Colin calls Bush to task...
It's one thing to put city tasks in the hands of cities and another entirely to cut the Army Corps of Engineers budget down to 20% specifically for building these levees when the city requested them. FEMA had identified a hurricane in New Orleans as one of the top three worst disasters likely to happen this decade. The whole country suffers with New Orleans thanks to our global economy. I don't pin this on Bush nearly so much as the whole anti-government, pro-privatization crowd he and his ilk have brought into power.
This argument has several basic problems.
It is not under the federal jurisdiction to provide for local disaster prevention. That is up to the cities and states. The Army Corps of Engineers budget for this should have been cut down to 0% and not 20%. The 20% was overgenerous.
FEMA compiled data that called this a threat. Your response is to blame the feds instead of the state. I think it was awfully nice for the feds to pay for a threat assessment for nothing for Lousiana.
Also...at what point is the state responsible? At what point is the city responsible? At what point do they become responsible for having a disaster plan? From what I understand, New Orleans is a city of about 500,000 people. Cities of that size dot the California landscape...should it be up to the feds to provide a distinct disaster plan for each of them? Each city is different and will have different needs...there's no way that the feds would be as good at monitoring what those cities need as they or their state counterparts would (they could perhaps provide advisory information on what sorts and quanties of emergency supplies to have on hand).
Following your argument to its logical conclusion, what you're proposing is that the federal government be held responsible for virtually every facet of governmental intervention in American life. This is completely antiethical to what we're about. Power is reserved to the states, and then given to the federal government only within the scope of specific powers granted to it by the Constitution. Beyond that scope, the federal government cannot legally act. Such is the case with the levees in New Orleans. They can no more legally build (or upgrade or repair) a levee system for New Orleans than they can forcibly take my land for use by a private land devel...err...than a state can pass a law taxing goods from another state. It's outside the bounds of their jurisdiction.
Privatization is not inherently bad and in many cases is most excellent. For example, I remember a story on the history channel about a nuclear reactor that went bad and irradiated a HUGE area. The army was called in, but eventually it took General Electric to come in and fix it. Most private organizations don't have the idiotic and insane bureaucracies that government organizations have. This slims down costs and helps prevent the enormous cost overruns that are typically displayed by government organizations. In addition to the above reasons for privatization, there is again the issue of jurisdiction creep. In every endeavor that the government takes, their first question should be, 'Is this directly within the scope of my jurisdiction?' If the answer is 'no', then they should stop dead in their tracks.
Last but not least, the city asking for the levees does not mean that the federal government is supposed to supply them. I don't care if New Orleans needed the levees - they asked the wrong organization for them. This is like asking your plumber to replace your breaker box and getting mad when he doesn't and your house has an electrical fire as a result. It's not his job or his function to manage breaker boxes. There are others that hold that job, and they are the ones who should have taken the initiative to make sure that was taken care of.
Ultimately, the existence of a problem is not indicative of the need and jurisdiction for a governmental solution to it.
Bartleby
6 Comments:
Well, to start with, we have a fundamental disagreement about the role of government. I believe the federal government has a national interest which it needs to protect by providing services to member states when their needs mirror the nation's needs. Most of our oil passes through New Orleans. It is very strategic and not merely another town in California or it wouldn't have been labeled as a top three disaster threat to America. It's not the number of people there that made it a threat, but the danger to our country's future and its economy.
Secondly, your logical conclusion isn't. It was widely known from research by LSU, done for FEMA last July, that the impact of a hurricane in New Orleans would be devastating with as many as 300,000 people trapped in the city and 1,000 shelters holding people for at least 100 days. Neither the city nor the state has the resources to handle this. Neither did they have the resources and expertise to build all the engineering structures required to contain the damage. Such a disaster is clearly an exceptional situation deserving of extraordinary measures, which in this administration is an overused concept often applied to Iraq. Due to this exceptional need, federal help was requested numerous times in the months prior to the hurricane.
I should also add that "most" privatization efforts aren't great successes. Look at HMOs as an example. In Minnesota counties that have HMOs, we pay about 20% overhead on all Medicare costs to the HMO. In counties without HMOs, we pay Medicare to the doctor's office directly at about 7% overhead. Can you show me where privatization just saved me money because I want to strangle an HMO exec for robbing me as a huge bureaucratic middleman through your free market system? The difference is the private organization has to maximize profit through any means.
I realize we disagree about the role of government. Your point about oil passing through New Orleans is an excellent one, and that DOES change my mind, because that is a matter of national security.
The impact of the hurricane and the requests from the city are not sufficient to bring forth federal jurisdiction (though your national security point is). While the state does not have the resources to recover from the tragedy, they should have had the resources to build up the levees - they may not have had the skillset or the workers on the state payroll, but I'm willing to bet cash money that there are private enterprises out there that could have modified them to a safe standard before the storm hit once they found out that federal aid would not be forthcoming.
Even if they didn't have enough money to rebuild the levees, they should either have found a way or made the PLANS (if not the purchases) for what to do in case this happened. As it is, you can tell no plans were made, or the buses would not have been left in the parking lots, evacuation routes would have been planned, a chain of command would have been established and followed, and so on and so forth. Doing these things would not have required many people and would have been well within the available resources of the state government.
All that aside, the need of a state does not magically create responsibility on the part of the federal government. It also does not magically create the money to do what the state needs to do. With as bad as the corruption is in Louisiana politics, I'm not sure I'd have given them any money either. ESPECIALLY with this being the case:
http://www.torontofreepress.com/2005/cover090605.htm
Ultimately, I agree with you, but only because of national security. I don't think that the feds were responsible because of the scale, but because it's a matter of security. Honestly, that's enough to make me wonder if Bush had an ulterior motive...for the first time ever...because his family retains its oil interests (hehe...I'm also heavy in oil stocks, but I'm not rich).
Bartleby
You're absolutely right about corruption in New Orleans. In fact, one reason the mayor didn't have the money for the levees is at least partly because, as he'd pointed out, the corrupt city assessors were dramatically underassessing many properties to the tune of $100 million a year in property taxes. That is not a federal problem, but there was clearly a great need. The estimated cost of the necessary category 5 hurricane protection was $2.5 billion.
The state should have been able to come up with enough to pay for the levees, if not the entire bill for cat-5 protection.
Bartleby
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