FEMA stages fake press conference

By STEVE WATKINS / Federal Times
October 26, 2007

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s deputy administrator, Harvey Johnson, had an unusually friendly audience at an Oct. 23 news briefing on his agency’s response to the California wildfires: his own spokesmen.

FEMA drafted at least four of its employees to play the part of reporters at a hastily called news conference when no members of the media showed up, spokesman Aaron Walker said. No reporters showed because FEMA announced the news conference only 15 minutes before it began. All reporters could do was call in on a phone line that did not let them to ask questions.

More after the click ...

My thought: Hell, why not? It goes right along with the fake emergency response, the faked concern by those at the top of the administration food chain, the fake offers of emergency aid and the fake follow through on promises.

Let's relate this to the Conservative Republican philosophy of "smaller government", which sounds good on the face of it ... and their strategy of "starving the beast" as a means to get there.

"Starving the beast" is simply not funding or underfunding mandated government programs. This has been the approach with virtually every government program for the last decade and a half (with the exception of military spending - no problem there). The consequences - the current fire situation in California is a prime example - don't show up immediately. However, there is a significant cumulative effect over time.

Here's how it works - and this example is from personal experience. We moved to Arizona in May, 2003. The Aspen Fire filled our front window and burned from June 17, 2003 for about a month on Mount Lemmon, part of the Santa Catalina Mountains located in the Coronado National Forest north of Tucson, Arizona, and in the surrounding area. It burned 84,750 acres (343 km²) of land, and destroyed 340 homes and businesses of the town of Summerhaven.

Damages to electric lines, phone lines, water facilities, streets and sewers totaled $4.1 million dollars. Firefighting cost was about $17 million, and the Forest Service is spending $2.7 million dollars to prevent soil loss.

In 2002, the year before the fire started, Congress had been requested to allocate about $2,000,000 to cover the implementation of fire prevention measures in the Colorado National Forest. However, that allocation was reduced to about $150,000 in the Congressional budget process.

Remember, it was a Republican controlled Congress that was managing the budget process and "Starving the Beast" saved taxpayers $1.85 million in 2002. They pointed to the savings as an example of how "fiscally responsible" they were.

However, they are not so eager to mention that savings were dwarfed by the $23.8 million it cost tax payers to control and correct the damage - not to mention the countless dollars residents of Summerhaven spent to rebuild their homes. Now that's where their short sighted fiscally responsible approach took us when you count ALL the beans.

---

In a related item:

In what seems to be an oft repeated theme, the Bush Administration again put politics over policy. And that has had an effect on the forests of Southern California.

San Bernardino National Forest Supervisor Gene Zimmerman has harsh words for D.C. regarding preparations for large-scale forest fires, and was told to shred his report on forest renewal during the drought in 2002:

Before the string of blazes that lay siege this week to nearly all of Southern California, even before the historic firestorms of 2003, then-San Bernardino National Forest Supervisor Gene Zimmerman told his bosses in Washington about the problem before him.

The most populous national forest faced a mounting threat of catastrophic fire, and reducing it would cost a lot of money, he said.

[...]

And back in 2002:

He [Zimmerman] said it would take a lot of money and a lot of time to return the forest to health -- $300 million at $30 million a year for 10 years, to adequately reduce the fire danger facing the tens of thousands of residents in Lake Arrowhead, Big Bear, Idyllwild and other forest communities.

In the months before the October 2003 fires, Zimmerman was told during a conference call to shred the document, he said during an interview this week.

Sourced here ...

My comment: If the facts don't fit your ideology, change the facts.