Government should work from the local up. Therefore, I first place blame on the local officals of New Orleans for not having an evacuation plan. For not having contingency plans for this event, when they knew it was a possiblity, especially in the couple of days leading up to the event. No plans to centralize police and governance. Resources were wasted that could have been used to move people and prepare people for the pending storm. There was a marked absence of LEADERSHIP from what I have seen, both before and immediately after the storm.
Secondly I place blame on the State of Louisiana. There were still thousands of National Guard members at the Governer's disposal, inspite of the deployments in Iraq and Afgahnistan. There is more that can be blamed on the poor response of the State Goverment(s) but you probably are getting the idea by this point.
Finally, there is without a doubt some blame to go toward the response of the Federal Government, but they are NOT the root of the problems, just the easy target.
If I lived in New Orleans, I would be calling for their mayor to resign. Not only did he do an appaling job getting his city ready, then he has made himself look even worse in almost every interveiw since.
With all that said, it needs to be regularly noted that playing the blame game does not help people restore their lives. Katrina Relief is still all over the news, but in the weeks and months to come we need to continue to do what we can to help this region on their road to recovery.
3 comments:
I replied over at my blog.
dlw
Do you blame the mayor of DC for Bush making an incompetent friend as the director of FEMA?
We need a neutral committee to assess the proper distribution of blame.
We can't theorize a priori how gov't ought to be as the basis for where blame should be assessed. As I said over at my blog, the proper level of authority depends on the scope of the problem. I deally, you want the authority to be as local as possible, but some problems have a wider scope and mandate more responsibility from a more centralized authority.
dlw
The deal is though, that had the local and state done their jobs properly, it wouldn't have mattered who was directing FEMA, as they would've had considerably less to take care of. I have no skin in protecting the director of FEMA. The way things went, I have no disagreement that FEMA should have done a better job. But the fact of the matter is they should not have been put in that situation to begin with.
Big Chris
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