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.

District court judge Stanwood R. Duval, Jr. wrote that the Corps’ negligence in failing to maintain the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet canal “was not policy, but insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness.

“For over 40 years, the Corps was aware that the Reach II levee protecting Chalmette and the Lower Ninth Ward was going to be compromised by the continued deterioration of the MRGO . . . The Corps had an opportunity to take a myriad of actions to alleviate this deterioration or rehabilitate this deterioration and failed to do so. Clearly, the expression ‘talk is cheap’ applies here.”

The ruling awarded the six plaintiffs in the case $750,000 in damages, and opens up the possibility of class-action lawsuits, plaintiffs’ attorneys said. Lead attorney Pierce O’Donnell said the government’s liability could come to “billions” of dollars.

“It has been proven in a court of law that the drowning of New Orleans was not a natural disaster, but a preventable man-made travesty,” the attorneys said in a statement. “The government has always had a moral obligation to rebuild New Orleans. This decision makes that obligation a matter of legal responsibility.”

“The judge’s ruling today validates the feelings and beliefs that many citizens have held for four years,” New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement. “Although the ruling is liberating for thousands impacted by the devastation and tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, it is my hope that justice will prevail to help families make their lives whole again.”

The government is expected to appeal the ruling.

Katrina struck New Orleans on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane. By the time it was over, 1,800 people had died and over 300,000 were displaced. The flooding caused by levee breaches destroyed large parts of the city and neighboring St. Bernard Parish.

View previous coverage of Hurricane Katrina here.

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.

Anyone caught living in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans after July 1 could be subject to a $500 fine plus daily fines after that, according to city zoning administrator Edward Horan.

“The point of this is to have the trailers removed, not to issue massive citations,” Horan toldUSA TODAY. “But there will those who will resist. They will be issued citations.”

A FEMA spokesman said the trailers were meant to be temporary and could pose a threat to residents during hurricane season, yet many still live in the trailers because of poverty or special needs. Residents of the hardest hit areas of New Orleans, Gentilly, the Lower 9th Ward and East New Orleans, will have an extra three months, until the end of September, to vacate their travel trailers.

As if that’s enough time. Most of the people in these trailers simply have nowhere else to go. They lost everything in the flood, or never had anything to begin with. And for them a $500 fine — or more — would be harsh.

And while FEMA says it will relocate travel trailer residents to hotels or apartments, actually getting the bureaucrats to do this often proves just this side of impossible, which is why there are still nearly 4,000 people in travel trailers in New Orleans alone.

Meanwhile a $74.5 million program announced in December 2006 to build cottages for Katrina survivors in Louisiana to replace the travel trailers hasn’t produced a single cottage. The program has been mired in red tape and a bureaucratic game of hot potato as the program got passed from one state agency to another, the Associated Press reported.

So you’re poor and have nowhere else to go and little money, the housing market has imploded, and The Big Easy wants you gone. And if you don’t leave, they’ll just take all your money until you have absolutely nothing left but life on the streets. This is how governments treat the poor and disabled. We can do better.

When disaster strikes, too many people look toward Washington, D.C., for the federal government to save them. But what happens when the federal government caused the disaster? Or at least made it worse than it would otherwise have been?

This we saw in New Orleans in 2005. We finally know why the federal government prevented Wal-Mart from delivering water to Hurricane Katrina victims: it was free.

Federal Emergency Management Agency head David Paulison said June 19 that the agency had negotiated a contract with Wal-Mart to deliver bottled water for the next disaster, and the company did indeed deliver 550,000 liters during this month’s Midwest flooding. And got paid for it.

It seems FEMA has finally learned they can’t do disaster response very well. (And they certainly can’t do it alone; Paulison said Wednesday that there was a “big gap” between the assistance FEMA would provide and what flood victims would actually need to recover.)

“Instead of doing everything ourselves, we develop partnerships and have these contracts in place ahead of time so we can don’t end up like Katrina, where we’re trying to negotiate contracts in the middle of a disaster,” Paulison said.

So if the government is in the middle of contract “negotiations,” then the supplier can’t just give away the product, even if people are dying in the streets and Superdomes. Never mind that Wal-Mart had that water on its way even before the hurricane made landfall. The government didn’t pay for it, so you, disaster victim, can’t have it. At any price.

Wal-Mart, for its part, is still giving away supplies to victims in flood-ravaged areas, just not water. For that, you need to call 1-800-621-FEMA and fill out some forms…

And just as it was flawed Army Corps of Engineers levees that broke and wiped New Orleans nearly off the map, so too is it flawed Army Corps of Engineers levees — and other, stranger river engineering along the Mississippi — which made the flood of 2008 a lot worse than it otherwise would have been.

As it turns out, for years the Corps of Engineers has been building wingdikes and weirs in the Mississippi River to channel the river’s flow. Three university professors last March warned that these structures have caused the river to rise even higher in floods than it otherwise would. And the only reason St. Louis isn’t underwater right now is that dozens of levees upstream broke, flooding out countless acres of Missouri and Illinois farmland and small towns.

Ironic that flawed levees would cause a city not to flood, but the water has to go somewhere.

Ironic, too, that those same small towns got new levees after the flood of 1993 and the government updated its flood maps to show these areas as low risk of flooding. So almost everyone canceled their flood insurance.

This is all so utterly predictable. We all know that government is incapable of doing anything very well, except perhaps killing people. Whatever it touches ultimately ends up going horribly wrong. It’s time to tell the government to keep their hands out of everything we don’t want turning into a disaster.

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.

Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday that he was pleased with the federal government’s virtually invisible response to the Midwest flooding, which in some areas exceeded 500-year plan levels and has destroyed millions of acres of crops across six states and displaced tens of thousands of people.

There have been no complaints about the federal response, because the federal government hasn’t done much of anything to date.

According to the Associated Press, federal response in the immediate aftermath of the flooding consisted of “moving federal assistance into the regions quickly and not waiting for bureaucratic declarations [and] setting up field offices with state and local officials.” These preparations will come in handy later when people start filing their applications for FEMA money, but in the meantime, for bungling and stupidity, we must look instead to state and local response.

In Cedar Rapids, where the Cedar River crested at 31.1 feet Friday, flooding nine square miles and displacing over 24,000 people, police have cordoned off large areas of the town and have sent in so-called “strike teams” to “inspect” houses as floodwaters begin to recede. On Friday, police chief Greg Graham said that while firefighters would enter homes through unlocked doors and windows, law enforcement would not enter homes. Yet video evidence has surfaced that police officers were not only entering homes, but breaking down locked doors and windows to do so.

Police officer Josh Bell, seen in this video breaking into a home and threatening a nearby resident, is described by a person who has known him since high school as a “prick cop” who had psychological problems including trouble socializing with his peers. Bell has certainly gotten his revenge against the society which “once threw him out into the hall butt ass naked after swim class.” Now he’s the big man with a gun, and he plays the tyrant role well. Notice how he goes for his gun while he’s breaking and entering.

Iowa National Guard assists Cedar Rapids police in keeping people out of flooded areas of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (SSgt. Oscar Sanchez/U.S. Air Force)

Police officers manning these checkpoints are still keeping people out, even though floodwaters are receding. They even arrested one man at gunpoint who attempted to drive past a checkpoint on Monday. Rick Blazek, 54, was dragged from his truck at gunpoint and arrested after police say he hit one of them with his truck three times while trying to drive around the checkpoint. Three times? Did the officer just keep jumping in front of the truck? The officer, of course, was not injured at all.

Yet some people still think the police and other bureaucrats are there to protect them, because — at least this week — that’s what they seem to be doing.

“They are keeping us out of our homes even though we’re getting upset with them,” resident Veronica Johnson told CNN. “We have no right [to be upset] because they’re trying to protect us.”

Indeed. Strike teams are tagging houses as they inspect them, with green stickers meaning the house is safe to enter, yellow stickers meaning the house is damaged but safe, red stickers meaning the house is unsafe, and purple stickers meaning the government will come by later and forcibly demolish the home.

Pray you don’t come home and find a red or purple sticker. You could get arrested and jailed for going into your own home, because the government’s idea of protecting you from yourself is pointing guns at you and forcing you into one of their own small metal boxes, and perhaps killing you. Either way your life is at risk, either from nature or from the people who you thought were protecting you.

Remember, these people are under no obligation to protect you from anything. It’s not part of the social contract. They can let you die if it suits them, and your survivors have no legal recourse. The only reason they go to all this trouble is to preserve their illusion of legitimacy and make you think that they should have control over every aspect of your life, for your own good.

These are not people to be respected; there is nothing respectable about how they do what they do. They may instead be feared, but above all they must be opposed, for not only violating the Fourth Amendment by breaking into people’s homes without good reason, but for doing what they do best: violating the trust of the people who were gullible enough to think that government was there to help out of some humanitarian motive.

We know that government can’t do anything as well as people acting voluntarily, and everyone in Cedar Rapids should now know what Hurricane Katrina victims know: ordinary people are much better than government employees at emergency response, and if government responds, things will go wrong.

And next to suffer from government incompetence and tyranny is downstate Illinois and Missouri, where the Mississippi River is now rising and threatening to reach levels not seen since the flood of 1993. More tyranny is sure to come.

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.

FEMA has gotten a virtual free pass for the last two years; since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans down in August 2005, there have been no hurricanes or other disasters of any comparable size.

Yet some claim that FEMA’s failures in responding to Katrina derive from it not having enough power under the law to accomplish its mission. Senate lawmakers are currently drafting legislation to update the Stafford Act of 1988, under which FEMA has responsibility for disaster response, which Senate staffers say does not cover catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina.

Mitchell Moss, the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University and an investigator at the center, said of the Stafford Act, “Despite good intentions, it doesn’t work. Congress is always having to work around its limits.”

Among the limitations Moss cited, the law caps federal loans to state and local governments to offset lost tax revenue following a disaster at $5 million — a wholly inadequate figure. In 2002 and 2003, for example, New York City lost nearly $3 billion in tax revenues following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. After Katrina struck, New Orleans had to lay off almost half of its workforce — about 3,000 employees — because the city didn’t have enough cash to pay them (the law allowed the federal government to reimburse the city for employee overtime, but not for the salaries themselves).

Not only did the city face overwhelming devastation, but with its tax base destroyed it had no way to pay employees when it needed them most, Moss said.

In addition, the law prohibits federal assistance to utilities except if those utilities are publicly owned or nonprofit. This was an impediment to New Orleans regaining phone service after Katrina because in the lawless interlude that followed, BellSouth could not provide security for employees needed to maintain service, and the federal government was prohibited from assisting, Moss said. Utility workers should be considered “emergency responders” in the aftermath of a disaster or catastrophic event, he added. — Government Executive

Nowhere in the discussions, unfortunately, is any mention made of the real reason why so many people suffered and died in New Orleans. FEMA forced them to suffer and allowed them to die by, among other things, keeping out rescue workers and relief supplies, not knowing what they’re doing, and tying victims up in red tape. Oh, did I mention wasting taxpayer money?

It gets better. President Bush in 2006 ordered the Department of Homeland Security to modernize the nation’s emergency alert system, and DHS gave the task over to FEMA. Two years later we’ve seen nothing but the occasional prototype and pilot project and a whole lot of talk, but the so-called Integrated Public Alert and Warning System is no closer to reality.

The House Homeland Security subcommittee on emergency communications, preparedness and response held hearings Wednesday on the state of the IPAWS system, with subcommittee chairman Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) calling for FEMA to explain why it hasn’t fully implemented the executive order.

“We cannot do everything at once so later this year we are rolling out the first increment to support digital alerts,” FEMA assistant administrator Martha Rainville said in written testimony. “Later on, we will roll out additional increments to support risk-based alerts, non-English language alerts and alerts for special-needs communities.”

The country’s existing Emergency Alert System is an audio and text only broadcast distributed over television and radio networks. The IPAWS system would “support audio, video, text and data messages sent to residential telephones, to Web sites, to pagers, to e-mail accounts and to cellphones,” Rainville said.

Of course, if you think those alerts are coming to your cell phone any time soon, think again. Rainville said that FEMA doesn’t have statutory authority to implement parts of the system.

In a Feb. 19 filing with the FCC, less than two months before the commission adopted technical rules for the commercial mobile alert system, Rainville said FEMA lacked statutory authority during non-emergency periods to be involved with critical components of the commercial mobile alert system, including aggregator and gateway functions as well as the trust model, when warnings are issued by non-federal agencies.

In the FCC’s commercial mobile alert ruling on April 9, Chairman Kevin Martin said it would have been better if a federal entity were in place to oversee alert aggregator and gateway functions. Commissioner Michael Copps was more critical of FEMA in his statement, triggering an angry response the following day.

“It is unfortunate that Commissioner Copps chose to question FEMA’s role and responsibility without first talking with the agency’s administrator before making his provocative comments,” said FEMA in a statement. The statement said Copps mischaracterized FEMA as an unwilling partner in the process to reform the nation’s public warning system. FEMA also accused Copps of failing to mention the FEMA’s apparent lack of clear legal authority during non-emergency periods to manage the commercial mobile alert system. — RCR Wireless News

The system uses the standards-based Common Alerting Protocol internally, but no provision has yet been made to provide the data to the public.

FEMA is the agency, some people think, that somehow needs more power and authority in order to respond effectively to disasters. It seems that they’ve misused the power and authority they already had. Giving them more power and control simply will mean more misuse of power, more widespread impact of erroneous emergency messages, and more disaster victims needlessly suffering and dying.

The bitter irony of Hurricane Katrina is that fewer people would have died and New Orleans would have recovered more quickly if the federal government had not responded in any way.

Don’t you feel safe now? You shouldn’t. Forget about Homeland Security and get yourself and your family really ready for the next disaster. And stay tuned to Homeland Stupidity where storm information is posted in the sidebar each hurricane season.

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.

FEMA has arranged for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct tests for formaldehyde in a random sampling of 500 of the 46,000 travel trailers still being used by hurricane victims more than two years after the August 29, 2005, hurricane made landfall, nearly destroying New Orleans and leaving devastation across hundreds of miles of the Gulf Coast region.

CDC will conduct testing beginning this Friday and continuing for the next five weeks, according to a government press release. Afterward, each resident whose travel trailer was tested will receive the results for that trailer and FEMA will issue a final report in May.

Formaldehyde, a common chemical used in many wood products as well as embalming, has been linked to cancer and respiratory problems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet the CDC says it has no guidelines on how much formaldehyde is dangerous.

Henry Falk, director of the CDC’s Coordinating Center for Environmental Health and Injury Prevention, said there are no existing standards for gauging air quality in trailers and “no sharp, direct way” of predicting the health effects of formaldehyde.

“Some people will react at higher levels. Some people might react to formaldehyde at lower levels,” he told reporters in New Orleans. — Associated Press

“FEMA’s first priority has been and continues to be the health and safety of temporary housing residents,” said FEMA Administrator David “Duct Tape” Paulison.

Testing had been postponed until this month because “we wanted to make sure we had a test that was scientifically based, that we had a credible agency that really understood formaldehyde to come in and do this,” said FEMA Administrator David Paulison. — USA TODAY

The real reason testing was postponed was FEMA’s lawyers stonewalled for a whole year, preventing the agency from doing anything to mitigate the threat, not even testing the trailers. Because they care so much about helping people.

Since then FEMA has been moving anyone out of travel trailers who complains about formaldehyde and asks to move. More than 6,500 people have such outstanding requests, but FEMA has been able to move only 800 people a week. And requests to move continue to come in.

And here is another problem. After two years, why is anyone still living in a travel trailer? I can’t imagine not wanting to do something to better my circumstances in two whole years. Yet, with government offering to pay for whatever people ask, and not asking too many questions about what they do with the money, it’s easy for disaster victims to become dependent on the government to provide for their every need for as long as they can get away with it.

Fortunately, for some victims, the government’s botched responses to the disaster and its aftermath were a clear wake-up call.

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.

Clergy response teams are nothing new. Though little information is available on the Internet, these teams have existed in various cities around the country since at least the 1990s. Their original purpose was to provide counseling for victims of violent crime and other traumatic events. One of the first such teams in Pacoima, Calif., is credited (PDF) with helping to reduce illegal gang activity in that area.

In Greeley, Colo., in 2002, the clergy response team helped officials deal with hate crimes against Muslim and Sikh residents and reduce community tensions. The program was set to expand to Grand Junction and Glenwood Springs by 2003, according to a 2002 U.S. Department of Justice report (PDF).

Some other clergy response teams are known to operate in Rochester, N.Y., (PDF) and Washington, D.C. (PDF) These were funded through Department of Justice Community Oriented Policing Services Value Based Initiative grants to “respond to the scene of traumatic incidents and provide services to victims, witnesses, and their families.”

In Washington, the East of the River Clergy Police Community Partnership “sponsors teams of clergy and other faith-based individuals that reach out to the families, next of kin and other secondary victims of violent crimes and homicide,” according to a statement on its Web site. “Its purpose is to provide aid, counseling and assistance to victims, witnesses and their families and to intervene in the occurrence of retaliation.”

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Christ in Action, a non-profit group of clergy from around the country, assisted in disaster relief by providing meals and home reconstruction for victims displaced by the hurricane. According to the White House’s report on Hurricane Katrina, “Dr. Denny Nissley, the Director of Christ in Action, is organizing a Coalition of Faith-Based First Responders from around the Nation to be prepared for the next major disaster. This Coalition will perform disaster relief training for volunteers and will maintain a current roster of thousands of volunteers who can be quickly called upon to provide support during the next major disaster.”

Now comes a TV news report from Louisiana of what some other of those faith-based first responders were doing during Katrina: helping the government take away victims’ guns.

Could martial law ever become a reality in America? Some fear any nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. soil might trigger just that. KSLA News 12 has discovered that the clergy would help the government with potentially their biggest problem: Us. . . .

If martial law were enacted here at home, like depicted in the movie “The Siege”, easing public fears and quelling dissent would be critical. And that’s exactly what the ‘Clergy Response Team’ helped accomplish in the wake of Katrina.

Dr. Durell Tuberville serves as chaplain for the Shreveport Fire Department and the Caddo Sheriff’s Office. Tuberville said of the clergy team’s mission, “the primary thing that we say to anybody is, ‘let’s cooperate and get this thing over with and then we’ll settle the differences once the crisis is over.’” — KSLA-TV

Watch the full report from KSLA-TV:

And when they aren’t taking them outright, they’re buying them. That clergy response team in Rochester completed a gun buyback program August 4, taking 102 guns from citizens and giving them $50 gift cards for Wegmans Food Markets in exchange.

At one point, the officers ran out of cards and Police Chief David Moore had to rush to a store to get more, said the Rev. Deloris Simpson, a member of the Clergy Response Team.

“Thank God for Wegmans,” said Simpson. “They’ve given people the incentive to say ‘enough is enough.’ One lady turned in four guns and she didn’t even want a certificate. She just wanted them out of her house.”

The police collected 29 long guns, 69 handguns and four air guns. Officer Deidre Taccone said the department was just as pleased to get the air guns because they’re also commonly used in crimes. — Rochester Democrat & Chronicle

Aside from taking away people’s guns so they can’t defend themselves from the looting and crime which invariably follows such a disaster, then providing those same victims with “counseling,” the clergy response teams will also have an important role to play if martial law is ever declared. And one of the scenarios where that might happen is a bird flu pandemic.

In Bellefontaine, Ohio, last year, Logan County Emergency Management Agency officials held training sessions with local clergy advising them how to use selected Bible passages to provide counseling during crisis situations. Some of the training focused specifically on the bird flu pandemic, according to documents (PDF) obtained by a pastor who attended the training and forwarded to Alex Jones’ prisonplanet.com Web site. “Pastor Revere” told Jones (MP3) that “we get the picture that we’re going to be standing at the end of some farmer’s lane while he’s standing there with his double barrel, saying we have to confiscate your cows, your chickens, your firearms.”

One of those passages, Pastor Revere said, was Romans 13.

For those who are ignorant of Romans 13, let me address the issue bluntly: According to Romans 13, every citizen is only bound to obey his or her governing official to the degree that the governing official does not violate the duty of the citizen to obey the “higher powers” which, for Americans, are God and the U.S. Constitution. In other words, no Christian can be ordered to disobey God, and no American citizen can be ordered to disobey the U.S. Constitution. Properly understood, Romans 13 teaches that each and every governing official (including the President of the United States and all those under him) must submit to the U.S. Constitution.

Article VI, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution states, “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.”

So, what does the Constitution say regarding the disarmament of American citizens? The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution could not be clearer: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Did you get that? “[T]he right of the people to keep and bear Arms, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.” [Emphasis added]

Therefore, any attempt to disarm the American people must be viewed as an act of tyranny and must be resisted.

The right to keep and bear arms is rooted deep in American history. I remind readers that it was the attempted gun confiscation of the colonists’ arms, which had been cached at Concord, Massachusetts, that directly precipitated the beginning of America’s fight for independence. — Chuck Baldwin Live

I would personally like to remind my Christian readers of 1 Samuel 8, in which God grants Israel their first of many earthly kings, not because men should have earthly kings to rule over them, but as punishment for rejecting Him. Just something to think about. Those who are right with God need no earthly king.

And since there are elections coming up, guess who is all for this? These Sam Brownback supporters. Yet another reason to vote for Ron Paul.

In any event, during the next natural disaster, terrorist attack, or pandemic, expect to see these clergy response teams out and about, providing counseling to people who need it, and possibly trying to take guns away from those who don’t.

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.

Formaldehyde, a wood preservative commonly used in particle board, can cause vision and respiratory problems, and has been linked to cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2006, FEMA relocated some families and began testing travel trailers after several Mississippi residents claimed that the formaldehyde in the trailers was making them sick. But documents released this week show that FEMA knew about the problem well beforehand, and the lawyers opposed testing.

On June 16, 2006, three months after reports of the hazards surfaced and a month after a trailer resident sued the agency, a FEMA logistics expert wrote that the agency’s Office of General Counsel “has advised that we do not do testing, which would imply FEMA’s ownership of this issue.” A FEMA lawyer, Patrick Preston, wrote on June 15: “Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. . . . Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them.”

Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) decried what he called FEMA’s indifference to storm victims and said the situation was “sickening.” He said the documents “expose an official policy of premeditated ignorance” and added that “senior officials in Washington didn’t want to know what they already knew, because they didn’t want the legal and moral responsibility to do what they knew had to be done.”

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) said FEMA had obstructed the 10-month congressional investigation and “mischaracterized the scope and purpose” of its own actions. “FEMA’s reaction to the problem was deliberately stunted to bolster the agency’s litigation position,” Davis said. “FEMA’s primary concerns were legal liability and public relations, not human health and safety.” — Washington Post

FEMA director R. David “Duct Tape Your Windows” Paulison announced that the agency is pursuing additional testing of travel trailers, distributing information on formaldehyde to every travel trailer occupant, and setting up a toll-free phone number for people to call for information. Residents who want to speak to FEMA about formaldehyde can call 1-866-562-2381.

This is but one of many reasons why government cannot provide disaster recovery services effectively. As much as individuals in government may care about doing the right thing, helping people in need, etc., the fact of bureaucracy constrained by law and regulation prevents any such individuals from being effective. As I’ve said before, everyone in New Orleans would have been better off had Wal-Mart, or even ordinary individuals, run the disaster recovery, and far fewer people would have died.

The good news is that people are beginning to understand once again that they should not put their trust in government.

“We have lost a great deal through our dealings with FEMA, not the least of which is our faith in government,” former Army officer Paul Stewart, who lives in a trailer with his wife in Mississippi, told theWashington Post.

Nearly a year after it went into effect, the Transportation Security Administration’s ban on liquids and gels in containers larger than three ounces on aircraft remains in place, and TSA head Kip Hawley said it could be at least another year before the restrictions are relaxed. The government is taking that long to get explosives detection devices which can screen liquids. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) has ordered an investigation into what’s taking so long.

The National Transportation Safety Board has released its report on the July 11, 2006, accident in Boston’s Big Dig tunnel in which a falling section of concrete ceiling killed one person and injured another. The NTSB found that the epoxy used in the ceiling wasn’t resistant to creep. The epoxy deformed and fractured over time, which allowed the support anchors to pull free. Turnpike authority head Matthew Amorello still hasn’t been charged with negligent homicide for his role in the $14 billion boondoggle.

Hurricane Katrina was an even worse disaster, striking New Orleans, La., on August 29, 2005, and overflowing the levees which helped to keep storm surge out of the city. As it turns out, when the levees were built, the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t want to build them in the first place, preferring floodgates on Lake Pontchartrain which they had said would be more effective, but Congress ordered them to build the walls after a so-called environmental group filed a lawsuit to stop the floodgates from being built. The Corps cut corners in their construction, not because they wanted to build shoddy levees, but because the government didn’t give them enough money.

In a bizarre public-private partnership, New York City is moving ahead with a $90 million plan to place over 3,000 surveillance cameras in downtown Manhattan, most privately owned, to monitor virtually everything they can record that happens on the streets, a plan they modeled in part on London’s so-called Ring of Steel. Officials say that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from being constantly monitored.

But George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove says that law-abiding citizens do need to fear. The nothing to hide argument and its variants, Solove says in his new essay, are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In “‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy,” Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

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.

One bit of good news, though, is that some left-leaning anarchist types are beginning to understand the importance of ordinary citizens having firearms to defend themselves from the government, a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

On May 12, Dave Strano and three other members of Kansas Mutual Aid, an anarcho-communist organization based in Lawrence, traveled to Greensburg to find out what was happening on the ground and try to assist with relief efforts.

They learned that a week after the tornado, FEMA finally began allowing relief workers into the area, long after they had disarmed everyone in the city they could, bungled initial relief efforts, and established a virtually complete police state.

We intended to analyze the situation and assess how our organization could help from Lawrence. If long term physical aid was needed from us, we had to make contacts within the local populace that could offer a place to set up a base camp. We also intended to find out what happened to the prisoners in the county jail during and after the storm, and what the current procedure for those being arrested was. In a highly militarized city, the police and military were the biggest threat to personal safety. . . .

After a short while, we met with several people evacuating belongings from their home. They told us that FEMA had been there for a week, and that all FEMA could offer them was a packet of information. The packet, however, had to be mailed to the recipients, and they had no mailing address! Their entire house had been destroyed. Their mailbox was probably in the next county. . . .

FEMA’s mission was to safeguard the property of businesses in the area and offer “low interest” loans to property owners affected. The National Guard was on hand along with the local police, to act as the enforcement mechanism for FEMA, while occasionally hauling debris and garbage out of the city. . . .

In the immediate recovery after the storm, FEMA and local police not only worked to find survivors and the dead, but also any firearms in the city. As you pass by houses in Greensburg, you notice that some are spraypainted with how many weapons were recovered from the home. This is central Kansas, a region with extremely high legal gun ownership. Of the over 350 firearms confiscated by police immediately after the storm, only a third have been returned to their owners. FEMA and the police have systematically disarmed the local population, leaving the firepower squarely in control of the state. — Dave Strano, Kansas Mutual Aid

FEMA’s top priority going in was clear. It was not to help people, but to establish control and cow the population. These, of course, are the same things they did during Hurricane Katrina, with much more disastrous results.

It’s time to get rid of FEMA, and along with it, any federal government responsibility for disaster response. Ordinary people and businesses, acting on their own and collaborating, have already proved they can respond to a disaster much more effectively than government force ever could.

(Via)

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.

Under the plan, some 33,000 families still receiving federal housing assistance, and 87,000 still living in travel trailers and mobile homes, will begin to pay a portion of the cost of the rental beginning in March 2008 and continuing through March 1, 2009, when benefits will end. Those living in travel trailers and mobile homes will also have the option of purchasing their units, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

Housing aid had been scheduled to end August 31.

Those receiving rental assistance will be moved to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Disaster Housing Assistance Program. “HUD will use their extensive experience in case management to help residents transition to longer-term housing,” said Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding Donald E. Powell. “We believe this is a coordinated, integrated approach to help those families who need more time and further assistance to move from temporary housing and transition to self-sufficiency.”

Some of the displaced welcomed the news, while some advocates for the poor were critical of the plan.

“You never know. You just wait until you hear the magic words: ‘No, you will not become homeless, no, you will not have to live in a shelter,’” said Gilda Burbank, who has been living in Houston since she was rescued from a public housing development in New Orleans. . . .

“Here’s the reality: The people left in the rental assistance program are extremely poor,” said Sheila Crowley, the president of the Washington-based National Low Income Housing Coalition. “It’s simply designed to push people out of the program.” — Associated Press

FEMA director David Paulison disagreed. “We’re not going to kick people out. We just want them to get back to self-sufficiency.”

It’s been almost two years. By the time the program ends, it will be three and a half. How long does it take to get back to self-sufficiency? For far too many people, it’s one day longer than the government pays their bills. Some people actually are unable to work, and those people will be transitioned into existing HUD programs. But I have little patience for those who deliberately arrange their lives so as to require government handouts, or worse, are able but unwilling to take care of themselves.

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.

But FEMA defended its actions, saying the contracts were awarded fairly.

The report, (PDF) requested by Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) found that FEMA awarded contracts to companies without determining whether the companies would be able to complete the work and accepted unrealistically low prices which then later ballooned to almost ten times the original ceiling.

In addition, several of the contract bidders posed “significant financial risk, including bidders with weak financial statements, incomplete and missing financial documentation, and negative net worth,” the report said. “FEMA allowed these contracts to go forward, in part because FEMA officials believed that the contract’s low minimum purchase requirement of $50,000 protected FEMA from contractor default or poor performance.”

Remember, these contracts were for companies to maintain, inspect and remove the trailers.

FEMA awarded no-bid contacts to four industry giants to install, maintain and then deactivate the units. The contracts originally had a ceiling of $400 million, but they quickly ballooned to roughly $3.4 billion. FEMA eventually re-competed a subset of the contracts with the awards going to six companies, including the original four.

Meanwhile, thousands of the trailers have never been used and sit idle at more than a dozen storage depots across the country. Among the waste was a $900 million purchase of 26,300 mobile and modular homes that FEMA later discovered could not be used in flood zones, where nearly all Katrina victims lived. — Government Executive

The 2005 storms, extensively covered here, submerged three-fourths of the city of New Orleans and displaced over 700,000 people. FEMA ordered 145,000 trailers for long-term housing, though thousands of them went unused and were left to rot.

In a report that will be made public later this week, the inspector general found that FEMA gave many of the contracts to politically connected firms -including Shaw Inc. of Baton Rouge. Shaw hired former FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh, one of President Bush’s friends, as its lobbyist. . . .

“(The inspector general’s report) suggests that taxpayers were victims and hurricane victims were victimized twice – once by Katrina and once by FEMA,” Dorgan said.

Second District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is investigating all aspects of contracts awarded by FEMA for procurement, maintenance and deactivation of hurricane trailers. — Jackson Clarion-Ledger

(The report was published late Monday after theClarion-Ledger went to press.)

FEMA’s trailer procurement is a whole other can of sardines. It bought far too many, the trailers made people sick, and potentially opened residents up to burglary.

Oh well, a few billion here, a few billion there, who cares if the government wastes money. After all, the taxpayers will always give up more.

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.

On a regular day, some of this stuff would have made it into a post, and some of it would not. Much of it would have made it into a post like this anyway, if I hadn’t stopped doing them.

The Project on Government Oversight notes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation desperately needs to be watched from outside, or it will misbehave. This, of course, is not news, but what’s interesting is that the FBI has a policy of actively resisting any sort of outside audit, put in place by former director Louis Freeh. “Ironically, in 1997, it was Freeh who called the FBI ‘potentially the most dangerous agency in the country’ if it is ‘not scrutinized carefully,’” POGO’s Nick Schwellenbach writes. “Freeh also called for more congressional oversight.”

In Boston, the state is trying to shut down a lawsuit brought by the family of Milena Del Valle, who was killed last July when 12 tons of Boston’s Big Dig tunnel fell on her husband’s car. The excuse they’ve given this time is that if they turn over relevant documents to the family, the nation’s transportation security could be compromised. By discovering exactly what shortcuts they took in building the thing and where it’s likely to kill someone next? (I’ve survived two trips through the Big Dig and I hope never to be caught down there again, especially with the state continuing its cover-up of just how shoddy a job the Big Dig really was.)

And down in New Orleans, the police aren’t paid enough to prevent them from leaving their jobs or becoming corrupt, according to a study (PDF) published last week by the RAND Corporation. Worse, the police aren’t receiving pay raises for promotions that they have earned, the report said. No word on where the city will find all the money it will need to slow this “exodus of officers that began after Hurricane Katrina hit the city.”

The man nominated to be the next undersecretary of defense for intelligence told his Senate confirmation committee last week that he would consider shutting down the Threat and Local Observation Notice military intelligence database because it might not be worth all the controversy. In 2005, the database came to public attention when anti-war protests and other peaceful First Amendment protected activities were found in the database. Last November a Homeland Stupidity special report revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had placed the inappropriate protests in the database by forwarding their intelligence reports on the peaceful activities to the military. (Homeland Security, though, is still watching the peaceful protesters.)

Finally, Bruce Schneier’s first Movie Plot Threat Contest went over so well that he’s doing it again this year. Yesterday he announced his Second Annual Movie Plot Threat Contest. “Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component,” Schneier writes. “The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.” The winner gets an autographed copy of Schneier’s book, Beyond Fear, and if he can swing it, a phone call from a movie producer.

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.

On September 4, 2005, just days after floodwaters drowned most of the city, Ronald Madison and his older brother Lance were crossing the Danziger Bridge, trying to get to a relative’s dental office, when a group of teenagers came up the bridge behind them and started shooting. The two brothers started running away, when a rental truck showed up, several unidentified men jumped out of it, and shot at them.

Ronald was killed, and Lance found himself on the ground with several guns in his face. The gunmen turned out to be police.

The official police report said that Ronald had reached into his waistband and turned around toward the police, as if he had a gun, and people would have believed this lie, since the coroner didn’t want to release the autopsy report. As it turns out, the reason was that the autopsy showed that police shot Ronald in the back. Five times.

Later the police would claim that they had guns but threw them away, but no guns were ever found.

That was enough for the district attorney to investigate, and last week, a grand jury indicted seven New Orleans police officers on charges of murder and attempted murder, charges the officers’ attorneys strongly deny.

“We cannot allow our police officers to shoot and kill our citizens without justification like rabid dogs,” District Attorney Eddie Jordan said. . . .

Police Superintendent Warren Riley called Jordan’s comments “highly unprofessional, highly prejudicial and highly undignified” and urged the community to withhold judgment until a jury decides their guilt or innocence.

“We want justice first and foremost,” Riley said, “but for the district attorney to try and prejudice the community against these officers before all the evidence is heard is really, I think, a sad day for the city.” — Associated Press

Two weeks ago, Kasimir Gaston, the only known eyewitness to the shooting, came forward and said that the two brothers were running away from the shooting when police officers lined up “like at a firing range” and shot him in the back.

Gaston was one of many flood refugees living on the second floor of the Friendly Inn, a low-income motel on the city’s east side. . . .

When asked if Madison had a gun, Gaston said, “I didn’t see any on him.”

CNN has visited the room where Gaston was staying. From that balcony, it is about 100 feet to where Madison was shot and killed. — CNN

The police even managed to put two bullets into Gaston’s truck.

The officers and the charges they face:

Sgt. Kenneth Bowen: one count of first-degree murder of Brissette and seven counts of attempted first-degree murder of Leonard Bartholomew, Susan Bartholomew, Lesha Bartholomew, Jose Holmes Jr., Lance Madison and Ronald Madison.

Sgt. Robert Gisevius: one count of first-degree murder of Brissette and two counts of attempted first-degree murder of the Madisons.

Officer Anthony Villavaso: one count of first-degree murder of Brissette and four counts of attempted first-degree murder of the Bartholomews and Holmes.

Officer Robert Faulcon: two counts of first-degree murder of Brissette and Ronald Madison and attempted first-degree murder of the Bartholomews and Holmes.

Officer Robert Barrios: four counts of attempted first-degree murder of the Bartholomews and Holmes.

Officer Michael Hunter: two counts of attempted first-degree murder of the Madisons.

Officer Ignatius Hills: one count of attempted second-degree murder of Leonard Bartholomew IV. — CNN

The officers turned themselves in today, and a crowd of supporters — supporters of crazed, cold-blooded killers — turned out to support them and wish them well.

One protester shouted “Police killings must stop” and “Racism must go” as the men arrived, but the protester was shouted down by the crowd yelling: “Heroes, Heroes.”

Uniformed police officers from nearby districts joined other supporters embracing the seven policemen and shaking their hands. The Fraternal Order of Police had encouraged rank-and-file officers to gather outside the jail to show their support. One sign in the crowd read, “Support the Danziger 7.” Another read: “Thanks for protecting our city.”

“These men stayed here to protect our city and protect us and this is the thanks that is given to them,” said Ryan Maher, 34, of New Orleans, who described himself as a civilian with friends in the police department.

“It’s a serious injustice,” said Sgt. Henry Kuhn of the Harahan Police Department, one of several uniformed officers from the New Orleans suburbs who joined the crowd. — Associated Press

Protecting the city does not mean shooting innocent people in the back as they try to get away from criminals with guns shooting at other people, covering up the autopsy report which showed that you killed somebody in cold blood, and saying God knows what to the only eyewitness to keep him quiet for over a year.

If that’s your idea of protecting the city, you probably belong in jail, too.

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.

Government Accountability Office investigators testified (PDF) at a hearing Wednesday that in addition, FEMA is still sending out tens of millions of dollars in inappropriate aid payments through its Individuals and Households Program, which provides rental assistance to people displaced due to natural disasters.

“These payments include $17 million in rental assistance paid to individuals to whom FEMA had already provided free housing through trailers or apartments,” GAO managing director Greg Kutz testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. In addition, “FEMA made nearly $20 million in duplicate payments to thousands of individuals who claimed damages to the same property from both hurricanes Katrina and Rita. FEMA also made millions in potentially improper and/or fraudulent payments to nonqualified aliens who were not eligible for IHP.”

FEMA has so far identified $290 million in fraudulent and inappropriate payments that it intends to have paid back, but so far has only collected $7 million of that amount. GAO found that FEMA had never contacted many of the people who had received inappropriate payments, including its own undercover registrations.

“Collection of only $7 million of an estimated $1 billion of potentially improper and/or fraudulent payments clearly supports the basic point we have previously made, that fraud prevention is far more effective and less costly than detection and monitoring,” Kutz said.

FEMA says that it has implemented fraud prevention controls, but GAO’s investigation shows that they were ineffective. GAO had not received recoupment notices for any of its five undercover registrations, and recently received yet another $3,200 check for rental assistance on a nonexistent property.

“The stringent controls instituted this past year by FEMA will dramatically improve safeguards and help eliminate processing errors and fraudulent abuse,” Pat Philbin, an agency spokesman, said in a written statement.

But the Government Accountability Office report made it clear that the inappropriate payments continued into this year. For example, 10 residents of an apartment complex in Plano, Tex., collected $46,000 in rental assistance from FEMA through June, even though the City of Plano was paying their rent, with money from the federal agency. — New York Times

So if FEMA isn’t going after individuals to get the money back, who is it going after? Why, the state of Louisiana, of course.

FEMA wants Louisiana to repay a disputed $60 million in money under an assistance program where states reimburse the federal government for part of “other needs assistance,” which provides disaster victims assistance with expenses such as transportation, dental care and funeral expenses. But Louisiana has filed suit in federal court, saying it shouldn’t have to repay the amount because FEMA paid out the money fraudulently. The court will hear arguments in the case Monday.

Louisiana was billed about $384 million and has paid about $320 million. It has deposited the disputed $60 million into a court account.

The disputed figure includes $45 million withheld because the state estimates that about 12 percent of FEMA’s other needs spending went to people who were probably not eligible for it. The estimate is based on a sample of payments examined by the office of Steve J. Theriot, Louisiana’s legislative auditor. The auditor’s office found problem payments among 425 cases it reviewed, according to its Oct. 17 report to the Legislature. . . .

The rest of the contested money, about $15 million, is the state’s share of money that FEMA paid to reimburse people who bought generators. The federal agency says the state approved such payments; the state says it did not. . . .

“Why should we pay 25 cents on the dollar,” he asked, “for errors from making payments to noneligible recipients?” — New York Times

One way or another, we all pay for this fiasco. It makes you wonder if perhaps Wal-Mart could have done better.

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