THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

Katrina Timeline of Events

Page Four

 

• Sept 8: While most e-mail messages to FEMA director Michael Brown either go unanswered or receive vague, indecisive replies, Brown instantly responds to one message. After receiving a message from a member of the public complaining about FEMA's policy of not allowing evacuees to bring pets with them, Brown sends an immediate message to his staff: "I want us to start planning for dealing with pets. If evacuees are refusing to leave because they can't take their pets with them, I understand that. So, we need to facilitate the evacuation of those people by figuring out a way to allow them to take their pets. Bill and Ron, this may not be an issue for you in AL and MS, but it is a huge issue in LA. Please get some sort of plan together to start handling the pets. Thanks. MB"
• Sept 8: Officials inside FEMA confirm that the agency was unprepared for any such disaster as Hurricane Katrina. The reasons include the huge budget cuts that FEMA suffered after it was rolled into the Department of Homeland Security, the failure of the Bush administration to emphasize disaster preparedness, and the rank cronyism which allowed unqualified Bush cronies to become top officials at the organization. When Katrina was poised on Sunday, August 28, to strike the Gulf Coast, FEMA director Michael Brown boldly asserted, "FEMA is not going to hesitate at all in this storm. We are not going to sit back and make this a bureaucratic process. We are going to move fast, we are going to move quickly and we are going to do whatever it takes to help disaster victims." But FEMA insiders knew that Brown was merely blowing smoke. "All of us were just shaking our heads and saying, 'This isn't going to be enough, and the director has to know this isn't going to be enough.' But nothing more seemed to be happening," said Leo Bosner, president of the FEMA Headquarters Employees Union. Bosner has been with FEMA since it began 26 years ago. He says the agency has been systematically dismantled since it became part of the massive Department of Homeland Security. "One of the big differences I see," said Bosner, "besides taking away our staff and our budget and our training, is that Homeland Security now, in my view, slows down the process." The union warned Congress in a detailed letter about FEMA's decline a year ago. State emergency managers also warned Capitol Hill and Homeland Security just weeks ago that DHS was too focused on one thing -- terrorism. "We've had almost zero support for a natural disaster and an all-hazards approach," said Eric Holdeman, director of the King County Office of Emergency Management in Washington state. "It's been terrorism only."
• Sept 8: Thanks for the $52 million in relief funds, I think.... The GOP-controlled House of Representatives not only limits floor discussion of the $52 million Katrina relief bill as proposed by Bush as well as blocks any votes on any possible amendments, they refuse to allow any House Democrats to even see the bill before bringing it up for a vote. Many Democrats voted for the bill sight unseen because the Gulf Coast area residents are so hard-hit and so desperately in need that they were willing to vote even for a bill they were forbid to read by their political opponents. God only knows what else is in that bill. Democratic congresswoman Louise Slaughter says, "We've been on vacation for five weeks. Now, in our first week back, the Republican Leadership would rather duck and run than discuss what's happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Life in the Gulf Coast is no vacation. The Federal Government failed the American people in its initial response to this horrible disaster and by their actions; the Republican Leadership is once again showing that their priorities are out of sync with the needs of so many hard working families. It is this very lack of accountability in government which ensured that our disaster response would be a bigger disaster than the hurricane itself. Yet here they go again, completely unfazed in their determination to eliminate debate, consideration and accountability from the Congress and the Federal government. No one has even seen a copy of the bill." As it turns out, little of that $51 billion will ever make it to the Gulf Coast.
• Sept 8: Bush signs an executive order allowing contractors in the stricken area to pay workers below the minimum wage. In a notice to Congress, Bush says the hurricane has caused "a national emergency" that permits him to take such action under the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in ravaged areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. The Davis-Bacon law requires federal contractors to pay workers at least the prevailing wages in the area where the work is conducted. It applies to federally funded construction projects such as highways and bridges. The outcry is loud and furious.
• Sept 8: Katrina victims in southeastern Louisiana say they have been forgotten by the federal and state relief efforts. "If you dropped a bomb on this place, it couldn't be any worse than this," says Ron Silva, a district fire chief in St. Bernard Parish. "It's Day 8, guys. Everything was diverted first to New Orleans, we understand that. But do you realize we got 18 to 20 feet of water from the storm, and we've still got 7 to 8 feet of water?" "The governor and the president let thousands of people die and they let them die on their roofs and they let them die in the water," says an electrician, Verlyn Davis. "We got left. They didn't care." And maintenance worker Jason Stage adds, "New Orleans took a beating. But St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines was ground zero."
• Sept 8: If willful denial was a crime.... In a staff meeting, undersecretary of state and longtime Bush handler Karen Hughes is asked about the international ramifications of the Katrina disaster. Hughes responds that the problem was not with the federal response, but the unfair efforts to tar and feather the Bush administration over it by a foreign press that didn't appreciate the administration's good works. The unshakable paradigm: always remain positive, refuse to acknowledge any difficulties, and enforce message discipline. The Washington Post writes, "Yet the Bush administration, whether discussing Iraq or Katrina, remains unfailingly upbeat. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, introducing Hughes, said nothing of Katrina as she repeated the Bush mantra that 'freedom is on the march.' Hughes picked up the theme. 'We have to offer a positive vision of hope,' she began. As if preparing troops for combat, she described her plans for improving world opinion of the United States: a 'rapid-response unit,' a plan to 'forward-deploy regional SWAT teams' and create 'a dual-headed DAS for public diplomacy.' One of her underlings rose to ask how this effort squared with the administration's famously tight control over its message. 'Recently, we've had tremendous amount of difficulty in some cases getting clearance for our ambassadors to speak,' he said. Hughes replied that ambassadors are free to talk -- if they use the talking points she sends them. 'If they make statements based on something I sent them,' she said, 'they're not going to be called on the carpet.'" Hughes will continue to try to "happy-talk" the Katrina disaster right into the memory hole.
• Sept 8: Conservative congressman Tom Tancredo urges the federal government not to release any federal disaster relief funds to Louisiana, calling the state and local governments there "incompetent." A spokesman for Louisiana Democratic senator Mary Landrieu retorts, "Louisiana will rebuild with or without Mr. Tancredo's help."
• Sept 8: Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco is still waiting for 175 generators and communications equipment promised to her by FEMA on Sunday. FEMA officials say they are looking into the reasons for the delay.
• Sept 8: Bush issues an executive order allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Katrina to pay workers below the standard wage. Bush says he is merely reacting to the enormity of the destruction under the law; Democratic lawmakers Edward Kennedy and George Miller disagree, with Miller saying, "The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities. President Bush should immediately realize the colossal mistake he has made in signing this order and rescind it and ensure that America puts its people back to work in the wake of Katrina at wages that will get them and their families back on their feet."
• Sept 8: The first reports of the potentially lethal toxicity of the flood waters standing in the streets of New Orleans hit the press. Estimates range from several months to several years before New Orleans can be certified toxin-free.
• Sept 8: The Bush administration is rumored to be considering the creation of a cabinet-level post to oversee emergency operations (and by inference snatch the responsibility for those operations out of the hands of Chertoff and Brown); rumors also have Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, being asked to take the job.

• Sept 9: FEMA director Michael Brown, a symbol of the incompetence riddling the federal government's disaster response, is relieved of his duties concerning Katrina. The head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, says during the announcement that "Other challenges and threats remain around the world," and Brown is needed to prepare for those. "Michael Brown has done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal response to this unprecedented challenge." The federal government's Katrina disaster response will now be coordinated by Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen. In a phone interview, Brown blames the press for the perception of his incompetence, claiming that he has been made a scapegoat "[b]y the press, yes. By the president, no. I'm anxious to get back to D.C. to correct all the inaccuracies and lies that are being said." He confirms that, for the moment, he is still the head of FEMA. His immediate plans? "I'm going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife and, maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep. And then I'm going to go right back to FEMA and continue to do all I can to help these victims. This story's not about me. This story's about the worst disaster of the history of our country that stretched every government to its limit and now we have to help these victims. That's all I've wanted to do."
• Sept 9: State and federal authorities are going out of their way to deny stories of outbreaks of dysentery and cholera in some Gulf Coast victim shelters. Federal health authorities said that "surprisingly few" reports of gastrointestinal disorders have been logged; the outbreak of disease among Mississippi victims in one refugee center was not dysentery as first reported, but Norwalk virus, commonly known as "the cruise ship virus." What makes me suspicious is this phraseology, from Mills McNeill, the chief epidemiologist for the Mississippi Department of Health: "What we have at this point is a good-news story regarding communicable disease. Despite the fact that we're still early in the recovery, we have had nothing that we feel would overwhelm our health-care system." A "good-news story?" "[N]othing that would overwhelm our system?" These are marketing and public relations phrases. We've learned to our immense sadness just what horrors the government is capable of hiding behind PR phrases. Let's see what develops. If dysentery and cholera do break out in these shelters -- which, considering most of them still have no running water and no sewage capacity, is all but inevitable at some point -- then God help those poor people. Six cases of cholera have already been identified in victims in the Biloxi area by the Centers for Disease Control; three of those victims have already died.
• Sept 9: A massive oil spill is reported in Chalmette, Louisiana. Millions of gallons of crude oil were released. Much of the oil spillage has not been contained at last report. CNN will later report that dozens of other oil spills are also polluting the already-toxic waters in and around New Orleans and throughout the Gulf region.
• Sept 9: FEMA and military officials confirm that they will use force to make the remainder of citizens still in New Orleans leave immediately, at gunpoint if necessary. Some holdouts remain because to leave would mean abandoning their pets; others have their own reasons for staying. Some wanted to leave but did not have the means to do so. While many guns had been confiscated, no outbreaks of violence have yet been reported. Reports of residents being handcuffed and forced to evacuate at gunpoint are also hitting the media.
• Sept 9: The head of the National Guard bureau, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, confirms that the state response to Katrina was delayed by days because of key units from Louisiana and other Gulf states being deployed in Iraq instead of being available for duty. Blum also predicts that up to 50,000 additional Guardsmen will be needed in the region to maintain order for the next few months.
• Sept 9: Stories from the government that the death toll may be far lower than expected is belied by first-hand reports from rescue workers traversing New Orleans by boat. One worker reports finding dozens of bodies on a single excursion through one neighborhood: "Obviously we are not recovering them. We are just tying them up to banisters, leaving them on the roof." The gargantuan task of pumping the water out of the city's streets and buildings is being complicated by corpses clogging the pumps.
• Sept 9: Hundreds of New Orleans police officers are feared dead. Between 400 and 500 have so far failed to report for duty, though some of them are thought to have walked off the job. Numerous stories of despondent police officers committing suicide rather than deal with the overwhelming task of trying to keep order during the worst of the hurricane and the resulting flooding have trickled through the media.
• Sept 9: FEMA authorizes the issuing of debit cards worth $2000 to eligible refugees from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities currently ensconced at the Houston Astrodome. The offer is later withdrawn, and most people who try to use the card find that they do not work. One woman relates that both she and her cousin tried for hours on end to get through using the 800 number FEMA provided, only to be told by an operator at 1 am that no one there knew anything about the debit card program. In a related story, FEMA opens an assistance office in Lafayette, Louisiana, but the office has nothing to provide for needy victims. "We're not giving anything," manager Kenneth Swain told the hundreds of evacuees who came to the office looking for help. "We don't have anything yet to give." A New Orleans resident said, "I'm tired of waiting. We've waited about two weeks already just for FEMA to show up." Another New Orleans resident wondered why so much federal aid has gone to states like Texas and Alabama, while Louisiana has received so little. "We're being ignored," she said. "We're like the forgotten ones."
• Sept 9: The chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, Tom Davis, and the committee's minority leader, Henry Waxman, send a letter to Michael Chertoff demanding explanations as to why the private contractor to which FEMA outsourced its hurricane preparedness plan, Innovative Emergency Management, only implemented the first of its three-stage plan to prepare for a catastrophic hurricane in the New Orleans area. The plan was originally conceived in 2004. The letter also asks why IEM was the only bidder to bid for the contract.
• Sept 9: Former FEMA head and Republican power broker Joe Allbaugh arrives in New Orleans -- not to help, but to drum up business for his business clients. Allbaugh is now the head of his own Allbaugh Company, which specializes in helping his clients drum up lucrative disaster relief contracts from the federal government. He characterizes his visit as "putting his shoulder to the wheel," trying to mobilize the private sector to get involved in the disaster relief efforts. Allbaugh's clients include KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, and many other companies with Republican ties. Before being named to head FEMA, Allbaugh was Bush's chief of staff in Texas and his 2000 campaign manager. Allbaugh named his college roommate Michael Brown to replace him as the head of FEMA when he left in 2002 to join the private sector. He and his several companies have profited handsomely from similar efforts in Iraq. He also helped FEMA partially privatize its disaster relief plans for New Orleans in 2004, by advising them to hire his client Innovative Emergency Management to help run disaster relief efforts. IEM is headed by Madhu Beriwal, who is a heavy financial donor to the Republican Party. (IEM also claims that former FEMA chief James Lee Witt has teamed with the company to help in its relief efforts, a claim that Witt denies.) Investigative journalist Greg Palast demands to see the hurricane emergency response plan that IEM says it had in place long before Katrina developed; both IEM and FEMA are forced to admit that such a plan doesn't exist. Source: Greg Palast
• Sept 9: As part of his attempt to privatize the National Weather Service, Republican senator Rick Santorum levels a barrage of bogus charges against the NWS, claiming that it is partially responsible for the magnitude of the disaster by failing to predict the fury of the storm and by downplaying its warnings. In reality, the NWS's predictions were quite accurate and its warnings were very, very urgent.

• Sept 10: The first FEMA office in Lafayette, Louisiana opens -- with no aid whatsoever to distribute to needy citizens. People arriving at the office looking for money, vouchers, or even water are turned away empty-handed. "We're not giving anything," manager Kenneth Swain tells a crowd. "We don't have anything yet to give." New Orleans resident Tonette Oatif says angrily, "They told me to wait a couple more days? I'm tired of waiting. We've waited about two weeks already just for FEMA to show up." Fellow victim Cynthia Amie says she doesn't understand why states such as Texas and Alabama have received so much aid while Louisiana has gone without. "We're being ignored," she says. "We're like the forgotten ones."
• Sept 10: Rather than battle a lawsuit filed by CNN, the US government rescindes an order banning the media from reporting on the recovery of the dead in New Orleans. The order is issued by Army Lieutenant General Russel Honore, heading the recovery efforts in New Orleans, with the rationale that media outlets don't need to provide pictures of dead bodies to their readers and viewers.
• Sept 10: Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These companies, including Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and the Shaw Group, have direct ties to the Bush White House; two of them, Halliburton and Shaw, are personally represented by former FEMA head and Bush campaign operative Joe Allbaugh. The New York Times reports, "Private contractors, guided by two former directors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other well-connected lobbyists and consultants, are rushing to cash in on the unprecedented sums to be spent on Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction." Washington lobbyist James Albertine says, "They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door. I'm sure every lobbyist's phone in Washington is ringing off the hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money -- and it's only a down payment." Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government spending watchdog group, says Katrina, like Iraq before it, would bring the greedy and the self-interested out of the woodwork. "This is very painful," she says. "You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering -- disaster profiteering."
• A day later, the Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, announces that it would begin a probe of the awarding of those contracts. Jesse Jackson says of the contracts, "While the disconnected and the needy are running from shelter to shelter, the connected and the greedy are getting FEMA contracts. It's completely unfair." Jackson goes on to call the contracts "white-collar looting." DNC chair Howard Dean says, "Congress has appropriated more than $60 billion to help with reconstruction efforts following Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people from the Gulf Coast who lost everything they owned now seek to rebuild their lives, and FEMA has already begun giving no-bid contracts to Bush's political cronies. The President himself suspended rules that ensure American workers are fairly paid for their work. Even as FEMA begins to spend tens of billions, the agency's 'track record in managing much smaller amounts of money has raised concerns,' according to the Washington Post. So once again President Bush has put the profits of his corporate cronies ahead of the needs of the American people. What's worse, it seems they are exploiting the very chaos they created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to do it. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the survivors and communities are forced to struggle through FEMA's never-ending bureaucracy and red tape to get the basic necessities, but Bush's corporate cronies have been given carte blanche in the form of no-bid contracts."
• Sept 10: One company hired by the Bush administration, the Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management firm (a subsidiary of Service Corporation International, both Houston-based firms), is slated to manage the recovery and "disposal" of dead bodies in New Orleans and other stricken communities. SCI, a firm with close personal and business ties to Bush, is the same company at the center of the "Funeralgate" scandal in Texas during Bush's tenure as govenor. Former FEMA director and Bush crony Joe Allbaugh was also a central player in the SCI scandal, and is thought to have orchestrated SCI's securing of the present contract. SCI was hired in spite of the fact that Louisiana and Mississippi, among other stricken states, has plenty of state workers who could do the job for free as part of their governmental duties. SCI was hammered in Texas for "dumping" dead bodies without proper treatment or even attempts at proper identification. It is known for its history of illegally dumping and desecrating dead bodies.
• "It is appalling that the Bush administration -- which has already badly bungled its response to Hurricane Katrina -- would hire a company with a record of gross mismanagement of mortuary services," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a Washington DC-based watchdog group. "I can only imagine that this decision was made because of President Bush's long-time friendship with the head of SCI, Robert Waltrip." A lawsuit settled by SCI found that the company, instead of properly cremating bodies, kept them in sheds, piled one on top of another, and vaults intended for proper interment were used as storage for corpses, with one vault containing the scattered remains of 67 corpses. One blogger notes, "The arrival of SCI in New Orleans is like a shredder truck pulling up outside the offices of a crooked firm expecting a forensic audit. The evidence -- the bodies that are still tied to lamp posts -- could be going up in the smoke of one of the city's uncontained fires, or weighted down and dumped in the bayou. It's not unimaginable -- SCI has already done this."
• Sept 10: New Orleans residents evacuated to Utah discuss their experiences trying to survive in the Convention Center. One resident, a prep cook named Cornell Perkins, intends to remain in Utah and has no desire to return to his home town. "The people told me about the convention center and I wound up staying there for four days," he says. Perkins describes the convention center as "Haywire. No police. It was vigilantes. Children getting raped. Bodies in the freezer. There were horror scenes all over. People scouring for food, water, pampers for babies. Two or three babies died. It was very tragic. ...It all happened the second, third and fourth day. The first day, everybody was setting up camp. We thought people were gonna bring us some food and water, but the people didn't know we were there until three days later. That's when they started sending buses. The President came to visit. Jesse Jackson came to visit. They all pulled together. That's the only thing they did right." Of the chaos, he says, "It was almost like a mini war. Citizens against the national guardsmen. Policemen couldn't handle the pressure. One policeman committed suicide on the other side of the street. Over 400 officers quit the force just because they couldn't maintain order and the city went under [martial] law. ...[T]he national guard would shoot us if we left. I found a safe spot in the back that was cool and waited for help."
• Perkins says the experience soured him on New Orleans forever. "It's a feeling and a thought in my mind that I will never forget. Every time I look at something about New Orleans, I'm gonna think of that day. Think of that day Katrina hit and think of those days in the convention center. It was my hometown. I grew up there. I thought I was gonna live there. ...New Orleans was a nice city before the storm hit. As far as the looters go, people needed to feed their families. It was mostly food items they were getting. We do have some ignorant people in New Orleans, but people were looking for food to feed their families. The people from New Orleans are not lazy. We're very hard working, middle-class people who want a chance at a better life. We're ready to start over." Another former resident, Charles Williams, spent six horrific days trapped in the Superdome. "It was horrible. It was like a nightmare," he says. "People were fighting in there, raping and doing everything in there. You could hear the shooting, but I wasn't around those bad people." He is critical of both the federal and local governments. Of the local government, he says, "I think they did a bad job. They did not build up the levees. They did not put sand bags over the canal. They did not prepare us. The governor and everybody did a bad job of preparing the people." As for the federal response, he says, "Bush didn't deal with it until the mayor of New Orleans called him about four or five days later. He was telling people what was going on in Iraq, but he didn't talk about the disaster in New Orleans until five days later and the mayor called him up and told him to come down and see the people and he did. Bush did a good job after he was informed about what was going on, but it took him five days. There's a big difference between Iraq and New Orleans. We are American people. We should get attention before anybody else. People were floating in the water. It was bad." Williams also intends to stay in Utah.
• Sept 10: Reports reveal that former vice president Al Gore underwrote two private rescue flights into New Orleans that rescued 270 people from the drowned city. Gore has consistently refused to be interviewed about the flights, but it is known that he paid $50,000 out of his own pocket for Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who operated on Gore's son Albert after a 1989 car accident and who was stranded at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, to orchestrate the rescue of 270 patients from that hospital.

• Sept 11: US government officials confirm that the toxic sludge standing in the streets of New Orleans will render areas of the city virtually uninhabitable for up to a decade, and that the federal government is deliberately covering up that fact. EPA official and toxic waste expert Hugh Kaufman says that the polluted water being pumped directly out of the city back into Lake Ponchartrain and the Mississippi River is worsening the problem. He also says that the EPA is covering up the problem and refusing to admit the extent of the toxic poisoning of the city. He says that the Bush administration is preventing the EPA from releasing information that oil and chemical companies are mandated by law to provide. Kauffman says the Bush administration's cover-up is endangering residents and relief workers throughout the Gulf Coast region, who are being exposed to dangerous levels of toxins, some of which have been proven to cause cancer and birth defects. Low-paid migrant workers hired to do the labor of cleaning up the city can expect major health problems because of their exposure to a variety of toxins.
• Kaufman, who was the chief investigator for the 9/11 clean up, also said that the Bush administration engaged in the same practice after 9/11 -- covering up the truth about the dangers in the air and water and lying to the public in the weeks after the disaster. Kaufman said that over 75% of those who responded to 9/11 have gotten sick and in some cases have died because of exposure to toxins at Ground Zero, and that he fears a similar fate will befall relief workers and residents in the Gulf Coast now. The Independent writes, "No one knows how much pollution has escaped through damaged plants and leaking pipes into the 'toxic gumbo' now drowning the city. Mr Kaufman says no one is trying to find out. ...Mr Kaufman claimed the Bush administration was playing down the need for a clean-up: the EPA has not been included in the core White House group tackling the crisis. 'Its budget has been cut and inept political hacks have been put in key positions,' Mr Kaufman said. 'All the money for emergency response has gone to buy guns and cowboys -- which don't do anything when a hurricane hits. We were less prepared for this than we would have been on 10 September 2001.' He said the water being pumped out of the city was not being tested for pollution and would damage Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, and endanger people using it downstream."
• Sept 11: In one of the most heartbreaking tragedies to come out of the Katrina disaster, reports reveal that some doctors in one flooded New Orleans hospital were forced to kill a number of critically ill patients rather than let them die in agony. One New Orleans doctor told how she "prayed for God to have mercy on her soul" after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save. Her account has been verified by hospital personnel and local officials. One emergency official, William McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die." The doctor who told the press of her actions said she and other doctors took the extraordinary, tragic steps because looters were ravaging the hospital, there was no electricity to keep needed machines such as ventilators running, and essential drugs and supplies were gone. She said, "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end. I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process. We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatized but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying. People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second. It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity. There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing. Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible. The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway." McQueen added, "They had to make unbearable decisions."
• Sept 11: New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin says, "I think the president for some reason probably did not understand the full magnitude of this catastrophe on the front end." Democratic senator Barack Obama says, "It's puzzling, given his immediate response during 9/11, that he did not feel a greater sense of empathy towards the folks that were experiencing this enormous disaster," and points out that the Bush administration is far better at public relations than actual actions and results.
• Sept 11: An extensive Time magazine report on Bush's handling of the crisis speculates that one reason Bush floundered for so long in responding effectively to the hurricane and its aftermath -- indeed, in showing an unwillingness to even show concern about the disaster -- was brought about in part because of political advisor Karl Rove's untimely hospitalization with kidney stones. Though many close observers to Bush believe that he was looking for another crisis to manage well, in part to shore up his sagging popularity ratings and to deflect attention from the ever-worsening situation in Iraq, when Katrina hit, Bush showed a distressing inability to pay much attention to the devastation. His first contact with DHS head Michael Chertoff after the hurricane strike was on that Monday, but Bush didn't discuss the hurricane -- instead, he wanted to talk about cracking down on illegal immigrants. Part of the problem, according to the article, is the "bubble" Bush exists in -- a bubble maintained by a coterie of insular "yes men" who handle most problems without his involvement, only taking certain problems to Bush directly -- problems that more often impact him politically. "His inner circle takes pride in being able to tell him 'everything is under control,' when in this case it was not," said a former aide. "The whole idea that you have to only burden him with things 'that rise to his level' bit them this time." Time reports, "Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, [aides] say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news -- or tell him when he's wrong. Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. 'The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me,' the aide recalled about a session during the first term. 'Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, "All right. I understand. Good job." He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.'"
• To worsen the situation, trusted advisors from the first term, including Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, and Karen Hughes, have left the White House for Cabinet posts or positions with other agencies; Bush has filled these posts, and "lesser" posts, with political cronies who lack experience. "Katrina has shown the incredible weakness of the notion that you can have weak players in key spots because the only people who matter are in the White House," said a lobbyist who is close to the administration. "You can't have a Mike Brown at FEMA unless you can guarantee that there isn't going to be a catastrophe." Time writes, "The result is a kind of echo chamber in which good news can prevail over bad -- even when there is a surfeit of evidence to the contrary. For example, a source tells TIME that four days after Katrina struck, Bush himself briefed his father and former President Clinton in a way that left too rosy an impression of the progress made. 'It bore no resemblance to what was actually happening,' said someone familiar with the presentation."
• Exacerbating the situation even more is the race issue. Bluntly, Bush had trouble grasping the fact that he and the federal government needed to intervene strongly because most of the stricken residents in New Orleans, the center of media attention for the disaster, are black. Bush's political power base specifically excludes poor and middle-class blacks, and few in his administration saw any political benefit in moving quickly to answer these victims' needs. Bush officials feel that the best answer to that criticism is to promise buckets of money for those victims and the stricken Crescent City, without actually making it clear where that promised money will come from. The strategy also includes the idea of "Don't look back," where the administration steadfastly refuses to accept any blame for its two weeks of virtual inattention, instead promising to "move forward" in helping victims and rebuilding New Orleans and other stricken areas. (This strategy includes slamming state and local Democrats for their own "failures" in responding, as detailed elsewhere in this site.) How this will happen is anyone's guess -- the administration continues to refuse to back down on further tax cuts for the wealthy and continues to push for the permanent removal of the estate tax. Other big gestures include a promised "day of prayer," similar to Bush's "Cathedral speech" of September 14, 2001, and naming a "superstar" such as Colin Powell or Rudy Giuliani to head reconstruction efforts.
• Sept 11: The Government Accounting Office announces that it will probe the awarding of contracts to restore hurricane-damaged areas along the Gulf Coast to companies with close ties to the Bush administration. The companies include Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and the Shaw Group. Democratic representative Henry Waxman says, "'The administration has an abysmal contracting record in Iraq. We can't afford to make the same mistakes again. We must make sure taxpayer funds are not wasted, because every dollar thrown away today is a dollar that is not available to hurricane victims and their families."
• Sept 11: 600 members of the Mississippi National Guard deployed in Iraq are denied permission to go home to aid in rescue efforts or even help their own stricken families. Their commanders have told them that there are too few troops in Iraq to allow them to leave. Guard members and relatives say in e-mail or telephone interviews that virtually all the approximately 300 soldiers of 155th Brigade's B and C companies had their homes destroyed or severely damaged in the hurricane. "All I know is that we are combat-ineffective due to the problems at home," says one Guard member, whose wife and young child escaped before their apartment building was washed away. Another member of the 155th writes, "We are not trying to weasel our way home, we just need to help our loved ones." Some 2,500 Louisiana Guardsmen are being allowed to return home after debriefing in Kuwait because their tours of duty are up anyway.
• Sept 11: Other areas hit as hard as New Orleans are receiving little or no aid from anyone -- federal, state, or local authorities. Of particular note are the dozens of small towns, villages, and hamlets in southwestern Mississippi, which have been virtually ignored by FEMA and by state governments, and have no local infrastructure to turn to. "We got hit just as bad as people farther south," says a resident of Four Points, Alabama, a small town just over the Mississippi border. "But it's just so far out. We get left out a lot." The resident, Roger Hayes, says he has been phoning the FEMA emergency number for days and gotten nothing but busy signals. And as always, race has its part to play. "All I want is somebody to come move this tree. My goodness," said black Mississippian Tomeka Collins. who has lived for more than a week with a huge tree on her roof, obstructing her front door and buckling her kitchen ceiling. She said she's beginning to wonder why. "Nobody cares," she said. "I don't want to be racial, but if this tree was on a house in a white neighborhood, it'd be gone." Less than a mile away, a tree fell on the home of retired police officer Charles McKinley, who is white. Work crews quickly removed the tree and his insurance adjuster has already been by.
• Sept 11: Radio talk show maven Rush Limbaugh marks the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by accusing America's liberals of celebrating the destruction of 9/11 and of Katrina. He tells his listeners, "I got a sneaking suspicion that the left's reaction to this is something that they had in the works ever since 9/11. I think the left has been waiting for the next terrorist attack. They've got their battle plan in motion, and they knew when the terrorist attack came that they were going to jump on Bush's case as being ill-prepared, unprepared, lousy, having done nothing, make the case for bigger government, roll out all the video of all the disasters and misery...."

• Sept 12: Bush tells the press that he was "misinformed" by his advisors as to the seriousness of the disaster. He says, "What I was referring to is this: When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. 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 airwaves say, The bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to. Of course, there were plans in case the levee had been breached. There was a sense of relaxation at a critical moment." The following link brings up a montage of newspaper front pages from the early days of the hurricane. You're welcome to scan over them yourself and see where Bush got the idea that anyone had "dodged a bullet." In addition, we know that Bush learned of the dire situation with New Orleans's levees on Sunday, well before the storm hit. (Why he didn't bother to know about the levee situation before is another good question. The media had been running story after story about the threat to the levees for close to a week before, and most reasonably informed citizens knew that the levees were unsafe long before any of this. But not Bush.) Additionally, reports had come in that the levees were beginning to breach as early as 3 am Monday, over three hours before Katrina made landfall. Michael Chertoff made the same assertion on September 4: "I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet.'" No, he didn't.
• Sept 12: Michael Brown resigns as the head of FEMA. Bush names senior DHS official David Paulison as acting FEMA director; Paulison is best known for sparking the "duct tape" scandal of 2003, when he advised Americans preparing for terrorist attacks to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting. AmericaBlog's John Aravosis observes, "Great. So we've gone from Brownie (aka Drownie) to Duckie. Is it impossible for Bush to appoint anyone competent to head any agency?" Vice President Cheney apparently was a key player in orchestrating Brown's removal from the Gulf Coast rescue operations, though the typically close-mouthed administration isn't saying if Cheney was behind Brown's resignation. Interestingly enough, Bush denied any knowledge of Brown's resignation when first asked, telling a reporter, "Maybe you know something I don't know." Whether he really didn't know that his own FEMA director had resigned, or whether he was lying again to the American people, doesn't seem to matter much right now, though later evidence proves that he indeed is lying -- see below.
• Sept 12: Bush lied when he told the press he knew nothing of Michael Brown's resignation. Bush, who over the weekend had told DHS secretary Michael Chertoff to "get rid of Brown any way you have to," was called by Chertoff when the president was aboard Air Force One; Chertoff told Bush that Brown was resigning. Bush told Chertoff to hold off on any comment about Brown's resignation because he didn't want his upcoming photo-op upstaged. White House sources confirmed Bush was "caught off-guard" when a peeved Brown announced his resignation himself. Reporters took the first opportunity to ask Bush about the resignation; as he has done so many times during his tenure in power, Bush lied, this time saying he knew nothing of it. All that he didn't know was that Brown had already gone public with the resignation. Acting FEMA director David Paulison had already been vetted as Brown's replacement before the weekend. The White House also claims that Brown's resignation was voluntary and unsolicited, but insiders confirm that Brown was, indeed, forced out, being warned by Chertoff that if he stayed he would face an internal audit of his travel expenses and additional inquiries as to his resume-padding and general incompetence. "Brown is just the first," says a White House insider. "Others will follow."
• Sept 12: Washington lobbyist Frederick Webber tells the press that the Katrina disaster has caused him a change of heart in his approach to his job. He says he came to work one day last week to find a dozen fundraising letters from politicians on his desk; he threw them all away. How could lawmakers be asking for money for their reelections, he asked himself, when thousands of Americans were desperate for aid along the Gulf Coast? Webber instead wrote a large check for rescue efforts, and then took to conventions and lunches to speak passionately about his conversion. Webber, 67, is one of Washington's most powerful lobbyists, and a veteran of the Nixon White House. Webber told K Street colleagues that radical change is needed in election laws: Donations should be further limited, campaign seasons should be shortened and lawmakers, somehow, should be freed up to do more legislating and less soliciting. He also makes clear that the hurricane's devastation was what prompted his proselytizing. "All of a sudden I asked, 'What are the priorities here?'" Webber says. "It was an easy decision to make. I couldn't justify making those $500 to $2,500 [campaign] contributions. It just didn't fit." Lawmakers' constant bombarding of lobbyists with fundraising invitations, he said, "is crazy." Yet the daily rush of fundraisers hardly slowed last week, even with the tragedy of New Orleans. "No sooner is someone elected or reelected than they start their fundraising right out of the box," Webber complains. "Members of Congress are trapped. They have to continue to raise money if they're going to survive, and I sympathize with them," he adds. "But I've seen a lot of people -- very good people -- leave Congress because they're tired of fundraising. This thing has gotten away from us." Webber calls the entire political funding process "diseased."

• Sept 13: Bush takes responsibility -- in a limited fashion -- for the federal government's insouciant response to Katrina. "Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," he said during a joint White House news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. "And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong."
• Sept 13: The official death toll from Hurricane Katrina rises to over 423. What the actual figures are, and what the final figures are, will probably never be known, partly due to natural factors, but mostly because the federal government is bent on keeping those numbers quiet. Corpses are not being identified, numbers are being hidden and/or falsified, and the media is being forcibly discouraged from asking questions.
• Sept 13: An investigation by the Congressional Research Service find that Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco did everything she could do under the law to respond effectively to the hurricane, and did so in a timely manner. The investigation, conducted at the request of House member John Conyers, "closes the book on the Bush Administration's attempts to evade accountability," Conyers says. "The Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time." The report finds 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 several additional days passed before such assistance was actually made available to Louisiana. In accordance with the law, Blanco did make the proper request for such assistance in a timely and proper manner, in writing on August 27. According to the report, "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."
• Sept 13: Evidence surfaces that proves the Red Cross, in collusion with Homeland Security, agreed not to send resources, including disaster relief teams, into New Orleans after Katrina struck. Their excuses range from the danger posed by the supposed "bands of marauding gangsters" roving the streets to, even more unbelievably, their efforts might make other relief organizations withhold their own efforts. As of today, the Red Cross is still refusing assistance efforts, except to supply military teams brought into the city. The Red Cross has been an ad hoc government agency, on a limited basis, since 1905, but since Republican Elizabeth Dole revamped the agency in the 1990s, and since the advent of the Bush administration in 2001, the Red Cross has demonstrably become much less of an independent relief agency and more of an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. After 9/11, the Red Cross attempted to divert half of the contributions it received for victim relief towards an Iraqi-destined "war fund" before Congress intervened to stop it. As of September 11, 2005, the Red Cross had received over $538 million in donations for Katrina victims, but has refused to release most of those funds, instead holding them back in a reserve fund for future needs, including, again, a "war fund" for Iraq. After 9/11, the Red Cross created what it called the "Liberty Fund," which was earmarked for supporting the adminstration's efforts in Iraq and preparing the country for future terrorist strikes. Any donations to the Red Cross not specifically earmarked for the "Katrina Fund" are likely to go into this "Liberty Fund" or other funds to support the government, and not for any kind of disaster relief.
• The organization was a key member of the Federal Response Program of 2000, and when the FRP was superseded in 2002 by the similarly-named National Response Plan, a part of the Homeland Security Act, both FEMA and the Red Cross were brought under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security. The Red Cross' leading officers are Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Chair of the Board, and Marsha Evans, the President and CEO. McElveen-Hunter was appointed by Bush in June 2004. Her Red Cross bio says she is the "former U.S. Ambassador to Finland (2001-2003) and the CEO and owner of Pace Communications, Inc., the largest private custom publishing company in the United States. The company's clients include such Fortune 500 companies as United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, AT&T, Carlson Hotels, and Toyota." She donated more than $130,000 to the Republican Party since 2000. Evans, the president and CEO of the Red Cross, is a rear admiral in the US Navy and the director of Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., a global investment bank serving the financial needs of corporations, institutions, governments and high-net-worth investors worldwide. Evans also sits on the boards of the May Department Stores Company and Weight Watchers International and was recently elected to the board of the Huntsman Corporation, a large chemical and plastics manufacturer. She is also a presidential appointee to the Board of Visitors of the US Military Academy. Evans donated $500 to the Republican National Committee in 2004.
• Sept 13: Charlie Cray, the director of the Center for Corporate Policy in Washington, reveals more of the corporate insider maneuvering that has given GOP-connected corporations lucrative contracts to clean up and restore the Gulf Coast. Cray writes, "...the current emergency has created a rush to skimp on competitive bidding processes designed to increase potential savings and enhance work quality. A handful of no-bid, 'cost-plus' contracts similar to the ones handed out in Iraq have already been signed -- with some of the same companies. This time the administration has begun to use the current emergency as an excuse to circumvent routine competitive-bidding processes, while virtually deflecting the hundreds of businesses that have been calling the Army Corps and FEMA to learn how they can get in on the action. We can expect new tales of wasted money and shoddy work." Bechtel and Fluor, two companies raking in billions from Iraq, are negotiating for no-bid contracts from the government to build new housing in the area. KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is already at work on cleanup and debris removal under a contract with the Navy signed in 2001 and renewed in 2004. Cray writes, "That contract is strikingly similar to the Army logistics contract that provided the 'foot in the door' for much of the rest of its work in Iraq. So there may well be more to come. The Army Corps of Engineers, which has given Halliburton the vast majority of its business in Iraq, will also surely be looking for help. The Corps recently demoted Bunnatine Greenhouse -- a top-level civilian employee who was responsible for ensuring the Corps follows competitive bidding requirements -- after she accused the Corps of giving KBR improper influence over the contracting process."
• Sept 13: Even though the US has chosen not to fight a lawsuit brought to prevent the government from prohibiting photographs and reports of the dead in the stricken Gulf Coast areas, military personnel are forbidding journalists from taking photos or writing stories about the recovery of the dead, on pain of being forcibly evicted from the area. "No photos. No stories," said one soldier to a reporter. An 82nd Airborne spokesman said that his unit was following the Army's New Orleans policy of not allowing media observers within 300 yards of a dead body.

• Sept 14: The National Response Plan designates DHS head Michael Chertoff, not Michael Brown, as the person ultimately responsible for mobilizing the federal government's emergency response. Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. He chose, however, not to do so. In contrast, FEMA chief Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm. One particular memo from Chertoff shows that he may have been confused about his role and responsibility as part of the NRP. The memo also shows that the response to Katrina wasn't left to disaster professionals, but was run out of the White House, according to George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at FEMA during the Clinton administration and the co-author of an emergency management textbook. "It shows that the president is running the disaster, the White House is running it as opposed to Brown or Chertoff," Haddow said. Brown "is a convenient fall guy. He's not the problem really. The problem is a system that was marginalized." General Julius Becton, FEMA director under Reagan, says he is shocked by Chertoff's inaction. He "does not have a full appreciation for what the country is faced with -- nor does anyone who waits that long. Anytime you have a delay in taking action, there's a potential for losing lives. I have no idea how many lives we're talking about. ...I don't understand why, except that they were inefficient."
• Chertoff's August 30 memo came on the heels of a memo from Brown, written several hours after Katrina made landfall, showing that the FEMA director was waiting for Chertoff's permission to get help from others within the massive department. In that memo, which can be found here, Brown requested Chertoff's "assistance to make available DHS employees willing to deploy as soon as possible." It asked for another 1,000 homeland security workers within two days and 2,000 within a week. The NRP mandates Chertoff, as head of Homeland Security, as the official responsible for declaring an "Incident of National Significance" when a catastrophic event happens. "Standard procedures regarding requests for assistance may be expedited or, under extreme circumstances, suspended in the immediate aftermath of an event of catastrophic magnitude," according to the plan, which evolved from earlier plans and lessons learned after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Notification and full coordination with the States will occur, but the coordination process must not delay or impede the rapid deployment and use of critical resources." While some say that the NRP has been shown to be flawed, former senior SHS official Mike Byrne says he doesn't blame the NRP for the confusion and inaction that followed Katrina's landfall; the new National Response Plan isn't all that different from the previous plan, called the Federal Response Plan. "Our history of responding to major disasters has been one where we've done it well," says Byrne. "We need to figure out why this one didn't go as well as the others did. It's shocking to me."
• Sept 14: Senate Republicans kill a bill attempting to create an independent, bipartisan panel to investigate the failure of federal, state, and local governments to respond to Katrina. The bill was sponsored by Democratic senator Hillary Clinton. "Just as with 9/11, we did not get to the point where we believed we understood what happened until an independent investigation was conducted," Clinton said. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said that he and his fellow Democrats will not take part in the Senate Republicans' proposed GOP-led inquiry because he felt no assurance that any such inquiry would be impartial. Like many others, Reid fears that any Republican-led investigation would merely be a whitewash and not a true inquiry. A Senate inquiry led by Republican Susan Collins began, without any significant Democratic participation. Her panel initially found evidence of a, in her words, "sluggish" federal response.
• Sept 14: 74-year old Edgar Hollingsworth is found near death in his New Orleans home. National Guardsman Frederick Fell disobeyed FEMA orders to enter Hollingsworth's home, and found the old man lying, starving and dehydrated, on his living room couch. FEMA has ordered searchers not to break into homes. They are supposed to look in through a window and knock on the door. If no one cries out for help, they are supposed to move on. If they see a body, they are supposed to log the address and move on. Fell's decision to defy FEMA's orders saved Hollingsworth's life. Fell and his fellow Guardsmen further disobeyed orders when they rescued Hollingsworth's healthy pet, a pit bull puppy, and brought the puppy along with Hollingsworth to the hospital.

• Sept 15: If any more proof was needed to just how clueless and politically minded the White House is over the entire Katrina debacle, here it is: Bush has personally named his political minder and guru Karl Rove to take charge of the reconstruction effort of the Gulf Coast. Veteran political reporter Dan Froomkin writes, "Rove's leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush's image. That is Rove's hallmark."
• Sept 15: The staff of New Orleans's Methodist Hospital tells their own stories of chaos and abandonment, and murderous interference by FEMA. The staff wanted to evacuate themselves and their patients before the hurricane hit, but hospital officials decided that since Mayor Nagin's evacuation order exempted hospitals, the Methodist staff and patients would stay. It was a bad decision. By midweek the building was flooded and seriously damaged; alligators and water moccasins patrolled the floodwaters on the first floor, and patients were dying because of lack of electricity to power their ventilators and dialysis machines. The staff worked heroically under horrific conditions to keep their charges alive. A dozen patients died by the time the hospital was evacuated on Friday, September 2. To make the situation more untenable before the evacuation, FEMA interfered with attempts to supply the hospital with emergency supplies. The emergency relief effort mounted by the hospital's owner, Universal Health Services in King of Prussia, included desperately needed water, food, diesel fuel to power the hospital's generators and helicopters to ferry in the supplies and evacuate the most vulnerable individuals. Instead, FEMA officials confiscated the supplies. According to Bruce Gilbert, Universal's general counsel, "Those supplies were in fact taken from us by FEMA, and we were unable to get them to the hospital. We then determined that it would be better to send our supplies, food and water to Lafayette [130 miles from New Orleans] and have our helicopters fly them from Lafayette to the hospital." The question of how many patients were forced to die because of FEMA's interference will never be known.
• Sept 15: In a carefully choreographed speech from New Orleans's Jackson Square, Bush called for an unprecedented level of federal spending to alleviate the disaster along the Gulf Coast. The spending will top $200 billion, and is expected to slam the government's budget deficits well over $400 billion. How exactly this money will be raised, what programs will be cut, and how much of it will actually materialize (as opposed to the famous Bush unfunded mandates that sound good but never actually appear) is unclear, but Bush continues to resist calls to drop his extensive tax cuts for the wealthy and his support for the elimination of the estate tax. The Washington Post observes, "[Bush's recommendations] are long on tax relief and business grants and loans, and focused on entrepreneurial ideas. Bush already has drawn fire from Democrats for suspending the law that requires contractors to pay prevailing wages on federal projects in the regions, and there will be a battle over the proposal to provide private and parochial school vouchers to children of displaced families."
• Political blog Perrspectives notes, "[J]ust as in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, President Bush asked for no sacrifices from Americans willing and ready to make them. Unsurprisingly, Bush did not call for the new taxes to fund his Katrina recovery program. Inexcusably, Bush said nothing about the postponement of further tax cuts during a time of war, national disaster recovery and endless $300 billion deficits. Instead, the President and his party will seek to make his 2003 tax cuts permanent, including the repeal of estate tax. This may be New Orleans' time of need, but for President Bush, America's wealthiest are needier still. ...In a nutshell, Bush's recovery from Katrina is just what we've come to expect: almost unlimited -- and unfunded -- federal largesse, with no accountability for past mistakes or independent oversight for the future." Bush also makes several nods to the systemic poverty that has afflicted the region for generations, and even noted poverty "has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which has cut off generations from the opportunity of America." He pledges bold, if unspecified, action to "rise above the legacy of inequality." Pundits from the left and right are quick to laud Bush for sounding like Lyndon Johnson instead of the typically racially uncaring Republican, a judgment which remains to be proven by real action. In a telling element of the speech, White House officials bring in heavy-duty generators to light up the square, thrilling stranded residents who hadn't seen the area with electricity in weeks; once the speech is concluded, the generators are hauled away, once again plunging the square, and the stranded residents, in darkness.
• Columnist Maureen Dowd asks, "In a ruined city -- still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?" Bush's PR team even strung up large swaths of military camouflage netting to hide Bush from the deserted and desolate streets of the city. Peter Harles responds to the speech's backdrop: "I was in NO for the hurricane, staying at the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street. On the Tuesday after the hurricane, I was able to go along the Riverwalk and around Jackson Square. There wasn't a single tree or shrub in the square that didn't have damage. The magnolias all around, and in the square, had limbs down. When I saw Bush strut to the podium, I said to myself, 'They cleaned the hell out of that square.' And they did. I'm sure there were plenty of resources diverted from other areas of NO so that Jackson Square would look pristine. Like everything else in this administartion, artifice, artifice, artifice. If it looks good, then it is good. If it's not good, spin it until people believe it's good."
• While the media rhapsodizes about Bush's newfound awareness of America's racial problems as exposed by Katrina, it's worth noting that his speech only contains one 19-word sentence concerning race, and portrays racial discimination as a thing of the past: "As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America." Columnist Derrick Z. Jackson advocates holding Bush truly responsible for his words, particularly his statement, "'Let us rise above the legacy of inequality." Jackson responds, "Let him be the first to rise, by ending his cruel and wasteful assault on the poor. The last four and half years of his trickle-down theories have failed. His tax cuts and tax incentives have only enriched the rich. The poor have become poorer. The poverty rate has risen by from a 27-year low of 11.3 percent to 12.7 percent according to the US Census. For the first time on record, household incomes failed to rise for five consecutive years. Even Phillip Swagel, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute was quoted in the New York Times as saying, 'The gains have gone to owners of capital and not to workers.' Bush now says he wants to rebuild New Orleans with federal dollars. But for four and a half years, he has embarrassed even fellow Republicans by his annual proposals to slash Community Development Block grants. He talks now of federal accounts of up to $5,000 for job training, education and child care expenses for evacuees. Yet before Katrina, he has proposed to slash job training programs, adult literacy programs and let his own No Child Left Behind program go underfunded by billions of dollars a year. Nearly every state in the nation is either suing the government or complaining about having to follow unfunded mandates.
• "Bush says he will now create a Gulf Opportunity Zone to stimulate business, 'including minority-owned enterprises.' But he also suspended the Davis-Bacon act for Katrina rebuilding, meaning that contractors need not pay the prevailing wage for laborers. Bush says he wants to 'help lower-income citizens in the hurricane region build new and better lives.' But between relaxing wage rules for the CEOs and heading a Republican Party that has for eight years blocked a rise in the $5.15 federal minimum wage, Bush's plan to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will squeeze yet more pulp out of the poor. Bush proclaimed that we are about to witness 'one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.' For that to happen, he will have to become everything he has not been for his first four and a half years. That is only possible if he does things like drop his tax cut program or end the needless war in Iraq. Bush says Katrina was cruel and wasteful. He was right in a way he did not intend. Katrina laid bare the cruel waste of so much of his presidency."
• Democratic congressman Ed Markey notes acidly that Bush officials rushed to assure the country that the tax cuts for the wealthy were in no danger of being repealed, but instead would be funded from cuts in Medicaid, education, and veterans programs. Markey writes, "[I]t is now clear that the cost of the reconstruction efforts will be borne by poor Americans who depend the most on government housing programs, after school programs and Medicaid that have already been starved by Bush Administration cuts. President Bush cannot credibly preach that he will eradicate a 'legacy of poverty' while his Republican allies work to cut $10 billion from Medicaid, a health program serving the country's poorest families. The President has pledged to cut unnecessary spending, but he has ruled out the option of amending his tax breaks for the rich, which will cost the government trillions of dollars over the next several years. The President is using the victims of Katrina as guinea pigs in a conservative policy experiment instead of turning to proven, effective programs of disaster relief. The devastation of the Gulf Coast is a national tragedy but Republicans consider it a golden opportunity to further a radical policy wish list by ignoring environmental laws and fair labor practices while lining the pockets of big government contractors. The needs of the families of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama must drive the reconstruction efforts, not the desires of ideological zealots and corporate contractors. We need oversight of government contracts, not overcharges from companies like Halliburton that are rushing to take advantage of this national crisis."
• Sept 15: Lieutenant General Stephen Blum, head of the National Guard, confirms what the Bush administration has been denying for weeks: that because of Guard deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guard responders to Katrina have suffered drastic equipment and personnel shortages. Most of the Guard's best equipment is overseas; much of it could have been well used here. "These guys get the hand-me-downs," says John Pike, a military analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. "And some of these units are turning into just bunches of guys. I think between the flipping of equipment [to Guard units] and the wearing out of equipment and being under-strength, I don't know how much more you could take as a force."
• A day later, peace activist Cindy Sheehan agrees, calling Katrina not only a natural disaster, but "a man-made tragedy and a criminal negligence disaster." The hurricane's victims, she said during a Philadelphia anti-war rally, are "collateral damage of George Bush's insane and moronic policies in Iraq." Thomas Paine Cronin, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 47, the union that represents Philadelphia's white-collar employees, tells the crowd that if there had been no war, 3,000 Louisiana National Guard troops now on duty abroad might have been available to rescue people trapped by the flood. And former Philadelphia city councilman Angel Ortiz adds, "We have a person in the White House that thinks he's an emperor, a man who believes that the role of the United States is an imperial one. ...It's time to impeach the man."
• Sept 15: 54 of 55 Republican senators vote to kill an attempt to appoint an independent, bipartisan committee to investigate the government's response to Katrina. The single GOP holdout is David Vitter of Louisiana, who simply did not vote. All the Senate Democrats voted for the bill. The Republicans want an investigation led by themselves, driven by Bush cronies who will be sure to paper over any potential problems for the administration.
• Sept 15: Democratic representative Henry Waxman assails the Republican effort to appoint a GOP-led "investigation" into the federal response to Katrina. Waxman insists only an independent investigation will uncover anything resembling the truth. "We've just experienced a national tragedy that has caused immeasurable pain to countless Americans, and yet here in the House of Representatives, nothing seems to have changed," Waxman says. "The House isn't rising above raw partisanship, even in a time of national tragedy. The Republicans are saying, well, we should just trust them because they have created something they're calling bipartisan. Well, the right way to create something that's bipartisan is for the two parties to talk. Instead, the Republicans met among themselves without talking to the Democrats and have proposed this select committee on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. ...[W]hy are we suspicious? They didn't talk to us, the Committees in the House and Senate that have oversight jurisdiction were starting to hold hearings, and suddenly the Republican leadership said, well, we're going to have a House-Senate committee. And suddenly it's not a House-Senate committee, it's a select committee. ...We had more hearings when Republicans were in charge and there was a Democratic administration on whether President Clinton misused his Christmas card list for political purposes. That merited seven or eight days of hearings, but we can't get hearings on these important subjects. ...We need to rise above this raw partisanship and join together -- if not on an independent commission, which I think makes the most sense -- then at least on a committee that is equally divided with the powers equally divided, where the intent is to work together. But we look at what is being proposed, and the only conclusion that many of us can reach is that this is going to be a committee to pretend to do an investigation but not find the truth."
• Sept 15: Consumer groups and victim advocates are lining up to oppose a draconian bankruptcy law scheduled to take effect October 17. The bill, crafted by the consumer credit industry and potentially devastating for millions of poorer Americans, will have a tremendously negative impact on victims of Hurricane Katrina. (Republicans blocked an amendment to the bill that would exempt disaster victims.) As Molly Ivins notes, "Under the new law, anyone whose income is above the state median must file under Chapter 13, a more restrictive category that requires some repayment of debt. The new law grants no exemption for natural disaster, even though it's going to be a little tough for some citizen sitting in the Houston Astrodome who no longer has a home to come up with tax statements, pay stubs and six months of income and expense data." House Republicans, led by James Sensenbrenner, refuse to even schedule hearings on the possibility of waiving the law for disaster relief. "These new requirements, coupled with strict deadlines for production upon the penalty of an automatic dismissal are difficult for the most organized person to meet, never mind someone who has had his or her home destroyed by Katrina," said the Consumer Federation of America. Sensenbrenner is one of 11 House Republicans who voted against the Katrina disaster relief funding package.
• Sept 15: Senators Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley, a Democrat and Republican respectively, have introduced a bill designed to help poorer victims pay their hospital bills by fully funding their Medicaid expenses for at least the first five months after their forced evacuation, and victims along the Gulf Coast would have their expenses met through December 2006. Currently the Bush administration only helps Medicaid recipients who were taken to Texas.
• Sept 15: The Center for Economic Policy and Research notes that up to $10 billion of the costs of Katrina recovery could be had by taxing the windfall profits of the oil companies on money they made off of the exorbitant prices they charged for gasoline and fuel after the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast. CEPR wrote, "since the oil industry anticipated much lower prices when it made its investment and production decisions, it can cover its costs and make a normal profit at prices that are less than half the $60-$70 a barrel price now seen in world markets. This surge in prices has led to an unexpected glut of profits for the oil industry. The oil industry's profits were running at annual rate of $62.8 billion in the first quarter of 2005, several months before the most recent run-up in prices. This compares to an average of just $24.3 billion (in 2005 dollars) over the last five years. The world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, will likely have over $10 billion in profits this quarter." So far the administration has shown no interest in taxing the oil companies, who are posting record profits at our expense.

• Sept 16: Over two weeks after the disaster, FEMA is still refusing to expedite disaster aid to storm survivors. Slidell, Louisiana mayor Ben Morris said, "We have had no help from them for our citizens. It is criminal." He said his city was now getting water, ice and fuel from FEMA but that more than 10,000 people who lost their homes here have been given little or no help with emergency housing. "What we are dealing with is a human tragedy, people have nowhere to go," said Morris. "At FEMA, they keep saying they are coming, but they don't. I think they're useless." Local radio stations have taken calls from dozens of people complaining that they spend hours trying to get through to FEMA staff, and others have recounted tales of pleas for assistance rejected or ignored. In response, FEMA officials compare the disaster recovery to the extent of "building the Pyramids," and say that its critics must expect perfection from the agency. Morris said FEMA should be given back its independence and overhauled to cut the bureaucratic red tape. "It's incompetence. They are encumbered by rules and regulations written by someone who just didn't have a clue."
• Sept 16: New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin says he's learned his lesson about counting on federal help. "I am not going to plan in the future for the cavalry to come in three days," he told CNN. "I'm going to buy high water vehicles, helicopters, whatever I can do to make sure that I am in total control...of the total evacuation process."
• Sept 16: The toxic sludge still filling the streets of much of New Orleans and other Gulf coast towns is teeming with disease-causing bacteria and chemical toxins. HHS secretary Mike Leavitt has declared a public health emergency for the entire Gulf region. Outbreaks of a cholera-like disease, salmonella, e.coli, hepatitis, and other ailments have been reported. Other pollutants like arsenic, mercury, lead, oil, and raw sewage also percolate through the floodwaters. EPA co-founder Hugh Kaufman, the agency's chief investigator of the agency's post-9/11 response, is worried for the health of those returning to the city, and for those working hip-deep in the sludge. "After 9/11, because the government did not do its job properly and provide the responders with the proper clothing and equipment -- like respirators -- now over 75 percent of the responders are sick as dogs," he said. "And they're starting to die off, four years after their heroic efforts in responding to 9/11. And I'm concerned the same thing is happening down in that region of the country, where the responders are not provided respirators and the proper equipment to protect them from their exposures."
• Once the floodwaters are drained, the problem could likely be even worse: "Once the floodwaters have been pumped and the streets drained. "The danger is actually worse when the water goes away, because you have hazardous materials more concentrated in muck and dust," he said. "People will more readily come back, and will try to clean their homes or porches. And they'll have toxic dust they'll be sweeping around. And they'll inhale it and ingest it. ...If there's no clean-up you have basically people living and trying to clean in the middle of the country's largest Superfund site." EPA's Jim Elder adds, "Depending on the type of contamination, we could see every medical illness you can think of. Cancer of any type -- bladder, kidney, intestinal, lung, brain, skin cancer. ...The EPA has a list of regulated drinking water contaminants and what the health effects are of exceeding the standards. You can pick any one of those chemicals, and each of them could be present in the Gulf Coast area right now." Even worse, the combined effects of all these chemicals is completely unknown. "You're gonna have so many of these chemicals interacting, and most of these chemicals have only been tested one at a time," Elder said. "They have never looked at the synergistic effect of all these chemicals on human health." Adding to the problem is a tremendously high level of fuel oil and diesel in sediment samples from the city. Kaufman says it is outrageous and irresponsible for authorities to claim that it is now safe to move back into the city.
• Sept 16: Echoing the National Prayer Service of September 14, 2001, Bush leads a national day of prayer in a strictly orchestrated prayer service at Washington's National Cathedral. The event featured busloads of hand-picked, carefully-screened evacuees from New Orleans, pitches for faith-based organizations (all evangelical, right-wing Christian groups) to lead the way in disaster relief, and plenty of blaming of Democrats in Louisiana for the entire debacle. Salon reporter Amy Sullivan notes, "sneaked into the service, though, was one rebuke to the president, delivered by Bishop John Chane of Washington's Episcopal Diocese, the official host of the event and a man who has not hesitated to criticize Bush in the past. Before he led the opening prayer, Chane reminds the audience, 'Our Lord Jesus reminds us that faith without works is nothing.'"
• Sept 16: Former president Bill Clinton advocates raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to help pay for the tremendous federal expenditures to rebuild the devastated Gulf region. He said keeping Bush's infamous tax cuts in place would be "crazy" and that the Bush plan to borrow billions while continuing to ease the tax burden on the rich would mean that future generations and the poor will have to pay "to cover our self-indulgence."
• Sept 16: In an effort to help the less sensitive among us understand the depths of the Katrina tragedy, Laura Bush tells an audience at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that families who have lost track of their children for weeks, and possibly forever, after the hurricane are in the same position as a rich suburban mom who lost track of her children at the mall: "Each of us knows what it's like to lose track of our children for a minute in a department store, so we can imagine what these families are feeling and what they're thinking if they have been separated from their children for a week or more." The level of empathy in Mrs. Bush's statement is, shall we say, underwhelming.

• Sept 17: New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin sets an "extremely problematic" timeline for residents to begin returning to the stricken city. The city is still partly flooded with toxic sludgy waste water, drinking water is a severe problem, and weakened levees pose a threat if new weather conditions develop. Nagin wants to have 180,000 residents return inside the week, but Coast Guard vice admiral Thad Allen, the head of the federal relief effort, said that such a figure was both "extremely ambitious" and " extremely problematic." Nagin has announced that two sections of the city, Algiers, the Garden District, and the French Quarter, will reopen over the next week, enabling a third of the city's 500,000 residents to return. None of those sections were flooded, and electricity has been partially restored in all three areas. Security will be tight in the reopened neighborhoods, with Nagin and others vowing never again to let New Orleans slip into the lawlessness that gripped the city in the days after the storm. This week, he warned potential looters that soldiers carry M-16 rifles "and they might have a few bazookas we're saving for spec people."
• Sept 17: In an off-the-record speech at a weekend gathering of high-profile businessmen in Aspen, Colorado, Presidential advisor Karl Rove says the only mistake the federal government made in handling Katrina was not overriding the local government. He also derides anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan as a "clown" and says that no real anti-war movement exists in this country.
• Sept 17: A resident of Bogalusa, Louisiana, who has been trying to work with federal and other government officials writes that her town is dying because of the carelessness and incompetence of FEMA and other officials. FEMA officials have told her that "we don't need doctors and nurses to run [medical] clinics." Fourteen days after the hurricane, she visited two old women living in a house crushed by toppled trees. The women had had little intervention except for a flying visit by a FEMA official, who handed them a check for $2000 to repair their destroyed house and wished them well. Red Cross volunteers who were supplying them with food and water only bothered to come by once every two or three days. Bodies of people and animals still lay unburied in the streets. Residents holed up in churches still have not been offered shelter, or even food and water. It is a horrifying tale.
• Sept 17: The Washington Post prints a cautionary tale of the year-old "FEMA City" in Florida, an arid, treeless collection of trailers housing 1500 residents of Punta Gorda rendered homeless by 2004's Hurricane Charley. "Having lived through the last year here, this is my advice to New Orleans and the other Gulf Coast towns: Don't make big camps with thousands of people, because it doesn't work," said Bob Hebert, director of recovery for Charlotte County. "It takes a bad situation and, for many people, actually makes it worse." The problem for most residents is that, after losing their homes, they were priced out of the market when their apartment buildings and neighborhoods were rebuilt. Unable to afford the doubled and tripled rents landlords were suddenly charging, they found themselves unable to leave the "temporary" housing provided by FEMA. Many homes, apartments, and project residences destroyed by Charley were replaced by higher-income housing and commercial development that made no allowances for the poor residents who used to live there. "That land was just too valuable to have poor people on it," said community leader Isaac Thomas. He said that the local government is trying to help him and other black leaders save some of the modest but historic homes in the African-American East End, but that "it's a really uphill fight." FEMA City is widely regarded as the equivalent of a prison, an impression that was strengthened when, in the spring of 2005, the entire city was surrounded by wire fencing, a police substation was opened, and armed security guards controlled all entrances and exits. The parallel with the situation developing in the Gulf Coast is unmistakable, and worrisome.

 

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