Hurricane Katrina. The NYTimes has a news analysis entitled "Casualty of Firestorm: Outrage, Bush, and FEMA Chief. which includes an interesting tidbit that answers the question of why Bush didn't go to New Orleans.
One prominent African-American supporter of Mr. Bush who is close to Karl Rove, the White House political chief, said the president did not go into the heart of New Orleans and meet with black victims on his first trip there, last Friday, because he knew that White House officials were "scared to death" of the reaction.
"If I'm Karl, do I want the visual of black people hollering at the president as if we're living in Rwanda?" said the supporter, who spoke only anonymously because he did not want to antagonize Mr. Rove.
In Bush's administration, people are not held accountable and Michael Brown, head of FEMA, is no exception.
Mr. Bush, characteristically, did not officially dismiss Mr. Brown, instead calling him back to Washington to run FEMA while a crisis-tested Coast Guard commander, Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, was given oversight of the relief effort. The take-charge Admiral Allen, who commanded the Coast Guard's response up and down the Atlantic Seaboard after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, immediately appeared on television as the public face of the administration's response.
Insurance companies may attempt to get out of paying for homes damaged in Katrina.
The majority of homes in areas slammed by the hurricane have policies that cover wind and rain damage, but relatively few had extra insurance to cover flooding. Insurers are posturing to limit the amount of damages by saying massive flooding in storm-ravaged New Orleans is a separate event from the hurricane itself.
Bush Suspends Fair Wages for the Gulf Coast Cleanup
The President issued an executive order on Thursday that makes it possible for federal contractors to pay extremely low wages to workers hired for the Gulf Coast rebuilding. Bush accomplished this by suspending the 1931 Davis-Bacon law, which says that federal contractors must pay their workers a
