

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OK, I feel guilty about Katrina;
so what do you want me to DO?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
EARLIER this month, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland made me feel pretty guilty, and I thought about expiating that guilt with a column of my own.
    I managed to forget about it. I’m resilient that way.
    But then, Mac Bennett and some other folks from the local United Way came in for a visit and reminded me of it. Yes, they brought up Hurricane Katrina.Katrinademolish_1
    The devastation of the Gulf Coast has cut into local fund-raising. It’s been hard to compete with. “How many days was Katrina on the front page” of newspapers? Mac asked. Actually, he understated the case. He should have used present tense; it was the centerpiece on USA Today’s front the very day he said that.
    Well, don’t blame me, Mac. The last time I had a column that was actually about Katrina was Sept. 23. By that time, I had said what I had to say about it, and was ready to move on. So I did.
But thousands upon thousands of people whose lives were wrecked have not moved on.
    I find this irritating.
    That’s why I feel guilty.
    It was just a vague sort of guilt creeping around the edges of my consciousness. I would climb groggily out of bed and hit the snooze button on the radio because NPR was doing yet another story on the plight of New Orleans. “I’ve heard all that,” I would think as I got up. “That’s not a very worthy sentiment,” I would think as I climbed back into bed. “After all, those poor people are still…” Zzzzzzz.
    Then Mr. Hoagland pegged people like me dead-on in his Feb. 5 column. It was about why the State of the Union message didn’t linger on Katrina. He suggested that maybe this was not because BushdoorPresident Bush “is out of touch.”
    “My fear is more ominous,” he wrote: “After a great deal of study and some polling, Bush is reflecting national opinion fairly well on the challenges still faced by the people of New Orleans: We wish them well, but it is their problem, not ours anymore.”
    Ow. That hit home. That’s just what I had been thinking.
    I’m a good guy. Really. I give to United Way, and my church. I don’t vote self-interest: If taxes need to go up, say, to help the poor get a better education, I’m for it. I’ve served on nonprofit boards. Hey, I was chairman of the local Habitat for Humanity. I’ve spent whole vacations on blitz builds — framing, roofing, putting on siding (not lately, but I’ve done it). Not even Jimmy Carter, the most self-consciously decent and moral president of my lifetime, has anything on me there. Right?
    But now, if Mr. Hoagland is right (and I fear he is), it’s George Bush who’s got me nailed.
    I know that Katrina, the worst national disaster in the nation’s history, was an event loaded with a profound message; it stripped away a veneer and exposed underlying problems that have always been there, problems that America needs to find a way to address meaningfully if we’re truly to be the land of opportunity.
    We said this on Sept. 23:
    “(T)here are millions of people who are so poor that they have no way to flee a killer storm. People who, even if transportation were available, wouldn’t leave because all they own is in their home:Katrinareport_1 They have no bank accounts, credit cards, job skills or network of family and friends in other cities to take them in. We have glimpsed for a harrowing moment the kind of random, wanton violence that the middle class never has to experience, but that plagues too many impoverished neighborhoods.”
    I meant all that. Still do. But we said it, and on some gut level, I’m more than ready to get on to other important issues, because, let’s face it, that one’s depressing. Poverty right here in South CKatrinachertoff_1arolina is a consuming passion of this editorial board. But as daunting as that challenge is, I at least have a clue what to say in terms of what we need to do about it.
    Besides, Columbia and South Carolina responded superbly to Katrina. Do you think I could motivate my readers to do more than they’ve done? I don’t.
    When another report comes out, as one did last week, saying government on all levels failed Katrina’s victims, and that things might have been better if the president had taken a personal interest earlier, I think, “Didn’t we establish all that some time back?”
    When I read, as I also did last week, that some Katrina victims are being booted out of their government-subsidized motel rooms, I think: “What? They’re still there? It’s been — what — almost seven months, and they still haven’t found a place on theirKatrinamotel_1
own?”
    When folks wring their hands over whether the poor of the Ninth Ward will get to return home, I’ve thought: “Would it be the worst thing in the world if they didn’t? Other communities — such as Columbia — have given them a leg up; maybe they have a better chance in new surroundings. (Maybe the president’s Mom had a point.) Maybe the rest of the country is better able right now to provide permanent homes to poor folks. Maybe New Orleans would have a better chance of recovering — and becoming a better place for the poor to make a living in the future — if for a few years it was a community of empowered, middle-class people with a compelling economic reason to be there. Maybe an electorate like that would choose better local lKatrina9thward_1eadership, and clean up the police department and other services that failed the poor so miserably. Would that be bad?”
    So now I’ve gotten that off my chest — but I don’t feel better.
    Look, I don’t know what the solution is. If you can think of something I can do, let me know. I’ll be glad to pay a higher gas tax or something. Go on, Mr. President, ask me. You don’t have my number on that. I want  you to ask me to sacrifice for something.
    Of course, the gas tax would help in the war on terror, which I’d be proud to do, but not do much for the Gulf.
    So until I see something I can do, I will probably still think, whenever I see or hear another Katrina story, that it’s past time for those folks and the rest of us to move on — even while I think it’s wrong to think that.
    But at least I feel guilty about it. That’s something. Isn’t it?

Sunday, Oct. 30 column

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Profiles in (incremental) courage
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
SEVEN U.S. senators tried to inject a little sanity into the federal budget last week. We can take pride in the fact that two of them were from South Carolina.
    Aside from Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, the group of Republicans included John McCain of Katrinacost_2 Arizona, John Ensign of Nevada, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Sununu of New Hampshire.
    Their proposals don’t go nearly far enough. But the sad truth is that by Washington standards, the initiative by these seven counts as a really bold move.
    They would:

  • Freeze cost-of-living pay raises for federal employees (including Congress), except those in the military and law enforcement.
  • Delay implementation of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, set to begin in 2006. Lower-income folks would still get $1,200 to help pay for medicine, while upper brackets would pay higher Medicare premiums a year earlier than planned.
  • Eliminate $24 billion worth of earmarked pork projects in the recent $286 billion highway bill.
  • Cut discretionary — that is, non-entitlement — spending by 5 percent across the board, exempting only national security.

    Fine, as far as it goes. But consider:

  • This is billed as a way to pay for Katrina relief. It would free up $125 billion. But with a deficit of $318.62 billion in fiscal 2005, and a bigger deficit projected in the year just begun, these moves would be inadequate if we didn’t spend a dime on disaster aid.
  • Folks in Washington were actually celebrating the fact that the deficit was only $318.62 billion. It was expected to be higher. But it’s still the third-highest deficit in history, though dwarfed by the $412.85 billion shortfall in 2004. Another South Carolinian, Democratic Rep. John Spratt, noted that the Bush administration had once predicted a $269 billion surplus for 2005. As he told The Washington Post, that means 2005 turned out “$588 billion worse than the Bush administration projected when it sent up its first budget in 2001.”
  • The new drug benefit should not be merely delayed. It should be thrown out. The original cost projection of $400 billion over 10 years has risen to more than $720 billion. The legislation deliberately avoided obvious steps to lower drug prices, even forbidding the government to use its purchasing clout to force down costs. Kicking this can down the road doesn’t solve the problem.
  • Speaking of can-kicking: Baby boomers will soon start retiring in droves. And nothing has been done yet to pay for their Social Security and Medicare.
  • While federal employees still serving their country would lose raises, those who have retired from federal service will get a 4.1 percent increase in their pension checks starting in January. Nothing against retirees, but this is the biggest cost-of-living increase in 15 years. Is this the time for it?
  • About 48 million Social Security recipients will also get a 4.1 percent increase in the coming year — the biggest since 1991. What with higher energy costs, I doubt that many will be taking luxury cruises on an average hike of $39 a month. Still, do you expect a pay raise of 4.1 percent in the coming year? I don’t, and I don’t think I’m in the minority.
  • Any across-the-board cut — a favorite remedy on the state level in South Carolina — is a cop-out. It avoids tough decisions, and hurts efficient, vital functions of government just as badly as wasteful programs that should be eliminated entirely. If senators can exempt national security (which they should), they can go further and specify what gets cut and what doesn’t elsewhere.
  • Rethinking tax cuts — some of them, anyway (such as $70 billion in new ones proposed in the 2006 budget) — should at least be on the table. Republicans believe religiously that they are necessary to prosperity. I’m an agnostic on this point. It makes sense that some tax cuts would give a kick to the economy. Of course, so can federal spending. Maybe that’s why the GOP has pursued both courses so zealously since gaining control of the political branches. But I can’t believe all tax cuts are created equal in terms of their salutary economic effect. To refuse to reconsider any of them is to be blinded by ideology.

    I don’t expect any of my concerns to gain serious traction on the Hill. The modest proposals put forth by the sensible seven were, of course, immediately assailed by Democrats. Our own Rep. Jim Clyburn complained that these cuts would be unfair to poor and middle-class citizens.
    But Democrats always say things like that. What’s more relevant is what Republicans do, since they’re running the show. And what they’ve done is cut taxes while presiding over the biggest expansion of the federal government (not counting the military, which should have expanded) since Lyndon Johnson. Remember the huge intrusion into state and local affairs called No Child Left Behind? The latest farm bill? The $223 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska (merely a symbol of billions in spending on unnecessary asphalt)?
    Speaking of LBJ — we’re at war, folks. Everybody, rich and poor, should be giving up something Katrinacost2_2 to help us win it. Our volunteer military is doing its part, but almost no one else is.
    As for Katrina relief, the Republican leadership is talking about maybe cutting $50 billion or so — an absurdity in times when we consider deficits of over six times that worthy of applause.
    So what Sens. Graham and DeMint and five others are talking about deserves our praise and encouragement. It might not go far enough, but at least they want to do away with the Alaska bridge. That’s a start.

No finger-pointing

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Did anyone besides me note the extreme irony in this item on NPR this morning?

Asked by anchor Renée Montagne about how the rest of the country was reacting to the anger of many Pakistani quake victims over "inadequate response" on the part of their government to their plight, Michael Sullivan said:

Renée, I think everyone here understands that what happened was absolutely terrible, and that the Kashmiris, who were most affected, have every right to be frustrated by the fact that they are not getting what they think is timely relief from this terrible tragedy. But at the same time, I think that many people here … all over the country are actually pulling together…

And then he said (and this is the really good part),

And oddly enough, the political opposition here which often, oftentimes uh, just will go after the General Musharraf at the slightest drop of a hat, they’re not really doing that this time around. The leader of the main opposition parties are, the leaders are saying that, you know, we do have to pull together, this is a difficult time; fingerpointing can come later; let’s just do what we can do right now to help the people on the ground.

How about that? Here we’ve got a military dictator who has people among his political opposition who would literally like to slit his throat, and opposition parties are sufficiently civilized to say, in essence, this is no time for a "blame game."

Kind of reminds me of something I said in a recent posting, back when Democrats were blaming the president, and Republicans were blaming the governor and the mayor, for the mess in New Orleans. But hey, you can’t expect a primitive, savage, shaky democracy such as ours to produce politicians who are able to rise above partisan interest in a moment of national crisis, can you?

On second thought, never mind

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Anything strike you as odd in this item from the "What’s News" briefing in The Wall Street Journal‘s weekend edition today?

Louisiana is asking up to $750,000 of FEMA for a media campaign to get storm-scattered residents to vote absentee in coming elections.

If you were an elected official in Louisiana right now, and you wanted to get re-elected, would you go out of your way to get the people who have suffered so much from your incompetence to vote? As dumb as some people think he is, I doubt that the president would try very hard to get those folks toMayor the polls — if he were running again.

There may be an explanation, though. What I just quoted was the print edition that came to my house. In the PDF version of the same item online, there is an added datum:

The mayor wants New Orleans gambling to expand.

I guess Louisiana politicos’ taste for risk explains the request for FEMA. If so, you have to admire them. Usually, when politicians advocate gambling, it’s so they can rip off other people — and mainly the poor and uneducated. In this case, they’re risking their own phony-baloney jobs. That’s putting your sinecure where your mouth is.

Like two peas in a pod

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Did you notice that excerpt (scroll down in the link to "Rebuilding casinos") we put on the Sunday op-ed page from the Biloxi paper?

I thought it was interesting for two reasons:

First, the paper put this editorial on the front page, which is kind of freaky and unusual.

Second, this is for those of you out there who persist in believing that Knight Ridder, which owns both the Biloxi paper and The State, dictates editorial policy to its newspapers. There are loads of ways I could demonstrate how false that assumption is, but few would be as dramatic as this one. Can you imagine The State, given its positions on video poker, the state lottery, and casino boats would take such a position — much less feel so strongly about it as to break the conventions by putting such advocacy on the front page?

Well, I should smile, as a Mark Twain character might say.

So it has come to this…

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You can read, or see video, of all the devastation — the flood waters, the bodies in the streets. You can see the refugees from the path of the storm, right in your own community. You can participate in debates about whether New Orleans should be rebuilt, and if so, how. But sometimes it’s the little things — the truly insignificant things, really — that tell you just how far gone a once-vibrant, unique city has gone compared to what it was.

To many people, the beverage associated with New Orleans is bourbon. But I haven’t been there since I lived there in junior high school, so I have a different association. To me, New Orleans is about sitting in front of the Cafe Du Monde and drinking coffee with chicory while looking out across Jackson Square. In fact, since about a year or so ago, when I suddenly realized I could get it over the Internet, that’s what I’ve drinking at home. I’ve been wondering whether I’ll have to give it up, but that’s seemed hardly worth talking about in light of all the real suffering out there.

(Cafe Du Monde already had nostalgic associations for me when I first discovered it at that young age. That’s because the cafe itself — or something that looked just like it — was used in the logo of French Market brand coffee, which my grandfather had sold when I was even younger. It meant a lot to me to be sitting in the actual place in the picture.)

But this morning, I heard this report on NPR. To my shock, an actual denizen of the city — a columnist at the Times-Picayune — stated on coast-to-coast radio that the four hours each day that Starbucks is open is "the best four hours of the day." The point of his commentary was to portray the extent to which his city is no longer the home that it was. Nothing could have communicated that idea more completely to me than that one detail — that someone actually OF that city, where distinctive coffee is a part of the community’s character, could speak so wistfully of the Wal-Mart of java. Hey, I’ve been known to drink Starbucks myself — even to go out of my way to get some, knowing that I have the true stuff at home. I suspect that, to paraphrase an old Mike Myers line, they put an addictive chemical in it that makes you crave it fortnightly.

But I don’t live and work in New Orleans. When someone who does is reduced to standing outside McCoffee waiting for it to open each day, you have to wonder whether the place will ever be anything like what it was, ever again.

Is God telling us something?

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As we’ve all come to learn from bitter experience, the worst place to be when a hurricane strikes is just to the right of the eye as it comes ashore. That’s where the greatest force and the highest storm surge hit, because at that point you’re dealing with not only the head-on circular speed of the counter-clockwise winds, but the forward momentum of the storm itself (at least I think that’s why; any more weather-savvy people out there are invited to correct me).

Conversely, if you’ve got to be within the radius of such a storm, the “best” place to be is to the left of the eye, because that way you just get the hurricane’s “backhand” as it is moving in a direction opposite that of the wind.

Thus Hugo hit McLellanvile harder than it did Charleston, and Katrina slammed little towns in western Mississippi harder than it did New Orleans (not that that was much comfort to New Orleans once the Lake Pontchartrain levee broke).

So it struck me as interesting, looking at the map we ran
on the front page this morning, to see the way Rita had shifted course. Galveston and Houston were able to breathe a little easier, as it looked as though they might get the backhand now, when the opposite had seemed likely earlier. But in shifting course to the east, the greatest force of the storm was now projected to hit the greatest concentration of oil refineries in the region.

Is God trying to tell us something? Is He giving us a more direct hint — since we haven’t taken the earlier ones, which were none too subtle (9/11, Katrina) — that maybe, just maybe, we ought to be thinking about a serious energy policy? One in which we pursue alternative sources of power for all we’re worth while conserving like crazy and in the meantime (as long as we’re still relying on some oil) looking for other places to get and process oil domestically besides the Gulf Coast?

Maybe. But before I make too big a deal about this in theological terms, let’s wait and see where the storm actually does come ashore…

FEMA column, w/ links & art

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Attempt to help evacuees
plagued by failure to communicate
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    THE MAN WAS walking around with a $2,000 FEMA check in his hand, and he didn’t have any idea what to do with it.
    That caused Nola Armstrong, a volunteer at the old Naval Reserve center that houses S.C. Cares’ many services for Katrina evacuees, to realize some folks needed more help than others. The Legal Services volunteers (who work out of the office pictured at right) came up with a way to provide it.Katrina_center_017
    What happened next illustrates a quandary inherent in trying to help the helpless: When someone is dependent upon you for the necessities of life, how responsible are you for what happens to them? Where is the line between compassion and condescension, between brotherly love and paternalism?
    From what I’ve seen at the S.C. Cares center, the volunteer “shepherds” know where to draw the line. But when they tried to make sure no one with mental problems got conned out of the $2,000 FEMA was sending to the head of each evacuee household, they ran into trouble with the feds.
    S.C. Cares chief Samuel Tenenbaum said that from the beginning of Columbia’s hastily organized effort, the main operating principle has been the Golden Rule: “How would I want to be treated?”
    It was decided these were not “refugees” or “evacuees,” but guests, and would be treated as such. They would not be herded into a communal shelter, but housed in motel rooms. Shuttles would Katrina_center_016take them back and forth between their motels and the center where they get medical care, eat a free meal, get reconnected with scattered relatives, make bank transactions without fees, and on and on.
    “What we set up was a community,” said Mr. Tenenbaum, and one that ran better than most.
    When it became obvious that some members of the community might be particularly vulnerable walking around town with $2,000, the organizers approached Probate Judge Amy McCulloch for help. They worried that while the center had a setup for helping the mentally ill, the checks were going to the motels. Judge McCulloch issued an order to change that arrangement. When FEMA heard about it, U.S. Attorney Johnny Gasser got involved.
    FEMA doesn’t dictate to local relief workers how to do the job, Mr. Gasser told me. “They leave it up to the locals to determine” pretty much everything, he said, including “what is the best way to distribute these checks.”
    He said FEMA had signed off on a local plan to have checks sent to the hotels. But when I sought a copy, Mr. Tenenbaum said “there was no written plan,” merely a hasty discussion on Labor Day in the mayor’s office, with planeloads of evacuees about to descend upon Columbia.
    Did Mayor Bob Coble know of any formal agreement with FEMA? “Absolutely not,” he said.
    Mr. Gasser said FEMA had two main problems with Judge McCulloch’s order: First, it departed from “the plan.” He said “FEMA’s in the crosshairs,” and feared a backlash if people who had been promised checks at their hotels had to get them somewhere else. Second, “the civil rights implications.” FEMA thought the language in the order created “a presumption that people had to prove their lucidness prior to receiving their money.”
    But “it was never about screening everyone,” said Judge McCulloch. The idea proposed by S.C.Katrina_center_008 Cares was that if the checks came to the center, where mental health services are available, conservators could be appointed for those who might need help handling money.
    “The issue was, how do we help these people to make sure nobody takes advantage of their dollars?” said Mr. Tenenbaum.
    Mr. Gasser sympathizes. “Everybody was well-intentioned,” he said. S.C. Cares’ concerns are “absolutely legitimate.” He said he told Judge McCulloch that local folks should “just get a new plan approved.”
    “It doesn’t take much time to type up an e-mail to FEMA,” he said. That doesn’t match the experience of those who tried.
    “There were many contacts, not only by me, but by people down there (at S.C. Cares), to contact FEMA” and work out the matter, Judge McCulloch said. “I personally made three phone calls to try to climb the chain” in Washington, she said. “The third person said, ‘We don’t have the authority to do this, and I personally don’t know who would.’”
    He recommended that she call the agency’s 800 number. At that point she issued the order that S.C. Cares had requested.
    “As soon as I issued the order, FEMA called me,” she said. It was the agency’s general counsel, saying “What are you doing?” She explained, and asked for help in getting the checks distributed in a more secure location, rather than leaving the job to “hotel clerks.”
    “Discussions were had,” she said. “People were asked.”
    “The next thing I knew,” she said, “I heard that the U.S. attorney’s office was going to sue me.”
    (When I called FEMA’s general counsel I got a
public affairs guy instead. “I’m not familiar with anyKatrina_center_001 plan,” he said. But, “Our policy is to mail the check to the individual where they are staying.”)
    Mr. Tenenbaum is indignant that anyone would think folks in Columbia were trying to deny anyone their “rights.”
    “Our whole philosophy was the opposite of that,” he said. The irony is, if S.C. Cares had treated its “guests” like “refugees” and kept them in a common shelter, the problem wouldn’t have arisen.
    “FEMA is incapable of getting outside the bureaucratic response and into the people response,” Mayor Coble said, adding that his advice to the agency would be: “Quit having meetings. Help the person in front of you.”
    For Judge McCulloch, “My biggest regret is that we have not solved the problem.”

What about that speech?

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A regular correspondent name of Phillip observed in a comment on this post (it’s the fourth comment) that "the President’s comments to the UN get my vote for the most encouraging words I’ve heard from his mouth since he took office."

What I’d like to do here is pose this question to Phillip and others: What did you think of his speech last night from Jackson Square?

Of course, I’d like to know anyway, but I will sheepishly admit that I have an additional motive this time for seeking your input: Unbelievably, I forgot about the speech, and therefore missed it — I didn’t get home and start eating dinner until after 9, and started reading a book while I was eating, so it kind of got away from me. Now I’ll have to go back and read it, and watch it via streaming video on C-SPAN or something — which I haven’t had time to do yet, but will get to later.

(This is particularly vexing because this is one of the two things I have a TV for. I don’t watch TV "news," but I do watch speeches and debates and other live, newsmaking events in which I want to pick up on nuances not available from reading the text. And I watch movies. Oh, yeah, I recently picked up a third reason to turn on the boob tube — my wife and I like to watch "House." Now there’s a guy who would make a perfect blogger — rapid-fire, cutting opinions, without the slightest worry about pleasing anybody.)

Anyway, a colleague who is no fan of the president was telling me the speech was a good one. I’m curious what others think. If this is one of those moments when partisans agree on something, I’d like to cherish the moment. If it isn’t — well, there would be nothing new about that, would there?