Rockey Vaccarella, the Republican activist who drove a “replica” of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington for a carefully staged photo-op, said victims of Hurricane Katrina should be “happy with what they got.”
Looking at the numbers, they didn’t get much.
* Less than half of the city’s pre-storm population of 460,000 has returned, putting the population at roughly what it was in 1880.
* Nearly a third of the trash has yet to be picked up.
* Sixty percent of homes still lack electricity.
* Seventeen percent of the buses are operational.
* Half of the physicians have left, and there is a shortage of 1,000 nurses.
* Six of the nine hospitals remain closed.
* Sixty-six percent of public schools have reopened.
* A 40 percent hike in rental rates, disproportionately affecting black and low-income families.
* A 300 percent increase in the suicide rate.
Like 9/11, Katrina was supposed to “change everything.” Poverty was supposed to be a front-burner issue again, with the president promising “bold action.” Barriers that keep low-income families, particularly African-American families, from getting ahead would finally get some long-overdue attention. New Orleans would see a rebuilding effort the likes of which we’ve never seen.
But the aftermath and political rhetoric was full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Frank Rich made a compelling case that Katrina, for Bush’s presidency, was very much the domestic version of Iraq.
The ineptitude bared by the storm — no planning for a widely predicted catastrophe, no attempt to secure a city besieged by looting, no strategy for anything except spin — is indelible. New Orleans was Iraq redux with an all-American cast.
Nowhere is that more true than in the area of lucrative, no-bid contracts, most of which were awarded noncompetitively, wrought with fraud. Congress passed four emergency spending bills to direct more than $110 billion in aid to the Gulf Coast — of which far less than half has been spent. And of the $44 billion that has been spent, House Dems found — stop me if you’ve heard this one — ample “waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement.”
As Paul Krugman explained, “As the Iraqis learned, allocating money and actually using it for reconstruction are two different things, and so far the administration has done almost nothing to make good on last year’s promises.”
For example, although Congress allocated $17 billion to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for Katrina relief, primarily to provide cash assistance to homeowners, as of last week the department had spent only $100 million. The first Louisiana homeowners finally received checks under a federally financed program just three days ago. Mississippi, which has a similar program, has sent out only about two dozen checks so far.
Local governments, which were promised aid in rebuilding facilities such as fire stations and sewer systems, have fared little better in actually getting that aid. A recent article in The National Journal describes a Kafkaesque situation in which devastated towns and parishes seeking federal funds have been told to jump through complex hoops, spending time and money they don’t have on things like proving that felled trees were actually knocked down by Katrina, only to face demands for even more paperwork.
Apologists for the administration will doubtless claim that blame for the lack of progress rests not with Mr. Bush, but with the inherent inefficiency of government bureaucracies. That’s the great thing about being an antigovernment conservative: even when you fail at the task of governing, you can claim vindication for your ideology.
But bureaucracies don’t have to be this inefficient. The failure to get moving on reconstruction reflects lack of leadership at the top.
Yesterday, returning to the scene of the crime, Bush told reporters in New Orleans that there are “a lot of problems left.” It was, alas, a spectacular understatement.
This imagery seemed to capture the problem perfectly.
Mr. Bush delivered his remarks at an intersection in a working-class Biloxi neighborhood against a carefully orchestrated backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. Just a few feet out of camera range stood gutted houses with wires dangling from interior ceilings. A tattered piece of crime scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet seat lay on its side in the grass.
Perfect.