Like many people, I made a donation to the Red Cross – then took up Ted’s offer.

I do not regret this decision. And I am sure the money will help people in need.

But I thought some of it might help the people who are trapped and dying in New Orleans. Turns out, the Red Cross is not allowed into New Orleans (tip to Atrios):

“As the National Guard delivered food to the New Orleans convention center yesterday, American Red Cross officials said that federal emergency management authorities would not allow them to do the same.”

There are understandable security concerns, but the main reason seems to be the following: “The goal is to move people out of an uninhabitable city, and relief operations might keep them there.”

I am (once again) speechless – and literally trembling. How is it even conceivable that someone would think that relief operations would keep victims there – and that depriving them of emergency food and water would be the the extra little nudge that would convince them to get out?

1. There are still incentives available for donors to hurricane charities. Eszter has given away all of her books, but requests for CDs have been entirely manageable, and I’m very happy to keep burning them. Jane Galt has kindly offered to send everyone who donates $100 a homemade pound cake. For $250, she’ll write a blog post about anything you like, besides her personal life.

2. Amanda at Pandagon has a Texas-specific list of ways that people can help. According to this news report, both the Astrodome and the Convention Center are accepting volunteers. I’m going to find out.

3. I don’t think that there’s anyone in America (besides, maybe, the President) who’s satisfied with FEMA head Michael Brown right now. His previous experience was as an estate planning lawyer. He’s a GOP activist with no previous qualifications in disaster management. His last private-sector job, before becoming the head of FEMA, was as the commissioner for the now-defunct International Arabian Horse Association, where he was asked to resign from his position. I believe that a diarist at the Daily Kos realized this first:

The man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” for the International Arabian Horses Association… a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray.

And the Boston Herald is backing it up (via Josh Marshall):

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

“He was asked to resign,” Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president’s re-election campaign.

I don’t know what to say. TheAdministration had absolutely no business putting this man in this position. But I’m completely unable to understand why Brown accepted this responsibility.

4. A few heartbreaking, gut-punching links from Making Light– John Scalzi’s Being Poor and Respectful of Otters’ Why The Aid Wasn’t There

Being in academia, I’ve been particularly curious to hear news about colleges and universities in the region. The Chronicle of Higher Education has set up a Katrina Update page. The Forum page has additional information.

Here’s a thought-provoking piece sent to me by Tim McGovern. Centralized assistance (properly organized) has its advantages, decentralized assistance has at least as much potential. I wonder whether this or some similar idea would be workable.

*The Catastrophe the Suburbs Were Invented For*
Timothy McGovern

More than half the US population lives in the suburbs, and I’d be willing to bet (though I don’t have the numbers to back it up) that more than half the US population lives within a day and half drive of New Orleans or Houston (New York City is 1300 miles from New Orleans, Chicago 925 miles, Denver 1200 from Houston)

There’s a long weekend coming up. You’ve got a day and a half to drive to a refugee shelter, pick up a family and bring them home to be your guest for a few weeks or a month.

[click to continue…]

Alan Schussman takes a first look at the social ecology of the flooded areas of New Orleans:

The flood area has a population of about 380,000. Here’s how it compares to national numbers [from the 2000 census]:

	median HH income	% black	% poverty	% owns home	% private trans.	% public trans.
US	$ 41,994	12.1	12.3	66.2	87.9	4.7
Flood area	$ 29,854	66.8	26.9	50.6	79.0	13.0

These real numbers should be part of the discussion of why so many people didn’t get out of town. Jack Shafer gives it some thought, but it’s also informative to compare these numbers with national rates: In the flooded area of the city, poverty is more than twice as high as the national rate; median income is twelve thousand dollars lower; reliance on public transportation is nearly three times as high. Lower rates of owner-occupation mean a greater lack of insurance coverage …

Thanks to the many generous people who have made donations to various relief agencies in the past few days. If you were at all intrigued and inspired by the book offer – as some of you very kindly let me know that you were:) – please make a donation now and send me a note. I can take requests from five more people.

I’ll update this post and the earlier one when I have to end the offer. Thanks to Ted for inspiring this thread. And big thanks to so many of you for your generous gifts to relief agencies!

UPDATE (9/2/05 6:33pm CST): That was quick. I’m afraid I have to close the offer now. I will be shipping 35 books to people across the U.S. next week. Thank you so much everybody!

China Mieville catches “Innovative Emergency Management” “trying to rewrite history”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/09/politics-of-weather-3-shyness-of.html.

bq. Remember my earlier point that disaster management in New Orleans had been privatised, the ‘catastrophic hurricane disaster plan’ having been handed over to Baton Rouge-based Innovative Emergency Management last year? Watching this nightmare unfold, I’ve been wondering why no fucking one is asking what exactly IEM got paid for. It’s turning out to be very hard to find out, for rather startling reasons. In my first post on this, I quoted their original press release:

bq. “IEM, Inc., the Baton Rouge-based emergency management and homeland security consultant, will lead the development of a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for Southeast Louisiana and the City of New Orleans under a more than half a million dollar contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).”

bq. Don’t bother trying the link to that release on the original post. It doesn’t work any more. Let me explain. If you go here now, you’ll see IEM’s page of press releases. Below is what it looked like at 3am on Friday 2nd September, a few minutes ago. … See the highlighted word? There used to be another press release, between May and July, dated June 3, announcing that ‘IEM Team to Develop Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana’. That’s right. The evidence that hurricane-management was privatised and handed over to IEM has been eradicated from the IEM website. It’s almost as if someone was trying to evade responsibility for incompetence that’s resulted in the deaths of thousands, or something.

It’s hard to find the words.

Please fill out this survey consisting of just one question.

Here is the question: What site first comes up when you launch your browser?

I’ll say more later today. At that point I’ll also open comments. Thanks!

UPDATE (9/3/05 10:45pm CST): Due to the number of “Other” responses and associated emailsI have received, it will take me a bit longer to tabulate the results than I had anticipated. I will be posting a follow-up note to this survey sometime this weekend. Thanks to the 660 people who have already taken it. The survey will remain open for up to 240 more respondents.

UPDATE (9/5/05 11:40am CST): I have now closed the survey. Thanks to the 784 people who participated. Stay tuned for a summary and discussion of responses.

Via “Radley Balko”:http://www.theagitator.com/, a “rather nice BBC article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4200056.stm about the crappy statistics behind the claim that the British are engaging in more binge drinking.

In comments to Kieran’s last post Daniel has catalogued “some”:http://www.pardonmyenglish.com/archives/2003/08/yeah_so.html “of”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003888 “the”:http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/004000.php “things”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9574 that the right-wing blogosphere said about the French heatwave of 2003. We could add op-eds like Denis Prager’s “Socialism Kills”:http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34372 to the roster, but pride of place should surely go to — who else? — Mark Steyn. Steyn makes the following observation in his “‘Events’ don’t just happen”:http://www.middleeastinfo.org/article3822.html :

bq. One of the most tediously over-venerated bits of political wisdom comes from the late British prime minister Harold MacMillan. It was his characteristically laconic Edwardian response as to what he feared most in the months ahead: “Events, dear boy, events.” It turns up in a gazillion books of quotations and 1,000 Fleet Street columns as if it’s some brilliant insight. It’s not. It’s an urbane banality. Even events come, so to speak, politically predetermined. If, for example, you have powerful public sector unions, you will be at the mercy of potentially crippling strikes. The quasi-Eastern European Britain of the 1970s was brought to a halt by a miners’ strike in a way that would have been impossible in the United States. A strike, of course, is man-made. But the best test of the political character of “events” is supposedly natural phenomena.

He draws the following conclusion about earthquakes in Iran, SARS in China, and the French heatwave (having paused to kick the Canadian welfare state along the way) :

bq. By the standards of the world, Iran, China and France are all wealthy societies. They’re vulnerable to “events” because of their organizational principles – a primitive theocracy which disdains modernity; a modified totalitarianism which thinks you can reap the benefits of capitalism without the institutions of liberty; and a cradle-to-grave welfare state that has so enfeebled its citizens’ ability to act as responsible adults that even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the government should do something about.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

First, neither this offer (for a free book for donors) (UPDATE: she might have run out of books by the time you read this, please check) nor this offer (for a free mix CD for donors) have expired (UPDATE: nope, still not expired). Don’t be shy.

Second, Houston is going to absorb quite a few of the refugees. This note about what Houstonians can do to help is taken directly from an email from my Representative, John Culberson, who (hopefully) ought to know. It’s long and local, so I’m putting it below the fold.

Third (thanks, nada!), MoveOn has put up a bulletin board to help match up people who need housing with people who can shelter them.

[click to continue…]

According to AP, this photo shows a man covering the body of a man who died — apparently in a chair — on Thursday outside the convention center in New Orleans. The baby in his arms looks to be about three or four months old. I wonder whether she has any milk to drink.

Plenty of people are “saying”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_08_28_atrios_archive.html#112559511188392756 “this”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/09/this_is_not_goo.html “already”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007022.php, but the situation in New Orleans and the surrounding areas is just unbelievable, and the official response thus far is pretty appalling. The United States is the most powerful country on the face of the earth. Over the past few years in particular, a lot of money and thought was supposed to have been devoted to planning for rapid response to large-scale urban disasters in the wake of 9/11. While authorities in Louisiana and New Orleans are not as powerful as the Feds, they have known for years that a disaster of this kind was likely and were told in detail what it would do to their city. And yet. The “reports of what’s happening”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/01/katrina.impact/index.html convey little except how “poorly-prepared”:http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12528233.htm, “ill-coordinated”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5248531,00.html and “slow-moving”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/impeach_george_.html the disaster response is. As “Mark Kleiman”:http://WWW.markarkleiman.com/archives/microeconomics_and_policy_analysis_/2005/08/failing_to_plan_is_planning_to_fail.php comments, failing to plan is planning to fail. Kevin Drum provides “a demoralizing chronology”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007023.php explaining why FEMA is being run by people with “no experience”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002458.html in disaster management.

Meanwhile, apparently the secretary of state has been “shoe-shopping on 5th avenue”:http://www.gawker.com/news/condoleezza-rice/index.php#breaking-condi-rice-spends-salary-on-shoes-123467.

“A cameraman for Reuters in Iraq has been ordered by a secret tribunal to be held without charge in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison until his case is reviewed within six months, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday.”

…

“The U.S. military has refused Reuters’ requests to disclose why he is being held. He has not been charged.
“His brother, who was detained with him and then released, said they were arrested after Marines looked at the images on the journalist’s cameras.”

…

“Reuters had also been pressing for the release of cameraman Haider Kadhem, who was detained in Baghdad on Sunday after an incident in which his soundman, Waleed Khaled, was killed as he drove the pair on a news assignment.
“Iraqi police said U.S. troops fired on the Reuters team, both Iraqis.”

What’s there to say?

I’ve written before about the sociological dimension of disasters — the fact that natural disasters are never wholly natural, because some kinds of people will be more likely to suffer and die than others, depending on how life is organized when the disaster hits. As everyone knows, social order is under severe pressure in New Orleans at the moment, and the media coverage is slowly coming around to analyzing the differential impact of the disaster. The fact that those who have been left behind, or turned into refugees, are disproportionately Africian-American, poor, or elderly is simply impossible to ignore from the media coverage. Seeing pundits and commentators react to these facts is, in a way, a barometer of their sociological imagination — their ability to see the systematic relationship between social structure and individual experience. For example, on the conservative side of the fence, the contrast between “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html and “Jonah Goldberg”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-archive.asp#074746 (also “here”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-archive.asp#074466) is striking. Brooks is one of nature’s optimists, and his vice is a tendency towards complaceny. But he has a sociological eye, and immediately grasps the social dimensions of the disaster:

Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. … We’d like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. … Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster – tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease – there is also the testing. … Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What’s happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

Brooks’ instinct to look at how the disaster exposes power relations and tests the social order is right on target. Contrast this with Goldberg. All _his_ instincts are that talk of class and poverty and refugees are merely rhetorical cards in a never-ending political slanging match, and his goal is to make sure they don’t get played. His immediate concern is to deny that there are any systematic differences in the experience of disaster, and to pretend it’s all just a question of partisan labeling:

bq. Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of a calamity is an important value? We’re all in it together, I guess, except for the poor who are extra-special.

And again:

bq. My guess is that it will simply be a really unpleasent time for [Superdome refugees for] the remainder of the day, but hardly so unpleasent as to sanctify them with refugee or some other victim status.

Burkean conservatives may be too sanguine about the virtues of inherited ways of doing things, but, if they have Brooks’ cast of mind they at least understand that there _is_ a social order, and that disasters like Katrina expose its structure and weaknesses. Meanwhile Goldberg — whom I’m sure has never gone a day without a hot meal in his life — is merely vicious.