[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 110 (Wednesday, September 7, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H7704-H7705]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S SHAMEFUL RESPONSE TO HURRICANE KATRINA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Reichert). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Ms. LEE. Mr. Speaker, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina 
has torn down the curtain and exposed the dirty secret that divides our 
Nation like an open wound, and the entire world is watching. If anyone 
ever doubted that there were two Americas, Hurricane Katrina and our 
government's shameful response have made the division very clear for 
all to see.
  New Orleans is a city where 67 to 70 percent of its population was 
black. Nearly 30 percent, one in three, were living below the poverty 
line. Twenty-one percent of the households earned less than $10,000 a 
year. Eighty-four percent of the people living in poverty in New 
Orleans were black.
  So when a disaster came such as this one, the people who had cash in 
the bank and a car in the garage, they escaped, and those who did not 
were shamefully left to fend for themselves, and the majority were poor 
and black.
  The Bush administration's response to Katrina has been nothing short 
of shameful, and they must account for their actions. Why did Federal 
officials ignore predictions of a disastrous flood and hurricane in New 
Orleans? Why did FEMA turn away assistance, telling Amtrak it did not 
need to help evacuating survivors, denying the Red Cross access to New 
Orleans, turning away three trailer trucks from Wal-Mart that were 
loaded with water, and preventing the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 
gallons of diesel fuel?
  How many people died as a result of this delayed response? And why 
has the FEMA budget been cut since 2003? Why have the last two 
directors of FEMA been political appointees who had no experience with 
disaster management?
  As one commentator recently said, he said, ``Actions have 
consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina 
would hit this year, but the slow Federal response when it did happen 
was no accident. It was the result of 4 years of deliberate Republican 
policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at 
the expense of operational competence. It is the Bush administration in 
a nutshell.''
  Quite frankly, the director of FEMA, Michael Brown, should resign 
immediately, or he should be fired. And we must help put people's lives 
back together immediately by providing the health care and the housing 
and the mental health care and the services and the education, all of 
the basics that people deserve, who live in the wealthiest country in 
the world.
  The incompetence and the indifference demonstrated by the 
administration in responding to this tragedy was shocking, but it was 
not really surprising. Does anyone doubt that if this sort of 
devastation had taken place in the communities where the small 
percentage of people who are benefiting from the Bush administration 
tax cuts live, the response would have been swift and efficient? Can 
you imagine Bush fund-raisers desperately clinging to their roofs, 
waiting for days to be rescued?
  This indifference to the most vulnerable among us is not isolated to 
this tragedy; it is part and parcel of a systemic problem that seeks to 
make a large sector of our population invisible.
  Many people viewing the human tragedy left in Katrina's wake could 
not recognize the images that they were seeing. They thought they were 
witnessing a tragedy in Somalia or Haiti or the Sudan. They think to 
themselves, they think, this does not look like the America that I 
know. Some have even come to refer to the survivors of this catastrophe 
as refugees, as if the image of the survivors they are seeing are too 
foreign for them to recognize them as Americans.
  The people you see on television are not refugees; they are 
Americans. They

[[Page H7705]]

are Americans. And for some of us, though, let me just say, for some of 
us, this is an America that we know very well, an America that is often 
swept under the rug by lawmakers and the media.
  The truth is, there are almost 36 million Americans living in poverty 
in the United States. There are more than 15 million living in extreme 
poverty.
  What does that mean? According to the Census Bureau, it means that a 
family of three is living on less than $14,680 a year. They define 
extreme poverty as half of that. In 2003, the number of children living 
in poverty, this number grew by a half a million. Since President Bush 
took office, the number of poor people in America has grown by 17 
percent. Is this the real state of this ownership society that we keep 
hearing about?
  It is unacceptable. The Bush administration policies of tax cuts for 
the wealthy and cutting funding from the programs that provide for 
economic and domestic security in order to pay for this unnecessary war 
in Iraq are only making matters worse. That is why we must call for the 
President to develop a plan to eliminate poverty by 2010.

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