Pursuant to a September 7 request by Representative John Conyers to review the law and legal accountability relating to Federal action in response to Hurricane Katrina, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report today about whether the Governor of Louisiana took the necessary and timely steps needed to secure disaster relief from the federal government. The report unequivocally concludes that she did.
Congressman Conyers issued the following statement:
“This report closes the book on the Bush Administration’s attempts to evade accountability by shifting the blame to the Governor of Louisiana for the Administration’s tragically sluggish response to Katrina. It confirms that the Governor did everything she could to secure relief for the people of Louisiana and the Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time.”
In addition to finding that “…it would appear that the Governor did take the steps necessary to request emergency and major disaster declarations for the State of Louisiana in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina. (p.11)” The report found that:
* All necessary conditions for federal relief were met on August 28. Pursuant to Section 502 of the Stafford Act, “[t]he declaration of an emergency by the President makes Federal emergency assistance available,” and the President made such a declaration on August 28. The public record indicates that severa additional days passed before such assistance was actually made available to the State;
* The Governor must make a timely request for such assistance, which meets the requirements of federal law. The report states that “[e]xcept to the extent that an emergency involves primarily Federal interests, both declarations of major disaster and declarations of emergency must be triggered by a request to the President from the Governor of the affected state”;
* The Governor did indeed make such a request, which was both timely and in compliance with federal law. The report finds that “Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco requested by letter dated August 27, 2005…that the President declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period from August 26, 2005 and continuing pursuant to [applicable Federal statute]” and “Governor Blanco’s August 27, 2005 request for an emergency declaration also included her determination…that ‘the incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of disaster.”
LOUISIANA NAACP PRESIDENT CALLS FOR EVACUEES TO TAKE CONTROL OF THEIR OWN DESTINY AND FORM “SHELTER COMMITTEES”
Ernest L. Johnson, President of the Louisiana NAACP called today for Katrina evacuees in shelters to take control of their own destinies by forming SHELTER COMMITTEES.
“Each SHELTER COMMITTEE should elect a Chairperson and a Secretary and begin holding meetings, organizing, and working as a team for better treatment,” Johnson said. “In unity there is strength.”
Johnson called for each committee to begin writing down the name, telephone number, and next of kin of every shelter resident.
This contact information must be put into the FEMA database for evacuees to receive financial assistance.
Johnson urged each SHELTER COMMITTEE to send this information to 1755 Nicholson Drive, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70802, or to fax it to (225) 334-7491.
The Louisiana NAACP is airing public service announcements on radio stations that explain the process for bringing participatory democracy to the shelter system.
“The Louisiana NAACP is with you in solidarity,” Johnson said. “The NAACP will stand with all displaced people until each and every one return to a brand-new New Orleans.”
Poeple need to take some control of their lives when they are at the mercy of strangers. I suspect that a lot of them are going to find themselves in need of advocacy very soon. It would be nice if they had a system set up to advocate for themselves.
When that storm came through at first, people said, whew. There was a sense of relaxation, and that’s what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.
I just threw up a little bit in my mouth watching that addled freakshow Tom Coburn shed crocodile tears about “incivility” at the Roberts hearings. Clearly he forgot to take his meds this morning. This is the same Coburn who famously said:
“lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?”
That claim is, of course, completely false, not to mention “uncivil” beyond belief.
Everybody’s asking what’s the matter with Kansas. I’d like to know what the hell is wrong with Oklahoma that they send both Coburn and Inhofe, two certifiably insane politicians, to the US senate.
Junior just said that the American people need to understand that he can do more than one thing at a time and that the government and other individuals can do more than one things at a time.
How does that square with this?:
“We’ve got to solve problems; we’re problem-solvers. There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong. What I’m interested in is helping save lives.”
The American people need to understand that he can do more than one thing at a time — unless it’s answering questions about what went wrong. He’s too busy solving problems and saving lives for that.
BUSH:“Look, there will be plenty of time to play the blame game,” he said. “That’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to say somebody is at fault. And, look, I want to know. I want to know exactly what went on and how it went on, and we’ll continually assess inside my administration.”
Yes, he always wants to know the truth. Indeed he demands it.
BUSH: … There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.
[…]
I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.
He has held his staff to the highest standards on that case and I’m sure he’ll do the same on this one.
(Now that poor little Brownie has resigned, some enterprising reporter needs to tell him that he’s measured for a scapegoat suit. He might be feeling raw enough to spill some beans.)
I promise that I will write about something else today, but I want to follow up on the post below just a bit to address an issue that comes up continually among liberals. It came up during the Democratic primaries and it will come up again I’m sure. There is a great desire to pivot the conversation to poverty rather than race because people believe that we will then be able to create a class argument that can appeal to working class whites and blacks alike.
Unfortunately, in America these issues are inextricably intertwined. You will never be able to separate them because the bedrock value of American “individualism” and the belief that the poor are simply unwilling to work is directly a result of our attitudes about race.
I linked to this moldy piece of mine in the post below, but I would like to put just a part of it on the front page so that people can see what I’m talking about. Ask yourself why America has never been able to put together a decent modern welfare state (or in less politically incorrect parlance — a robust safety net) when all the other first world democracies (and some second world democracies) have.
It comes down to the veto power or dominance of the conservative southern states in electoral politics, just as we see it today. And it is one reason we have been unable to advance liberal government programs short of a national crisis or brief period of consensus — and win much in the south since 1968.
The question has always been, why don’t southern working class whites vote their economic self-interest?
In this paper (pdf) Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard), who has long been interested in the question of America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question — “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality” which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, “Why Doesn’t the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.
AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that “opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. For example, according to the World Values Survey, whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view…. 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said …poor people could work their way out of poverty.”
[…]
“Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution…. Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs.”(p. 61)
“Endogenous” is economics-ese for saying we have the political system we do because we prefer the results it gives, such as limiting redistribution to the blacks. Thus the racial factor as well as a wider net of social beliefs play a key role in why Americans don’t care about income inequality, and why, not caring, they have no great interest in expanding the welfare state.
Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:
But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected. But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, they were dependant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependant, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state’s social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.
Glazer notes that there are other factors involved in our attitudes about inequality having to do with our British heritage, religious backround etc, that also play into our attitudes. But, he and the three economists have put their finger on the problem Democrats have with white Southern voters who “vote against their economic self-interest,” and may just explain why populism is so often coupled with nativism and racism — perhaps it’s always been impossible to make a populist pitch that includes blacks or immigrants without alienating whites.
So, we are dealing with a much more complex and intractable problem than “southerners have been duped by Nixon’s southern strategy” or that liberals have been insulting them for years by supposedly devaluing their culture. Indeed, even the nostalgia … for FDR’s coalition is historically inaccurate. A majority of whites have never voted with blacks in the south. (In the 30’s, as we all know, southern blacks were rarely allowed to vote at all.) In fact, FDR had an implicit agreement with the southern base of his party to leave Jim Crow alone if he wanted their cooperation on other economic issues. The southern coalition went along out of desperation (and also because they were paying very little in taxes.) But, as soon as the economy began to recover, and Roosevelt began to concentrate on programs for the poor, the division that exists to this day re-emerged.
When you all get a chance to read Rick Perlstein’s new book (which he generously allowed me to excerpt a bit of here) you will see how fragile and ephemeral the consensus that allowed the civil rights bills to pass in the mid-60’s was. You will see that almost immediately the backlash formed against the anti-poverty programs despite the fact that, contrary to myth, they worked quite well and actually lifted a lot of people out of poverty, black and white alike.
Racism informs many Americans’ ideas about poverty. It is also one of the darker philosphical underpinnings of our vaunted American individualism. From the beginning we had problems because government programs often had to help blacks as a last resort. It is why today many people believe that welfare has a black face even though far more welfare recipients are white. It is why we have developed the idea that the poor (pictured in our minds’ eye as black and brown) are lazy and shiftless rather than unfortunate. (Europe, with its long history of class division doesn’t see poverty this way.) It’s why certain people made the assumption that the poor and black in New Orleans were all on welfare rather than the truth, which is that many of them are members of the urban working poor.
There are certainly many conservatives who hold a philosophy of small government for different reasons than racism. They may believe that power corrupts or that big government is inefficient. But there is no sense of economic self-interest in working class whites being against high taxes for millionaires and corporations and there is no reason that they should be worried about big government takeover of healthcare when thiers is terrible if it exists at all. And yet many of them vote against the party that promises to tax millionaires and corporations and provide national health insurance.
The sad fact is that in that great sea of Republican red, there are many whites who would rather do without health care than see money go to pay for programs that they believe benefit blacks to the detriment of whites. Their prejudice overwhelms their economic self-interest and always has. They vote for the party that reinforces their belief that government programs only benefit the undeserving african american poor.
That is why liberals have to accept that race must be part of the argument. We are making progress. Things are better. But progress requires staying focused on the issue and ensuring that there is no slippage, no matter how difficult and cumbersome this debate feels at times. The liberal agenda depends upon forcing this out of the national bloodstream with each successive generation not only for moral reasons, which I know we all believe, but it also depends upon forcing it out of the bloodstream for practical reasons. Until this knee jerk reaction to black poverty among certain whites (and Pat Buchanan), particularly in the south, is brought to heel we are fighting an uphill battle to muster the consensus we need to create the kind of nation that guarantees its citizens a modern, decent safety net regardless of race or class.
Kevin reports that Time magazine says the Republicans have a three point plan for a comeback after Katrina:
By late last week, Administration aides were describing a three-part comeback plan. The first: Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later….The second tactic could be summed up as, Don’t look back. The White House has sent delegates to meetings in Washington of outside Republican groups who have plans to blame the Democrats and state and local officials.
….The third move:…Advisers are proceeding with plans to gin up base-conservative voters…focused around tax reform….no plans to delay tax cuts…veto anticipated congressional approval of increased federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research.
There’s one other little way to gin up base conservative voters that we can already see developing on the shout fest and gasbags shows. But this is one that the leakers know very well mustn’t be mentioned to writers for Time magazine. They are already dusting off their old tried and true southern strategy manual and after more than 40 years it’s like a favorite old song — they just started regurgitating their coded talking points without missing a beat. They’ll need to. This happened deep in Red territory.
On This Weak, George Will basically said that the problem in New Orleans is that blacks fuck too much. Or rather, the problem of the “underclass” can be traced to so many “out of wedlock births.” I think it’s pretty clear he wasn’t suggesting that abortions be made available to poor women. (If Bill Clinton thought he neutralized that line with welfare reform, he was sadly mistaken.) As far as the right is concerned, it’s all about that old racist boogeyman “dependency.” Last night on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan was foaming at the mouth about “the welfare state.” He was in his element, getting his “we’re gonna take our cities block by block” Pitchfork Pat mojo back. These are code words. They aren’t about class — although they will certainly claim that’s what they’re talking about. These are code words for blacks. (And if you want to understand how it’s affected our ability to create a decent liberal government, read this.)
Immigration had already reared its ugly head out of nowhere, and now this. I believe the Republicans already see the elections of 06 and 08 as an opportunity to revert to a tried and true code saturated “law ‘n order” strategy. The War on Terrorism has been losing its juice for sometime — and Iraq is nothing but an embarrassment now. It’s time to go back to what works.
For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he’s racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don’t kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.
I know that people are uncomfortable with this, but that doesn’t make it any less true or relevant. Remember that famous electoral map of 2004:
Here again is that famous map of the slave and free states.
Whether or not you believe that Ohio was overtly stolen, there can be little doubt after reading the Conyers report that African American disenfranchisement likely resulted in that close election going to the Republicans. The same was true in Florida in 2000. Nobody wants to talk about that or deal with it. It interferes with our liberal insistence that all problems must be seen through the prism of class. But white voters have not been systematically disenfranchised, regardless of class, that’s just a fact. And that speaks to the larger issue.
There are strong forces at work that rival economics in people’s minds — tribalism, religion, culture, and tradition all have strong pulls on the human psyche. We are complicated creatures. And the complicated creatures who call ourselves Americans have an issue with race. It’s been there from the beginning of this republic and it affects our political system in profound ways.
In the modern era, the Republicans party has developed a patented technique for exploiting it. It’s been in disuse for the last few years — war superseded their need for it. But, they only have to pull it out of the package, wipe off the filth from the last time they used it and put it back in action.
The good news is that each time they use it; it is less effective than before. Things are improving. Racism is not as immediate for younger people as it once was and the virulent strain is much less potent than it was when I was a kid. On race, this country takes two steps forward one and a half steps back. I’m hopeful that we can eradicate the systemic nature of this illness from our culture over time.
But we aren’t there yet. It was only forty years ago that this country was still living under apartheid. Since then, overt public racism became socially unacceptable. That’s huge and is the reason why, in my opinion,you see so much less of it among the young. But we’ve also seen the Republican Party very deftly develop an alternate language to appeal to those for whom this issue is still very salient — and who talk about it among themselves. That language has helped to remake the map we see above. It’s not a coincidence that the lines that divided the slave, free and “open to slavery” states are the lines that form the political divide today.
In the right wing litany of family values, small government, low taxes, god and guns the missing word is racism. They don’t have to say it. It’s part of all those things.
These last two weeks I’ve heard the old school racists dragging out the “n” word, but they are dying out. We aren’t going to see a lot of that anymore, thank god. But the code words were being slung around more freely than I’ve seen in ages. The first thing I heard out of people’s mouths was that these people had been “irresponsible” for not following the directions they were given. The next thing I heard was that “looters” were taking over the city and they should be shot. Then there was the “why do they have so many kids” and “why can’t they clean up after themselves” and “defecating where they stood.”
I’ve heard all of this before. Just as racist code language sounds sweet and familiar to the true believers, it sets off alarm bells for people like me; when you grow up in a racist household, (just as when you grow up in a black household, I would assume) you know it when you hear it.
And throughout I’ve heard many good people insist that race is not a factor. They seem to think that racism is only defined as an irrational hatred of black people. It’s not. It also manifests itself as an irrational fear of black people.
Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about. This slide show of the destruction of the city from the beginning of the hurricane until the photographer managed to finally get out on day four is spectacular. Look all the way through it. It’s great. When he finally realized that he would have to evacuate from the city he went to the convention center with a friend as authorities told him to do. And when he got there he saw long lines of people. This is the caption to his picture:
My jaw dropped and a sudden state of fear grasped my body. However, I maintained utter calmness. It was obvious that they were NOT going to help these people evacuate any time soon. They had been forgotten and obviously and shamelessly ignored. And it was evident that Andy and I were merely two specs of salt in a sea of pepper. Not only would we have to wait forever, but more than anything, we would probably suffer dire conditions after it would be obvious that we wouldn’t “fit in”. It was clear to me that we would have to find another way out. We left the Convention Center and my first intuition is to walk around the city. I wanted to clear my head, but I also had a weird and crazy plan in mind.
This was number 193 out of 197 pictures with captions. In earlier pictures he was pretty judgmental about looters but I thought that he was maybe just a law and order type. He is also Nicaraguan, so I didn’t chalk up his vague condemnation of looters to racism although I’ve known many non-whites who actively dislike black people. And I don’t chalk the above to overt racism. It is, as I’ve pounded the last few days, a sub-conscious fear of the black mob. If you look at that picture (#193) you don’t see a rampaging mob. You see a bunch of black people standing around. He sees their plight. But he also assumes that he is personally in danger because he doesn’t “fit in.” He had been walking around lawless New Orleans taking pictures throughout the crisis and the only time he expressed fear for his personal safety was when something exploded nearby. But when faced with a large group of African Americans he immediately feels terribly threatened. He is proud that he “maintained utter calmness” in the face of it.
That’s subconscious racism. And many white people succumb to it without even knowing what they are doing. The New York Times reported that the Louisiana authorities were “terrified” — just as this guy was frozen with fear. He is not a bad person. Neither are most of the cops or the others who succumbed to this fear. They just do not know themselves. And that lack of self-knowledge ends up coloring their decisions, both political and social, in ways they don’t understand.
The fact is that at this point, white people don’t appear to have been the primary victims of crime during that time. As far as I am able to ascertain, the deaths at the evacuation centers were all black people.
(Incidentally, the weird and crazy plan that this gentleman had was to hotwire a car and drive it out of New Orleans. That is an action that Peggy Noonan and others considered worthy of being shot on the spot. Do you think she would have thought this guy should have been shot?)
If Karl Rove is going back to basics and shoring up the base you’ll hear a lot of talk about Jesus as always. But after Katrina when they rail about traditional values, they will also be talking up the traditional value of southern racism again. The Republican base is that sea of red in the deep south and Karl and his boys are going to have to reassure those people that all this talk about rebuilding and federal money isn’t going to benefit black people at the expense of whites. That’s always been the sticking point.
We can hope that this has a galvanizing effect on the country and that there will be a reckoning for the Republicans. But prepare for the fact that there will also be a reaction. That’s how these things work in Murika.
I wrote some things last year in the wake of the election, when I contemplated that election map that some of you may remember. If you are interested in this subject and you haven’t read them, you might find these posts interesting:
Darrell Plant sent me this partial transcript of an interview with Ray Nagin on Nightline from last Sunday. He has the full interview, but doesn’t have the bandwidth to take a lot of hits, so don’t watch it unless you really have to verify what I’m posting. (Or if one of you hotshit videobloggers would like to host this vid, that would be good too.)
Nagin talks about the Crescent Connection bridge issue that I and others have been writing about:
JOHN DONOVAN, ABC NEWS: The last thing I want to ask you about is the race question.
So, I’m out at the highway — it was last Thursday — huge number of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Jesse Jackson comes in, looks at the scene, and says it looks like the scene of a, from a slave ship. And I said, “Reverand Jackson,, the imagery suggests you’re saying this is about race.” And he didn’t answer directly, he said, “Take a look at it, what do you think it’s about?”
What’s your response to that?
RAY NAGIN, MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS: (Sighs) You know, I haven’t really thought much about the race issue. I will tell you this. I think it’s, it could be, but it’s a class issue for sure. Because I don’t think this type of response would have happened if this was Orange County, California. This response definitely wouldn’t have happened if it was Manhattan, New York. And I don’t know if it’s color or class.
DONOVAN: In some way, you think that New Orleans got second-class treatment.
NAGIN: I can’t explain the response. And here’s what else I can’t explain: We are basically, almost surrounded by water. To the east, the bridge is out, you can’t escape. Going west, you can’t escape because the bridge is under water. We found one evacuation route, to walk across the Crescent City Connection, on the overpass, down Highway 90 to 310 to I10, to go get relief.
People got restless and there was overcrowding at the convention center. They asked us, “Is there any other option?” We said, “Well, if you want to walk, across the Crescent City Connection, there’s buses coming, you may be able to find some relief.” They started marching. At the parish line, the county line of Gretna, they were met with attack dogs and police officers with machine guns saying “You have to turn back…”
DONOVAN: Go back.
NAGIN: “…because a looter got in a shopping center and set it afire and we want to protect the property in this area.”
DONOVAN: And what does that say to you?
NAGIN: That says that’s a bunch of bull. That says that people value their property, and were protecting property, over human life.
And look, I was not suggesting, or suggesting to the people that they walk down into those neighborhoods. All I wanted them to do and I suggested: walk on the Interstate. And we called FEMA and we said “Drop them water and supplies as they march.” They weren’t gonna go into those doggone neighborhoods. They weren’t going to impact those neighborhoods. Those people were looking to escape, and they cut off the last available exit route out of New Orleans.
DONOVAN: And was that race? Was that class?
NAGIN: I don’t know. You’re going to have to go ask them. But those questions need to be answered. And I’m pissed about it. And I don’t know how many people died as a result of that.
They imprisoned those poor people in a catastrophic disaster area with no food and water because they were afraid of them. What a bunch of chickenshits.
Update: Nagin speaks out again today — and mentions the incident at the bridge:
