[From the diaries by susanhu. Don’t miss the stats below on % of Nat’l Guard in Iraq — I heard the same on CNN today.] I get most of my news via various net sources, but my impression is that there are various parts of the Hurricane Katrina story that aren’t being covered.
Coincidentally enough, many of those things make the Bush Administration look bad.
I’ll give the condensed version after the jump, but American Progress has a good report here.
As a couple of folks here have mentioned, rescue and recovery efforts are no doubt being hampered by the fact that many members of the National Guard are thousands of miles away from where they’re needed, fighting a war started for — to put it politely — dubious reasons. According to an article in the Shrevesport Times:
Louisiana has 65 percent of its troops available for state missions; Mississippi, 60 percent; Alabama, 77 percent; and Florida, 74 percent, Guard officials said.
But that’s only the most blatant issue.
There an old britishism about being “penny-wise and pound-foolish”. Given the damages of this storm, perhaps we should update it to “million-wise and billion-foolish”:
Two months ago, President Bush took an ax to budget funds that would have helped New Orleans prepare for such a disaster. The New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suffered a “record $71.2 million” reduction in federal funding, a 44.2 percent reduction from its 2001 levels.
Sometimes I miss George the Elder. Well, not very often and not much, but compared to his kid, he seems positively wise:
The Gulf Coast wetlands form a “natural buffer that helps protect New Orleans from storms,” slowing hurricanes down as they approach from sea. When he came into office, President Bush pledged to uphold the “no net loss” wetland policy his father initiated. He didn’t keep his word. Bush rolled back tough wetland policies set by the Clinton administration, ordering federal agencies “to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands and an untold number of waterways nationwide.”
And then there’s the whole climate change issue. While it doesn’t make sense to point at a specific bit of weather and say that it was “caused by global warming”, most scientists who’ve studied the issues agree that (a) humans are having a significant effect on the atmosphere, (b) global temperatures seemed to be slowly rising, (c) it’s very likely that (a) is causally related to (b), and (d) those rising temperatures will likely contribute to more dramatic (read: more destructive) weather.
AP reported recently on a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis that shows that “major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific … have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent” since the 1970s, trends that are “closely linked to increases in the average temperatures of the ocean surface and also correspond to increases in global average atmospheric temperatures during the same period.” Yet just last week, as Katrina was gathering steam and looming over the Gulf, the Bush administration released new CAFE standards that actually encourage automakers to produce bigger, less fuel-efficient vehicles, while preventing states from taking strong, progressive action to reverse global warming.
As a side note, I hesitated before writing this diary, as I was reluctant to “politicize” the tragedy. But unfortunately, the tragedy was politicized even before it occurred. Thanks to the triumph of power over reason, everyone’s future has been politicized.