The flooding which nearly wiped the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, La., off the map after Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers failing to maintain a navigation channel through the city, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin announced that the city would begin citing residents who did not vacate the FEMA trailers in which they have been living.
We finally know why the federal government prevented Wal-Mart from delivering water to Hurricane Katrina victims: it was free.
So far the federal government has done little to respond to the historic floods in eastern Iowa which are among the worst in recorded history. In order to maintain tyranny in the flooded areas, local governments have had to step up to meet the challenge.
When the next hurricane threatens to strike, how will you get the news? For that matter, will you survive? Some want to give the Federal Emergency Management Agency even more authority over disaster response than it already has, even while it struggles to modernize the country's emergency alert system.
More than a year after displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina first said that formaldehyde in government-issued travel trailers was making them sick, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has arranged for air quality testing to begin this week.
Over the past decade, cities around the country have established clergy response teams, comprised of pastors, priests and other religious leaders from all religious denominations, to provide aid, counseling and assistance to victims of crime and lately of natural disasters. Now a report suggests that these clergy response teams may be used to help put down civil unrest and enforce martial law.
People who survived Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in a century, then had to face the next challenge to their survival: the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Those who survived FEMA's first round of incompetence in New Orleans were placed in travel trailers, many of which oozed formaldehyde, making them sick and killing at least one person. But FEMA lawyers stonewalled, preventing the agency from taking steps to mitigate the formaldehyde problem.
Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity.
On Friday, May 4, an F5 tornado wiped the town of Greensburg, Kan., almost entirely off the map. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, along with the National Guard and local police from all over Kansas, then systematically kept out relief workers while they went house to house disarming the residents.
About 110,000 households displaced due to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 will continue to receive housing assistance through March 1, 2009, under a plan the Bush administration announced last week.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency wasted billions of dollars by awarding contracts for services to maintain and remove emergency trailers for people displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to politically well-connected and financially risky companies, according to an inspector general's report released Monday.
In case you haven't noticed, there haven't been any posts here in several days. This is primarily because I've been wrapped up with another project which has taken up virtually all of my time since the last post. To make it up to you, I'm just going to give you links to several interesting items in my unread list for you to enjoy.
Tonight, residents of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, La., can rest a little easier, now that seven dangerous men indicted for murder and attempted murder are off the streets and in jail.
A Congressional investigation found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid out an estimated $1 billion inappropriately after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but to date has recovered less than one percent of that amount.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has wasted another $3 or $4 million of your dollars on Hurricane Katrina relief that never arrived -- and now, never will.FEMA purchased about 1,800 pre-fabricated modular homes and put them in storage in Texarkana, Ark., without assembling them, because they never actually used them to build housing for hurricane victims. But despite a warning from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general's office, FEMA never bothered to protect the homes from the weather, and as a result, some of them are beyond repair.
If you've been reading here for a while, you know I collect large numbers of stories of government stupidity, and rarely have time to share all of them or treat them all with the depth they deserve. Some of the more noteworthy or interesting ones I collect into these "bits" postings.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is still far short of its recruitment goals, but its director, R. David Paulison, says he wants to expand the agency's staffing even beyond those goals.
The damage Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast region was nothing like anyone had ever seen. And a year later, few say their lives are back to normal.A recent poll conducted by Gallup and USA TODAY indicates that Katrina may well have done the most damage to the idea that government is here to help.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is ready for the 2006 hurricane season despite being at only 84 percent of its authorized staffing level, director R. David Paulison said Friday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said Monday that it would replace locks on request for residents of travel trailers issued to evacuees of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year after finding that the same key patterns were used for many trailers.
Some travel trailers issued to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are emitting potentially dangerous levels of formaldehyde, an industrial chemical used in their manufacture which some residents say is making them sick.
The United Nations issued a damning report Friday decrying the human rights record of the United States. The report urges the U.S. to close its secret detention centers, reduce its usage of the death penalty, ensure that minorities are adequately aided in relief efforts such as those after Katrina, and more.
Your government is slow, inefficient and stupid. It's a miracle it ever manages to get anything done.I like it that way.
Department of Homeland Security employees who were issued purchase cards to make small purchases, generally of $2,500 or less, for immediate needs while working in the field, abused the cards, making inappropriate purchases of, among other things, a 63 inch plasma television set, a beer brewing kit, and golf and tennis training.In addition, much of the material purchased with the cards has been lost or misappropriated, such as 100 laptops FEMA purchased for use during Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
If you're like most of us, your e-mail box fills up daily with pure junk. I'm not just talking about spam, though that's certainly a problem. I'm talking about chain letters, stupid jokes forwarded 384 times, news you don't need, even wedding invitations.Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff found a solution to his e-mail problem: He no longer uses it.
After Hurricane Katrina last August, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid out fraudulent disaster assistance which may have exceeded $1 billion, according to Government Accountability Office testimony before Congress Wednesday.
To a government employee, for whom efficiency is something one hears about but is rarely able to achieve, the efficiency which the market can provide can seem like magic: mysterious and forever out of reach.So it was on June 7, as 24 AT&T Network Disaster Recovery trailers rolled in to the parking lot at FedExField, normally the home of the Washington Redskins, and began setting up for a disaster recovery exercise, George Foresman, undersecretary for preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security stared slack-jawed and commented that government needs "to really begin to understand how these [communications] networks -- that were like magic -- work."
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate committee Thursday that making the Federal Emergency Management Agency an independent agency would cost billions of dollars, create a "schizophrenic" response to future disasters, and roll back progress made since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In a further example of Louisiana legislators' incompetence, the state senate passed a bill raising the Louisiana minimum wage to $6.15, $1.00 above the national wage. The Democrat senator from Monroe, Charles Jones, had originally wanted the wage to be set at $7 an hour!
The federal government is a slow, stupid, plodding bureaucracy which can't respond quickly to anything. And if you're counting on them to save you when the next hurricane hits, you may well find yourself dead. A Department of Defense official told Congress Thursday that DoD and Homeland Security need as much as a week to prepare to respond to a major disaster. And those of you living in hurricane territories will immediately recognize exactly how stupid that is.
Low morale continues to plague the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, resulting in widespread vacancies in senior-level positions all over the department as well as general understaffing. DHS will "probably" do something about it, according to its top human resources official.
New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin was re-elected Saturday by a vote of 52 percent to 48 percent against his challenger, Mitch Landrieu, the current lieutenant governor of Louisiana. And, Nagin said in his victory speech, for all of the "folks who went to the other side, who went to the red-light district, I forgive you."
Here are some updates to four stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity.
New Orleans, La., mayor Ray Nagin has unveiled the city's new disaster plan. It's quite a simple plan: Run for the hills, run for your lives.
A bipartisan Senate investigation into the government's response to Hurricane Katrina has found that government failed at all levels to provide an appropriate response to one of the worst disasters in American history, and called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be abolished. I would be cheering, except for what they recommend to replace it.
Is there anything that moves slower than a government bureaucracy?Actually, it seems that there is: the mainstream media.
The 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced Monday at Columbia University in New York City, and among the winners were the New Orleans Times-Picayune for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the two reporters from the New York Times who broke the story in December of President George W. Bush's terrorist surveillance program.
So much stupidity happens every day that sometimes it's hard to keep up. I frequently have more stories than time to post them. Here are a few things that happened in the last week. Some are noteworthy, some are funny, and all are just plain stupid.
Last month I let you know that the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave out far too much money in disaster assistance for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, mainly because of people defrauding the system. Now FEMA is lowering the boom. It's sending letters to everyone who got too much money, telling them they now have to pay back the amount of assistance they were overpaid.
The Department of Homeland Security has several top-level management vacancies, including director-level postions with responsibilities for disaster management and preventing terrorist attacks.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scrambling to complete rebuilding of levees in and around New Orleans which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina six months ago. But critics are saying that the Corps is using substandard materials and ignoring levees with structural damage, which will leave the city with even less protection than it had last year.
If you want to criticize the Federal Emergency Management Agency, today's lesson is: don't do it when FEMA is looking.George Barisich, 49, received a $75 ticket from Homeland Security officials when he gave away a T-shirt with a message critical to FEMA printed on it Feb. 1 in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Chalmette, La.
On Thursday the White House released a report on lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they've learned very much. The report's recommendations are unlikely to address the primary problem revealed by the government's response to Hurricane Katrina: the fact that government is not the best vehicle for responding to a natural disaster.
Even if you were nowhere near the paths of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you are a victim.A report released Monday shows that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was defrauded of potentially billions of dollars because it made duplicate emergency assistance payments to thousands of people, and potentially thousands of other people took advantage of flaws in FEMA's registration process to obtain more than one payment. In some egregious cases, individuals received as many as 23 $2,000 checks.
Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Friday, former Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown said that he warned the White House on Monday, Aug. 29, that New Orleans was flooding, but that bureaucratic obstacles got in the way.
In a system of two parties, two chambers, and two elected branches, there will always be differences and debate. But even tough debates can be conducted in a civil tone, and our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger. To confront the great issues before us, we must act in a spirit of goodwill and respect for one another -- and I will do my part. Tonight the state of our Union is strong -- and together we will make it stronger.
"Never mind what Bush has to say [tonight] on his speech," says Timothy West. President George W. Bush will say "that the Union is strong, that we we are winning the fight against terrorism, and that America has never been better. And all of it, is of course, 100% bullshit."
The National Flood Insurance Program doesn't have enough money to continue functioning, according to a Government Accountability Office report, and the program is flawed by design and would have gone broke even if not for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
This is a public service announcement from Homeland Stupidity.If you are an evacuee from Hurricanes Katrina or Rita and still living in a hotel/motel room, you need to take action now to ensure that FEMA continues to pay for your housing expenses after February 7, 2006.
Federal Emergency Management Agency employee Frank Charles Tanner, 47, of Independence, La., was arrested Friday and charged with looting after the homeowner, who was there to watch a FEMA trailer being delivered, caught him.
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money," Everett Dirksen once said.Here are a few places billions of dollars, which might have otherwise been in your paycheck, actually went.
Alert reader Tony Street sent me a snapshot from the inside front cover of Consumer Reports magazine showing part of a letter from FEMA to various homeowners in flood-prone areas offering flood insurance.
Almost three years ago, the federal government began its largest reorganization in half a century, creating the Department of Homeland Security. Today, the department is hampered by "major management challenges" which, for instance, hampered its response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to the inspector general's report released Wednesday.
Former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge was warned in 2003 that under his plan to reorganize the department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency would suffer, and the nation's ability to respond to a natural disaster or terrorist attack would be crippled.That warning came from former FEMA head Michael Brown.
As Hurricane Katrina formed from nothing in the Atlantic last August, a small crew began tracking it. As it gathered strength and barrelled toward the Gulf Coast, they sent warning all up and down the coast: Board up your windows and block your doors. They pre-positioned critical supplies of food, water, generators, even diapers, in staging areas, ready for the hurricane to strike. These are the men and women of Wal-Mart.Wal-Mart?
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced yesterday that he is "retooling FEMA" to better meet future challenges and address "lessons learned in Katrina."
A report prepared for the House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and released Thursday says that the American Red Cross doesn't live up to its promise to deliver short-term relief during large scale disasters, that the agency is hampered by bureaucracy, and that this pattern has continued for at least the last 20 years.
Homeland security expert W. David Stephenson takes a look at the government's response to Hurricane Katrina and compares it to ordinary citizens' response, and finds that the citizens handily beat out the government in their ability to respond effectively to an emergency.
This story is getting way too much attention for how completely stupid it is. I wasn't even going to comment on it, but after seeing it all over the net, I think at this point I have to say something.The story goes like this:
The city of New Orleans continues to struggle to get back on its feet. Some residents have returned and begun rebuilding. Others have returned to find nothing remains. And still others will never go back. But several things are happening which are making the rebuilding process longer and more painful than it needs to be.This is a special edition of "Bits of homeland stupidity."
That's the proposal made by Democratic representatives in Congress, to retroactively cover losses due to flooding for victims of Hurricane Katrina who didn't have flood insurance.
After being forced to resign from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in September amid concerns that he mismanaged the agency, former director Michael Brown announced that he's going into the consulting business.
Some 300 million people live in the United States of America, and the federal government is spying on an unknown number of them, who have done absolutely nothing wrong, prowling through their most sensitive personal data, and keeping it on file forever. Today I'm going to turn the situation on its head, and show you just how easy it is to gather information on the government, and some amazing bits of stupidity that came out of this experiment.I pulled the server logs for this site from October 1 to yesterday, November 22, and analyzed them to find anyone from a U.S. government agency who visited the site. Even I was startled by what I found. Let's take a look at what government bureaucrats were doing when they crossed paths with homeland stupidity, or in a few cases, exhibited it.
This site went live with its first bit of homeland stupidity on Saturday, November 6, 2004. Here's a retrospective of some of the best posts of the first year, and a peek at the year ahead.
Two proposals making their way through Congress appear to be working at completely cross purposes to each other. One would force oil companies to raise gas prices, and one would allow them to lower gas prices. Given this crazy Congress, it's entirely possible both will pass.
Tens of thousands of Lower Ninth Ward residents of New Orleans, La., face eviction, but they don't know it, because National Guard troops refuse to allow them access to their homes to find the eviction notices on their front doors.
You've probably heard by now that Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., had tried to amend a 2006 transportation funding bill to kill Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" and "Don Young's Way," another Alaska pork-barrel bridge. You even heard that the measure failed, 82-15. What you didn't hear is Don Young's opinion of his constituents.
There's so much homeland stupidity out there, what's an overburdened American to do? Here's yet another collection of government follies from around the U.S.
At one point, Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney, D-Ga., asked why Chertoff shouldn't be charged with negligent homicide for his department's response to the storm. Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas, quickly criticized her comment as "over the top" and "not constructive."
Copies of e-mail messages sent by people working in the Federal Emergency Management Agency, released to the Associated Press Monday, reveal that the agency was ill-prepared to face a disaster the size of Hurricane Katrina.Follwoing are excerpts from an article published by the Associated Press Tuesday, with my own annotations.
A survivor of Hurricane Katrina, from New Orleans, La., told me last week that after the hurricane hit, she called the Federal Emergency Management Agency's hotline (1 800 621-FEMA) daily, and every day, the FEMA workers would ask her for news, and give her an update on the red tape her disaster aid request was tied up in.This appears to have been an all-too-common occurrence for hurricane victims, which led someone affected by Hurricane Rita in Texas to express the opinion that...
The federal government is set to miss a self-imposed Oct. 15 deadline for having all of the Hurricane Katrina evacuees out of temporary shelters.
Back in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared "War on Poverty." And yet, poverty is still with us. Why is this, and what can be done about it?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into New Orleans, a new danger to human life and property has emerged: the New Orleans Police Department.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is still screwing up disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, according to various news reports.
A report released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of the Inspector General (IG) highlights deficiencies in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's information technology (IT) systems and integration with overall DHS strategic objectives.
Congress is set to authorize $200 billion in Hurricane Katrina disaster relief funding. Maybe we should take a look at where this money is going.
New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin has invited residents to begin returning to sections of New Orleans from which floodwaters have cleared.
Updated As Hurricane Rita made a northwesterly turn sooner than expected, Houston and Galveston, Texas, may be spared a direct hit from the hurricane, but New Orleans may not be so lucky as two recently repaired levees have failed.
A city official in Kenner, La., was found to have been stockpiling relief supplies for his own personal use, and a new report shows federal officials really are idiots when it comes to terrorism and natural disasters.
The story of the day is gridlock, as hundreds of thousands flee the Texas coast for higher ground to get out of the path of Hurricane Rita, a Category 5 storm set to make landfall early Saturday somewhere between Galveston and Corpus Christi.
In nearly the most shocking display of stupidity to date, the U.S. government is set to burn 400,000 NATO military rations donated to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort from Great Britain due to bureaucratic red tape.
New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin has suspended the reopening of New Orleans to residents due to concerns over Hurricane Rita."The conditions have changed. We have another hurricane approaching us," Nagin said.
New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin has announced that it's time for residents to return to New Orleans, but federal officials say the city isn't ready to handle their return.
FEMA is constructing dozens of temporary communities out of mobile homes and trailers to house up to 300,000 people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, as local business owners begin to return to assess the damage and possibly reopen.
After reading the transcript of George W. Bush's Thursday night speech from New Orleans, what I want to know is, who wrote it?
Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco said Wednesday evening in an address to the state legislature that "we will rebuild" New Orleans and other hard-hit areas of Louisiana, as officials prepare for the return of evacuees.
Under the reorganized Department of Homeland Security, the responsibility for first response in the immedate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina fell not to former FEMA chief Michael Brown, but to Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff.
President George W. Bush announced today that he accepts responsibility for failures in federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, resigned today "in the best interest of the agency and best interest of the president," three days after being relieved of duty in responding to Hurricane Katrina.
As the government continues to turn back aid and relief supplies, Hurricane Katrina, though long dissipated, is set to claim President George W. Bush as its last casualty.
The Register on Friday published this entirely hilarious image from Sky News. Read the caption.
New Orleans is divided along racial lines by floodwaters, with most of the affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods largely untouched, and most of the poor, predominantly black neighborhoods underwater. And some want to keep it that way.
Let me just preface this by saying that this is not a partisan issue. Everyone in the country, most especially those displaced by Hurricane Katrina, deserves a full and independent investigation into the federal response, not just some whitewash, which is what we usually get. With that in mind, I was forwarded a letter that MoveOn sent to its members today, the text of which appears below.
Many responses to Hurricane Katrina, its aftermath, and its survivors, have been inappropriate at best, and at worst inhuman. Here are a few responses that have been observed over the past few days.
The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) today exposed internal oil company memos that show how the industry intentionally reduced domestic refining capacity to drive up profits. The exposure comes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as the oil industry blames environmental regulation for limiting number of U.S. refineries.
I thought the worst thing I'd heard in the Hurricane Katrina disaster was when children were being raped and killed in the Superdome.I was wrong. It's gotten worse.FEMA intends to ship certain refugees from New Orleans to hastily converted detention camps where they will not be able to leave.
New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin has ordered the forcible removal of all New Orleans residents from flood-stricken areas, whether they want to leave or not.
As engineers finally plugged the breached levee and began pumping water out of New Orleans, mayor C. Ray Nagin said of the death toll: "It wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000."
Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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