New Orleans The Los Angeles fires continue to rage, adding to their death and destruction. Thousands of houses have been ravished. More than 100,000 have now been rendered fire refugees searching for housing and their futures. The city and its people are desperate for relief.
Many are moving to the rescue. Taylor Swift ponied up $10 million. There are celebrity faces to this disaster from actor Jeff Bridges to the Lakers basketball coach J. J. Redick, who joined the many who lost their homes. ACORN was contacted by a French-based relief organization that is trying to find a way to help. Friends on Facebook have brought the issue forward. This is the time for Congress to begin to act to provide serious support.
Here’s a spoiler alert: this is where tragedy is piled on top of tragedy. Whether than the usual practice of providing relief without strings, representatives in Congress from Speaker Johnson on down are talking about “conditions” for California to receive the aid. The Post reporter noted how unusual disaster relief would come with conditions, but for any of us for whom the memories of Hurricane Katrina twenty years ago are still fresh when relief was denied for months after August 29th as Congress and the Bush administration sought to put conditions on the relief because of what they argued was Louisiana’s record of corruption.
ACORN brought hundreds to the Capitol in the cold to help push through the first $4 billion in aid late in 2005. There may not have been conditions expressed in the final budgetary allocation, but the pressure on the Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco was fierce and led her to implement extensive delays in distributing the money, even once it was finally received in order to placate the Republican backbenchers and the Bush people that there would be no graft. That solution was worse that problem, since that meant that everything in the recovery was postponed, which is a key factor in the population loss New Orleans still feels after two decades. People couldn’t come home to no houses, no hospitals, no schools, and in some cases no jobs as well.
Learning nothing, even though Speaker Johnson is from Louisiana, means that they once again want to polarize the politics by alleging that they won’t provide the relief until they correct California’s “bad behavior.” President-elect Trump’s spit fight with California’s Governor Newsom is longstanding, so part of this is about pandering to the new boss. They want to pretend climate change is not an issue. They want to leverage more oil and gas. They want to claim mismanagement, even though all outside parties acknowledge that California and Los Angeles are probably more fire-ready than any other city and state in the country.
When fires raged through Kobe, Japan in the wake of a devastating earthquake, Japanese legislators immediately approved relief and directed it to the families who needed it most. The lesson wasn’t learned in Katrina in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, and right now politicians, all of whom should know better, are trying to leverage disaster into political advantage, rather than doing what is necessary right now to help fellow Americans. That’s not sad, it’s despicable.