(no subject)

[heidi]

Cenk Uyger, one of my dorm-mates from my freshman year at Penn, is one of the bloggers at the Huffington Post, and this weekend, he posted an interesting exploration of some of the theorizing about government that people like Grover Norquest and Rush Limbaugh have been harping on these last two weeks - the question I have, especially for those of you who are, or have been, conservatives or more libertarian (the latter as I myself have been at times) - what are your thoughts? Anon commenting is allowed and although I'm still keeping IP logging on, I promise to not use it for anything that isn't an actual LJ ToU violation. I've seen a lot of discussion from the right recently that emergency response is entirely the responsibility of the local and state government, but if that's the case, when did it change? Can anyone deny that last fall when the hurricanes hit Florida, the government stepped in to help throughout the recovery process, and the national guard was there hours after the eye had passed? 4000 soldiers & airmen, my statels national guard site says, were activated to aid in disaster relief. In contrast, only 7,500 troops were activated to help in three states as of September 1, with a storm that was much more severe, regardless of the flooding aftermath. how does this make sense?

Also, those who've been passing around and reposing Larry Bradshaw's story, it's now in the New York Times, along with a confirmation by Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., Police Department, "that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge." He had not, as of yesterday, asked his officers about whether any of them threatened people with guns or fired weapons over people's heads.

Comments

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

I'll have to ask him about it, but I was talking with my Chief Political Correspondent last night, who got back from the APSA meeting about a week ago...and there is study, which really did *just* come out (in perfect ironic timing), about how much the response to disasters varies according to one thing:

Is it an election year? If so, watch the money flow, baby!

It also matters quite a bit what state is affected--is it a major state, but more importantly, is it a potential swing state. (I'll try to get the actual citation for the paper, I will.) Florida is, of course, and so there was an assload of help for Charley.

Post-9/11, FEMA has been shoved to the backburner. I was a resident of a town on the Mississippi River when everything went to shit in 1993, although my town was spared by being further downriver and having a floodwall. But some areas of town did flood. What did FEMA do?

They bought it out. They bought out these old houses in really low-lying areas that couldn't be wall-protected (our old downtown is), and those parts haven't been redeveloped. When we had some subsequent minor flooding, no property damage.

But to the Republican restructuring, that's dangerously close to (ewwww) WELFARE, and they've butchered that part of FEMA. They've reoriented the department towards terrorism. And since when has the Republican party been good at realizing the dangers of humanity tampering with natural systems?

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~reeves/papers/fema.pdf is the link to the paper. It's about the effect of disaster relief on presidential elections; congressional affects have been studied, but presidential ones have not, in a systematic manner.

[verstehen.livejournal.com]

Well, disaster experts have been saying for years that the most effective prevention/rescue organizations are the ones that are community based (this would be something like tornado warnings here in the midwest, which are completely community-based). But, uh, last I heard that hadn't been implemented.

[belleweather.livejournal.com]

I think that conservatives have a hard time in this case getting around Article Four of the US constitution, which specifically grants the responsibility to protect the several states from domestic distrubance to the federal government.

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

he posted an interesting exploration of some of the theorizing about government that people like Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh have been harping on these last two weeks - what are your thoughts?

The traditional archconversative rationale is simple. Small central government is best because it maximizes individual freedom and income.

Unfortunately for Norquist et al, this rationale is doomed by the same rampant jingoism that put Bush in the White House. To argue against a strong central government -- which is literally the only thing that links all Americans, that determines who is an American and who is not an American -- is to devalue the concept of being an American. "We take care of our own" -- this sentiment commands far more power in the average American's psyche than "Lower taxes means more freedom."

You can see the other side of this coin in the fact that so many Americans are only now realizing that Bush's worldview, callousness, and incompetence inadvertently kills people.

It's not a new idea at all; it's an old idea, demonstrated conclusively by the tremendous pile of 30K+ corpses manufactured by his pet war, almost certainly a multiple of the Katrina death toll. What's new is that Americans die too.

Even aside from the jingo element, there was no human depth to the Iraqi death stats. We never saw those people and their trauma in a hundredth the detail Katrina has generated. They had no Broussard talking about someone's mother drowning to make us cry, and if they had, he'd have been speaking in a foreign language. And, in the end, he wouldn't have been an American.

Well, these people are Americans, they speak English, and their grief is the media event of the year.

Republicans tend, if anything, to be still more jingoistic than Democrats. This is why it's so easy for them to turn on Bush now, as you see all over Fox; it's impossible to spin New Orleans as an attempt to protect Americans and American interests, the way Iraq was.

As for Norquist, he's widely believed to be a crook, caught up in the Abramoff/Native Americans scandal which is also dogging Senator Burns' career.

I won't play

[amandageist.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, Heidi. I would love to engage you on this, except I have engaged you various times over the years and although you ask for debate, what you really want is affirmation. Either opinions confirming your thoughts, or opinions which do not agree, which you can then contest, proving to yourself in the process both the brilliance and perfection of your argument. If a solid point is brought up, it is not acknowledged--the tactic of questioning sources, or of bringing up one exception to invalidate a "trend" argument is used. Never is it even hinted, in any of your posts, that other ways of intepreting the same facts may be in any way valid or true. I can't debate with a 'my way or the highway' mindset, no matter how open it tries to sound. The best I can ever do is argue you to an "agree to disagree" point--and that's hard to do in any case, since you talk large trends but want to argue tiny points--and if that's where we start, why bother? If I thought you wanted to learn, or understand the approach of those who feel differently than you, I would engage you willingly--not to convert or belittle, but to help you understand (which I why I post on Peg's LJ; she truly does want to understand). But you want to argue dissent away to shore up your own thoughts, and you have enough people to do that for you.

Re: I won't play

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I posted this link on my own journal, and I want an explanation as much as Heidi does.

Re: I won't play

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

The Bradshaw link, I mean.

[kokopoko.livejournal.com]

I think, from what I've read, it's everyone's fault. The mayor didn't follow his emergency plan to get the poor out, the governor wasted time, the feds didn't care and didn't give a damn.

I think the reason Florida got such help is because Bush and Bush are brothers.

[cleverthylacine]

Okay, here's what I think. Socially, libertarianism makes sense. The government doesn't need to be involved in what you're allowed to eat, drink, do in bed. Although I do see a role for government to enforce labelling, just as it has always been the role of the government to enforce accurate standards of weights and measures--fraud is bad, and while I'm not going to stop people from eating things that are bad for them, they should know.

But the libertarian party has been taken over by a sort of vaguely Objectivist sort whose moral philosophy is Calvinism with G-d excised and Work put in its place, and those who don't Work (i.e do things that they get paid for) of little value--including children and the people who devote the majority of their time to caring for them, the elderly, and the disabled. Suddenly proof of your membership in the Elect is not G-d's favour but good luck: the fact that not only have you managed to find people to pay you for whatever you do enough that you can set a lot aside for your old age or your offspring, but also, that you have managed to avoid hurricanes, earthquakes, a devastating illness or accident, and all the other many things that can wipe out even a wealthy person's savings quickly.

I'm not a Libertarian. I'm a Republican. I haven't voted for any Republican presidential candidates in a long time because my views are minority views in terms of party leadership (I don't see what's socially conservative about denying people the right to get married or legitimising shacking up in order to avoid it, I am not Christian and never will be, etc) but the thing is, supposedly we're in favour of *limited* government, not *no* government. Ideally a social contract exists to serve the following purposes:

* to defend the society that it governs from dangers without and within (war, crime, and in the modern world where we understand the dangers of epidemics, viruses and bacteria too--I'm a health care worker and have argued conservative positions in favour of single payer health care before);

* to support the continuation of society in the face of large catastrophes;

* to keep people out of each other's private business and to adjudicate disputes;

* to prevent fraud etc.

The idea is that government exists to prevent human liberties and facilitate human enterprise.

If you ask me, the problem with both parties is not 'big government'--it's the legal confusion of corporations with persons and the insane idea that corporations should have 'civil rights' such as the right to participate in the political process. This country went wrong when it allowed corporations to participate in the political process, because they are so much bigger than people as financial powers and social powers. Essentially this serves to disenfranchise human beings, and sadly, my party is more in thrall than the Democratic party, but they are both pretty well enslaved and as no third party alternative has corporate backing, third parties are dead in the water.

But yes. By G-d, from a conservative or libertarian standpoint, dealing with Katrinas is what government is FOR. We're not (supposed to be) anarchists. We're supposed to believe that government is there to deal with the BIG stuff, not to micromanage our daily lives.

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a libertarian...

I think the conservative/libertarian point of view is basically "Do your job right or get out of the way and let someone else do it." There are some more extreme wings of the parties that believe in the total dismantlement of the government (the Libertarian party platform is disgusting in that regard). But it's also quite reasonable to believe that government ought to be smaller than it is now.

The biggest advantage of private enterprise is that it can be replaced. Ask yourself: would you pay $20/year for a service that acts like FEMA did in this disaster? Would you pay more than that for a service that actually did its job and kept you safe? But because FEMA's a government agency, you don't have a choice in the matter. Its existence, role, and budget are all set by elected officials who, chances are, you didn't vote for.

I think it's clear that Americans want the federal government to protect them in disasters. The question is what they get. Up until the New Deal in the 1930s, disaster relief was primarily the responsibity of state, local, and community officials. And the results are mixed, just like they are under the federalized area. San Francisco in 1906, Baltimore in 1904, and Washington in 1814 all were rebuilt successfully by local businessmen and civic organizations. Galveston was not - at least, not to the same glory - but apparently the rebuilding was quite inspiring. The 1964 Alaskan earthquake happened after people had begun to think the federal government should take a more active role, but as is typical of dealings with Alaska, they didn't. Katrina was a government failure; the Florida hurricanes last year, evidently, were not. It seems like the success or failure of the rebuilding effort depends little on whether or not the government intervenes.

So the choice seems to be hit-or-miss relief by the government, or hit-or-miss relief by the local citizenry. You get the same outcomes, but you don't spend $5 billion a year on an ineffective bureaucracy. It's not whether we want the federal government to take care of us that matters. It's whether they will. And the record's pretty spotty.

There were plenty of private efforts to help out with Katrina. And many were actively stopped by governmnt officials. Wal-Mart sent in 3 trucks full of water to the convention center - they were stopped by FEMA and sent back, because they hadn' been "authorized". The Red Cross had volunteers standing by to go to the convention center: the Louisiana Homeland Security department forbid them from going, because it was "too dangerous". Buses bought

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

And I hit submit a bit too quickly. Continuing...

Buses chartered privately by hotel occupants were commandeered by FEMA, and then sat idle. Fuel ordered by St. Bernard's Parish was seized by the national guard for their own use.

It's one thing to not do your job right. It's another to actively prevent others from doing it for you.

Like any organization, the government has limited resources, and it often does a piss-poor job of allocating them. But unlike other organizations, the government doesn't go out of business when it screws up. We just suffer.

And I might post later, to my own journal, on exactly what I think the government's role should be. But that could get rather long and would likely fill up another 2-3 comments.

[selinakyle47.livejournal.com]

My problem with relegating rescue, recovery and aid to private enterprise comes down to 2 things. One, if the disaster area encompasses several states (like Katrina did) or a fairly large metropolitan city (like NOLA), then local and community resources are quickly overwhelmed financially and logistically. Also, as in the case with NOLA, the local infrastructure was damaged, which hampered their ability to respond.

Secondly, if cities were to contract out rescue and relief services, I would worry that the poorer communities would have a difficult time getting equitable allocation of services compared to more wealthy cities who could afford better and more numerous sources of aid.

While private offers of aid have been more than helpful, the federal government is still needed to coordinate and allocate the resources needed to deal with the crisis, regardless of the economic status of the citizens needing help. Of course, it has performed poorly these past 2 weeks, but I don't think it's an indication of all it could possibly do.

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

But all those problems seemingly apply to federal relief efforts too. The damaged infrastructure in New Orleans is hampering FEMA and the National Guard as much as it is private SAR groups. Possibly more so, if the SAR teams are local, because they then know the ins-and-out of the area instead of being completely at a loss because the interstate is underwater.

And they haven't exactly been doing a good job at coordinating things. So far, coordination seems to mean basically "If you're not FEMA or the military, get out of the area." That's ignoring resources, not allocating them. I almost think that Google should've come out with a G!Maps extension that overlaid Craigslist requests for rescues and GPS data from rescuer and showed everyone a map of where all the rescuers were and all the people needing rescue. Heck, the technology exists already. Hook that into Walmart's inventory system and you'd know exactly what food & water was available too. Then you call for everyone on the gulf coast who has an airboat/jetski/zodiac/rowboat, hand them a portable radio, GPS receiver, and cheap laptop, and have them ferry supplies in and people out by water. Get 1000 people, with maybe $2000 of equipment each, and you're looking at $2 million. And I bet it would've been far more effective than what we actually did.

Ultimately, disaster relief comes down to people. The federal approach is to have someone at the top who coordinates everything and then gives orders (through several layers) to the troops on the ground. But disasters are too big for any one person to handle: it's just too easy to get overwhelmed and not do anything. Instead, I'm proposing that disasters ought to be handled by giving the relevant information and resources to the folks on the ground and letting them make the decisions.

As for the poor not getting help: that's an issue, but it's an issue even with federal disaster aid. As someone mentioned above, the biggest factor determining whether someone will get help is whether it's an election year. That and whether they live in a swing state and are likely to vote for the incumbent. Government just replaces money with votes as a currency.

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

Also, the one thing that concerns me about leaving disaster preparation to private and local organizations is that corporations have notoriously short time horizons. Note that all the successes I mentioned earlier - Baltimore, San Francisco - had strong rebuilding efforts. But they might not have needed rebuilding had they not been so flammable to begin with.

Unfortunately, an inability to plan ahead seems uniquely human, and not just uniquely corporate. Look at the $500 million or so levee strengthening plans that were scrapped by the federal government before the storm hit. So I'm not sure the federal government would do any better.

[bordergold.livejournal.com]

Last year, after Ivan, the guys who run the Tulane Medical Center (I can't remember the name of the company) sat down and made a game plan in case there was a severe hurricane in NO. Two particularly interesting things: 1)They were based in Nashville 2) Their job was NOT disaster relief, it was to run their medical centers.

But they did a hell of a job anyway. They considered all the angles. What if the electricity ran out? How are we going to get our patients out of the disaster area? How will we get food or supplies? If we bring in helicopters, where will we get them and how do we keep them from crashing into each other?

They thought if it all. They signed contracts with local suppliers. They bought generators and set up their own air traffic controllers using radios. And when the hurricane struck, they shipped out all their patients and medical personnel - in spite of the same problems that faced FEMA and the idiot Brown, such as snipers and lack of electricity. And then went back and picked up some of the people from University and Charity.

What I would like to know is, why wasn't Louisiana as well prepared? Why didn't Ray Nagin and New Orleans have a similar plan?

My personal experience with federal interference is limited to the Northridge earthquake, where the government pulled some crazy shenanigans and caused too many middle class business owners to file bankruptcy, while those just hovering over the poverty line were given free rent for months. Of course, financial difficulty is not the same as dead bodies, and that earthquake was no Katrina, but I'm just saying, the federal government will make a hash of things when left to their own devices.

Without assigning any blame here, it would have been more effective for the locals, both in New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, to come up with their own "in case of emergency" plans rather than trust that Brown the idiot and FEMA would save them. They know their own homes and their own city and their own state better than any Washington official.

(Of course, the fact that they were not as well prepared as they could have been does not in any way exonerate Brown the lying idiot or FEMA or any of the whole sorry lot. But it just goes to show that you ought never trust the government to save you. Thus, I'm going to go build some bunkers now, seeing as a California earthquake is probably going to be the next major national disaster.)

PS. I just realized that I sound even nuttier than I really am. Truly, I do not believe in government conspiracies or such. But one can always rely better on oneself than on a set of idiot bureaucrats and squabbling lawyers two thousand miles away.

[cadetsandkings.livejournal.com]

Basically, YES. You said it way better than I did.

[(Anonymous)]

it would have been more effective for the locals, both in New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, to come up with their own "in case of emergency" plans rather than trust that Brown the idiot and FEMA would save them....

While this is true, the problem is that Louisiana & Mississippi are about the poorest of the US states, and New Orleans has (or rather, had) some of the most concentrated poverty in the US. Along with poverty comes all sorts of problems with their government -- poor training, corruption, etc. This should not be a death sentence for the people who live there -- but without federal help, that's exactly what it was for many of them.

[bordergold.livejournal.com]

Well, federal help in the form of Brown isn't exactly inspiring.

[selinakyle47.livejournal.com]

This brings to mind the woman who asked, while being rescued, if she needed to pay for a ticket to get on the helicopter, with the implication that she would've rather stayed home and died than added more debt. The poor shouldn't have to think about that, and unfortunately that's what I fear will happen when the federal government's role in disaster response and relief is lessened rather than expanded.

[cadetsandkings.livejournal.com]

As several people have said, and as a Libertarian myself, I believe that while individual, city, and state preparedness are of the utmost importance in ANY situation (72 hours, they've always said), I also believe that this kind of situation of all others it precisely where the federal government MUST step in and take care of the states/cities that are affected.

Regardless of whether you are talking about a stripped-down form of national government that Libertarians would generally like to see or the current bells-and-whistles one we have, hands down the one deepest resource is that goverment. It's the network that ultimately connects us, short of interstate agreements or support.

I think the people in New Orleans were let down HORRIBLY by their local and state leaders, who wanted too much from the feds for a number of reasons. I think there's a lot to the philosophy espoused by Libertarians and old-fashioned Republicans that you have to be able to take care of your own first; this event tells me that we need to begin shoring up our states' abilities to handle disasters independently of immediately forthcoming federal aid.

I agree with you

[judyserenity.livejournal.com]

I've seen a lot of discussion from the right recently that emergency response is entirely the responsibility of the local and state government, but if that's the case, when did it change? Can anyone deny that last fall when the hurricanes hit Florida, the government stepped in to help throughout the recovery process, and the national guard was there hours after the eye had passed?

No, I don't think anyone can deny that Federal aid arrived quickly in Florida.

As for those who say emergency response is the responsibility of local and state government, I'd make two comments. First, if that's the case, what is the Federal government doing taking National Guardsmen and shipping them overseas? Second, if the Federal government has so little responsibility, then what gives it the right to levy such high taxes? I don't see how local and state governments are supposed to provide those services with Federal taxes sucking up so much of the US national product.

One of the things that angers me is much is that Bush has been asking for a *lot* -- money, restriction on civil liberties -- in order to keep Americans safe. Then, when tens of thousands of Americans are in danger, he doesn't seem to care. I guess it wasn't our safety he cared about after all -- just his war. (I have an essay about this on my LJ.)

Thanks for the link to the Bradshaw article; people should know!!! (For those who haven't read it, it says that people trying to evacuate on foot from New Orleans were blocked from crossing bridges out of the city by police from the suburban areas who apparently didn't want "their kind" around; the police reportedly fired guns over their heads to scare them back into the city.)

(By the way, the "Kitty plays with an anony-mouse!" entry from a few minutes ago is mine. Sorry, didn't realize I wasn't signed in! At least the kitty imagery is appropriate.)