Priorities all askew

The situation in New Orleans along the Gulf Coast is beyond tragic. But it's not too soon to consider just how much less horrific the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina could have been, if not for tax cuts for the rich, the deadly boondoggle that is the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and Bush Inc.'s insistence on cutting funding to FEMA and other domestic programs that aid Americans in situations like this one.

From the San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 2004, in the aftermath of last year's horrendous hurricane season:

Disaster in the making
As FEMA weathers a storm of Bush administration policy and budget changes, protection from natural hazards may be trumped by "homeland security."
by Jon Elliston

Fridays don't get much busier than this. It's the morning of Sept. 3, and Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., is running at a full clip, having mobilized a cadre of disaster-response specialists in its National Emergency Operations Center the day before. "This is our 'war room,'" a FEMA employee explains.

"Right now we're in 24-hours-a-day activation," he says. "It's a double whammy." Indeed, the agency is still busy helping Florida recover from Hurricane Charley's punishing winds and rain when satellite images show that an even greater storm, Hurricane Frances, will soon make landfall. It appears so threatening that most of FEMA's personnel on the ground, along with 2.5 million Floridians, have evacuated from the storm's projected path....

As storms continue to batter the Panhandle, no one would call Florida lucky. But with national elections just around the corner, the hurricanes could scarcely have hit at a better time or place for obtaining federal disaster assistance. "They're doing a good job," one former FEMA executive says of the Bush administration's response efforts. "And the reason why they're doing that job is because it's so close to the election, and they can't fuck it up, otherwise they lose Florida -- and if they lose Florida, they might lose the election."

Such political considerations may indeed make this round of recoveries go better than most. But long before this hurricane season, some emergency managers inside and outside of government started sounding an alarm that still rings loudly. Bush administration policy changes and budget cuts, they say, are sapping FEMA's long-term ability to cushion the blow of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Among emergency specialists, "mitigation" -- the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters -- is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half, and now communities across the country must compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.

As a result, some state and local emergency managers say, it's become more difficult to get the equipment and funds they need to most effectively deal with disasters.

In the Bay Area, where living on an earthquake fault should prioritize disaster preparedness, state and city funding for emergency management and citizens' training is often precarious.

"We have a limited state grant, but we rely more heavily on federal funding," says Lt. Erica Arteseros, coordinator of the San Francisco Fire Department's Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training program. She describes the tight budgetary situation of a year ago, when NERT funding was cut on both city and federal levels. "We had to operate pretty much on a shoestring."

"We need every Homeland Security dollar we can get," agrees Amy Gaver, director of community preparedness and youth services for the Bay Area chapter of the American Red Cross. "Training people to take care of themselves in a disaster should be a necessary investment on the part of the government."

On the state level, California disaster management agencies voice concern about the ongoing congressional proposals to halve federal funding for training citizen disaster response teams. Adam Sutkus, state director of the Citizen Corps program, says, "Congress often argues that federal money isn't adequately used by state agencies and local programs. But here in California, 92 percent of the funds for fiscal year 2002 were used directly on the local level. That proves that we do need and use the money. The proposed federal cuts could be very damaging to Californian volunteer disaster response programs."

In North Carolina, a state regularly damaged by hurricanes and floods, FEMA recently refused the state's request to buy backup generators for emergency support facilities. And the budget cuts have halved the funding for a mitigation program that saved an estimated $8.8 million in recovery costs in three eastern N.C. communities alone after 1997's Hurricane Floyd. In Louisiana, another state vulnerable to hurricanes, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer.

Consequently, the residents of these and other disaster-prone states will find the government less able to help them when help is needed most, and states and the federal government will be forced to shoulder more recovery costs after disasters strike....

There's much, much more here

Remember, while Bush Inc. was cutting funding to programs that would have served to alleviate to a significant degree the chaos and suffering that has come in the aftermath of Katrina, they were a) launching and continuing our absurd invasion and occupation of a country that was no threat whatsoever to us, an occupation manned largely by the very National Guardsmen and women and reserves who ought to be here in the U.S. protecting and assisting the innocent victims along the Gulf Coast, and b) giving huge tax breaks to the wealthiest among us.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg regarding Bush Inc.'s disinterest in protecting Americans in times of strife, natural and otherwise. Their destructive measures are further exposed in this Salon.com piece by Sidney Blumenthal:

"No one can say they didn't see it coming"
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Aug. 31, 2005 | Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. [emphasis added] The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late....

There's much more here. (If you can't access the full story, use Salon's day pass option -- it's well worth clicking through a few ads.)

It's shameful. Bush Inc. could have done nothing about Katrina, of course, and no one's suggesting that they could have. But lessening its impact and easing the suffering in its aftermath? They had every opportunity to do that, and they opted not to, preferring instead to further line the pockets of the wealthy and to embark on a war of choice in Iraq.

Just as they had every opportunity to do something about the events of September 11, 2001, and chose to keep their heads in the sand.

Compassionate conservatives, my pale white ass.

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