The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Pete:

Vicki, when you say "they," you're talking about multiple "theys," each acting independently, for different reasons.

At first the narrative was simple: the levees weren't maintained because Evil Bushitler cut the budgets. But more recent reports suggest that the overall spending levels were quite sufficient, but tended to go to pork barrel projects rather than flood prevention. This does indeed implicate the Bush administration, but it also implicates the state's congressional delegation and local officials, who controlled at least some of the money which should have gone to levee maintenance.

And "they" didn't allocate funds toward unsexy but useful maintenance and repairs for perfectly reasons perfectly explicable by public choice theory. Catastrophic failures of the levees are relatively rare events, but elections happen like clockwork, every few years. Politicians know that bringing home the bacon is of more immediate utility than putting funds into projects that don't get them elected.

They're not evil people, nor did they want New Orleans to be destroyed. But they responded rationally to the incentive structure of a liberal democracy.

The local officials didn't pre-position supplies (or at least enough supplies) at emergency shelters for the same reason that New Orleans had an absurdly-high murder rate, corrupt police department, and really bad schools. It was one of America's most poorly-governed poor cities.

The state officials kept the Red Cross out for reasons of their own -- they claim it was because they wanted people to leave rather than remaining in the city. Their failure to let Red Cross people in when it became clear that the situation was intolerable was most likely bureaucratic inertia.

The delay in getting either state or federal help to the Superdome and Convention Center was more of the same.

This is very shocking to you if you expect government to do a good job, most of the time. Since I think that "SNAFU" is the default state of most government programs most of the time, I'm not particularly shocked or surprised.

Graydon, I don't believe that the federal government has, in fact, invoked the Insurrection Act. Some journalists have made loose talk about it, but I don't think that it's actually been done. Nor should it be.

In any case, I think your Canadian origins are leading you astray. Our federal and state governments are wholly separate entities, with their own bureaucracies, their own chains of command, etc. The Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness is wholly separate from the US Dept. of Homeland Security in Washington, DC. "Homeland Security is Homeland Security" is a false statement. Now, presumably they're supposed to work together, but I've seen precious little evidence of that sort of coordination.

More to the point, you're positing the existence of a conspiracy -- or at least concerted action -- involving the federal government, a state agency in a state with a Democratic governor, the National Guard (again, controlled by the governor) and the Gretna, Louisiana Police Department, all put together in the space of a couple of days. People just aren't that competent.

More to the point, it doesn't even make any sense that they would do that. Suppose we posit the existence of such concerted action. Well, if Bush and his minions could do that, then they could have easily evacuated the whole city in a clean, orderly, efficient, coordinated manner.

If they'd done that, then CNN would have showed up at the Convention Center, only to report "everything going well here. Water is being distributed over there, helicopters are taking those in need of emergency care to hospitals, and buses have been arriving every hour to evacuate the rest. All Hail President Bush and Mike Brown!" Bush's sagging approval ratings would skyrocket to 80%, and he could use the resulting politcal capital to put through his nefarious plans without anybody noticing.

So why, given the capacities which you posit, would he do something that would cause his own political stock to plummet, and make him look like an idiot for appointing guys like Mike
Brown to positions of serious responsibility? Like many of the more overwrought conspiracy theories, yours requires a bizarre mixture of super-competence and utter stupidity.

Besides, if "they" can do that, then we're all fucked anwyay.

First of all, it's now fairly clearly established that it was the STATE Homeland Security types who kept the Red Cross out of New Orleans. The Red Cross said as much on its web page, and there's been no serious dispute regarding that fact. In retrospect, this was clearly a mistake on their part, though I suspect that the officials who made this decision had what they thought was a good reason. Note: the governor of Louisiana is a Democrat. It was a stupid decision, but not a nefarious Republican plot.

Second, it now turns out that the Bataan in fact was on station and began search-and-rescue operations as soon as it could do so. The reports that the ship was just waiting around for days are simply false. Even Kevin Drum seems to have reluctantly given up on that nonsense.

Finally, Graydon's apocolyptic paranoia serves to undermine legitimate critcisms of the administration. Look, it's pretty clear that FEMA has been staffed with political hacks. As a result, the agency has performed incompetently, and failed to respond rapidly enough. Even now its response is bizarre -- witness the reports of firefighters being given sexual harassment training in preparation for depolyment as "community relations" people for FEMA, rather than being sent to assist the New Orleans Fire Department in actual useful work. Furthermore, the massive expenditures for "Homeland Security" appear not to have been made very efficiently. (This is attributable to both Congress and the President, who is unwilling to veto even the most pork-laden spending bills.) Those are fair, reasonable points.

But paranoid, overwrought hyperventilations serve only to undermine those reasonable points. The American people simply don't respond well to people who seem demented.

Adamsj, I don't see any evidence that the administration ever "decided" not to do these things. Bush isn't a libertarian, and never pretended to be. It would be one thing if the administration had succeeded in devolving this function to the private sector -- then at least Wal-Mart could deliver trucks with water in them unimpeeded. Rather, the administration said it was going to do this job and proceeded to do it poorly.

As for the bit about libertarianism being the Luddism of the 20th century, it's not worth my time trying to convince you otherwise. Nor would I bother arguing with somebody who wants to give even one cheer for old Ned Ludd.

So, why doesn't this weaken anybody's faith in the whole concept of having this big, powerful state which does all these things for us?

Seriously, the story of the survivors in New Orleans could easily be a chapter from a novel by L. Neil Smith. One might conclude that we need better government, or one might conclude that we need a lot less. If nothing else, he'd love the bit about how government officials interfered with a market transaction by commandeering buses which had been hired by private parties for evacuation. Under other circumstances, socialists like that sort of state intervention.

I'm not trying to make a cheap shot here. Rather, it does seem that government officials at all levels -- local, state, and federal -- seem hostile to the whole notion of private relief efforts, spontanous self-organization, and even using the resources at one's disposal to make one's life better. In effect, they infantalize people, encouring them to stand in line, do what they're told, wait to be ground through the machinery. It's not a conspiracy; it's a mindset, a philosophy of governance. Mike Brown's comments about how everything has to be organized and coordinated is a part of this mindset.

One of my concerns about the long-term effect of this is that exactly the wrong conclusions will be drawn. Many will say we need more of the same, only better this time. So we'll end up with more rules, more regulations, more controls.

When, in fact, one lesson ought to be "first, do no harm." If anything, we need to harness the power of spontaneous mutual aid and citizen volunteers. How many more people could have been evacuated quickly if they'd asked for volunteers to drive to certain locations to pick up people, a sort of vehicular Dunkirk?

Two other smaller comments while I'm at it.

First, I think it's a mistake to go overboard with the whole Bushiltler thing. Bush screwed up, and he deserves to be criticized, condemned, even excoriated for it. It's inexcusable that the top three guys at FEMA are all political operatives or cronies. But if Bush fell on his sword tomorrow, the mindset I talked about above would still be presesnt. Recall that a lot of the screwups happened at the local and state level. And no, I don't think that the local cops were getting secret orders from FEMA to keep the blacks bottled up at the Superdome. FEMA's not that competent or organized.

Second, it sometimes is the case that decisions which seem stupid or unreasonable at some remove actually do make some sense. Not to give people an unreasonable benefit of the doubt, but the bit about not letting people walk out might be one of them. I think that I detect a certain amount of Eastocentric perspective in Teresa's comments. Of course it makes sense for people to walk across the bridge out of Manhattan -- Brooklyn is on the other side. It makes much less sense to have people wandering around on the roads in Louisiana, which is far more rural and less hospitable.

This is not to say that it was right for the cops to lie in order to get people to move from an inconvient location, or that everything they did made sense. But "just walk out" makes a lot more sense in Manhattan than New Orleans.

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