Katrina/ hurricane

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see houston hurri for newer

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National TV news coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s 20th anniversary was solemn and respectful but largely elided the structural inequalities the storm exposed

09/04/25 mma

mma 919

Fox's Geraldo Rivera: Trump is being “unfairly mugged by the media” for repeatedly lying about Alabama and Hurricane Dorian

09/05/19 9:14 AM EDT

During coverage of Hurricane Dorian, Fox “hard news” show hosts climate denier

09/03/19 5:14 PM EDT

As Hurricane Dorian wreaks havoc, Fox casts doubt on climate change science

09/05/19 12:42 PM EDT

bak 719

poster boy for disaster capitalism, or at least charters

promoted to primary since we can make specitfic link, plus harvey/irma maria etc debied by djt perry

this WAS is a proxy for climate/ weather change, global weirding

Rick Perry to Climate Activists: Fossil Fuels Save Lives

Protestors showed up to the National Petroleum Council's meeting in Washington, DC on Monday to call outSecs. Rick Perry and Ryan Zinke for their controversial stances on climate change.

After an activist expressed, "climate change is killing people," the Secretary of Energy remarked in the conference room full of oil industry representatives and executives that fossil fuels save lives.

"This industry is leading the world in affecting the climate and affecting the climate in a positive way," Perry said, according to Bloomberg. "I'm proud to be a part of this industry. You want to talk about saving lives, that's what we are doing."

The former Texas governor praised Texas' efforts in reducing carbon dioxide and other pollution and that U.S. liquefied natural gas, which produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to coal, is replacing dirty coal plants.

He also insisted that energy access saves lives in Africa, an industry talking point, Bloomberg noted.

"It upsets me when some guy stands up and says, 'What are you going to do, you're killing people,'" Perry said to applause. "No sir. You want to kill people, you take energy away from them and you see how those north African countries will be treated."

Some of the fossil fuel industry's biggest names, including Exxon Mobil and Shell, were present at the annual meeting.

According to Bloomberg, the protestors were removed from the hotel conference room after their remarks.

The Trump administration's environmental PR problem has been under heavy scrutiny in the wake of devastating Atlantic hurricanes that destroyed parts of Texas, Florida and the Caribbean.

Earlier this month, Perry dismissed the link between climate change and its effect on extreme weather after Hurricane Harvey wrecked Houston.

"We can line up scientists on both sides of this," he told CBS News, but "this is not the time to be having this conversation."

Rather, Perry said, the focus should be on helping Hurricane Harvey victims.

"Everyone wants to run to the climate change debate, but that is very secondary at this particular time," he said.

This week happens to be Washington's inaugural " National Clean Energy Week," an event touted to bring together "high-profile elected leaders and national clean energy organizations for substantive discussions around commonsense solutions that directly address America's need for abundant, reliable forms of energy."

Perry is one of the featured speakers at Tuesday's star event, the Symposium & Demonstration Fair on Capitol Hill.

But environmental organizations criticized the weeklong event as an "ultimate corporate greenwashing experience."

In a letter addressed to members of Congress, the groups called out some of the sponsors of National Clean Energy Week as "some of the dirtiest actors in the energy industry," such as the American Gas Association, American Petroleum Institute, Biomass Power Association, Energy Recovery Institute (garbage incineration), and the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The letter was signed by organizations including 350.org, Friends of the Earth and Oil Change International.

"The climate crisis is real, and these clean energy claims are phony," said Dr. Mary Booth, director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a nonprofit that applies science to inform clean energy policy. "We're writing Congress to remind it that clean energy doesn't come out of a smokestack. Congress must keep its hands off Americans' wallets when these super-polluters come asking for clean energy subsidies."

https://www.ecowatch.com/harvey-pesticide-naled-2484385387.html

Naled monsanto partner bad for bees

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/9/12/a_storm_of_silence_study_finds

"A Storm of Silence." That’s the title of a new report by the watchdog group Public Citizen that looks at the media’s failure to discuss climate change in its wall-to-wall hurricane coverage. While all the television networks commented on the magnitude of Hurricane Harvey and "extreme weather," virtually none explained how warmer ocean temperatures lead to heavier winds, warmer air causes more precipitation, and higher sea levels exacerbate storm surges. The report examined 18 media sources’ coverage of Hurricane Harvey—looking at 10 major newspapers, three weekly news magazines and national programming from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNNand Fox News over the course of eight days’ worth of Hurricane Harvey coverage. The report concludes, "Many failed to discuss the issue [of climate change] much or failed to cover important aspects of it. ... Two of the three major broadcast networks, ABC and NBC, did not mention climate change at all in the context of Hurricane Harvey." We speak to David Arkush, managing director of Public Citizen’s Climate Program.

https://www.citizen.org/system/files/case_documents/public_citizen_storm_of_silence_harvey_climate_coverage_2.pdf

Only 43 percent of Americans report hearing about climate change in the media at least once a month.1 Only 19 percent report hearing people they know talk about global warming once a month or more,2 and 28 percent say they never hear people they know talk about it.3 In the words of Yale and George Mason University researchers, there is a “spiral of silence” on climate change in which “even people who care about the issue shy away from discussing it because they so infrequently hear other people talking about it — reinforcing the spiral.”4

....

This report examines media coverage of climate change in the context of a major event—Hurricane Harvey—starting on the day it first made landfall, Friday, August 25, 2017, and ending the following Friday, September 1, 2017. It considers eighteen sources: ten major newspapers, three weekly news magazines, and national programming from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News Network. The relevance of climate change to events like Hurricane Harvey is clear in multiple respects: (1) warmer ocean temperatures lead to stronger winds; (2) warmer air leads to more rain (and therefore flooding); and (3) higher sea levels worsen storm surges.7 This analysis first counts the number of articles that simply raise climate change in the context of Harvey. It then considers whether each piece generally accepts or denies the role climate change (or, if news reporting, gives a platform to deniers) and whether it covers any of seven aspects of the climate issue in the context of disasters like Harvey

...

A few conclusions stand out: 

ABC and NBC did not mention climate change in the context of Harvey at all.8 Only one other news source, The New York Post, failed to clear that minimal hurdle. Climate coverage was highly concentrated among a handful of outlets. The top four outlets by volume of pieces that mention climate (The Washington Post, CNN, The Houston Chronicle, and The New York Times) produced 72 percent of pieces that mention it (98 pieces). The remaining 28 percent of coverage, 38 pieces, was scattered across 10 sources. That figure includes three pieces that deny any connection between climate change and Harvey, as well as two more that give voice to deniers or skeptics. (Again, three sources failed to mention climate change at all.) 

Only five outlets covered all seven aspects of the climate issue that this analysis considered: CNN, The Houston Chronicle, The L.A. Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

The Denver Post, Time, and USA Today covered seven of eight. The Chicago Tribune covered just two. Despite running five pieces that mentioned climate change, The Wall Street Journal covered only one aspect of the issue that this analysis considered....

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/08/secret-history-hurricane-katrina/

Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren’t too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely “natural” disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently ...civilian aid was scarce—but private security forces already had boots on the ground. Some, like Blackwater (which has since redubbed itself Xe), were under federal contract, while a host of others answered to wealthy residents and businessmen who had departed well before Katrina and needed help protecting their property from the suffering masses left behind. According Jeremy Scahill’s reporting in The Nation, Blackwater set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Armed as they would be in Iraq, with automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, and pockets overflowing with ammo, Blackwater contractors drove around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates.

“When asked what authority they were operating under,” Scahill reported, “one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’ Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, ‘He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.’ The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.”

The Blackwater operators described their mission in New Orleans as “securing neighborhoods,” as if they were talking about Sadr City. When National Guard troops descended on the city, the Army Times described their role as fighting “the insurgency in the city.” Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, who commanded the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, told the paper, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Ten days after the storm, the New York Times reported that although the city was calm with no signs of looting (though it acknowledged this had taken place previously), “New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers.” The local police superintendent ordered all weapons, including legally registered firearms, confiscated from civilians. But as the Timesnoted, that order didn’t “apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property…[who] openly carry M-16’s and other assault rifles.” Scahill spoke to Michael Montgomery, the chief of security for one wealthy businessman who said his men came under fire from “black gangbangers” near the Ninth Ward. Armed with AR-15s and Glocks, Montgomery and his men “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.'”

Malik Rahim, a Vietnam veteran and longtime community activist, was one of the organizers of the Common Ground Collective, which quickly began dispensing basic aid and medical care in the first days after the hurricane. But far from aiding the relief workers, Rahim told me this week, the police and troops who began patrolling the streets treated them as criminals or “insurgents.” African American men caught outside also ran the risk of crossing paths with roving vigilante patrols who shot at will, he says. In this dangerous environment, Common Ground began to rely on white volunteers to move through a city that had simply become too perilous for blacks.

In July, the local television station WDSU released a home video, taken shortly after the storm hit, of a local man, Paul Gleason, who bragged to two police officers about shooting looters in the Algiers section of New Orleans.

“Did you have any problems with looters,” [sic] asked an officer.

“Not anymore,” said Gleason.

“Not anymore?”

“They’re all dead,” said Gleason.

The officer asked, “What happened?”

“We shot them,” said Gleason.

“How many did you shoot?

“Thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight people? What did you do with the bodies?”

“We gave them to the Coast Guard,” said Gleason.

Gleason told his story with a cup of red wine in one hand and riding a tractor from Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World.

Although the government’s aid efforts were in chaos, those involved in the self-generated community rescue and relief efforts were often seen as a threat. Even so, Common Ground, founded in the days after Katrina hit, eventually managed to serve more than half a million people, operating feeding stations, opening free health and legal clinics, and later rebuilding homes and planting trees. But they “never got a dime” from the federal government, says Rahim. The feds did, however, recruit one of Common Ground’s founders, Brandon Darby, as an informant, later using him to infiltrate groups planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

And while the government couldn’t seem to keep people from dying on rooftops or abandoned highways, it wasted no time building a temporary jail in New Orleans.

Burl Cain, the warden of the notorious Angola Prison, a former slave plantation that’s now home to 5,000 inmates, was rushed down to the city to oversee “Camp Greyhound” in the city’s bus terminal. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the jail “was constructed by inmates from Angola and Dixon state prisons and was outfitted with everything a stranded law enforcer could want, including top-of-the-line recreational vehicles to live in and electrical power, courtesy of a yellow Amtrak locomotive. There are computers to check suspects’ backgrounds and a mug shot station—complete with heights marked in black on the wall that serves as the backdrop.”

In the virtual martial law imposed in New Orleans after Katrina, the war on the poor sometimes even spilled over into the war on terror. In his latest book Zeitoun, published in July, Dave Eggers tells the story of a local Syrian immigrant who stayed in New Orleans to protect his properties and ended up organizing makeshift relief efforts and rescuing people in a canoe. He continued right up until he was arrested by a group of unidentified, heavily armed men in uniform, thrown into Camp Greyhound, and questioned as a suspected terrorist. In an interview with Salon, Eggers said:

Zeitoun was among thousands of people who were doing “Katrina time” after the storm. There was a complete suspension of all legal processes and there were no hearings, no courts for months and months and not enough folks in the judicial system really seemed all that concerned about it. Some human-rights activists and some attorneys, but otherwise it seemed to be the cost of doing business. It really could have only happened at that time; 2005 was just the exact meeting place of the Bush-era philosophy towards law enforcement and incarceration, their philosophy toward habeas corpus and their neglect and indifference to the plight of New Orleanians.

Through all the time that the federal and local governments, in concert with wealthy New Orleanians, were pitching their battle, there was virtually no one fighting on the other side. Reviewing the “available evidence” a month after Katrina, the New York Times concluded that “the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations.” The reports of residents firing at National Guard helicopters, of tourists being robbed and raped on Bourbon Street, and of murderous rampages in the Superdome—all turned out to be false.

Since then it has become increasingly clear that the truth of what happened in New Orleans—vigilantism and racially tinged violence, a military response that supplanted a humanitarian one—is equally sinister.

ref 404

https://web.archive.org/web/20120211183446/http://www.thenation.com/article/blackwater-down

scahill

2x?

...an hourlong conversation I had with four Blackwater men, they characterized their work in New Orleans as "securing neighborhoods" and "confronting criminals." They all carried automatic assault weapons and had guns strapped to their legs. Their flak jackets were covered with pouches for extra ammunition.

When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, "We're on contract with the Department of Homeland Security." Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, "He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary." The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck. Blackwater spokesperson Anne Duke also said the company has a letter from Louisiana officials authorizing its forces to carry loaded weapons.

"This vigilantism demonstrates the utter breakdown of the government," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "These private security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity, in Iraq. To have them now on the streets of New Orleans is frightening and possibly illegal."

Blackwater is not alone. As business leaders and government officials talk openly of changing the demographics of what was one of the most culturally vibrant of America's cities, mercenaries from companies like DynCorp, Intercon, American Security Group, Blackhawk, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) are fanning out to guard private businesses and homes, as well as government projects and institutions. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235. Some, like Blackwater, are under federal contract. Others have been hired by the wealthy elite, like F. Patrick Quinn III, who brought in private security to guard his $3 million private estate and his luxury hotels, which are under consideration for a lucrative federal contract to house FEMA workers.

A possibly deadly incident involving Quinn's hired guns underscores the dangers of private forces policing American streets. On his second night in New Orleans, Quinn's security chief, Michael Montgomery, who said he worked for an Alabama company called Bodyguard and Tactical Security (BATS), was with a heavily armed security detail en route to pick up one of Quinn's associates and escort him through the chaotic city. Montgomery told me they came under fire from "black gangbangers" on an overpass near the poor Ninth Ward neighborhood. "At the time, I was on the phone with my business partner," he recalls. "I dropped the phone and returned fire."

Montgomery says he and his men were armed with AR-15s and Glocks and that they unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. "After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said."

Then, Montgomery says, "the Army showed up, yelling at us and thinking we were the enemy. We explained to them that we were security. I told them what had happened and they didn't even care. They just left." Five minutes later, Montgomery says, Louisiana state troopers arrived on the scene, inquired about the incident and then asked him for directions on "how they could get out of the city." Montgomery says that no one ever asked him for any details of the incident and no report was ever made. "One thing about security," Montgomery says, "is that we all coordinate with each other--one family." That co-ordination doesn't include the offices of the Secretaries of State in Louisiana and Alabama, which have no record of a BATS company.

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2010/02/12/2729/former-blackwater-employees-accuse-security-contractor-defrauding-government

bbq pit

It's simply a fact that climate change makes hurricanes significantly stronger. But rather than talk about how humans have contributed to the disaster, major networks are ignoring the story. This would be less of a problem if these same networks did not also ignore climate change the rest of the time. Meanwhile, Trump's EPA chief spoke to Breitbart and denied the basic science of climate change and hurricanes. Here's our video of scientists calling out climate deniers.

The Grey Lady can do better

What is going on at The New York Times? The paper of record inexplicably bought into Trump pivot nonsense in regards to Hurricane Harvey. They were one of several outlets who got it wrong when it came to Trump's transgender military ban. They've consistently undermined their own coverage of climate change. They also published an op-ed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince calling for a taxpayer funded army of mercenaries in Afghanistan.

Google funding fake news site behind Harvey lie

From the moment that Harvey hit Houston, mosques in the city opened their doors. But a fake news story tried to erase it, making up a story about a mosque closing its doors to non-Muslims. A fake news site sullied the image of a Canadian Islamic scholar and imam. The imam subsequently confirmed that he'd never even been to Texas. We investigated and found numerous sites pushing this story, including one funded by Google's AdSense program. Google has previously committed to fighting fake news -- but clearly there is more work to be done.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rush-limbaugh-uncorks-wild-new-conspiracy-theory-about-hurricane-irma

September 5, 2017

Alexander Nazaryan

Posted with permission from Newsweek

Hurricane Irma is gathering strength over the Atlantic Ocean as it heads towards the Caribbean. Already rated Category 5, it is expected to make landfall in Florida by the end of the week, with many worried about a repeat of the havoc caused in Texas and Louisiana by Hurricane Harvey.

None of that seems to worry Rush Limbaugh.

OnMonday, the right-wing radio personality delivered a customarily freewheeling monologue in which he seemed to suggest that hurricanes were a liberal conspiracy intended to convince the public that climate change is real.

Limbaugh is not a meteorologist, as he acknowledges at the opening of the monologue, before proceeding to muse on meteorology. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Limbaugh is a resident of Palm Beach, Florida, and the hurricane-themed monologue appeared to be driven by his observation that bottled water had already been sold out in local stores, in preparation for Irma’s imminent landfall.“The reason that I am leery of forecasts this far out, folks, is because I see how the system works,” Limbaugh said, alluding to alleged conspiracies against President Donald J. Trump. “Hurricane Harvey and the TV pictures that accompany that go a long way to helping further and create the panic.”

Hurricane Harvey flooded 50 counties, killed 63 people and displaced more than a million. Limbaugh did not offer evidence of how any of this was a conspiracy by the "Deep State," environmentalists or other groups that might presumably want to exaggerate the storm’s devastation.

The crux of Limbaugh’s argument was that “in the official meteorological circles, you have an abundance of people who believe that man-made climate change is real. And they believe that Al Gore is correct when he has written—and he couldn’t be more wrong—that climate change is creating more hurricanes and stronger hurricanes.”

It is not clear what Limbaugh meant by “official meteorological circles.” Perhaps this is a reference to people who have studied meteorology and are experts in the field. Recently, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory published an extensive review that said it was “premature” to declare a causal link between human activity and hurricane strength. However, that same review said that “it is likely that climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”

The journalist John K. Wilson has called Limbaugh “the country's leading denier of global climate change.” That mantle has been proudly claimed by President Trump, who does not appear to believe that global warming is real. Nor do most national Republican politicians. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Republicans “worry a great deal” about climate change; conversely, 66 percent of Democrats evinced a heightened level of concern about it.

On Monday’s program, Limbaugh said that “there is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it. You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic. You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere. All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”

The National Hurricane Center did not respond to a request for comment on Limbaugh’s assertions about hurricanes.

Near the end of the segment, Limbaugh suggested that hurricane coverage was a means for local media outlets to increase ratings and local retailers to increase sales, returning to the observation with which he’d begun.

“You cannot find a case of bottled water here in Palm Beach,” he said. “You can’t. Miami, probably even worse.”

http://www.alternet.org/environment/conspiracy-theorists-say-hurricane-harvey-weather-weapon-video

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/disaster-capitalism-hurricane-harvey

Harvey and its aftermath offer an opportunity for gangster capitalists to further undermine the commons and the public square. Harvey has created a stage on which the profiteers and price-gougers will take advantage of a desperate public.

Harvey and its aftermath also offer an example of what can happen when Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s desire to destroy the infrastructure and legitimacy of government are applied to a national disaster. What follows will be a spectacle of greed and incompetence.

Harvey and its aftermath will also demonstrate how neoliberal policy elites help create a crisis which they in turn propose to solve through “innovative,” “free-market” solutions — most of which do not work.

Investor’s Business Daily, a site that expends most of its energy tracking the financial markets, published an unsigned editorial this week under the headline “Harvey’s Wrath Reveals the Blessing of Liberty.” (I suppose they got some pushback on that one, since it has since been changed to “If You’re Focused on the Government’s Response to Harvey, You’re Looking in the Wrong Direction.”) As you would expect, it’s pro-business propaganda, depicting large corporations as kindly souls and public-spirited friends of the people rather than self-interested, rapacious and often destructive entities.

Of course Investors Business Daily — like the corporate news media in general, is not likely to explain how unregulated free markets and unrestrained capitalism greatly worsened the impact of Hurricane Harvey.

Houston is America’s fourth largest city. Its zoning laws are largely nonexistent. Many of the city’s neighborhoods were constructed at or below the flood plain. Basic common-sense rules and guidelines about designing building codes and infrastructure that could survive severe flooding have been overruled in favor of unregulated growth of. This has been a dream come true for the rich and real estate entrepreneurs. But it is now a nightmare made real for Houston as oil and chemical facilities sit close to residential communities and the people are potentially being poisoned by toxic flood waters and air.

Global warming has exacerbated the likelihood of extreme weather events such as Harvey. Corporations such as ExxonMobil — formerly the employer of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — have long known about the dangers posed by climate change. Instead they chose to conduct a propaganda campaign that systematically sought to mislead the public about such risks. Many of these same oil and petrochemical corporations earn billions of dollars a year from the Houston area and the adjacent Gulf of Mexico....

ref

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/harveys-wrath-reveals-the-blessings-of-liberty/

If You're Focused On The Government's Response To Harvey, You're Looking In The Wrong Direction

8/29/2017

Charity: Disasters like the one unfolding in Houston show the worst in Mother Nature, but also show the best of a free society. Even before any government agency could act, volunteers, private businesses and charities from around the country were organizing relief efforts.

There has been plenty of attention given to how well the government — particularly the federal government — is responding to the unfolding disaster in Houston. President Trump's tweet praising FEMA's response, for example, was instant news. But while there's no doubt that marshaling government resources in a time of crisis is vital, all this attention on government activities overlooks the far more important and inspiring voluntary efforts across the country.

Over the weekend, dozens of people from Louisiana showed up in Houston as part of what's become known as the Cajun Navy. This is an all-volunteer group formed during Hurricane Katrina that has grown in size since.

Autoplay: On | OffThe Cajun Navy was part of what's been described as an "armada of private boats" that came to Houston to help rescue thousands of people stranded in their homes by Harvey's relentless deluge.

Nobody ordered it, or organized it, or coordinated it, or directed it. Nobody's getting paid. But their efforts are a big reason why the death rate from Harvey has been so low.

It's just one of many stories emerging from Houston that show how, in times of crisis, Americans come together, on their own, to help each other, save lives, and solve problems. A few examples:

Gallery Furniture, a Houston-based chain store, opened two of its nearby locations to residents seeking shelter.

HEB Grocery, which has more than 150 stores in Texas, sent its mobile kitchens to Houston to provide meals, pharmacy services and ATMs.

Wal-Mart (WMT) is delivering nearly 800 truckloads of supplies to the region. It says it plans to send another 1,700 next week.

KL Outdoor in Michigan paying the shipping costs to send 2,000 kayaks to the region. Bass Pro is providing 80 boats.

Duracell is sending out free batteries to anyone impacted by the storm.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) has sent more than 155,000 cans of drinking water.

Airbnb activated its disaster response program, called "Urgent Accommodations," which lets evacuees find lodging, with all service fees waived. Those with rooms to spare can use Airbnb to offer their space for free.

Mobile carriers are issuing waivers and credits to customers in the area.

The owner of the Kansas-based Vapebarsent a truck load of diapers, nonperishable food, telling a local news channel that " a lot of bad things are happening down there right now and we need to help them out."

Volunteer Houston launched the Virtual Volunteer Reception Center on Monday, which lets those who want to help get matched with relief organizations and agencies.

A multitude of businesses are donating large sums of money for relief efforts, including Aetna (AET), Amazon (AMZN), Boeing (BA), Caterpillar (CAT), Wells Fargo (WFC), Home Depot (HD), Coca-Cola (KO), Lowe's (LOW).

There are less obvious ways private companies help. Waffle House, for example, has become an indicator of how bad a weather disaster is, because the restaurant chain is so determined to keep operating in the worst conditions.

Rory Carroll, writing for the UK-based Guardian newspaper about the outpouring of voluntary help in response to Harvey, put it this way: "Here was the America of the ideal: one nation, indivisible. A republic of citizens looking out for each other. No politics or polarization. No fake news or social media bubbles. A crisis all could see, and a response all wanted to be part of."

Amen to that. The nation's moral character isn't measured by the number of federal programs, or how big their budgets are, or how many bureaucrats are involved. It is measured in the willingness of its citizens to rally, organize and respond to a crisis all on their own, freely donating their time and resources, experience and know-how to help strangers in need. Too, often, these private efforts get lost in the relentless focus on what government is or isn't doing.

For all the terrible news to come out of Houston, the response from individuals, communities and businesses around the country is a beautiful thing to behold.

Of course, not everyone has been inclined to see the good emerging from the Harvey tragedy.

Chauncey Devega of the left-wing Salon, for example, could not contain his Trump bashing even for a moment, writing in a truly awful column about how "many Americans face a massive natural disaster — but the disaster of this failed presidency is even worse."

Salon should send Devega to Houston so he can see what America is really about.

Hurricane Harvey's Nationalized Insurance Nightmare

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/landmark-human-rights-case-against-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-firms-pushes-on/

Landmark Human Rights Case Against World’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Firms Pushes On

Dec 29, 2016 by Casey Coates Danson

Environment

This is the first-ever human rights violations case due to climate injustice alleged against carbon majors.

By Ping Manongdo / Eco-Business

December 24, 2016

:{The Philippines Commission on Human Rights has announced that it is moving forward with the next steps in the world’s first-ever case against major fossil fuel companies for alleged human rights abuses.

The commission is to take to task oil giants such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Total, BHP Billiton, Suncor and ConocoPhillips for their alleged role in causing death and financial loss on a massive scale as a result of climate-induced disasters in the archipelago.}:

A month after concluding the first phase of their investigation, which looked at scientific evidence linking climate change and fossil fuel operations, CHR commissioner Roberto Eugenio T. Cadiz, who leads the national investigative body for the case, said they are now ready to push forward with public hearings, beginning in April 2017.

Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) devastation. Many houses were wiped out by container vans that were pushed by the typhoon from a nearby port in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines. Image: Asian Development Bank, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Cadiz said they have secured responses from 20 out of the 47 fossil fuel companies involved in the case as of December 8.

The responses were either sent to CHR directly or to the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC), a New York-based advocacy group that tracks the human rights policies and performance of businesses.

In a letter addressed to BHRRC, American company ConocoPhillips, which claims to be the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company, said they challenged the jurisdiction of the legal proceedings arguing that their company does not have operations in the Philippines.

“We operate responsibly and take climate change issues seriously; managing greenhouse gas emissions in our operations and integrating climate-change related activities and goals into our business planning,” Sabrina Watkins, ConocoPhillips’ head of sustainable development, said in the statement.

Repsol, a global energy producer based in Madrid, confirmed in a letter sent to BHRRC on November 8, that they sent a reply to the CHR but are unable to disclose details due to the confidentiality rules of the government body.

Russian company Lukoil for their part said that they have now developed and are implementing what they call a Biodiversity Protection Program focused on “undoing harm” to marine resources and “reclaiming oil contaminated land.”

The company further said that it has been aiming to prevent water pollution by using “zero pollution” technology in its off-shore operations since 1997. With this technology, not a single item of waste will pass into the water, the company said in a statement.

The CHR said the petitioners would be ready with a consolidated response by February 14, 2017.==

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-worse-anti-science-nonsense-of-2016/

Hurricane Matthew truthers

In early October, as Hurricane Matthew approached the southeastern United States and officials ordered mass evacuations, a group of right-wing commentators alleged that the Obama administration was conspiring to exaggerate hurricane forecasts in order to scare the public about climate change. On Oct. 5, Rush Limbaugh said hurricane forecasting often involved “politics” because “the National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service, which is part of the Commerce Department, which is part of the Obama administration, which by definition has been tainted.” He added, however, that Matthew itself was “a serious bad storm” and hadn’t been politicized.

The next day, Matt Drudge took the theory a step further, tweeting, “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate.” He added, “Hurricane center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims.” Drudge’s tweets were widely condemned as dangerous and irresponsible. They also caught the attention of conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones:

A day later, Limbaugh also went full Matthew Truther, declaring it “inarguable” that the government was “hyping Hurricane Matthew to sell climate change.” Matthew would ultimately kill more than 40 people in the United States and hundreds in Haiti. It caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/superstorm-sandys-surge-was-extreme-it-could-become-new-normal

Billions of Gallons of Animal Waste From Factory Farms Poses Health Risks in Wake of Hurricane Matthew see climate change and Food and Water 10/16.

8/16 update inequality charters

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/katrina-pain-index-2016-numbers-race-and-class-gap-widening

3.Ninety-three percent of New Orleans’ 48,000 public school students are in charter schools, the highest percentage in the U.S. Before Katrina, there wereover 65,000 students enrolled in New Orleans public schools, less than 1 percent in charter schools. There are now 44 governing bodies for public schools in New Orleans. There are seven types of charter schools in Louisiana. The public schools are 87 percent African American. Widespread charter school problems for students with disabilities are getting a little bit better according to a federal court monitor report. The public has very mixed feelings about the system reflected in the most recent poll, which shows 43 percent of whites think the schools are getting better, compared to 31 percent of African Americans; while 23 percent of African Americans thought schools were getting worse, in contrast to 15 percent of whites.

2,000. Black median income in New Orleans rose from $23,000 in 2005 to $25,000 eight years later, while white median income rose by $11,000 from $49,000 to $60,000 during the same time.

smoking gun?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032016/global-warming-climate-change-extreme-weather-drought-attribution-study

UCI

http://www.alternet.org/environment/amazon-wildfires-and-hurricanes-are-linked-study

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and NASA have uncovered a remarkably strong link between high wildfire risk in the Amazon basin and the devastating hurricanes that ravage North Atlantic shorelines. The climate scientists’ findings are appearing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters near the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s calamitous August 2005 landfall at New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

"Hurricane Katrina is, indeed, part of this story," said UCI Earth system scientist James Randerson, senior author on the paper. "The ocean conditions that led to a severe hurricane season in 2005 also reduced atmospheric moisture flow to South America, contributing to a once in a century dry spell in the Amazon. The timing of these events is perfectly consistent with our research findings."

Lead author Yang Chen discovered that in addition to the well-understood east-west influence of El Niño on the Amazon, there is also a north-south control on fire activity that is set by the state of the tropical North Atlantic. The North Atlantic has two modes. In years of high numbers of hurricanes and high fire risk, warm waters in the North Atlantic help hurricanes develop and gather strength and speed on their way to North American shores. They also tend to pull a large belt of tropical rainfall — known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone — to the north, Chen said, drawing moisture away from the southern Amazon.

As a consequence, ground water is not fully replenished by the end of rainy season, so coming into the next dry spell, when there is less water stored away in the soils, the plants can’t evaporate and transpire as much water out through their stems and leaves into the atmosphere. The atmosphere gets drier and drier, creating conditions where fires can spread rapidly three to six months later. Ground-clearing fires set by farmers for agriculture or new deforestation can easily jump from fields to dense forests under these conditions.IMG

This map of ocean surface temperatures shows how warm waters in the North Atlantic fueled Hurricane Katrina. NASA and UCI researchers have found that the same conditions heighten fire risk in the Amazon basin. (image: Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

"Understory fires in Amazon forests are extremely damaging, since most rainforest trees are not adapted to fire," noted co-author Douglas Morton at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The synchronization of forest damages from fires in South America and tropical storms in North America highlights how important it is to consider the Earth as a system."

The team pored over years of historical storm and sea surface temperature data from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and fire data gathered by NASA satellites. The results showed a striking pattern, a progression over the course of several months from a warm condition in the tropical North Atlantic to a dry and fire-prone southern Amazon, and more destructive hurricane landfalls in North and Central America.

According to Randerson, the importance of this study is that it may help meteorologists develop better seasonal outlooks for drought and fire risk in the Amazon, leveraging large investments by NOAA and other agencies in understanding hurricanes.

"The fires we see in the U.S. West are generally lightning-ignited, whereas they are mostly human-ignited in the Amazon, but climate change can have really large effects on the fire situation in both regions," Randerson said. "Keeping fire out of the Amazon basin is critical from a carbon cycle perspective. There’s a huge amount of carbon stored in tropical forests. We really want to keep the forests intact."

RELATED STORIES

Why We Love Storms

Drought-Fueled Wildfires Burn 7 Million Acres in U.S

==-

http://www.alternet.org/environment/global-warming-may-increase-grey-swan-hurricanes

3 at one time

Before then, we had never seen two Category 3 hurricanes, let alone Category 4 hurricanes in the North Central Pacific at the same time prior to this, says hurricane researcher and forecaster Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/09/04/record-breaking-hurricane-season-pacific/

10 yr anniversary

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/08/27/3695968/jindal-katrina-climate-change/

President Obama is heading to New Orleans Thursday to mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. But there’s one subject Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal hopes the president won’t broach in his remarks to city residents: climate change.

Jindal, who’s also running for president on the Republican ticket, sent a letter to Obama Wednesday urging the president not to mention climate change during his trip to Louisiana.

“Although I understand that your emphasis in New Orleans will – rightly – be on economic development, the temptation to stray into climate change politics should be resisted,” Jindal states in the letter. “While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians. I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism.”

This week, Jindal writes in the letter, should be solely about mourning those lost in the storm and celebrating the recovery New Orleans has made so far.

But Obama had a different plan for his time in New Orleans. The trip is the second stop in his 11-day climate tour, a trip that started at the Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas and will end in Alaska. Along the way, Obama is planning on speaking about the country’s need to invest in renewable energy, protect coastal communities, and be part of a global effort to address climate change.

In New Orleans, Obama is planning to discuss the city’s “extraordinary resilience” in the face of the storm, and is also going to address the government’s failings when it came to serving the people of New Orleans. But climate change — and the need to protect communities like New Orleans from future disasters — is also expected to come up.

facing so

INSTITUTE INDEX - The inequity of New Orleans' Katrina recovery at 10

Number of people Hurricane Katrina initially displaced from New Orleans, where federal levee failures caused mass flooding: at least 400,000

Percent of white New Orleanians displaced by Katrina who returned to the city within a year: 67

Percent of displaced black New Orleanians who returned in that time: 44

Percent share of New Orleans' population that was African-American in 2005: 66

In 2013: 59

Number fewer African Americans living in New Orleans today than before the storm: 100,000

Number of low-income public housing units that were available in New Orleans before Katrina, almost all of them occupied by African Americans: 5,146

Number of low-income public housing units available in the city today: 1,925

Following the drastic makeover of New Orleans' public schools into mostly independently-run, less-regulated charters, portion of the city's white residents who say the schools have gotten stronger: 2/3

Percent of the city's African-American residents who agree: 55

Of every 10 jobs being added today in the New Orleans metro area, number that are in low-wage industries like tourism, administrative services and retail:7

Amount by which the median income of white residents of New Orleans increased from 2005 to 2013: $11,000

Amount by which the median income of black New Orleans residents increased over that same period: $2,000

Percent of black men in New Orleans who were unemployed in 2000: 48

Percent of black men in New Orleans who are unemployed today: 52

New Orleans' percent poverty rate in 2005: 17.77

In 2013: 19.31

Percent of black children in New Orleans who lived in poverty in 2005: 44

Percent of black children who live in poverty there today: 50

Portion of white New Orleans residents who believe the city has mostly recovered since Katrina: nearly 4 out of 5

Portion of New Orleans' black residents who say it has not: nearly 3 out of 5

(Click on figure to go to source. To com

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, the American Red Cross raised more than $300 million in disaster relief funds. But a shocking amount of the Red Cross' resources was diverted away from real recovery and toward efforts to make the Red Cross look good.

BW bk:

9/05 started at BW (katrina)

katrina 900rpm; deputized by gov (badges)DHS contract; got coast g call sign, claimed to rescue 150 ppl (₎; protected banks and rich ppl; in 3 wk 400K tyo proect morque; 3 mos 33 m$ 326 06 73M, 240K/day 327

B2 repealed 1931 bacon act so did not have to pay previaling wage; KBR (halli #1 $ iraq)30m$ assess infra and support recovery; shaw gp 700m katrina (135 m irq); both co had Joe Allbaugh lobbying; B-Ch camp mgr and ex head FEMA 327

950 m shaw

1.4b fluor (alan B also ran iraq recon, sowing down so shifted to La)

merc la; dyncorp, wac, am sec gp, kroll, Instinctive Shooting Intel (israel)[helo'd in to proetect gated commun], 235 co's and up; f patrick quin iii guard 3m house, his hotels considered to house fema workers 328

575M Bechtel

dhs IG said need sec 2-5 yrs 330; BW best value

aug 06 BW guard library (Walmart a fema outpost too) used by fema, parteon denied entry, not told why, denied name of guard or his sup; BW hq in swaggart bible college

BW sets us new domestic disater div 332

bw and red cross $ raiser gala, bremer goh

b43 tried to use katrina to ~ posse comit 337

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/22/2014-atlantic-hurricane-season_n_5371562.html?utm_hp_ref=green

According to Media Matters, more than 95% of the media coverage on Typhoon Haiyan has failed to mention climate change

==

boss rove? says he steered $200m in relief?

http://grist.org/climate-energy/a-scientific-storm-is-brewing-over-the-hurricane-climate-connection/

A large number of Louisiana Republicans think President Barack Obama is to blame for the federal government's poor response to Hurricane Katrina, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey released Wednesday -- despite the fact that the storm occurred three years before he took office.

The Democratic-leaning polling firm, which provided its results to Talking Points Memo, found that 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans said Obama was responsible for the Katrina response. Twenty-eight percent put the blame on President George W. Bush, whose administration did in fact oversee the federal response to Katrina. Nearly half (44 percent) of the Louisiana Republicans polled didn't know who to blame.

Bush was heavily criticized at the time for the government's response to Katrina, a storm that caused 1,833 fatalities, damaged an estimated $81 billion in property, and ranks among the five deadliest hurricanes in United States history. Heremained on vacation in Texas as the hurricane rocked the Gulf Coast, before belatedly cutting his trip short and returning to Washington. An infamous photo of Bush peering out the window of Air Force One at the wreckage was also attacked as insensitive, and the former president himself later acknowledged the photo was a "huge mistake" in a 2010 interview.

Bush's approval ratings plunged in the months following the disaster, and his administration was dogged by suggestions that race was a factor in its response efforts.

During a live concert for hurricane relief, rapper Kanye West said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," a moment Bush later said was the "most disgusting moment" of his presidency. Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's secretary of state, recalled in her memoir that there was clearly "a race problem" during Katrina, although she disputed allegations that Bush or his administration were racist.

Read the full survey results here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina 2005

===

As the United States grows warmer and extreme weather more common, the federal government’s flood insurance maps are becoming increasingly important.

The maps, drawn by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, dictate the monthly premiums millions of American households pay for flood insurance. They are also designed to give homeowners and buyers the latest understanding of how likely their communities are to flood.

The government’s response to the rising need for accurate maps? It’s slashed funding for them.

Congress has cut funding for updating flood maps by more than half since 2010, from $221 million down to $100 million this year. And the president’s latest budget request would slash funding for mapping even further to $84 million — a drop of 62 percent over the last four years.

===

military sats? CIA shop closes? //?

Hurricane Sandy Forecasts Would Have Suffered Without Polar Satellites, NOAA Analysis Says 12/14/12

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/hurricane-sandy-2012-forecasts_n_2296043.html?utm_hp_ref=green

===

brownie http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/06/heckuva-job-brownie-deadly-indifference

For all the Bush administration's failures in handling Hurricane Katrina, only one person was made the poster boy for the catastrophe: Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown. Even as George W. Bush was praising him for doing a "heckuva job" in the response, Brown was on his way out; the floodwaters had barely receded when he submitted his resignation. He was later lambasted when emails he sent at the height of the storm came to light; they included lines like "Can I quit now? Can I go home?" and chatter about his clothes. But in the years since, Brown has been on a mission to clean up his image. His latest venture is a health care technology firm, Apokalyyis, Inc., and he has a new book out offering his own take on what went wrong in the wake of the worst hurricane ever to hit the US.

Deadly Indifference is one part apology and two parts passing the blame. While Brown does accept fault for the mishandling in some respects, like not being as attentive to some response details as he perhaps should have been, he spends much of the book pointing his finger up the chain of command, from others at a Department of Homeland Security mired in bureaucracy to a commander-in-chief who couldn't be bothered to take time away from his Crawford vacation to visit the shattered Gulf region. The book's revelations range from the not-so-revelatory—he feels he was "made the scapegoat"—to accusing Karl Rove and Trent Lott (among others) of capitalizing on the storm for political gain. Katrina "was the first time in 160 disasters that I kept smelling politics," Brown, whose jobs since leaving the administration have included serving as a disaster-preparedness consultant and talk-radio host, told Mother Jones. "It was something I never saw anywhere else."

One might ask why Rove had anything to do with the Katrina response at all. And that would be a good question. "Karl Rove became interested in Louisiana for the very practical reason that it had voted solidly Democratic when Bill Clinton won his two terms, and it had voted for George W. Bush in the election that followed," writes Brown. Basically, the state had a large swath of the registered voting population that didn't have a strong alliance to either party. Gov. Kathleen Blanco was the first female governor of the state and the first Democrat to be elected in more than a decade. New Orleans' mayor, Ray Nagin, was a Republican before changing parties in 2002. The storm, Brown asserts, presented a "wonderful opportunity to bring Louisiana solidly with the Republicans."

In a recent interview on ABC News, Brown accused Rove of "micromanaging" search and response efforts—stepping in and making specific requests of FEMA resources to help those identified as allies, "totally irrespective of what the overall game plan was to respond to this disaster."

In an interview this week with Mother Jones, Brown walked back from the term "micromanaging," but maintained that White House interference was a large part of the problem. "Now you have three-way communications going on, which make it even more difficult to make decisions and sometimes even end up making conflicting decisions," Brown says. He has claimed to have emails from the White House demonstrating this and has said he would share them, but has not, so far, made them available.

The subject of the most scorn, though, is then-Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi (R). The book's most damning passages refer to his desire to move the USNS Comfort, the Navy's medical treatment ship, to Pascagoula, Miss., rather than to New Orleans where it was needed most. Lott, one will recall, had resigned as Senate Minority Leader in December 2002 amid controversy over his remarks about Strom Thurmond, and was enjoying less political clout than he'd once held. He wanted the Comfort in Mississippi, Brown writes, simply for the "damn photo opportunity," and was indifferent to "any reality other than his political ambitions."

Late at night, as the Comfort was heading to New Orleans, Lott called Brown demanding that he change its course, Brown writes. "WHY DON'T YOU GROW SOME BALLS AND BE A REAL MAN?" Lott screamed, according to Brown. When Brown refused, Lott went over his head to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who capitulated. This kicked off, in Brown's words, a "full-scale clusterfuck." The Comfort was redirected to Mississippi, and in the ensuing confusion no ships were sent to New Orleans—whose residents were desperate for shelter and medical attention.

Brown also pegs Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), then Speaker of the House, for wanting a FEMA employee assigned to each member of Congress from the region—another political move, he says, to create the appearance of doing something rather than actually serving a purpose. Brown doesn't spare a lot of kind words for fellow Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter, specifically Nagin and Blanco). Bush, while described as a "decent man," is also deemed negligent at best—but generally indifferent when it came to Katrina.

While the book jacket promises that Brown won't be "making excuses," it's hard to find many points in the book where he admits his own errors. Perhaps that would dampen his efforts to rehabilitate his own image. In our conversation, the best he could come up with for what he would handle differently is the "communication" side of the story—specifically, how he dealt with the press. He's certainly counting on the book to recast his public persona. In the very least, it reaffirms that there was plenty of blame to go around, both inside and outside of the Bush administration. kate s mojo

FEMA Cronyism Led to Failure

Michael Brown, who resigned September 12, 2005, as FEMA's director, "has become a symbol of cronyism," Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times.

Brown "didn't know the difference between a tropical depression and an anxiety attack when President Bush charged him with life-and-death decisions," Maureen Dowd wrote in the Times.

"W. trusted Brownie simply because he was a friend of a friend," Dowd said. "He was a college buddy of Joe Allbaugh, who worked as W.'s chief of staff when he was Texas governor and as his 2000 presidential campaign manager."

When FEMA was "reorganized under Homeland Security, stripping it of authority," Allbaugh left the agency to become a lobbyist for companies like Halliburton, leaving behind "an eviscerated FEMA" with "his friend Brown in charge," Dowd said.

Spencer S. Hsu wrote in the September 9, 2005, Washington Post that "Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative."

"Meanwhile," Hsu reported, "veterans such as U.S. hurricane specialist Eric Tolbert and World Trade Center disaster managers Laurence W. Zensinger and Bruce P. Baughman -- who led FEMA's offices of response, recovery and preparedness, respectively -- have left since 2003, taking jobs as consultants or state emergency managers, according to current and former officials."

"Patronage appointments to the crisis-response agency are nothing new to Washington administrations. But inexperience in FEMA's top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina," Spencer S. Hsu wrote September 9, 2005.

FEMA's "Bungled Response" to Hurricane Katrina

FEMA's response to one of the greatest natural disasters in American history was serious hampered by its failure to prepare, in spite of the recent "Hurricane Pam" simulation, and relief spending experience in pre-Election Florida 2004.

"The breakdown in management and communications was so execrable that the president learned about the 25,000 desperate, trapped people at the New Orleans convention center not from [FEMA director Michael Brown] ..., who didn't know himself, but from a wire story carried into the Oval Office by an aide on Thursday, 24 hours after the victims had been pleading and crying for help on every channel," Maureen Dowd wrote September 10, 2005.

The "lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self," Paul Krugman wrote September 12, 2005.

shu

Leaders Lacking Disaster Experience

'Brain Drain' At Agency Cited

By Spencer S. Hsu

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, September 9, 2005

Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerceofficial who was once a political operative.

Meanwhile, veterans such as U.S. hurricane specialist Eric Tolbert and World Trade Center disaster managers Laurence W. Zensinger and Bruce P. Baughman -- who led FEMA's offices of response, recovery and preparedness, respectively -- have left since 2003, taking jobs as consultants or state emergency managers, according to current and former officials.

Because of the turnover, three of the five FEMA chiefs for natural-disaster-related operations and nine of 10 regional directors are working in an acting capacity, agency officials said.

Patronage appointments to the crisis-response agency are nothing new to Washington administrations. But inexperience in FEMA's top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

"FEMA requires strong leadership and experience because state and local governments rely on them," said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association. "When you don't have trained, qualified people in those positions, the program suffers as a whole."

Last week's greatest foe was, of course, a storm of such magnitude that it "overwhelmed" all levels of government, according to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). And several top FEMA officials are well-regarded by state and private counterparts in disaster preparedness and response.

They include Edward G. Buikema, acting director of response since February, and Kenneth O. Burris, acting chief of operations, a career firefighter and former Marietta, Ga., fire chief.

But scorching criticism has been aimed at FEMA, and it starts at the top with Brown, who has admitted to errors in responding to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding in New Orleans. The Oklahoma native, 50, was hired to the agency after a rocky tenure as commissioner of a horse sporting group by former FEMA director Joe M. Allbaugh, the 2000 Bush campaign manager and a college friend of Brown's.

Rhode, Brown's chief of staff, is a former television reporter who came to Washington as advance deputy director for Bush's Austin-based 2000 campaign and then the White House. He joined FEMA in April 2003 after stints at the Commerce Department and the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Altshuler is a former presidential advance man. His predecessor, Scott Morris, was a media strategist for Bush with the Austin firm Maverick Media.

David I. Maurstad, who stepped down as Nebraska lieutenant governor in 2001 to join FEMA, has served as acting director for risk reduction and federal insurance administrator since June 2004. Daniel A. Craig, a onetime political fundraiser and campaign adviser, came to FEMA in 2001 from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he directed the eastern regional office, after working as a lobbyist for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown has managed more than 160 natural disasters as FEMA general counsel and deputy director since 2001, "hands-on experience [that] cannot be understated. Other leadership at FEMA brings particular skill sets -- policy management leadership, for example."

The agency has a deep bench of career professionals,said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews, including two dozen senior field coordinators and Gil Jamieson, director of the National Incident Management System. "Simply because folks who have left the agency have a disagreement with how it's being run doesn't necessarily indicate that there is a lack of experience leading it," she said.

Andrews said the "acting" designation for regional officials is a designation that signifies that they are FEMA civil servants -- not political appointees.

Touring the wrecked Gulf Coast with Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff yesterday, Vice President Cheney also defended FEMA leaders, saying, "We're always trying to strike the right balance" between political appointees and "career professionals that fill the jobs underneath them."

But experts inside and out of government said a "brain drain" of experienced disaster hands throughout the agency, hastened in part by the appointment of leaders without backgrounds in emergency management, has weakened the agency's ability to respond to natural disasters. Some security experts and congressional critics say the exodus was fueled by a bureaucratic reshuffling in Washington in 2003, when FEMA was stripped of its independent Cabinet-level status and folded into the Department of Homeland Security.

Emergency preparedness has atrophied as a result, some analysts said, extending from Washington to localities.

FEMA "has gone downhill within the department, drained of resources and leadership," said I.M. "Mac" Destler, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. "The crippling of FEMA was one important reason why it failed."

Richard A. Andrews, former emergency services director for the state of California and a member of the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council, said state and local failures were critical in the Katrina response, but competence, funding and political will in Washington were also lacking.

"I do not think fundamentally this is an organizational issue," Andrews said. "You need people in there who have both experience and the confidence of the president, who are able to fight and articulate what FEMA's mission and role is, and who understand how emergency management works."

The agency's troubles are no secret. The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes careers in federal government, ranked FEMA last of 28 agencies studied in 2003.

In its list of best places to work in the government, a 2004 survey by the American Federation of Government Employees found that of 84 career FEMA professionals who responded, only 10 people ranked agency leaders excellent or good.

An additional 28 said the leadership was fair and 33 called it poor.

More than 50 said they would move to another agency if they could remain at the same pay grade, and 67 ranked the agency as poorer since its merger into the Department of Homeland Security.

----

Patrick James Rhode

Chief of Staff

Patrick Rhode was appointed chief of staff for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, part of the new Department of Homeland Security, by President Bush in April 2003. As chief of staff, he is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the agency and for directing the implementation of Under Secretary Michael Brown's priorities and policies. FEMA coordinates federal disaster relief activities, including the response and recovery operations of 26 federal agencies and departments and the American Red Cross. FEMA's responsibilities also include initiating proactive mitigation activities, training first responders and overseeing the National Flood Insurance Program and the U.S. Fire Administration. FEMA became part of the Department of Homeland Security in March 2003.

Before joining FEMA, Mr. Rhode was associate administrator at the U.S. Small Business Administration and White House liaison for the Department of Commerce.His first position with the Bush Administration was as special assistant to the President and deputy director of National Advance Operations, a position he assumed in January 2001.

Previously, Mr. Rhode served as deputy director of National Advance Operations for the George W. Bush Presidential Campaign, in Austin, Texas. His other professional credits include serving in communications and public affairs roles in the Texas Department of Agriculture, the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, andEntergy Corporation. Earlier in his career, Mr. Rhode was an anchor/reporter with network affiliated television stations in Alabama and Arkansas.

A native of Hot Springs, Ark., Mr. Rhode holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4747403

FEMA Deputy During Katrina Now at NASA

The Associated Press

Friday, January 12, 2007; 5:40 PM

WASHINGTON -- The second-in-command for the Federal Emergency Management Agency during its much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina started a senior job at NASA this week.

Patrick Rhode, who was chief of staff and deputy director of FEMA under Michael Brown, was hired as asenior adviser to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin on communications issues, NASA spokesman David Mould said.

The hiring of Rhode, a former television reporter who was an advance man for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign, was made by the White House and Griffin together, Mould said.

Rhode's name emerged in an embarrassing e-mail exchange between him and Brown just hours after Katrina struck New Orleans. When asked if he was available for a phone call, Brown said he was "sitting in the chair, putting mousse in my hair," and Rhode chimed in, "Me too!" The communication occurred early on the morning of on Aug. 29, 2005.

Disaster management professionals faulted the way the two men ran FEMA during Katrina and wondered how that qualified Rhode for NASA.

Rhode, whose appointment was first reported on the Web site NASA Watch, could not be reached for comment by phone or e-mail.

Mould said Rhode is qualified for the NASA job, commenting, "he's done a lot of things." He said Rhode had been associate administrator of the Small Business Administration and communications director for technology administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

More on Patrick Rhode's Move to NASA

By Keith Cowing on January 12, 2007 2:50 PM.

FEMA deputy during Katrina now at NASA, AP

"The hiring of Rhode, a former television reporter who was an advance man for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign, was made by the White House and Griffin together, [NASA spokesman David] Mould said. ... Rhode, whose appointment was first reported on the Web site NASA Watch, could not be reached for comment by phone or e-mail."

Bush Administration Incompetence to Expand Scope Past Atmosphere, Wonkette

"Remember Patrick Rhode? He was the former TV reporter who leveraged a job as deputy advance guy for Bush in 2000 (deputy to the guy who makes sure there's bottled water behind the podium!) into a gig as deputy director of FEMA. Then New Orleans drowned, and Rhode called FEMA's response "probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country's history." Thankfully, he's no longer with FEMA. Nope, instead he's going to strand all of our astronauts in space.

http://crooksandliars.com/taxonomy/term/352?page=5

Hurricane Katrina: Who's at Fault?

The question Who's at fault? for the growing list of Bush administration failures surrounding Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, was answered nearly two months afterwards by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff told members of Congress on October 19, 2005, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's "lack of planning, not the failures of state and local officials, was to blame for much of what went wrong with the government's response to Hurricane Katrina":

"He told lawmakers that he found the governors and mayors of the region to be responsive as the crisis unfolded."
"The sheer scope of the damage inflicted by Katrina overwhelmed FEMA and exposed underlying flaws in the structure and management of the agency."
"The agency's problems stemmed from a failure to restructure and modernize itself, not from a lack of funding."
"He also denied that there was a lack of urgency at the highest levels of the federal government as the hurricane approached the Louisiana coast."
"As urgent problems, he cited inadequate logistics and communications systems and the need to 'replenish its ranks at the senior level with experienced staff.'"
"[He] said he was taking steps to 'retool' the agency and that he was establishing emergency reconnaissance teams that could immediately move into disaster areas to assess the situation and prioritize relief efforts."

Contents[hide]

Blaming the Government: Failure to Perform

Michael Chertoff

"Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast," Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was the "federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina, [and] could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials." [1]

According to federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder, Michael D. Brown, who resigned on September 12, 2005,as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency,"had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the 'principal federal official' in charge of the storm."

"But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director," Knight Ridder's Jonathan S. Landay, Alison Young and Shannon McCaffrey wrote.

"But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department," they said.

"The Chertoff memo indicates that the response to Katrina wasn't left to disaster professionals, but was run out of the White House, said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at FEMA during the Clinton administration and the co-author of an emergency management textbook," Landay, Young and McCaffrey wrote. "'It shows that the president is running the disaster, the White House is running it as opposed to Brown or Chertoff,' Haddow said. Brown 'is a convenient fall guy. He's not the problem really. The problem is a system that was marginalized.'"

However, "if you go back to August 27th," President Bush had already "declared a state of emergency in the state of Louisiana under Title V of the Stafford Act, ... Ergo, Katrina became an Incident of National Significance on August 27th -- two days before the storm. But Chertoff apparently didn't realize this and waited till a day after [on August 30th] to make the determination on his own, one that according to the flow chart had already been made," Josh Marshall pointed out September 14, 2005, in his Talking Points Memo.

Crisis Systems

Andrew C. Revkin and Christopher Drew, "Intricate Flood Protection Long a Focus of Dispute," New York Times, September 1, 2005.
Scott Shane and Eric Lipton, "Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure," New York Times, September 2, 2005.
"Mayor to feds: 'Get off your asses'. Transcript of radio interview with New Orleans' Nagin," CNN, September 2, 2005.
Paul Krugman, "A Can't-Do Government," New York Times, September 2, 2005.
John Tierney, "Ben Franklin Had the Right Idea for New Orleans," New York Times, September 3, 2005: "But then why are urbanites so much better prepared to cope with fire than with flooding? Mostly because they learned to fight fire without any help from the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Emergency Management Agency."
Nikki Davis Multe, "'We are working hard to meet our own needs'," Clarion Ledger (Hattiesburg, Mississippi), September 4, 2005.
"Critics: Terror blinded U.S. security to disasters. Homeland security has focused on terrorism prevention since 9/11," Associated Press (MSNBC), September 4, 2005.
Paul Krugman, "Killed by Contempt," New York Times, September 5, 2005: "But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?"
"Clinton: Government 'failed' people," CNN, September 5, 2005: "Former President Bill Clinton on Monday said the government 'failed' the thousands of people who lived in coastal communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and said a federal investigation was warranted in due time."
"Russert blasts Government over handling of Katrina," Crooks and Liars, September 6, 2005: "Tim appeared on The Imus Show this morning and leveled scathing criticism all around to the 'powers that be' in the wake of Hurricane Katrina." QT and WMP video links on page.
Eric Lipton, Christopher Drew, Scott Shane, and David Rohde, "Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy," New York Times, September 11, 2005.
"4 Places Where the System Broke Down. A *TIME* investigation shows how confusion, incompetence and, ironically, a fear of making mistakes hobbled the government at all levels," September 11, 2005.

Funding Levee Projects

Faiz, "Bush Administration Had Reason To Know About Levee Problems," Think Progress, September 1, 2005.
Izzy, "When the Levees Broke," unbossed.com, September 3, 2005.
Richard A. Serrano and Nicole Gaouette, "Despite Warnings, Washington Failed to Fund Levee Projects," Los Angeles Times (Yahoo! News), September 4, 2005.
Geoffrey Lean, "Warnings went ignored as Bush slashed flood defence budget to pay for wars," Independent (UK), September 4, 2005.

Cause was political

"The cause was political through and through -- a matter of values and principles. The progressive-liberal values are America's values, and we need to go back to them. The heart of progressive-liberal values is simple: empathy (caring about and for people) and responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy). These values translate into a simple principle: Use the common wealth for the common good to better all our lives. In short, promoting the common good is the central role of government,"George Lakoff, wrote in AlterNet, September 6, 2005.

"The right-wing conservatives now in power have the opposite values and principles. Their main value is Rely on individual discipline and initiative. The central principle: Government has no useful role. The only common good is the sum of individual goods. It's the difference between We're all in this together and You're on your own, buddy. It's the difference between Every citizen is entitled to protection and You're only entitled to what you can afford. It's the difference between connection and separation. It is this difference in moral and political philosophy that lies behind the tragedy of Katrina."

Blaming environmental groups

"Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show," Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion Ledger (Mississippi) reported September 16, 2005.

"The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: 'Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation,'" Mitchell wrote.

"Shown a copy of the e-mail, David Bookbinder, senior attorney for Sierra Club, remarked, 'Why are they (Bush administration officials) trying to smear us like this?' ... The Sierra Club and other environmental groups had nothing to do with the flooding that resulted from Hurricane Katrina that killed hundreds, he said. 'It's unfortunate that the Bush administration is trying to shift the blame to environmental groups. It doesn't surprise me at all,'" Bookbinder said.

Mitchell said that "Whoever is behind the e-mail may have spotted" the September 8, 2005, National Review Online article "Greens vs. Levees. Destructive river-management philosophy" by John Berlau "thatchastised the Sierra Club and other environmental groups for suing to halt the corps' 1996 plan to raise and fortify 303 miles of Mississippi River levees in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.

"The corps settled the litigation in 1997, agreeing to hold off on some work until an environmental impact could be completed. The National Review article concluded: 'Whether this delay directly affected the levees that broke in New Orleans is difficult to ascertain.'

"The problem with that conclusion?," Mitchell asked? "The levees that broke causing New Orleans to flood weren't Mississippi River levees. They were levees that protected the city from Lake Pontchartrain levees on the other side of the city."

Blaming George W. Bush

Adam Entous, "Early warnings raised doubt on Bush disaster plans," Reuters, September 17, 2005: "President George W. Bush sought to cut a key program to help local governments raise their preparedness, and state officials warned of a 'total lack of focus' on natural disasters by his homeland-security chief, documents show."

Blaming Governor Blanco: Accountability Resolved

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco "declared a state of emergency Aug. 26 three days before the storm and followed the steps in her disaster playbook. On Aug. 31, she asked Bush for 'everything you've got.' But some commentators and officials have blamed her for problems such as flawed communication and blocked aid," USA Today's Jill Lawrence reported September 12, 2005.

"Blanco has had several skirmishes with Bush and sent signals that she did not trust his administration. She brought in James Lee Witt, former president Bill Clinton's emergency management director, to advise her. She rejected Bush's proposal that the federal government take control of National Guard troops under her command. ('If that would have improved our situation, it would have been a no-brainer, she says)," Lawrence wrote. "She says that two days after Katrina, desperate for help, she couldn't get through to Bush and didn't get a callback; hours later, she tried again, and they talked."

However, Mississippi's governor Haley Barbour "hasn't had to wait hours to talk to Bush," Lawrence wrote. "In fact, Barbour said in an interview with USA TODAY, the president called him three to four times in the wake of Katrina. 'I never called him. He always called me,' he said."

"Pursuant to a September 7 request by Representative John Conyers, Jr. to review the law and legal accountability relating to Federal action in response to Hurricane Katrina, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report [September 13, 2005] about whether the Governor of Louisiana took the necessary and timely steps needed to secure disaster relief from the federal government. The report unequivocally concludes that she did." [2]
Transcript: "Special Defense Department Briefing with Commander of Joint Task Force Katrina," Department of Defense, September 1, 2005. See Joint Task Force Katrina.
Manuel Roig-Franzia and Spencer Hsu, "Many Evacuated, but Thousands Still Waiting. White House Shifts Blame to State and Local Officials," Washington Post, September 4, 2005.
Hesiod, "Operation Blame Blanco," The American Street, September 5, 2005.
"'Wash Post' Runs A Key Katrina Correction," Editor & Publisher, September 4, 2005: "A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26."
Eric Lipton, Christopher Drew, Scott Shane, and David Rohde, "Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy," New York Times, September 11, 2005.
Jill Lawrence, "Governors handle crisis in own ways," USA Today, September 12, 2005.
Joby Warrick, Spencer S. Hsu and Anne Hull, "Blanco Releases Katrina Records. La. Governor Seeks to 'Set the Record Straight'," Washington Post, December 4, 2005.

Blaming the Victims

Blaming the Media

Nedra Pickler, "First Lady Becomes President's Defender," Associated Press (Yahoo! News), September 13, 2005: First Lady Laura Bush "also blamed the media for focusing on the negative in the recovery efforts."
"Chertoff blames the Media for his failings," Crooks and Liars, September 4, 2005. WMP Video. Also see Transcript: Tim Russert's Meet the Press interview with Director of Homeland Security "Michael Chertoff, Marc Morial, Mike Tidwell, Mark Fischetti, David Wessel, Haley Barbour & Aaron Broussard," September 4, 2005.

Pointing Fingers

"now is not the time to point fingers"

Although inevitably the "finger pointing" has begun, Rob at AMERICAblog wrote September 6, 2005:

"To a single one, I have heard Republican Congressperson after Republican Congressperson toeing the Party line that 'now is not the time to point fingers.' ... How dare they tell the public not to hold their Government accountable? How dare they think photo ops are enough to quell public outrage at the utterly preventable human catastrophe?"

Jefferson County Parish President Aaron Broussard said on the September 4, 2005, NBC Meet the Press with Tim Russert:

"We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Keep Pointing Fingers

"It might make sense to hold off on the criticism if this were the first big disaster on Mr. Bush's watch, or if the chain of mistakes in handling Hurricane Katrina were out of character," Paul Krugman wrote September 9, 2005. "But even with the most generous possible assessment, this is the administration's second big policy disaster, after Iraq."

"Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time."

Congressional Comments

Republicans

Following a September 7, 2005, meeting with President Bush, Bill Frist "placed the blame for the slow response on all levels of government but warned against citing specific individuals. "'Having been on the ground and seen the failures of the system's approach, the failure in appropriate planning -- yes, federal government; yes, state government; yes, local government -- but the call for people's heads early on almost, to me, misses the root cause of the problem'," Frist said.

"'Some people are really very anxious to start pointing fingers and playing the blame game. I think we need to get our work done," Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives, said September 7, 2005.

"But in a sign of the White House effort to move the dispute out of the Oval Office and try to cast the argument in partisan terms, the Republican National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, issued a statement assailing Democrats like Ms. Pelosi for 'pointing fingers in a shameless effort to tear us apart.'"

Democrats

"'Americans should now harbor no illusions about the government's ability to respond effectively to disasters ... Our vulnerabilities were laid bare,'" House Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said September 7, 2005.

"'Our government failed at one of the most basic functions it has - providing for the physical safety of our citizens,'" Senator Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) said.

"'It's a summary of all that this administration is not in touch with and has faked and ducked and bobbed over the past four years. What you see here is a harvest of four years of complete avoidance of real problem solving and real governance in favor of spin and ideology'," Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) said in an interview.

"'This is deeply disturbing to a lot of Americans, because it's more than thousands of people who get killed; it's about the destruction of the American community. ...The idea that somehow government didn't care until it had to for political reasons. It's appalling'," Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said.

Investigation

Political Fallout

Bill Walsh, "House Speaker: Rebuilding N.O. doesn't make sense," The Times-Picayune, September 1, 2005: "House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city."
"Blanco demands apology from Hastert," Associated Press (4 WWLTV.com, New Orleans), September 2, 2005.
"Hastert was against the emergency funding before he was for it," The Carpetbagger Report, September 2, 2005.
Charles Babbington, "Hastert Tries Damage Control After Remarks Hit a Nerve," Washington Post, September 3, 2005.
Transcript: "Anderson Cooper with Trent Lott," Crooks and Liars, September 3, 2005: "Cooper has been on a roll taking politicians to task over the fiasco of mis-management that has allowed Katrina to be much worse than it should have." WMP and transcript links.

Related SourceWatch Resources: Hurricane Katrina: List of related pages

Related Issues

Perspective on Preparedness: FEMA relief spending in pre-Election Florida 2004

FEMA Cronyism Led to Failure

Michael Brown, who resigned September 12, 2005, as FEMA's director, "has become a symbol of cronyism," Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times.

Brown "didn't know the difference between a tropical depression and an anxiety attack when President Bush charged him with life-and-death decisions," Maureen Dowd wrote in the Times.

Spencer S. Hsu wrote in the September 9, 2005, Washington Post that "Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FEMA's "Bungled Response" toHurricane Katrina

"The breakdown in management and communications was so execrable that the president learned about the25,000 desperate, trapped people at the New Orleans convention centernot from [FEMA director Michael Brown] ..., who didn't know himself, but from a wire story carried into the Oval Office by an aide on Thursday, 24 hours after the victims had been pleading and crying for help on every channel," Maureen Dowd wrote September 10, 2005.

posted on infowars

Two Bush 2000 Florida recount aides were rewarded with top FEMA posts

Philadelphia Daily News | September 8, 2005

Reversing an eight-year crusade to rid the now-embattled Federal Emegency Management Agency of political patronage, a newly elected George W. Bush in 2001 named two key players in his Florida recount fight to important FEMA posts.

Neither man, Jacksonville attorney Reynold Hoover (pictured at left) andMiami lawyer Mark Wallace,had any experience in emergency management before they were named by the Bush administration to FEMA, now under fire for its botched response to Hurricane Katrina.

Hoover, a longtime "explosives expert" with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who became a lawyer in 1996, is still with FEMA as its director of national security coordination. Wallace left the Bush administration in 2004 to become deputy manager of the president's re-election campaign, and is now a lobbyist.

They are two more names to add to the list of political appointees and out-and-out hacks at FEMA. Many are calling for the firing of agency chief Michael Brown, the ousted head of a horse association who was hired at FEMA in 2001 along with his college roommate, top Bush advisor Joe Allbaugh. And it was reported yesterday thatFEMA's No. 2 and No. 3 officials, Patrick Rhode and Scott Morris, are also former campaign aides.

Consider this quote:

"FEMA is widely viewed as a 'dumping ground,' a turkey farm, if you will, where large numbers of positions exist that can be conveniently and quietly filled by political appointment," the preliminary report said. "This has led to a situation where top officials, having little or no experience in disaster or emergency management, are creating substantial morale problems among careerists and professionals. "

Appropriate in the wake of the agency's bungled efforts over the last 10 days in Louisiana and Mississippi? Yes -- but the above quote is from 1992, during the administration of George H.W. Bush. It came from a preliminary report from the staff of the House Appropriations Committee, and it was written before FEMA came under fire that year for a tardy response to Florida's Hurricane Andrew. (Note: Any article not linked came from the Nexis search engine.)

The Andrew debacle was one of many factors in the first President Bush's failed re-election bid. They say that good government is good politics, and so when Bill Clinton arrived at the White House in 1993, he made a serious effort to rid FEMA of political hackery.

Clinton hired a professional, James Lee Witt, to run the agency and that May Witt told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, according to a Washington Post article, "that FEMA 'will not be doing business as usual' and that he was committed to making his organization 'one of the most respected agencies in this nation.'

Did he succeed? Here's what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in a January 1996 editorial:

FEMA has developed a sterling reputation for delivering disaster- relief services, a far cry from its abysmal standing before James Lee Witt took its helm in 1993.

How did Witt turn FEMA around so quickly? Well, he is the first director of the agency to have emergency-management experience. He stopped the staffing of the agency by political patronage. He removed layers of bureaucracy. Most important, he instilled in the agency a spirit of preparedness, of service to the customer, of willingness to listen to ideas of local and state officials to make the system work better.

But if Clinton and Witt stopped the staffing of FEMA by political patronage, George W. Bush re-started it within days of taking the oath of office -- rewarding some of the people who'd helped him become president in the grueling 2000 Florida recount.

One of those was Wallace (pictured at left) -- a young lawyer who, according to a July 14, 2002, article by the Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg -- "fought on behalf of the GOP in Palm Beach County during the butterfly ballot brouhaha." He was hired in 2001 as FEMA's general counsel and was the chief lawyer for the agency on its Sept. 11 recovery effort. After his 2004 stint as a top official in the Bush campaign, he was hired in March as a D.C. lobbyist for a Florida-based law firm, Akerman Senterfitt.

Hoover, the formerATF agent turned attorney, was active in the Duval County GOP at the time of the Florida recount, and because a point man in the Jacksonville area. He initially served as FEMA's chief of staff for a time, but he's currently listed on the agency's organizational chart as director of the Office of National Security Coordination.

Of course, we all know that Bush has rewarded a number of people who went to bat for him in Florida in 2000 with plum jobs. One of those is his new UN ambassador John Bolton, who -- as the Herald article reminds us -- "[burst] into a Tallahassee library on behalf of the Bush-Cheney campaign to stop a recount of Miami-Dade County ballots." Another was recently picked by Bush to become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts.

What's more, Wallace and Hoover -- and Brown and Rhodes and Morris -- aren't the only political hires at FEMA. Indeed, the officials tasked with the response to Hurricane Katrina -- Dan Craig, the director of the recovery division -- is another. As his bio notes, "Craig worked as a campaign advisor, and political fundraiser and research analyst" and was also a lobbyist. At the risk of stating the obvious by this point, he did not have emergency management experience.

He was the key player in a 2004 FEMA controversy that may get some new scrutiny in light of recent events. From a May 15, 2005, Knight-Ridder article:

As Hurricane Frances made landfall 100 miles north of Miami-Dade County in September, a top official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared the county a major disaster area with no evidence of damage and contrary to a presidential order, federal auditors have found.

That decision allowed more than 12,000 Miami-Dade residents, many with minimal or no damage, to collect $31 million and brought unprecedented scrutiny to the federal disaster aid program...

On Sept. 5, as the storm continued its trek into central Florida, FEMA added to the declaration Miami-Dade and the other 12 counties originally requested by Gov. Jeb Bush. The decision was made by FEMA's recovery division director in Washington. The report did not name him, but Nicol D. Andrews, FEMA spokeswoman, identified him as Dan Craig.

The ruling came just two months before the 2004 presidential election, with Florida the top battleground state.

Also in 2004, up the Gulf Coast, FEMA was involved in a mock drill called Hurricane Pam, in which a hurricane with 120 mph winds topped the levies of New Orleans. FEMA's chief representative at the drill was its regional director at the time, Ron Castleman.

"We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts," said Ron Castleman, FEMA Regional Director. "Disaster response teams developed action plans in critical areas such as search and rescue, medical care, sheltering, temporary housing, school restoration and debris management. These plans are essential for quick response to a hurricane but will also help in other emergencies."

When the very real Hurricane Katrina struck last month, Castleman had already moved on to a job in the private sector. Would his presence have helped? We don't know.

We can only tell you Castleman's immediate job before he became FEMA's top person in the Gulf region. He had been the chief administrative officer -- for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign.

===

Nicol Andrews

Independent Public Relations and Communications Professional

Cincinnati Area Public Relations and Communications georgetown

rnc

Associate Director of Regional and Caucus

Nicol Andrews

(announced June 4, 2004) Most recently, Andrews served as Press Secretary for theHouse Resources Committee. Before Capitol Hill, she worked in the Communications office at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Nicol Andrews

**Nicol Andrews** was appointed Associate Director of Regional and Caucus to the Republican National Convention on June 4th, 2004 [1]. In addition to her formal title, she also acts as a spokeswoman for the convention [2].

Prior to her RNC appointment, she worked as a Press Secretary for the House Resources Committee. In this role, Andrews became involved in controversy in March 2004 when the Committee issued a press release attacking John Kerry. Many considered the press release to be explicitly partisan.

It was headlined with a quote from John Kerry about petroleum: "That black stuff is hurting us". And it went on to describe Kerry as "completely out of touch with basic economics … a hostage to the radical environmental community." The press release also contained the subheading "But is this just another flip-flop?", echoing a frequently used GOP line on Kerry [3]

According to the Las Vegas Weekly, Andrews saw nothing wrong with a House Committee issuing such a partisan press release: "Committee Press Secretary Nicol Andrews maintains that singling out one senator (who happens to be running for President) is policy as usual. 'There are a few obstructionists in the Senate who are holding [up] a nation's ability to craft good policy for our energy future,' she says. 'Senator Kerry happens to be one of the most vocal.'" [4]

SourceWatch resources

External links

David McKee, "'Black Stuff' & Political Gray Areas", Las Vegas Weekly, March 25-31, 2004.

wiki

Mark D. Wallace is an American businessman, former diplomat and lawyer who has served in a variety of government, political and private sector posts. He served in several positions during the administration of President George W. Bush, including as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Representative for UN Management and Reform.

He is currently the CEO of Tigris Financial and CEO of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI).

[hide]

1 Political career
- 1.1 UN Ambassadorship
- 1.2 2008 U.S. presidential campaign

2 Current work
- 2.1 United Against Nuclear Iran

Political career:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit source | edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

Prior to government service, Wallace was a practicing commercial litigation attorney in Miami, Florida. He began his political career under Florida Governor Jeb Bush and was active in his election campaigns in 1994, 1998 and 2002.^[1]

In 2000 Wallace played a key role working for then Governor George W. Bush’s legal team in the decisive Florida recount in 2000 where he served as counsel to the campaign in Florida and was a spokesman for the legal team in various national media outlets.^[2][3] Wallace was portrayed in the HBO movie Recount for his role in the disputed presidential contest.^[4]

During President Bush's administration from 1999 to 2003 Wallace served in a variety of federal government general counsel positions. At the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), he oversaw and managed all aspects of the FEMA Office of General Counsel, and acted as counsel to the FEMA-led New York and World Trade Center recovery effort in the wake of the 2001 September 11 attacks. He also served as the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), during the INS’ transition from the DOJ into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002reorganization. After the reorganization Wallace served as the first principal legal advisor to the Bureau of **Immigration** and Customs Enforcement and to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services for the Department of Homeland Security.^[5]

In 2003, Wallace joined President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign as the deputy campaign manager. In addition to his day-to-day responsibilities of assisting in the management of the national campaign, Wallace was the campaign’s lead liaison to theRepublican National Convention, the campaign’s representative in debate negotiations, and led the campaign’s debate team at each of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates.^[5]

UN Ambassadorship:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit source | edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

In 2005 President Bush nominated Wallace to serve in the United States Department of State, United States Mission to the United Nations as Ambassador, U.S. Representative for UN Management and Reform and Alternative Representative of the United States to Sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The Senate confirmed his appointment in 2006.^[6]

During his tenure as Ambassador to the United Nations, Wallace most notably sought to uncover corruption in UN programs in such places as North Korea and Burma.^[7] He exposed the "Cash for Kim" corruption scandal in North Korea, revealing, among other issues, that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had funneled millions of dollars in hard currency to North Korea without assurance that North Korea’s dictatorship would use the money to help the North Korean people instead of diverting it to illicit activities including the country’s illegal nuclear program.^[8] Wallace accused the program of being "systematically perverted for the benefit of theKim Jong Il regime" and the media drew parallels between UNDP’s corruption in North Korea and the Oil-for-Food scandal in Iraq several years earlier.^[9] The Wall Street Journal wrote that the finding of the Cash for Kim investigation "vindicates" Wallace, "who led the charge for transparency at UNDP."^[10]

In addition he led the U.S. delegation’s "no" vote against using UN money to pay for the 2009 "**Durban II**" conference, describing it as "noxious to my country and a disgrace in the International Community."^[11][12] He further opposed the 2008-2009 UN Biennium Budget for its "ad hoc" and "piecemeal" approach that ensured spending increases in the UN general budget that far outpaced the general budget increases of member states.^[11]

While at the UN, Wallace also launched the UN Transparency and Accountability Initiative that focused on eight areas of reform related to member states’ access to UN financial documents, ethics, financial disclosure, oversight mechanisms, IPSAS accounting standards and administrative overhead.^[13]

Upon his departure from the U.S. State Department, The Wall Street Journal editorial board compared Wallace to a list of "distinguished" Americans who tried to make the United Nations live up to its original ideals including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick and John Bolton.^[14] The opinion piece noted that although Wallace was unpopular with some officials who didn’t want to risk their engagement with North Korea over corruption, "he’s the one who had it right."^[14]

2008 U.S. presidential campaign:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit source | edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

During the 2008 presidential campaign Wallace was a senior advisor to Senator John S. McCain. In that role, he led the debate preparation team for Senator McCain’s running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.^[15][16] After the debate, The New York Timescommented that Governor Palin's debate performance against Democrat Joe Biden "exceeded expectations in this highly anticipated face-off, though those expectations were low after she had stumbled in recent television interviews."^[17] Wallace was portrayed in the HBO movie Game Change by actor Ron Livingston for his work on the McCain campaign.^[18]

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Wallace currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Tigris Financial Group, a New York City-based investment, advisory and asset management firm that focuses on natural resources and the natural resources sector through its Electrum Group of Companies. In that capacity, he headed the transaction team for Silver Opportunity Partners in its acquisition of Idaho's historic **Sunshine Mine**. Regarding that acquisition, Wallace told Bloomberg Businessweek, "It was no doubt a complicated and risky transaction. Through our expertise, we were able to minimize the risk involved, resolve litigation, and reunite the patchwork and fractured ownership interests that inhibited the mine and limited its value over the last decade."^[19] In 2011, Sunshine Silver Mines filed its S1 with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission describing its intention to go public on the NYSE and TSX.^[20]

Wallace’s work with Electrum has included leading its investment and operational entry into the Polish mineral sector through Śląsko Krakowska Kompania Górnictwa Metali Sp. z o.o. (SKKGM) and Amarante Investments S.p. z.o.o. (Amarante). In 2011, SKKGM commenced a drilling program at its Bolesławiec-Iłowa and Osiecznica-Nowiny concessions in Lower Silesia and at its concession near Myskow.^[21] Also in 2011, Amarante announced its application to the Polish government for nine concessions for mineral exploration in and near Wroclaw and Kobierzyce. In relation to their work in Poland, Wallace was quoted as saying that the Group’s team hopes “to make discoveries of copper, tungsten and silver in Poland.” In the same article, Wallace stated that gold, due to the uncertain business environment, has “practically become a currency again,” and that the Group’s belief that supply and demand fundamentals would continue to be the key economic driver for copper, silver and other metals.^[22]

Wallace has also attempted to secure the necessary regulatory approvals and community support for Electrum’s efforts to explore its Paramount mine claims in eastern California’s Bodie Wilderness Study Area. Wallace spoke for Electrum’s Cougar Gold subsidiary at a February 2011 meeting in California. There, he explained that additional exploratory drilling in the area cannot occur until the Wilderness Study Area designation is removed.^[23] In an August 2011 Wall Street Journal article, Wallace described the Bodie dispute as "'the tip of the spear' in a growing national debate over balancing conservation and resource extraction."^[24] In the Los Angeles Times he described the great potential of Paramount. "A lot of us are quite fond of the people there. This could be a real success story."^[25]

Also as part of his work with Electrum, Wallace serves on the board of directors of Niocan Inc., a Canadian TSX listed company whose Quebec mining assets focus on niobium and iron ore.^[26]

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Wallace also serves as Chief Executive Officer of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a bipartisan non-profit dedicated to prevent Iranfrom producing nuclear weapons. Wallace founded UANI in 2008 alongside former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, the late Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross.^[27] Under Wallace, UANI and its Advisory Board has grown to include prominent foreign policy experts such as Graham Allison, Les Gelb and Fouad Ajami, and former government officials including former U.S. Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan, former head of the German Intelligence Service Dr. August Hanning, and former head of the British MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove, among others.^[28]

Since its founding, Wallace has led UANI in dozens of successful business and corporate campaigns that have called on such multinational firms as General Electric,^[29] Huntsman,^[30] Caterpillar,^[31] Ingersoll Rand,^[32] Porsche, Hyundai,^[33] Fiat,^[34] Royal Dutch Shell,^[35] Terex^[36] and Siemens^[37] to end their business dealings in Iran. Wallace and UANI led the first successful campaign to convince a Chinese company to end its work in Iran. After various discussions between Wallace, UANI and Huawei, the company announced that it was scaling back its business in Iran. The decision by Huawei and the role of UANI was prominently featured in the news media includingThe Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times^[38] and Reuters.^[39] In The Wall Street Journal piece, Wallace was quoted saying of the decision: "This is a significant milestone. For the first time a major Chinese business is pulling back from Iran in the face of mounting international scorn for Iran’s brutal regime."^[40]

Wallace and UANI launched a campaign calling on SWIFT to terminate its relationships with Iran’s banks and financial institutions, arguing that SWIFT was in violation of U.S. and EU sanctions by affording Iranian banks BICs and access to SWIFT and, therefore, access to the international financial system.^[41] Subsequently, SWIFT announced that it would comply with new EU sanctions and cease providing messaging services to sanction designated Iranian banks. “It’s a good positive step forward and it will cause real difficulties for the regime,” said Wallace.^[42] SWIFT’s decision and UANI’s campaign were extensively covered in media outlets around the world.

UANI and Wallace have pursued a successful “Auto Campaign” that has focused on the lucrative Iranian automobile industry. UANI has called on international automobile manufactures to leave Iran including, among others, Nissan, Fiat, Peugeot, GM and Hyundai.^[43] Every year, UANI launches its annual Hotels Campaign, calling on all New York area hotels and venues to refuse to host President Ahmadinejad and the Iranian delegation during the United Nations’ annual meeting in New York City.^[44]

Wallace and UANI have authored and/or supported a variety of federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives designed to enhance Iran’s economic isolation. Their model legislation has been incorporated into both federal bills and state bills, including theComprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA),^[45] the Iran Transparency and Accountability Act (ITAA),^[46] the Iran Financial Sanctions Improvement Act of 2012 (H.R. 4179 as introduced by Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Congressman Brad Sherman),^[47] California’s Iran Contracting Act of 2010 (AB1650) and New York’s Iran Divestment Act of 2011 (A08668) among others.^[48] In May 2012, Wallace along with Meir Dagan, August Hanning, R. James Woolsey, Lord Charles Guthrie and Kristen Silverberg co-authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for “the most robust sanctions against Iran in history” as a means “for the international community to truly isolate the regime.”^[49] Wallace described a proposed strategy to implement such sanctions during testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on 17 May 2012 by proposing legislation focused on four areas, namely Banking, Insurance and Reinsurance, Disclosure and Debarment and Shipping (UANI BIDS) in order to achieve an “economic blockade” of Iran.^[47]

Wallace is a frequent media contributor and op-ed author and has been featured in news outlets around the world including The Wall Street Journal,^[50] The New York Times,^[51] the Financial Times,^[52] CNN,^[53] Fox News,^[54] Huffington Post,^[55] the New York Post,^[56]and CNBC.^[57] In an October 2012 profile on UANI in NBC News by chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, Wallace stated, "Our message is clear: You have to choose between doing business with our checkbook or their checkbook -- with the reality being we're the biggest checkbook in the world. Notwithstanding the purported demise of the United States, we're still the biggest checkbook in the world."^[58]

Wallace also serves on the Board of Advisors of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.^[59]

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Wallace attended the University of Miami, where he received both his Bachelor's and law degrees.^[1] He is married to Nicolle Wallace, aNew York Times best-selling novelist and political commentator who served as President George W. Bush’s communications director and senior advisor to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid.^[60]

[ #8

The deputy chief of the United Nations Development Program has shot back at American accusations that it had squandered millions of dollars in North Korea, saying the amount far surpassed what the program had at its disposal and questioning the authenticity of documents the American mission provided to back up its claims.

In a confidential letter delivered Thursday evening to Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador, the official, Ad Melkert, said the money amounts, vendor names and transaction dates supplied by the United States had been examined against his agency's records and ''there is not a single match.''

He said the volume of payments that the Americans claimed that the program had made to North Korean government entities was ''significantly higher'' than the total that the office had for all purposes in the country.

American officials have said their charges stem from internal business records of the program, but Mr. Melkert challenged the veracity of seven supporting documents that the United States mission supplied in a June 15 meeting.

Those were presented as being files from 2001 and 2002, but he said his office had determined that they had been generated under a computer coding system put into effect in 2004. The documents, he said, ''show U.N.D.P. corporate system codes not in use by U.N.D.P. in those years.''

Noting that the United States had termed the evidence made available so far ''sample documents,'' Mr. Melkert asked Mr. Khalilzad to furnish all of the documentation substantiating the American claims.

The letter is the latest in a series of frosty exchanges between Mr. Melkert and American officials in the six months since Mark D. Wallace, the deputy American ambassador for management, accused the program of serving as ''a steady and large source of hard currency'' for the North Korean government.

The program, Mr. Wallace wrote then, has been ''systematically perverted for the benefit of the Kim Jong-il regime rather than the people of North Korea,'' and he suggested that the United Nations money might have ended up financing North Korea's nuclear program.

The new letter was made available by an official interested in combating the wide attention that the American allegations had received through briefings by Mr. Wallace for selected news outlets, editorial writers, members of Congress and nations that finance the development program.

A note sent to participants in a briefing by Mr. Wallace before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on May 23 promised ''many parallels to the oil-for-food scandal'' and evidence of ''a direct link between U.N. assistance and the North Korean missile programs.''

Mr. Melkert complained in a previous letter that the briefings failed to mention the rebuttals supplied by his office to each set of allegations.

Asked Thursday afternoon about the months of charge and countercharge, Mr. Wallace noted that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Kemal Dervis, the development program's chief, had committed themselves to look into the matter. ''I think the U.S. certainly looks forward to the U.N.D.P.'s constructive and technical inquiry into the program, a program that appears to have lost its way,'' he said.

The original January accusation from Mr. Wallace prompted the development program's executive board that same month to order an end to the practice of furnishing payments in hard currency to the North Korean government and to making in-country hiring subject to government approval.

In March, after North Korea resisted those conditions, the agency announced that it was suspending operations in the country, curtailing 20 programs with an overall budget of $4.4 million. The programs dealt with agricultural recovery and rural energy development, according to the development program's Web site.

On June 1 a preliminary United Nations audit offered no support for the charge that systematic large-scale diversions to the North Korean government had occurred, but it said the program had broken its own rules by hiring workers selected by the government and paying them in foreign currency.

Then the United States raised a series of new charges, and program officials responded to each point.

To Mr. Wallace's charge that the program had transferred $7 million to its counterpart agency in the North Korean government, the program said that the amount actually had been $175,000 and that most of it had gone for workshops on vegetable growing and seed processing.

The program reiterated the same $175,000 figure in reply to a second allegation: that an additional $2.8 million in program money had gone to North Korean missions in New York and Europe and had been used to purchase buildings and houses in Britain, France and Canada.

The agency also turned aside Mr. Wallace's accusations that it had procured equipment for North Korea that could be put to military use. It said the equipment, which included global positioning systems, personal computers and a portable spectrometer, an optical device, had been purchased under a program, common in developing nations, that monitors natural disasters and helps to estimate crop yields.

Mr. Melkert also denied that his agency had paid $2.7 million to the Zang Lok Trading Company, a banking institution based in Macao that Mr. Wallace said was linked to a North Korean financial agent involved in weapons sales.

According to banking records, Mr. Melkert said, the development program's total payments to Zang Lok from 1999 to the present amount to $52,201.95 and went for workshop equipment and computers for Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and for the World Intellectual Property Organization. The development program had no transactions with Zang Lok on its own account, he said.

Totaling up the charges, Mr. Melkert said in his letter to Mr. Khalilzad that ''the allegation that U.N.D.P. transferred $15 million in cash to the D.P.R.K. government in the period 2001-2005 is not supported as our banking records show that the country office did not have this magnitude of resources at its disposal.'' North Korea's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Mr. Melkert said that only an average of $2.5 million a year had been available from 2001 to 2005 and that the sum included all payments made by the country office supporting development program operations and some other United Nations functions.

Mr. Wallace has also cited ''eyewitness accounts'' from unidentified people to support his charges, and he has accused the program of retaliating against one of its employees for revealing information about mismanagement.

In a letter Tuesday to the secretary general, Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, identified the employee as Artjon Shkurtaj, the program's chief of operations in North Korea in 2005 and 2006.

David Morrison, the program's spokesman, said Mr. Shkurtaj left North Korea in August 2006 and left the program in March 2007, after fulfilling several short-term contracts. Senator Coleman said he had been let go because of concerns he had raised and should be afforded whistle-blower protection.

Mr. Melkert said Mr. Shkurtaj had been invited to submit his information to the program's audit office but had declined to do so.

References:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit source | edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-Appleman_1-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-Appleman_1-1) "President George W. Bush-Campaign Organization". Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
^ Steven Meyer (14 December 2000). "Florida Dispatch: 36 Days in the Life of a Recount Observer". The American Prospect.
^ Thomas C. Tobin (29 November 2000). "Watchdogs do their own recount in Palm Beach". St. Petersburg Times.
^ "Recount". IMDb. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-bio_5-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-bio_5-1) "Mark Wallace". United Against Nuclear Iran. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
^ "Presidential Nominations 109th Congress (2005 - 2006): PN1169-109". THOMAS. Library of Congress.
^ Colum Lynch (31 July 2007). "U.S. Crusader Odd Man Out at the UN". The Washington Post.
^ Warren Hoge (29 June 2007). "UN Development Agency Rebuts U.S. Charges of Wasteful Spending in North Korea". The New York Times.
^ Bay Fang (11 March 2007). "Did UN agency serve as ATM for North Korea?". Chicago Tribune.
^ "Hooray for the U.N.". The Wall Street Journal. 2 September 2010. Retrieved 2 September 2010.
^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-USUN_11-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-USUN_11-1) Mark Wallace (22 December 2007). "Explanation of vote by Ambassador Mark Wallace, United States Ambassador for management reform, on Agenda item 128". United States Mission to the UN. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
^ Anne Bayefsky (27 December 2007). "Voting Against Hate".National Review Online.
^ "U.N agencies’ budgets eyed". The Washington Times. 1 November 2007.
^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-editorial_14-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-editorial_14-1) "UN Reformer (Really)". The Wall Street Journal. 1 April 2008.
^ Philip Sherwell (27 September 2008). "Vice-presidential debate: Sarah Palin relies on Bush veterans for her big day". The Daily Telegraph.
^ Anne E. Kornblut and Juliet Eilperin (22 September 2008)."Steering the McCain Campaign, a Lot of Old Bush Hands". The Washington Post.
^ Patrick Healy (3 October 2008). "Cordial but Pointed, Palin and Biden Face Off". The New York Times. p. A1.
^ "Game Change". IMDb. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ Kelly, Jason (26 August 2010). "Gold's Evangelist".Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
^ "Sunshine Silver Mines files for IPO of up to $250 mln". Reuters. 7 July 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ "SKKGM Announces Start of Drill Program in Poland". Business Wire. 30 November 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ "Golden boy reaches... for Polish copper". Bloomberg Businessweek Polska (in Polish). 30 November 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ "Cougar Gold says won't mine unless wilderness protection removed, county supervisors divided". Mammoth Times. 16 February 2011.
^ "Gold fever stirs ghost town". The Wall Street Journal. 18 August 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ "As gold prices soar, Bodie is thrust from the past". Los Angeles Times. 1 October 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ "Niocan Announces Private Placement Financing with Nio-Metals Holdings LLC and Changes to Niocan's Board of Directors". Market Wire. 29 August 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ Perelman, Marc (11 September 2008). "Broad-Based Coalition Seeks To Prevent a Nuclear Iran". The Forward.
^ "Leadership". United Against Nuclear Iran. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ "General Electric Signs UANI's Iran Business Declaration". United Against Nuclear Iran. 18 September 2009. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ "UANI Applauds Huntsman for Its Decision to Stop Doing Business in Iran". United Against Nuclear Iran. 27 January 2010. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ "UANI Applauds Caterpillar's Commitment to End Sales into Iran". United Against Nuclear Iran. 1 March 2010. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ "Ingersoll Bars Units From Sales to Iran". The Wall Street Journal. 10 March 2010. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ Jonathan Wachtel (16 April 2012). "Bowing to pressure, Porsche joins Hyundai in ending business with Iran". Fox News. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ "Fiat Slams Brake On Sales To Iran". The Wall Street Journal. 25 May 2012. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
^ "UANI Applauds Royal Dutch Shell for Its Decision to End its Sales of Gasoline Into Iran". United Against Nuclear Iran. 10 March 2010. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ "UANI Applauds Terex For Ending its Business in Iran". United Against Nuclear Iran. 24 March 2011. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ "UANI Calls on Nokia and Nokia Siemens to End Their Business in Iran". 1 October 2010. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
^ "Huawei pledges not to pursue Iran business". Financial Times. 9 December 2011. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "China's Huawei to scale back Iran operations". Reuters. 9 December 2011. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "Huawei to Scale Back Business in Iran". The Wall Street Journal. 10 December 2011. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "UANI Launches SWIFT Campaign". United Against Nuclear Iran. 1 February 2012. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
^ "Banking group faces pressure to cut Iran ties". The Hill. 18 March 2012. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "Auto Campaign". United Against Nuclear Iran. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
^ "Hotels Campaign". United Against Nuclear Iran. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
^ "UANI Applauds Congress for Passing Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Legislation". United Against Nuclear Iran. 24 June 2010. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
^ "UANI Applauds Introduction of the Iran Transparency and Accountability Act of 2011". United Against Nuclear Iran. February 2011 16.
^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-testimony_47-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wallace#cite_ref-testimony_47-1) Mark Wallace (17 May 2012). "Iran Sanctions: Strategy, Implementation, and Enforcement". U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
^ "State Debarment – Iran Contracting Act". United Against Nuclear Iran. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
^ Meir Dagan, August Hanning, R. James Woolsey, Charles Guthrie, Kristen Silverberg, and Mark D. Wallace (16 May 2012)."Total Sanctions Might Stop Iran". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ Richard Holbrooke, R. James Woolsey, Dennis B. Ross and Mark D. Wallace (22 September 2008). "Everyone Needs to Worry About Iran". The Wall Street Journal.
^ "Senate Panel Approves Potentially Toughest Penalty Yet Against Iran’s Wallet". The New York Times. 2 February 2012. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "California tightens screw on trade with Iran". Financial Times. 27 June 2011. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "Walkout at U.N. as Ahmadinejad speaks". CNN. 23 September 2011. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "Shipping Firm Maersk Suspends Business With Iranian Ports in Wake of Sanctions". Fox News. 1 July 2011. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ Mark D. Wallace and Frances Townsend (28 October 2011). "(Another) Act of War and What We Can Do About It". Huffington Post. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ Mark D. Wallace (26 July 2011). "Trading with the enemy: As Iran helps kill our troops, multinationals do biz with both sides".New York Post. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ Mark D. Wallace (20 December 2011). "Why a Chinese Company Finally Decided to Pull Back from Iran". CNBC. Retrieved 31 May 2012.
^ "US nonprofit 'names and shames' businesses to put bite into Iran sanctions". NBC News. 18 October 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2013.
^ "Leadership". Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
^ Jonathan Martin (10 September 2008). "Palin team stocked with Bush veterans". Politico.

Categories:

Katrina/ hurricane

==

Rick Perry to Climate Activists: Fossil Fuels Save Lives

Hurricane Matthew truthers

According to Media Matters, more than 95% of the media coverage on Typhoon Haiyan has failed to mention climate change

==

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina 2005

===

===

Hurricane Sandy Forecasts Would Have Suffered Without Polar Satellites, NOAA Analysis Says 12/14/12

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/hurricane-sandy-2012-forecasts_n_2296043.html?utm_hp_ref=green

===

----

More on Patrick Rhode's Move to NASA

Hurricane Katrina: Who's at Fault?

Blaming the Government: Failure to Perform

Michael Chertoff

Related Links

Crisis Systems

Funding Levee Projects

Cause was political

Blaming environmental groups

Blaming George W. Bush

Blaming Governor Blanco: Accountability Resolved

Blaming the Victims

Blaming the Media

Pointing Fingers

"now is not the time to point fingers"

Keep Pointing Fingers

Congressional Comments

Republicans

Democrats

Investigation

Political Fallout

Related SourceWatch Resources: Hurricane Katrina: List of related pages

Related Issues

Perspective on Preparedness: FEMA relief spending in pre-Election Florida 2004

Other Related Links

FEMA Cronyism Led to Failure

FEMA's "Bungled Response" toHurricane Katrina

Nicol Andrews

Nicol Andrews

SourceWatch resources

External links

Contents

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