FEMA STILL AT IT
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” George W. cluelessly said in 2005 to Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, when it was in the midst of its disastrous performance after Hurricane Katrina.
Brownie, an incompetent Bush political hack, is now long gone, but FEMA continues in his spirit to do “a heck of a job.” First, it fumbled and bumbled for months before finally providing house trailers along the Gulf Coast for thousands of devastated families who’d lost their homes.
Then, it turns out that FEMA’s trailers reek with formaldehyde, a colorless gas that can cause sever allergies, asthma, chronic skin rashes, bleeding, and cancer. Children are especially vulnerable. The agency’s head conceded, “We don’t know what the long-term effects are.” Did our “emergency managers” respond with any sense of … well, emergency? No. Instead, they stalled and denied there was a problem. Then, when health complaints kept pouring in from residents, FEMA officials gave this helpful advice: Open your windows, or use your air conditioners.
When residents demanded their trailers be checked for the gas, a FEMA attorney warned top officials not to do that, fearing the agency could be liable if the formaldehyde was harming the people: “Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK,” instructed the lawyer, more concerned about the agency than the families’ health. Finally, after Congress intervened, tests were run on about 500 trailers; the formaldehyde levels averaged five times higher than normal.
So now FEMA says it will test other trailers but only if the families request it! Officials plan to test about 200 units per week. Two hundred? There are 38,000 of these trailers. Two hundred a week will take more than three years!
Heck of a job. Brownie would be proud.
A LIBRARY FOR BUSH GROUPIES
“Think tank” is not a concept you would associate with George W. – and sure enough, there won’t be much thinking done in the Bush Library and think tank to be built at Southern Methodist University.
The Bushites have cut a deal with SMU executives to locate his presidential library on this private campus in one of Dallas’ wealthiest neighborhoods. They’ve targeted some Arab oil kingdoms, corporate chieftains, and wealthy heiresses to be the “megadonors” they need to raise a half-billion bucks to establish George’s ex-presidential palace.
This one is to be markedly different from the usual complex of library, museum, and policy institute that other presidents have built. First (and unsurprisingly), rather than placing the full archive of the administration’s papers in the SMU complex so historians and others have access, Bush is to have a heavily censored, anti-academic library. None other than Karl Rove will help with the censoring, making sure historians only peruse documents that cast the Bush-Cheney regime in a glowing light.
Second, the policy institutes at other presidential libraries are scholarly units of their host universities. The work done in them is judged by normal academic standards, deans are chosen by university presidents, etc. George W.’s think tank, however, is to be academically unattached to SMU and will unabashedly push a partisan, ideological agenda. It will hire conservative acolytes and, as an insider told the New York Daily News, “give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President’s policies.”
Stretching for money and celebrity, SMU trustees are not bringing a reputable library to campus but another of Bush’s self-serving frauds. As one SMU professor put it: “The whole purpose of a library is for critically reflective academic inquiry. It’s not to be groupies.”
This article appears in April 4 • 2008.