While poor New Orleans residents at the city’s convention center suffered from hunger, dehydration and violence—while people literally died awaiting rescue—President George W. Bush told then-FEMA director Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
Despite wall-to-wall TV news coverage, President Bush’s people didn’t know anyone was having trouble at the convention center until four days after the hurricane hit. Nonetheless, “Brownie” was doing a heck of a job.
That’s the cost of Bush-style politics.
A former failed horse show manager, Brown had only one real qualification for the top Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) job: a three-decade friendship with Joe Allbaugh, who managed Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign before being crowned FEMA’s first director. Other very political appointees filled out FEMA’s top ranks, including a chief of staff who had been an advance man for Bush and a deputy chief of staff who had been a Bush media strategist.
No one should have been surprised when our disaster chiefs dropped the ball so completely. Back in June 2004, the AFGE, which represents FEMA staffers, sent Congress a letter warning that FEMA’s ability to respond to disasters was being degraded by contractors and other outsiders with little or no valid experience being placed in top management positions. The experienced and committed government workers at FEMA weren’t authorized to rip into fast, life-saving action when Katrina struck.
It took days for FEMA’s politicized leaders to even recognize the catastrophe. In contrast, floodwaters had barely begun to recede when Bush issued an executive order removing Davis-Bacon wage protections for the workers who will rebuild the Gulf Coast. His administration also suspended Jones Act requirements that petroleum products must travel on U.S.-flagged ships while operating in U.S. coastal waters, weakened contract preferences for small and minority-owned businesses, deferred requirements for contractors to make affirmative action plans and eased rules on how many hours truckers can drive when transporting fuel. And tucked into hurricane relief legislation was a goodie allowing no-bid federal contracts of up to $250,000. All gifts corporate lobbyists love.
The Bush administration did a very, very good job of one thing over the past few weeks: demonstrating how misguided its priorities are and how dearly that costs America’s working families.
We’ve got a lot of work to do to rebuild the Gulf Coast and to reverse the priorities of this president and his allies.
We need Congress to overturn Bush’s waiver of Davis-Bacon protections and to ensure that every job rebuilding the region is a good, family-sustaining job. We need union members everywhere to demand their elected leaders provide hurricane survivors with the unemployment compensation, health care and schools they must have now. We need government to protect relief and rebuilding workers from the toxins left behind by the storm and flooding. We need the states and towns that have opened their arms to hurricane survivors to get the funds they must have to care for them.
And as much as anything, we need a new set of values in the White House.
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