In this week’s Newsweek, Jonathan Alter asks how President Bush could have been so inept at handling Katrina recovery:

Not only has the president done much less than he promised on the financing and logistics of Gulf Coast recovery, he has dropped the ball entirely on using the storm and its aftermath as an opportunity to fight poverty. Worker recovery accounts and urban homesteading never got off the ground, and the new enterprise zone is mostly an opportunity for Southern companies owned by GOP campaign contributors to make some money in New Orleans. The mood in Washington continues to be one of not-so-benign neglect of the problems of the poor. …

… If the president was MIA, Congress hasn’t been much better. Consider the estate tax and the minimum wage. The House in June passed a steep reduction of the estate tax (so as to apply only to couples leaving more than $10 million to their heirs) that would cost the Treasury three quarters of a trillion dollars over the next decade. Last time I checked, that was real money. Senate Republicans tried to push it through by linking the bill to an increase in the minimum wage, which has not been raised in nine years. The idea was to get credit for giving crumbs to the working poor—but only if the superrich receive hundreds of billions of dollars. Fortunately, the bill failed. Unfortunately, other tax cuts for the wealthy keep moving through the system, ballooning the deficit and drying up money for everything else. Meanwhile, the GOP wants to make welfare reform (now 10 years old) more punitive, which will increase suffering. …

… After all the heat he took last year, how could Bush have blown the aftermath of Katrina? It’s not as if he lacks confidence in the power of his office. He believes he can fix Iraq and transform the Middle East. He aspires to spread democracy to the far corners of the globe. But the fate of an American city and millions of his impoverished countrymen are apparently beyond his control, or perhaps just his interest.

Gordon commented on the last post that what we’re seeing is the natural result of conservative ideology. Bob Burnett wrote about this recently at Huffington Post. Contemporary conservativism is all about shrinking government and “drowning the beast” in the bathtub. However,

During the last five years, conservatives discovered that while Americans rail against the federal government in the abstract, they actually like the programs it provides, such as Medicare and Social Security. They want their mail delivered on time and levees maintained to guard them from floods.

In Why Conservatives Can’t Govern political scientist Alan Wolfe observes. “Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain… The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.”

Faced with the reality that Americans secretly like the federal government, conservatives had two invidious responses: privatization and patronage. In Federal agency after agency, conservative Bush political appointees privatized jobs that formally had been done by agency employees. This resulted in deterioration of service and massive cost overruns. This can be seen in the Bush Administration’s handling of FEMA, where many of the essential functions were outsourced to corporations–with disastrous results, as was seen in the response to Hurricane Katrina. Privatization has been one of the major problems with the occupation of Iraq; selling Iraqi assets off to multinational corporations is not a substitute for building a civil society.

For years conservatives have been telling each other a fairy tale about government: that government is the problem, not the solution, and if government could just be shoved aside we would all live happily ever after. Without government, the good Market Forces fairy would be freed, and our wishes would be granted as naturally as the rain falls and the sun shines.

Alan Wolfe observes that since the primary objective of conservatives was thwarted–they couldn’t shrink the size of government–they settled for preventing it “from doing any good.” From the Department of Justice to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bush Administration eased federal regulations and reduced oversight responsibilities; the result was an across-the-board abandonment of the public interest. Conservatives abandoned a vital historic role of the federal government: protection of our rights.

Simultaneously, conservatives used the resources of the federal government as a vehicle for unprecedented political patronage; strengthening the Republican Party by securing huge donations from corporations. Conservative control of government unleashed an unprecedented wave of venality, a hybrid form of plutocracy where the interests of corporations where given primacy over the rights of individuals. This bias had many forms: sole-source contracts given in Iraq, bribery of Administration and Congressional officials, heightened influence of lobbyists, and elimination of bipartisanship — creation of an atmosphere where fairness and cooperation are seen as character flaws.

This is not necessarily new. Fred Siegel wrote (scroll down to subhead “American History” to read the entire essay):

… in rapidly industrializing post-Civil War America, the Whig politics of property, organized to protect wealth from the democratic “mob,” underwent an extraordinary transformation. “What it did,” writes Louis Hartz, “was to smash the ‘mob’ into a million bits, so that the fierce acquisitive passion, instead of being expended against property, would be expended against itself in the quest for property.” From roughly the end of the Civil War to the onset of the New Deal, there was a right wing in American politics but nothing, literary tendencies aside, that could be described as “conservative” as the term is commonly understood. The right wing turned against government in the name of that oxymoron laissez-faire conservatism and feared the state as an instrument of majoritarian reform. This came to be called “the American (as opposed to European) Way.”

State action, said social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner, threatened the natural social processes that produced prosperity through inequality. State action to regulate business or protect workers from injury was said to be the equivalent of European socialism and thus a threat to civilization itself. Or as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., explained it, the rise of big business was merely the working out of a law of nature and law of God. In the Gilded Age “the inequalities of nature would be allowed to run their full course.”

The Right sold this nonsense to voters by appealing to “that part of the American individualist psyche that has found all institutions, let alone the state, a suffocating danger.” That’s still true today, but today the Right has the advantage of control of most news media and highly sophisticated propaganda techniques. Bob Burnett wrote in his Huffington Post piece,

In the face of ideological failure, managerial ineptitude, and widespread corruption, why do any Americans support President Bush and his conservative cronies? The answer lies in the skillful use of propaganda by the Bush Administration. On a daily basis, citizens are fed lie after lie; told that Bush and the GOP mean well, have the best interests of the US at heart.

For the most part, Americans have bought these lies. And, they can’t resist the promise of a free lunch. Thus, while Americans didn’t accept the conservative notion of shrinking the size of the Federal government, they willingly supported the foolish notion of paying less for exactly the same services. In many parts of the nation, naïve citizens have been slow to associate deterioration of public services with the conservative Bush ideology, but eventually they will.

Burnett may be optimistic. A big chunk of our citizenry has been so brainwashed with the notion that government doesn’t work that they accept the atrocity of Gulf Coast “reconstruction” as proof.

One difference between then and now is that during the Gilded Age and many years after, the “activist judges” were on the side of the Right.

The post-Civil War Supreme Court led by Justice Stephen Field reshaped the Fourteenth Amendment (designed to ensure due process for the freed slaves) into an instrument of laissez-faire. In the Slaughterhouse cases of 1873, Field suggested that the very idea of economic regulation was un-American. And in the Pollock income tax case of 1895, progressive economic policy was denounced as “socialistic” and “communistic.” The Supreme Court saw itself as fashioning the Constitution into a bulwark “behind which private rights and private property may shelter themselves and be safe” from “the will of the majority.” In short, for conservatives the only good legislature was an adjourned legislature.

Today, the courts mostly have acted as our last shield between individual rights and the totalitarian Right. No wonder the righties hate the judicial branch.

“Laissez-faire conservatism reached its intellectual apogee in the 1920s.,” Siegel writes. The Depression, followed by the New Deal, drove it into disrepute. The Right was also home to rabid isolationists who refused to see the dangers posed by the emergence of Hitler, and many of them remained stubbornly isolationist through World War II. Needless to say, by 1945 the Right was way out of the mainstream. However, during the Cold War righties were able to take credibility on foreign policy away from the Left through a campaign of hysterical charges and brazen lies, as explained in this post.

But how did laissez-faire and free-market ideologies make such a triumphant comeback? I think the chief wedge issue used by the Right to separate voters from progressivism was race. I explained here how the Republicans capitalized on a white backlash against the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs to lure white voters away from the Democrats. Expanding on that a bit — voters enraged by federally mandated desegregation were voters easily persuaded that the federal government was too powerful and needed to be taken down a few pegs. Voters who resented Ronald Reagan’s apocryphal black welfare queen were voters persuaded that Republicans wouldn’t throw money away on foolishness like entitlement programs, the way those tax-and-spend Democrats do.

And although I haven’t taken a demographic survey, it has struck me for a long time that so many of the loudest drum-beaters for the Right were born in the 1960s and 1970s. They don’t remember the New Deal; they don’t remember the post-World War II economic explansion, which peaked about 1972. They’ve been programmed with rightie beliefs all their lives, however, to the point that the rightie world view is all they know. I fear that younger voters — younger than me, anyway, which is most people — will be very hard to win back to progressivism. They’ve never seen true progressivism at work during their lifetimes, and years of rightie programming will make many of them averse to giving progressivism a try.

But then came Katrina, and I sincerely believe most of the nation is disturbed at how slowly the Gulf is being reconstructed. The first Atlantic hurricane of the year, Ernesto, could reach Florida by Thursday. The nation will be watching.

“We will stay until the job is done,” President Bush said today about the Gulf Coast, which is the same thing he said earlier this week about Iraq. But isn’t it odd that he speaks about a region of the U.S. the same way he speaks about a foreign country? “We” will “stay” in the Gulf Coast until the job is done? The Gulf Coast is home; it’s us. We’re staying whether the “job” gets done or not.

[Update: Josh Marshall noticed the same thing —

Commenting on Katrina recovery Saturday in his weekly radio address, the President sounded as if he were reading from one of his Iraq speeches by mistake: “We will stay until the job is done.” Well, it’s not as if the federal government can hightail it out of Louisiana or Mississippi. Where would it go exactly?

The further implication of the President’s remarks is that the federal government was not present before Katrina struck, an absurd and offensive suggestion. New Orleans would not have existed as a modern city if not for the Army Corps of Engineers. The President would have us believe that the federal government came to the rescue after this natural disaster, albeit a bit late. In fact, the Corps and decades of federal flood control policy played a pivotal role in what was a manmade disaster in New Orleans–the failure of the levee system. (No one has done a better job of banging this drum than Harry Shearer, the actor, comedian, author, media critic, and sometime journalist.)

It was a really weird thing to say, even for Bush.]

Frank Rich, behind the New York Times subscription firewall [Update: Here’s the column outside the firewall.]

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. The discrepancy between Mr. Bush’s “heckuva job” shtick and the reality on the ground induced a Cronkite-in-Vietnam epiphany for news anchors. At long last they and the country demanded answers to the questions about the administration’s competence that had been soft-pedaled two years earlier when the war first went south.

And the same federal contractors that soaked up billions in tax dollars to not reconstruct Iraq are getting more billions to not reconstruct the Gulf Coast.

A year after the storm, the reconstruction of New Orleans echoes our reconstruction of Baghdad. A “truth squad” of House Democrats has cataloged the “waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement” in $8.75 billion worth of contracts, most of which were awarded noncompetitively. Only 60 percent of the city has electricity. Half of the hospitals and three-quarters of the child-care centers remain closed. Violent crime is on the rise. Less than half of the population has returned.

Let the cameras roll:

What’s amazing on Katrina’s first anniversary is how little Mr. Bush seems aware of this change in the political weather. He’s still in a bubble. At last week’s White House press conference, he sounded as petulant as Tom Cruise on the “Today” show when Matt Lauer challenged him about his boorish criticism of Brooke Shields. Asked what Iraq had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush testily responded, “Nothing,” adding that “nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks.” Like the emasculated movie star, the president is still so infatuated with his own myth that he believes the public will buy such nonsense. …

… with no plan for salvaging either of the catastrophes on his watch, this president can no sooner recover his credibility by putting on an elaborate show of sermonizing and spin this week than Mr. Cruise could levitate his image by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. While the White House’s latest screenplay may have been conceived as “Mission Accomplished II,” what we’re likely to see play out in New Orleans won’t even be a patch on “Mission: Impossible III.”

Ann M. Simmons, Richard Fausset and Stephen Braun write for the Los Angeles Times that the Katrina disaster isn’t something that happened a year ago; it is ongoing.

Despite four emergency spending bills passed by Congress to provide more than $110 billion in aid, federal agencies have spent only $44 billion. Even as President Bush insisted last week that “$110 billion is a strong commitment,” he conceded that the recovery effort was plagued with “bureaucratic hurdles.”

The scale of the catastrophe continues to overwhelm the government’s capacity to respond. Aid agencies only now are contending with the long-term needs of hundreds of thousands of evacuees and with the landscape of shattered houses and public infrastructure that will take years to restore.

Many homeowners and business owners have waited impatiently for promised grants and loans as federal and state officials have spent months dickering over how much and where to spend aid — and officials remain at odds over who bears the blame for the inconsistent flow of Katrina aid. …

… But after a year of fielding constituents’ pleas for help, U.S. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., said, “We’re seeing the same thing going on with the recovery as we did with the immediate response. We’re going through another unfolding disaster.”

Get this:

Until last week, when the White House Office of Management and Budget released an agencywide breakdown of recovery spending, the administration had not provided a clear overview of how the money was being doled out. For much of the year, elected officials, government auditors and outside experts had to rely on fragmentary indicators of the pace of recovery spending, which handicapped efforts to monitor the process.

“It’s not only that we don’t know what’s been spent. We haven’t even had an accurate description of what ‘spent’ means,” said Rob Nabors, Democratic staff director for the House Appropriations Committee. “They talk about ‘commitments’ and ‘obligations’ — they’ve invented new terms for not spending money.”

Somebody better watch ’em to be sure Katrina money isn’t ending up in the Middle East somewhere.

In today’s radio address, President Bush delivered a couple of paragraphs about how awful it was and how “Americans responded with heroism and compassion” to last year’s Katrina disaster. And then he said (emphasis added),

Unfortunately, Katrina also revealed that federal, state, and local governments were unprepared to respond to such an extraordinary disaster. And the floodwaters exposed a deep-seated poverty that has cut people off from the opportunities of our country. So last year I made a simple pledge: The federal government would learn the lessons of Katrina, we would do what it takes, and we would stay as long as it takes, to help our brothers and sisters build a new Gulf Coast where every citizen feels part of the great promise of America.

I’d like to know more specifically what lessons he thinks “the federal government” ought to learn, and if he has any clue that “the federal government” has, in fact, learned anything so far.

James Gerstenzang writes in today’s Los Angeles Times that the anniversary of Katrina presents a public relations challenge for Bush’s handlers.

Bush is planning to spend much of Monday and Tuesday in Mississippi and Louisiana, visiting regions that were devastated by the winds and floods that accompanied the storm.

His goal, said White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino, is to “reflect on the many people who died,” as well as on those who rescued others. He will examine “how America opened up its arms and wallets” to care for the survivors.

But in the view of administration officials, their advisors and others, the question of how Bush should approach the anniversary is a difficult one. Speechwriters must craft presidential remarks that recognize devastation and recovery, but that also show an awareness of government failures in responding. Staffers must find locations for his visit that demonstrate progress but do not minimize problems and mistakes.

But electronic and print media are running a flood of feature stories and programs with a unanimous message: The government’s response to Katrina continues to be a bloated, wasteful, inefficient mess. Here are just a few links to stories I found this morning:

Michael Eric Dyson, “Not Much Has Changed,” Newsweek (web exclusive).Blurb: “President Bush made some bold promises to help the Gulf Coast’s poor after Katrina. Too bad he hasn’t kept them.”

Michelle Roberts, “New Orleans awaits billions in fed aid,” Associated Press

William Douglas, “Bush has fallen short in steering recovery, experts say,” McClatchy Newspapers. See also McClatchy’s “Katrina One Year Later” archive.

Eric Lipton, “Despite Steps, Disaster Planning Still Shows Gaps,” New York Times

Stephen Sackur, “One year on: Katrina’s legacy,” BBC. Blurb: “New Orleans sells itself to the world as the Big Easy. But one year after Hurricane Katrina there’s nothing easy about life in New Orleans.”

Ben Macintyre, “Another Katrina and that’s it,” Times (London) Online. Blurb: “The future of New Orleans depends on restoring coastal wetlands. Guess how much has been done.”

Kristin Jenson, “Katrina, One Year Later: A city in ruins, then and today,” Bloomberg. Let’s look at this one:

This is New Orleans a year later:

Fewer than half the city’s hospitals are open.

More than 85 million gallons of drinking water are leaking into the ground each day.

Mangled cars, mounds of debris and broken traffic lights mar a city with half the population that lived there Aug. 29, 2005 — the day Hurricane Katrina struck.

Thousands of homes stand deserted.

That’s just a tiny sampling. If you do a news google for “Katrina” you get hit after hit with the same bleak message. What you don’t get are news stories about how President George W. Bush showed excellent leadership and expedited timely and efficient federal response to the recovery effort. And that’s because he didn’t.

The President’s recent statements on Katrina emphasise the big appropriations made by Congress for Gulf Coast recovery. But this Associated Press story by Michelle Roberts says that, so far, New Orleans has received only “$117 million for largest urban restoration in U.S. history.” This is mostly because of bureaucratic hurdles at the federal level —

For every repair project, city officials must follow a lengthy application process — and spend their own money — before getting a dime of federal aid to fix at least 833 projects such as police stations, courtrooms, baseball fields or auditoriums.

Residents don’t care much what the cause is. They’re just tired of crater-like potholes, sudden drops in water pressure and debris-clogged storm drains.

‘‘We’re not asking for a lot. At this point, we’re just looking for basic services: power, gas, water. Sewer that doesn’t back up into your house would be nice too,’’ said Jeb Bruneau, president of the neighborhood association in the Lakeview area. ‘‘Whatever the snafu was, the result is Joe Blow Citizen isn’t seeing the effect of that federal money.’’

Righties like to whine about the evils of bureaucrats and bureaucracies, but the fact is bureaucracies are as good or bad as their management. Clearly, the management of FEMA continues to be the same morass of incompetence it was a year ago. Early this year there was some noise about reforming FEMA, but as Seth Borenstein reported for Knight Ridder, the “reforms” under discussion amounted to tweaking the morass. Borenstein wrote that the disaster experts he interviewed …

… pointed to a recent Government Accountability Office report and to the upcoming House report, saying the problem is leadership and accountability and that it starts at the Department of Homeland Security.

Penn State University public administration professor Beverly Cigler, who studied the response to Katrina for an association of public administration professionals, said some of the administration’s changes would make matters worse by removing preparedness from FEMA.

“The way it is now, none of these piecemeal things will deal with FEMA being buried in a gigantic bureaucracy,” Cigler said. “I think we are in worse shape now than we were pre-Katrina.”

This summer, Congress was still debating whether to keep FEMA within the Department of Homeland Security or make it separate. Nothing substantive has yet been attempted to untangle the morass. (Do a news google for “FEMA reform” and you’ll get hits guaranteed to raise your blood pressure.)

Back to this Associated Press story:

President Bush has acknowledged the problems posed by excessive bureaucracy.

‘‘To the extent that there still are bureaucratic hurdles and the need for the federal government to help eradicate those hurdles, we want to do that,’’ Bush said Wednesday at the White House.

A year has passed. What is he waiting for?

FEMA has signed off on $4.8 billion worth of rebuilding in Louisiana and $1.7 billion in Mississippi so far, said Darryl Madden, a spokesman for FEMA’s Gulf Coast recovery office. … The procedural requirements for local governments to collect federal aid are designed to ensure the money is spent properly, Madden said.

‘‘We are dealing with very, very large dollars. There has to be accountability,’’ he said.

Accountability? That’s rich. As I wrote a couple of days ago, the Bushies refuse to be accountable for anything they do, but they are determined to be sure state and local governments don’t misspend a penny. (For more on why the feds need a bit of watching, see Jordan Green, “Profiting from Disaster,” at CounterPunch.)

What’s stunning about this mess is that President Bush continues to be disengaged from the problems of the Gulf Coast. Sure, he’s flown down to the Gulf to get his picture taken from time to time, but what has he actually accomplished, other than sign some congressional appropriations? What has he even tried to do? Even after he blew the initial response, the Katrina disaster was still a big, fat opportunity for the President to restore his credibility. For example, he could have followed Franklin Roosevelt’s “100 days” example and call a special session of Congress to work out exactly how relief and recovery could be expedited. He could have called in the heads of agencies involved and demand that he be updated regularly on what was being accomplished, not on how much money was appropriated. He could have rattled some cages and demand accountability for ongoing problems months ago.

Yet last December I quoted a Time magazine article (no longer free content) in which the White House seemed at a loss to think of something to do.

The plan is to make January a critical month in what the President’s aides hope will be a turning-point year. The White House expects a quick victory on Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and the State of the Union speech will nod to big goals. But when it comes to fresh and concrete ideas, the list of what Bush will actually try to accomplish in 2006 is so modest that one bewildered Republican adviser calls it “an insult to incrementalism.” …

…White House advisers tell TIME that the agenda for 2006 is in flux and that senior aide Karl Rove is still cooking up ideas. But the initiatives they have settled on sound more like Clinton’s brand of small-bore governance: computerizing medical records; making it easier for workers to take their health benefits with them when they leave a job and–an idea that captured Bush’s imagination in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina–giving a boost to Catholic and other private schools as an alternative for inner-city children.

Karl Rove was the guy in charge of Katrina recovery, remember. It seems to have slipped his mind.

Well, one politician’s screwup is another politician’s opportunity — Jim Kuhnhenn writes for the Associated Press —

On the verge of Katrina’s one-year anniversary, Democrats from New Orleans to New Haven, Conn., to New York are launching a coordinated political assault on the Bush administration’s response to the devastation that struck the Gulf Coast.

Democratic lawmakers began arriving in the stricken region Thursday, making a stand that will culminate Monday when about 20 House Democrats convene in Bay St. Louis, Miss., for a town hall meeting. Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana plans to deliver the Democratic response to President Bush’s Saturday radio address.

I like this part —

House Democrats on Thursday accused the administration of poorly managing the recovery effort, saying 70 percent of $10 billion in recovery and reconstruction funds were awarded to contractors without competitive bids.

“There is no question that incompetence by the Republican administration and their leaders in Congress, the lack of open government and honest leadership is a campaign issue,” said Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee.

In New Orleans on Thursday, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said after a tour that the city needs a massive public works project to rebuild it physically and economically.

“For as much money as we spend in one week, one week, in Iraq – $3 billion – we would create 150,000 jobs in America,” he said. “If we spend it all along here in New Orleans, that would be 150,000 high-paying jobs. That’s where we have to go.”

That’s a great message. Dems should keep pounding it into the public from now until election day.

Peter Wallsten and Maura Reynolds write for the Los Angeles Times:

As next week’s anniversary of Hurricane Katrina triggers recollections of rooftop refugees and massive devastation along the Gulf Coast, the White House has begun a public relations blitz to counteract Democrats’ plans to use the government’s tardy response and the region’s slow recovery in the coming congressional elections.

President Bush will visit the area Monday and Tuesday, including an overnight stay in New Orleans. He probably will visit the city’s Lower 9th Ward, the heavily black area that remains mired in debris, and is expected to meet with storm victims. …

What do you want to bet those “storm victims” will be very carefully vetted? If not bused in from somewhere else?

… The White House announced Bush’s visit Tuesday as a phalanx of administration officials stood before reporters to argue that billions of dollars had flowed to the region and millions more was on the way. …

…At Tuesday’s briefing, White House aides passed out folders and fact sheets that painted a picture of aggressive recovery efforts. A packet from the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the levees that were breached after the storm, carried the slogan: “One Team: Relevant, Ready, Responsible, Reliable.”

Donald E. Powell, the White House official in charge of recovery plans, declared that Bush was “fulfilling his commitment to rebuild the Gulf Coast better and stronger.”

I like this part:

The plans for the trip were disclosed one day after Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales announced that he was sending additional lawyers and resources to the city to fight fraud and abuse.

He’s sending lawyers and resources to the city to fight fraud and abuse?

Today the House Committee on Government Reform Minority Office (that means Democrats) released a report titled “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Hurricane Katrina Contracts.” I haven’t had a chance to study it, but here are key findings from a press release:

* Full and Open Competition is the Exception, Not the Rule. As of June 30, 2006, over $10.6 billion has been awarded to private contractors for Gulf Coast recovery and reconstruction. Nearly all of this amount ($10.1 billion) was awarded in 1,237 contracts valued at $500,000 or more. Only 30% of these contracts were awarded with full and open competition.

* Contract Mismanagement Is Widespread. Hurricane Katrina contracts have been accompanied by pervasive mismanagement. Mistakes were made in virtually every step of the contracting process: from pre-contract planning through contract award and oversight. Compounding this problem, there were not enough trained contract officials to oversee contract spending in the Gulf Coast.

* The Costs to the Taxpayer Are Enormous. This report identifies 19 Katrina contracts collectively worth $8.75 billion that have been plagued by waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. In the case of each of these 19 contracts, reports from the Government Accountability Office, Pentagon auditors, agency inspectors general, or other government investigators have linked the contracts to major problems in administration or performance.

I repeat — Gonzales is sending lawyers and resources to the city to fight fraud and abuse?

According to an Associated Press story by Matt Crenson, “Bush fulfills few promises to Gulf Coast“:

A June report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that FEMA wasted between $600 million and $1.4 billion on “improper and potentially fraudulent individual assistance payments.” …

… More than 100 million cubic yards of debris have been cleared from the region affected by Katrina. So far the government has spent $3.6 billion, a figure that might have been considerably smaller had the contracts for debris removal been subject to competitive bidding.

Can someone who can do arithmetic figure out how much the govenment has spent per cubic yard, assuming $3.6 billion for 100 million cubic yards? My calculator doesn’t go that high.

Working through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA gave each of four companies contracts worth up to $500 million to clear hurricane debris. This spring government inspectors reported that the companies — AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Knoxville Ceres Environmental Services Inc. of Brooklyn Park, Minn., and ECC Operating Services Inc. of Burlingame, Calif. — charged the government as much as four to six times what they paid their subcontractors who actually did the work.

Here’s an oldie but goodie — Justin Park reports for The New Standard:

Taxpayers around the nation who urged the federal government to pay for relief and reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina probably didn’t expect their money to be spent on $279 meals and $2,500 tarps. But according to a newly released report, corporations hired by the federal government have not only inflated costs but committed labor abuses and delayed the reconstruction process, making millions while local companies and workers have been left behind.

The report, released last week by the Oakland-based non-profit CorpWatch, which investigates the private sector, details corporate price gouging, contracting pyramid schemes, labor abuses and unnecessary delays in the wake of last year’s hurricane season. The “disaster profiteers,” as CorpWatch calls them, include Halliburton, Blackwater, Fluor, CH2M Hill and Bechtel – all of which have also received federal contracts for work in Iraq.

“What we found is that rampant disaster profiteering abuses are needlessly slowing down the reconstruction of New Orleans and the rest of the stricken Gulf Coast region after Katrina,” CorpWatch director Pratap Chatterjee told reporters. Chatterjee, who is author of the book Iraq Inc. about contractor abuses in halfway around the world, compared the situation along the Gulf Coast to that of the Middle East.

According to the report, the clearest instances of waste in Gulf Coast reconstruction are the contracting pyramids schemes – layers of subcontracting that turn an easy profit for the many middlemen. This layering creates distance between corporations such as Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and the subcontractor that ultimately performs the work. It allows KBR, for example, to plead ignorance when labor abuses are uncovered, as happened when a subcontractor was caught employing undocumented immigrants late last year and accused of mistreating them.

And the punch line —

The report also alleges that many workers, both undocumented and otherwise, remain unpaid. As also reported by The NewStandard, immigrant workers – many of them undocumented – were drawn to the disaster zone by promises of high wages and plentiful work. When they arrive, many face hazardous work conditions and often are stiffed out of pay.

But we can’t have Louisiana letting any fraud and abuse slip by, can we?

In his Monday press conference Bush said he wants “local folks” to make decisions about how to proceed with recovery. But along with the fact that most of the big contracts are being made between the feds and their pet contractors, it seems the Bush Administration is overriding state decisions. Back to Crenson:

Despite Bush’s Jackson Square promise to “undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities,” state and local officials had a hard time reaching a deal for federal aid to help residents rebuild their ruined homes.

In January the administration rejected a $30 billion plan for Louisiana as too expensive. The White House also balked at subsidizing the reconstruction of homes in flood plains, a policy that would have excluded all but a small fraction of Louisiana homeowners whose houses were significantly damaged.

The state finally won funding in July for the $9 billion ‘Road Home’ program, which pays homeowners up to $150,000 either to repair their damaged property or rebuild elsewhere in the state. People who leave the state are eligible for a 60 percent buyout. The money, which is being distributed through escrow accounts to prevent fraud, is just becoming available a year after the hurricane.

$9 billion is just about what we’re pissing off about every six weeks in Iraq, is it not? But putting that aside — does the Bush Administration’s treatment of Louisiana just reek of imperialist condescension, or what? His Gloriousness says he wants to be a partner with the states and cities; he says he wants them to make decisions; but then he overrides their decisions and rejects their requests. And while Bush’s courtiers piss off money right and left, the Royal Fart Joke wants to be sure the colonials are being frugal.

I don’t doubt that some of the delays are happening at the state and local level, and the insurance companies’ foot dragging and shirking has added to the general misery. But what the Gulf Coast needed before, during, and after Katrina was competent and coordinated management and oversight of the regional recovery process. And that management and oversight should have come from the federal government.

Crenson of the Associated Press revisits the President’s famous floodlights in Jackson Square speech of last year to see how many of his promises have been kept. So far, one: Storm survivors are no longer living in shelters. Large numbers of them are still camping out in other “temporary” quarters, however, with no clue how long it will be before they have a permanent home. Some other promises have been partly filled, and the rest seem to have dropped off the to-do list without explanation.

You’d think (and I’ve said the same thing about Iraq, many times) that with so much of Bush’s political capital and credibility on the line, the Administration would have been at least paying attention to the Gulf Coast recovery to be sure something was happening. But so far it’s all been meandering along with no direction or oversight, and not much in the way of haste. My impression is that most of what has been accomplished so far was accomplished through private initiative and money, not through anything the Bush Administration did.

So now they’re putting on a spectacle and handing out folders and fact sheets. Do they think they’re going to fool anybody, when people can just drive around the Gulf Coast and notice how much isn’t being done?

By the way, do you remember who Bush named to be in charge of overseeing recovery efforts? Karl Rove. Last September, Dan Froomkin wrote,

All you really need to know about the White House’s post-Katrina strategy — and Bush’s carefully choreographed address on national television tonight — is this little tidbit from the ninth paragraph of Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson’s story in the New York Times this morning:

“Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort.”

Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.

That is Rove’s hallmark.

Rove’s hallmark is not, however, actually doing stuff. Tangible stuff, that is. Rove is an illusionist. He mounts pageants; he creates spectacles; he builds images. All of his works are as substantial as smoke. Sorta like Hurricane Katrina recovery.

Update: Dr. Ronald Walters writes,

Although what happened in the New Orleans gulf was arguably the worst internal disaster in American history, there has been nothing like the urgent attention the administration gave to New York City after the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Truth is, it was the city and state of New York doing the work. The feds just showed up to get their pictures took.

… one year later, 100 million pounds of debris still lay on the ground in and around New Orleans, tens of thousands of people cannot return to their homes, the infrastructure of public utilities in the city of New Orleans has not been restored, contractors are bringing in immigrant workers who further displace New Orleans’ poor, and the politics and bureaucratic inertia—complicated by the theft and broken promises of private financial agents—form impenetrable barriers that make it difficult for people to surmount to retrieve their lives.

I watched the first half of Spike Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina last night. Riveting and gut-wrenching. If you get HBO, be sure to see it.

Among many things revealed by the storm was our ambivalence about federalism and the respective roles of state and federal government. You might remember that as people waited for rescue from the flood, the Bush Administration’s attitude was that the hurricane was a state and local problem.

The President was asked about Katrina during yesterday’s press conference. His response, in short, was that a whole lot of money had been allocated, but that it was entirely up to people at state and local levels to figure out how to proceed. And I agree that governors and mayors and people close to the destruction should be determining what needs to be done and making decisions about allocation of resources.

However, something seems to be seriously out of whack, somewhere. Chris Adams, Jack Douglas, and Sharon Schmickle report for McClatchy Newspapers:

Hundreds of thousands of lives are on hold throughout New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. One year after Katrina devastated the area on Aug. 29, huge swaths of the region are barely beyond the basic cleanup stage.

Life for many survivors is still one obstacle after another:

New Orleanians must contend with the loss of public schools (only 29 percent are open), bus routes (only 49 percent are operating) and child-care centers (only 23 percent are open), according to an index of Katrina statistics compiled by the Washington-based Brookings Institution. Everybody has insurance hassles to deal with or FEMA stories to tell.

Many communities remain scattered; some neighborhoods seem irreparable. And it’s been a year. There’s no excuse for this.

One big flaw in the “it’s the states’ problem” theory is that a big chunk of the federally allocated money is going into the pockets of federally contracted businesses. And these people are doing to the Gulf what they did to Iraq. Justin Park reports for The New Standard:

Taxpayers around the nation who urged the federal government to pay for relief and reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina probably didn’t expect their money to be spent on $279 meals and $2,500 tarps. But according to a newly released report, corporations hired by the federal government have not only inflated costs but committed labor abuses and delayed the reconstruction process, making millions while local companies and workers have been left behind.

The report, released last week by the Oakland-based non-profit CorpWatch, which investigates the private sector, details corporate price gouging, contracting pyramid schemes, labor abuses and unnecessary delays in the wake of last year’s hurricane season. The “disaster profiteers,” as CorpWatch calls them, include Halliburton, Blackwater, Fluor, CH2M Hill and Bechtel – all of which have also received federal contracts for work in Iraq.

“What we found is that rampant disaster profiteering abuses are needlessly slowing down the reconstruction of New Orleans and the rest of the stricken Gulf Coast region after Katrina,” CorpWatch director Pratap Chatterjee told reporters. Chatterjee, who is author of the book Iraq Inc. about contractor abuses in halfway around the world, compared the situation along the Gulf Coast to that of the Middle East.

According to the report, the clearest instances of waste in Gulf Coast reconstruction are the contracting pyramids schemes – layers of subcontracting that turn an easy profit for the many middlemen. This layering creates distance between corporations such as Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and the subcontractor that ultimately performs the work. It allows KBR, for example, to plead ignorance when labor abuses are uncovered, as happened when a subcontractor was caught employing undocumented immigrants late last year and accused of mistreating them.

I like this part:

The report also alleges that many workers, both undocumented and otherwise, remain unpaid. As also reported by The NewStandard, immigrant workers – many of them undocumented – were drawn to the disaster zone by promises of high wages and plentiful work. When they arrive, many face hazardous work conditions and often are stiffed out of pay.

Slavery is the new capitalism.

Let’s look at some of the comments made by the President yesterday:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. As you know, the one-year anniversary of Katrina is coming up. And there are a lot of retrospectives about what went wrong down there last year. Specifically, what has your administration done in the past year to help the folks down there, and what remains to be done?

THE PRESIDENT: Thanks. You know, I went to New Orleans, in Jackson Square, and made a commitment that we would help the people there recover. I also want the people down there to understand that it’s going to take a while to recover. This was a huge storm.

First things — the first thing that’s necessary to help the recovery is money. And our government has committed over $110 billion to help. Of that, a lot of money went to — went out the door to help people adjust from having to be moved because of the storm. And then there’s rental assistance, infrastructure repair, debris removal. Mississippi removed about 97 percent, 98 percent of its — what they call dry debris. We’re now in the process of getting debris from the water removed. Louisiana is slower in terms of getting debris removed. The money is available to help remove that debris. People can get after it, and I would hope they would.

Q What —

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish. Thank you.

We provided about $1.8 billion for education. That money has gone out the door. We want those schools up and running. As I understand, the schools are running now in New Orleans, a lot of schools are.

Only 29 percent of those schools are open, according to the McClatchy Newspapers report quoted above.

Flood insurance, we’re spending money on flood insurance. There is more work to be done, particularly when it comes to housing. We’ve spent about — appropriated about $16 billion, $17 billion for direct housing grants to people in the Gulf Coast and in Louisiana.

I’m not sure to which “$17 billion for direct housing grants” the President refers. I googled and learned that there is a program called “Road Home” that has $7.5 billion for individual grants to Louisiana homeowners who want to rebuild and repair, and another $1.7 billion for relocation. And as of today, guess how much of the housing grant money has made it into the hands of homeowners?

Zero. However, 42 homeowners should get checks by the end of this week.

The program was delayed at several points. It took Congress ten months to allocate the money, and Governor Kathleen Blanco held it up a couple more months to make sure safeguards were in place to prevent fraudulent claims.

But I bet Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t have let Congress dither for ten months over an appropriation like this. He would have shoved it through Congress. Personally.

Bush says he wants “local folks” to be in charge:

I thought it would be best that there be a local plan developed and implemented by local folks. And so there’s now, as I mentioned, $16 billion of direct housing grants. Each state has developed its own plan, how much money goes to each homeowner to help these people rebuild their lives. And so I think the area where people will see the most effect in their lives is when they start getting this individualized CDBG grant money.

And that sounds grand, but if most of the recovery money is going to contractors, and the contracts are being made in Washington, and all these federal contractors are operating without oversight, then seems to me those local folks don’t have much control over what’s getting done. And from what I can tell not much is getting done, except where private capital is available to get it done.

And it also seems to me that there is more to be considered than just rebuilding homes and businesses. IMO there should be a master, multi-state plan that takes meta-issues like flood prevention, wetlands and ecosystems into consideration. Otherwise, decisions made by local officials now might create big problems later. I’m not saying the feds should dictate every detail of the recovery, but they should be providing some general oversight and parameters. A big chunk of the United States was damaged; and the success or failure of the recovery will have long-term effects on the entire country. The feds should have some responsibility beyond allocating money.