Katrina One Year Later: ‘The George Bush Dog-and-Pony Show’

by James Parks, Aug 25, 2006

Today, we launch the first in a series of profiles highlighting the experiences of Hurricane Katrina survivors—and exposing the gap between Bush administration spin and on-the-ground reality for the tens of thousands of survivors whose lives are still torn apart one year after the storm.

As the one-year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster approaches, some in the media have focused on New Orleans resident Rocky Vaccarella, who this week told President Bush he should have four more years in office.

But as Will Bunch on Attytood, Christy Hardin Smith on Firedoglake and others have written, Vaccarella’s appearance with Bush smells like the familiar smarmy sizzle of a White House PR campaign, this one swirling around the one-year anniversary of the Bush administration’s disaster relief debacle. Writes Bunch:

Turns out that the earthy Vaccarella—a highly successful businessman in the fast-food industry—is indeed a Republican pol, having run unsuccessfully under the GOP banner for a seat on the St. Bernard [New Orleans] Parish commission back in 1999.

Shouldn’t the media be a tad more skeptical about events like these? And isn’t the fact that Vaccarella was once a Republican candidate for office a relevant fact that should be mentioned, to help viewers place his effusive, nationally televised praise in context.

Maybe reporters should instead talk with Vaccarella’s childhood friend and Chalmette High School classmate Rickey Fabra:

All George Bush has done so far is a dog-and-pony show. Nothing has been done. If we can go to a third-world country and tear down bombed out buildings and rebuild them, how come we don’t have that here? George Bush is just saying something to satisfy the public and doing nothing.

Fabra, president of Plumbers and Pipe Fitters (UA) Local 60 in New Orleans, says he was one of the lucky survivors of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall last Aug. 29, killing more than 1,800 people and causing some $81 billion in damage as it moved across the Gulf Coast, with nearly 80 percent of New Orleans underwater.

Although Fabra and his family have rebounded, he says nearly one-third of the 2,200 Local 60 members still are in “bad shape” and haven’t received any real aid from the federal government. Hundreds of union members still are living in Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) trailers, working hard, long hours trying to salvage what’s left of their homes.

Many of his members, like millions of other Gulf Coast residents, still are trying to get their insurance companies to pay up so they can rebuild. But insurers are doing everything they can to keep from paying out the monies that policyholders deserve and desperately need.

Fabra and his family evacuated the Crescent City before the storm hit. After finding a safe place for his family, he went to Baton Rouge, about 90 miles away. The national UA set up an office in the Baton Rouge local where he could work while he lived in a makeshift shelter in the union’s apprenticeship classrooms along with dozens of other union members.

After five weeks or so, Fabra finally returned to his home in suburban New Orleans, and what he saw broke his heart:

My house had been under 17 feet of water. I had to shovel slush to just get up to the house. Inside it looked like all the furniture had been in a washing machine, everything was tossed around, turned upside down. It was a two-story house and everything was destroyed. The only thing left was that the clothes were still hanging in the closets upstairs.

Now in a new home, Fabra says the disaster demonstrated the union movement at its best.

Unions really showed we are a brotherhood and sisterhood organization. All across the country, our people pulled together and set up shelters and provided whatever was needed—clothes, food. The AFL-CIO played a big part, too. We wouldn’t have made it without the unions.

But it’s long past time for the Bush administration to step up assistance, Fabra says.

If we can go overseas and spend billions of dollars rebuilding the infrastructure in the Middle East, why can’t we do it here? Instead of progress, all I see is chaos. Everything is upside down. Our infrastructure doesn’t exist. Our health care is all messed up.

What you see makes you think we’ve been forgotten. It’s been a year, but one year of what? The money should have been dispersed.

Democrats in Congress agree with Fabra. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), issued a report detailing what they call the Bush administration’s failed response to Katrina.

Here’s what Reid had to say:

One year ago, [Hurricanes] Katrina and Rita taught the American people the terrible lesson that their government was not prepared to protect them. Unfortunately, one year after the hurricanes and five years after 9-11, Bush Republicans in Washington still have not taken that lesson to heart.

The report, Broken Promises: The Republican Response to Katrina, argues that:

• Thousands of families are still waiting for FEMA trailers.
• An estimated 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA, or $2 billion, has been wasted by fraud and abuse.
• About 80 percent of Gulf Coast businesses with approved Small Business Administration disaster loans are still waiting to receive their funds.

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