So far, the DHS, like the DEA, is a complete waste of time and money.
The budget screams, "We have no agenda of protection other than our own jobs! Our future matters more to us than yours!"
More than that, New Orleans has known for decades that a major natural disaster (upriver flood, hurricane, tsunami) would almost certainly breach the levees, and would with absolute certainty overwhelm them with floodwater, and at least partially inundate the town. Nobody's done anything to improve the infrastructure, because there was no money to do it. Why there was no money is the question we need to answer, and I would suggest to you that that question may well be what the outspoken black activists have at the core of their argument that nobody at the top cares about poor black people. Absolutist statements like that are of course untrue, but the kernel within may well be true: that nobody with real money to spend or allocate, cares enough about poor black people, and rotting old French villes, to spend big big money on protecting them from nature, when the protection might not work anyway. (i.e. Katrina was a Cat 4 storm, thus pretty destructive, but with enough improvement to the levees, they might have held...but what if the next one was a Category 5 storm?)
Another reason I would suggest to you, unrelated to race, or at least neutral to the question of poor, black folks, is the fact that we have multiple Federal agencies (the DEA comes to mind) with a massive mandate to do...something...to protect the citizens of this country from their own behavior. This is only a spit in the ocean of the federal budget, but nonetheless consumes billions of American citizens' dollars, and disrupts millions of lives (my wife's would be an example) generating fear and castigating people for behavior about which they have little choice, thus diverting taxes from public projects which actually would help people, by employing them and protecting them from things which actually may not be preventable by other means, such as the forces of nature.
But then, the one thing that I really do dislike about the current government is that, given a choice of governing by consensus or fear, they choose fear. While it is an understandable choice, it is not a forgivable one.
So what I would like to see happen, and what I do not believe will happen anytime soon, is for DHS to worry about fixing the problems in New Orleans, Gulfport, and so on, instead of fixing the blame for what happened there. What I believe will happen is that at least another year of fixing the blame will transpire while local people and non-governmental organizations like the American Red Cross, already overbudget and undermanned, will do what they can to clean up the mess that nature has seen fit to create while the federal government played the fiddle, and hoped they could cleverly manipulate the press so somebody else would appear to be at fault. The truth, of course, is that no single human being is at fault for this terrible weather disturbance overwhelming inadequate human preparations to deal with weather disturbances, but the system itself is profoundly broken and needs to be fixed if we are to prevent another disaster when the next big storm blows across the Atlantic, which will be soon. Maybe not for ten years, but ten years is probably only four or five more than it will take to rebuild New Orleans anyway.
The solution? Marvelously simple, which means it will probably not happen: restructure or completely dismantle at least half of the federal emergency-response and preparedness agencies. Most of them are just fat on the federal budget anyway; I include the DEA, which hasn't had a coherent mandate since the Johnson presidency, the Department of Homeland Security, which is neither a department nor secure (though it is located in the "homeland", which renders it almost an accurate acronym by federal standards) and the Central Intelligence Agency, which isn't actually central anymore, and doesn't wind up using much of the intelligence it gathers because of the carefully-defined divide between domestic and foreign intelligence, which thanks to the evolution of information and transport systems, is no longer an effective divide.
I would like to see the DHS de-bureaucratize FEMA, the NRC, the CIA, and the FBI, completely subsuming the analytical arms of NSA, NRO, CIA, and perhaps DIA, to make a central intelligence clearinghouse that reports directly to the National Security Council. I would like to see the DEA dismantled; we already have an FBI to handle federal law enforcement. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms doesn't make much fucking sense to me either; the Secret Service is already a law-enforcement agency that is not part of the Department of Justice. All of the federal departments do not need their own independent police forces, although the Secret Service not being attached to the FBI does make sense to me, given their particular mission. The other federal police agencies do not.
These changes will cost thousands of well-paying, highly-skilled jobs. They will also reduce the size of government, and the number of people in the national security loop, and concentrate both authority and responsibility in the hands of people who, hopefully, will be able to do some good for the people of the United States with it, and more importantly, it will increase accountability, so if they fail, the "paper trail" will not get lost among a dozen different agencies and a hundred different desks.
I don't really expect to see any of these changes implemented, even if I should become a Senator someday. I do, however, believe that I have begun to understand what is wrong with the way this country is managed, having been a part of the "system" for eight years now, and I also believe that I can do better. I may be incorrect about both of those things, and I'm sure my opinion and analysis will change as the years go by and I acquire new information. I am equally sure, however, that this country can be improved, if we are willing to change what does not work as designed, and if we are willing to leave unchanged what works not as designed, but to the benefit of our employer, We the People.
More than that, New Orleans has known for decades that a major natural disaster (upriver flood, hurricane, tsunami) would almost certainly breach the levees, and would with absolute certainty overwhelm them with floodwater, and at least partially inundate the town. Nobody's done anything to improve the infrastructure, because there was no money to do it. Why there was no money is the question we need to answer, and I would suggest to you that that question may well be what the outspoken black activists have at the core of their argument that nobody at the top cares about poor black people. Absolutist statements like that are of course untrue, but the kernel within may well be true: that nobody with real money to spend or allocate, cares enough about poor black people, and rotting old French villes, to spend big big money on protecting them from nature, when the protection might not work anyway. (i.e. Katrina was a Cat 4 storm, thus pretty destructive, but with enough improvement to the levees, they might have held...but what if the next one was a Category 5 storm?)
Another reason I would suggest to you, unrelated to race, or at least neutral to the question of poor, black folks, is the fact that we have multiple Federal agencies (the DEA comes to mind) with a massive mandate to do...something...to protect the citizens of this country from their own behavior. This is only a spit in the ocean of the federal budget, but nonetheless consumes billions of American citizens' dollars, and disrupts millions of lives (my wife's would be an example) generating fear and castigating people for behavior about which they have little choice, thus diverting taxes from public projects which actually would help people, by employing them and protecting them from things which actually may not be preventable by other means, such as the forces of nature.
But then, the one thing that I really do dislike about the current government is that, given a choice of governing by consensus or fear, they choose fear. While it is an understandable choice, it is not a forgivable one.
So what I would like to see happen, and what I do not believe will happen anytime soon, is for DHS to worry about fixing the problems in New Orleans, Gulfport, and so on, instead of fixing the blame for what happened there. What I believe will happen is that at least another year of fixing the blame will transpire while local people and non-governmental organizations like the American Red Cross, already overbudget and undermanned, will do what they can to clean up the mess that nature has seen fit to create while the federal government played the fiddle, and hoped they could cleverly manipulate the press so somebody else would appear to be at fault. The truth, of course, is that no single human being is at fault for this terrible weather disturbance overwhelming inadequate human preparations to deal with weather disturbances, but the system itself is profoundly broken and needs to be fixed if we are to prevent another disaster when the next big storm blows across the Atlantic, which will be soon. Maybe not for ten years, but ten years is probably only four or five more than it will take to rebuild New Orleans anyway.
The solution? Marvelously simple, which means it will probably not happen: restructure or completely dismantle at least half of the federal emergency-response and preparedness agencies. Most of them are just fat on the federal budget anyway; I include the DEA, which hasn't had a coherent mandate since the Johnson presidency, the Department of Homeland Security, which is neither a department nor secure (though it is located in the "homeland", which renders it almost an accurate acronym by federal standards) and the Central Intelligence Agency, which isn't actually central anymore, and doesn't wind up using much of the intelligence it gathers because of the carefully-defined divide between domestic and foreign intelligence, which thanks to the evolution of information and transport systems, is no longer an effective divide.
I would like to see the DHS de-bureaucratize FEMA, the NRC, the CIA, and the FBI, completely subsuming the analytical arms of NSA, NRO, CIA, and perhaps DIA, to make a central intelligence clearinghouse that reports directly to the National Security Council. I would like to see the DEA dismantled; we already have an FBI to handle federal law enforcement. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms doesn't make much fucking sense to me either; the Secret Service is already a law-enforcement agency that is not part of the Department of Justice. All of the federal departments do not need their own independent police forces, although the Secret Service not being attached to the FBI does make sense to me, given their particular mission. The other federal police agencies do not.
These changes will cost thousands of well-paying, highly-skilled jobs. They will also reduce the size of government, and the number of people in the national security loop, and concentrate both authority and responsibility in the hands of people who, hopefully, will be able to do some good for the people of the United States with it, and more importantly, it will increase accountability, so if they fail, the "paper trail" will not get lost among a dozen different agencies and a hundred different desks.
I don't really expect to see any of these changes implemented, even if I should become a Senator someday. I do, however, believe that I have begun to understand what is wrong with the way this country is managed, having been a part of the "system" for eight years now, and I also believe that I can do better. I may be incorrect about both of those things, and I'm sure my opinion and analysis will change as the years go by and I acquire new information. I am equally sure, however, that this country can be improved, if we are willing to change what does not work as designed, and if we are willing to leave unchanged what works not as designed, but to the benefit of our employer, We the People.