Who is YOUR regional FEMA chief?

[solarbird]

Do you live in an area that might be hit by a major natural disaster or terrorist attack? Sure, we all do! Do you know who your regional FEMA head is, with responsibility for Federal response in your area? Ours is a no-talent diploma-mill hack appointed by patronage! Better check out who yours is!

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002484649_pennington10m.html

Summary: The Pacific Northwest's FEMA chief, John Pennington, has a degree in Business Administration from an unaccredited correspondence-course school that the GAO has identified as a diploma mill selling diplomas for a flat fee. Despite being in charge of FEMA in four states (Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Idaho), he has no real disaster relief experience. He is, however, a former Republican legislator and headed local Bush-Cheney election campaign efforts. He was appointed by President Bush in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, with the help of Representative Jennifer Dunn.

I would assume from this that FEMA here will do no better than FEMA in the Gulf Coast. Which leads directly to my take on the Federal response to Katrina and NOLA:

The Federal Government has demonstrated - that's demonstrated, as in by its actions - that if you are not politically important to the current administration, you will be left to rot. FEMA will hamper local relief efforts, which will already be screwed up on their own but will be made significantly less effective by Federal ineptitude. In the critical hours and days after the event, you, your neighbourhood, your city, your town - you are on your fucking own.

The more I read about the FEMA response and the more I hear from people who were there on the ground, the more angry and disgusted I get. The response was (and is) un-fucking-believable, and is every turf-fighting bureaucratic responsibility-avoiding not-my-job imperious blame-the-victims fucktard nightmare imaginable. It is surreal. It is like parody.

I hope people who read me regularly will take into account the fact that I don't make shit up and that I don't generally go hyperbolic in my public journal. I'm angry here, but I'm not amping this to amp it. As far as I can tell, it really is that bad.

The best news I've heard is that President Bush yanked FEMA head Michael Brown back to DC. Now he needs to be fired and maybe prosecuted. But recalled is a good start.

Seriously, I barely know what to say. Four years of work to prepare specifically for things like this. Four years of massive taxpayer cash, of expanded government power, four years since 9/11 to prepare for a list of most-likely terrorist scenarios that specifically included a breach of the NOLA levee system, and FEMA is dramatically less capable of responding to a major hurricane than it was in 2001.

This is ineptitude to the level of criminality. Yes, locals fucked up too. Some of them very seriously. But FEMA is an example of taking a reasonably effective bureau and degenerating it into a botchfest busily making things worse. They broke it.

And sadly, President Bush prizes loyalty above everything else; as they say about this administration, no failure goes unrewarded. Because of that, I don't think it will get better until the next government, if not long after. I hope I'm wrong. I hope this administration will break from its normal responses and seriously clean house. I have written urging it to do so. But I don't think it will.

So until then - for the next five years or so, at least, counting restructuring time - assume that if we get hit with a major terrorist attack or natural disaster like this, you're completely on your own. Be ready to help yourself, to help your neighbours, help your city or town, and otherwise to wait it out without coordination or aid. You might get some - and hopefully it'll be more help than hindrance. But the odds are pretty damn good that you won't get help, or that if you do, it'll just be in the way.

The incompetent hacks are the ones throwing the party. That's where we seem to be now. And I have no other words for it than that.

Comments

[banner.livejournal.com]

I'm still wanting to wait a few months for the dust to settle and the facts to come out. There still seems to be a lot of stuff going around that seems to indicate that the Governor was trying to keep people out. And no matter what FEMA's rule may say, the Governor is the one who has the legal right to decide if FEMA can come in or not.

I do agree that it sure does look like Brown is a complete Fuckup. I'd like to know what happened there as well.

But the Mayor and the Governor still (to me at least) appear to deserve a whole lot more of the blame. They're supposed to have plans, follow those plans, and lead and organize. It's what they were put in office to do, and it's their job, not FEMA's.

I'm sorry, but I do not want FEMA or the President to be in charge of disaster relief in any city, in any state. I want the Local politicians to be doing that. I want FEMA and the President to be responding to those people, not to be the ones running the show.

[avram]

Yeah, we all know how much Bush would love taking orders from a state governor.

[banner.livejournal.com]

No, I do not know. Would you please tell me how YOU know?

And that's not the issue here anyways, I do not like handing ANY federal politician, or ANY federal agency any more power than they all ready have (regardless of their political stripes or political convictions), in my opinion they already have way way too much power and too much say.

[solarbird]

The problem is that they already have the power. It's very clear from my reading: they had it. They didn't need to do any waiting. They did anyway.

I agree they shouldn't be handed any more power. Having been handed too damn much is part of what I was complaining about above. But it's even worse to have it, then use it to interfere with, rather than facilitate, relief.

I gotta tell you, if they start using the newfound eminent domain for private corporations power to hand over big swaths of other peoples' property to private developers... I don't know what I'll do then. Seriously.

[darkphoenixrisn.livejournal.com]

The Pacific Northwest's FEMA chief, John Pennington, has a degree in Business Administration from an unaccredited correspondence-course school that the GAO has identified as a diploma mill selling diplomas for a flat fee.

Oy.

[solarbird]

Got a three-day pack? Better yet, got a week-pack and some water barrels? Get some.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

The republican party has never been shy about stating that in its view, we need less federal involvement. Their goal in recent memory has always been to "starve the beast". The oft-repeated idea that it should not be the federal government's responsibility to protect us from disasters, but local government's, is one they have worked hard to put into the public consciousness. Of course, the absurdity of this quickly becomes apparent when one realizes that disaster relief would also include things such as biological and chemical terrorism, and more conventional attacks such as the one that leveled the twin towers. Such things are on a scale where it is impossible for local government to respond by itself.

[kensaro.livejournal.com]

Terrorism is a different ballgame, but I believe that protection against natural disasters should be as localised as possible. People chose to live in a certain area, they should take interest (if not care) in how and if their local area is safe to live in, and ensure that it is, it's not really a matter of state. (I'm avoiding the obivious socialistic argument here, again, it's a matter of scale.)

[kensaro.livejournal.com]

And of course, there's a difference between disaster relief, and disaster prevention.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Scale? A terrorist attack on September 11th destroyed two buildings. A single hurricane destroyed an entire city, plus outlying regions. If scale is the issue, clearly the hurricane is larger and thus local agencies are less adequate to respond to it.

[solarbird]

The republican party has never been shy about stating that in its view, we need less federal involvement.
Yeah, but even there, see, what Republican control over the whole shebang has demonstrated is that that line was a big fat fucking lie. President Bush signed the biggest new entitlement into law since Lyndon Johnson, and has provided over the biggest Federal power grabs since, fuck, I don't even know. In decades. In short: they're big-government too. Just different big government. And better yet, they're worse at it.

[brombear.livejournal.com]

Ok...now for something that might cause another flamer...how ready would you be to resist, with force if necessary...police and military efforts to "hamper" cleanup and rescue efforts?

[wrog]

(as long as we're wading through hypotheticals here:)

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that there had been a (small) group in New Orleans that was doing just that. How would the reporting have been different?

[solarbird]

What're you talking about, armed street resistance? Bluntly: not very. I'm out of practice with a firearm of any sort and my tactical training is nonexistent. At that point it really is just war, and if we get there, well, then all bets are just off. I don't want to think we're actually getting to that kind of point yet.

If you're talking about, "FUCK you, go ahead and stop me," then I'm pretty good at bullying my way through those situations. That was apparently working pretty well in several areas of the Gulf Coast - a lot of people were saved and a lot of aid was delivered by people telling FEMA to fuck off. However, given that NOLA saw the use of firearms to prevent people from doing things like bringing in water and things like leaving the city, I don't know that I can assume that's what you're talking about.

[kvogel.livejournal.com]

The more the facts come out about who did or didn't do what, and who had authority to do what, it is clear that FEMA and the White House deliberatly stalled. Formal annoucements of emergency status were declaired (and were not nessisary for FEMA to pre-position or even come in full-tilt, the claim that Federal action needed local request is a lie) yet real action was simply not taken.
The ideology of government is not your freind stifled effective pre-and post- event actions. The failure of action was a deliberate choice by the administration.
This is not simply some rabid Bush-bashing.
The string of events, the whens and whos and hows of the days leading up to and all the days since, all point to intentional faliure., driven from the top down.

[solarbird]

I won't think about that until and unless there is widespread use of the newly-authorised eminent domain powers to hand property to corporations for private development.

[bjorker.livejournal.com]

I don't have a hell of a lot of time right now, so I WILL be back to read this fully - but damn, that seriously sucks. That's my last name too... *looks around* I need to go do a head count and make sure everyone in my family is accounted for. :P


Thanks for posting, I will be back.