After the Storm
How Joplin, Missouri, rebuilt following a devastating tornado by circumventing bureaucracy.
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Mistakes after Katrina caused much delay, despair, and suffering. They also revealed lessons that have improved FEMA’s disaster response. Joplin provides more learning material. If successful disaster recovery relies upon having good people in power, many if not most municipalities will fare much worse in the event of a catastrophe than Joplin has so far. We have a government of laws, not men. The good men and women of Joplin have pushed those laws to promote recovery, but in the absence of such people, and especially in the absence of improved laws, victims of future disasters are more likely to be saddled with something closer to the Katrina recovery.
Micklethwaite went through the tornado not just as president of Joplin’s school board but also as a resident of her hometown, to which she returned 20 years ago. She describes her neighborhood as “closed” before the tornado; after the storm, she did laundry in a neighbor’s house while hers was being repaired, and people on her street held group meetings in the cul-de-sac to discuss rebuilding. “We joke about it being group therapy,” she says. “We just keep moving forward.”
Tate Watkins is a 2012 Phillips Foundation fellow and a former reason intern. He lives in Port-au-Prince.
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In the months and years after the hurricane and resulting floods, media outlets, congressional investigations, and government reports excoriated the agency for its inept response.
FEMA writes checks. I don't know what else people expect from it.
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The government magic they so believe in.
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I'm sure that reason.coms favorite gay Oklahoman is unable to achieve a firm erection due to the rampant govhate detailed in this article.
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We have a government of laws, not men.
I very much disagree.
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I wonder if Joplin will be punished for its bureaucratic non-compliance.
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OT but dig the irony:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....f=politics
"No way! Only Teapublicant's are crooked!"
snicker.
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Wow... an almost-entirely sensible post on HuffPo??
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....f=politics
I am surprise.
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Not so fast, skippy:
Worried about the deficit? That's why God created the possibility of 75% tax rates on the highest earners (15% less than during the Eisenhower years -- last I looked, a Republican administration). You can milk 98 percent of the people of their incomes and savings after a year, in misbegotten efforts to bring down the deficit created because so many of those middle and working class people got laid off because of the greed of the .01%, or you can create tax brackets that break at half a million, a million, 5 million, 10 million, and above 10 million, and have a tax code that is fair, progressive, and wildly popular. And impose a 75% tax on incomes above, say, 10 million, and CEOs might decide that, instead of giving themselves that extra 15 million dollar bonus, they'll keep their 5 million dollar salary and just 5 million of that bonus (because now they're only going to get 25% of it) and give $2000 each to each of their 5000 employees, who helped earn them that bonus and won't be taxed at 75 percent.
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I said there were sensible parts, not the whole.
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and wildly popular.
Gee, a tax code that puts the bulk of the burden on a tiny minority is wildly popular? Go figure.
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four out of five people surveyed agreed that higher taxes on the fifth was a good idea. Or something like that.
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That's everyday stuff from the wealth-enviers. Team Blue has brainwashed them well over the decades.
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Three wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.
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This person wants to dishonor poor people and kick them out of civilized society.
After all don’t they say that its an honor to pay taxes and its what we pay to live in civilized society so by raising the tax rate to 75% on rich people its giving all that honor and civilizing to rich people and once again the poor are left without honor or civilization..
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ROTFL apparently the author doesn't think through what he is saying.
If the CEO's are so self absorbed that they want that money no matter what they will simply convert some of their salary into stock grants or options and then they don't have to pay the tax on it until it is advantageous to them (ie their portfolio took a hit this year so time to cash in some of the stock options to offset it leaving them revenue neutral and therefore having no tax burden).
Even if that doesn't work, who is to say that the money doesn't get doled out to the 500 stockholders in the form of a dividend, there is little to no guarantee that such a tax system would result in the megabucks salary of executives being diverted into the salaries of the individual employees.
Oh I should also point out that there are not very many companies with only 5000 employees paying their CEO's $20 million a year, a few maybe, especially in the financial services field but when you start talking about multi tens of million dollars in salary and bonuses you're pretty much talking Fortune 500 companies most of whom have 10's of thousands of employees.
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And the economics of this doesn't even make sense. Restricting CEO pay does not translate into paying workers more. The productivity of the worker has not changed, so therefor the demand for labor has not changed. All this would do, other than making it harder to attract top executive talent, would be higher retained earnings for the company. I suppose if pretty much every company did this, maybe competitive forces drive prices of goods down a little bit, but either way workers aren't going to be payed more.
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The other problem with specific numbers is that they take people into their heads and away from their guts, which they respond to appeals to values like fairness. You don't want them engaged in internal debate about the validity of your numbers
Yeah, we don't want people thinking, we need them feeling. That's when they vote democrat.
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Okay, after re-reading, there was just a smidgen of sensibility in the article.
Guess that's what got my hopes up.
I need to drink more coffee. Or just drink more, in general.
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Money shot:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....61017.html
Maher is "blacker" than Wayne Brady? The hell you say.
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White people like Wayne Brady because he make Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X.
Wayne Brady's gonna have to choke a bitch.
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And John Ashcroft makes Billy Graham look like Freddie Mercury.
/HT Dennis Miller
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knowing when to say “no thanks” to government.
Enjoy that while you can. Government is increasingly able to make us "an offer we can't refuse".
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I was in Joplin about 3 weeks after the tornado. It was certainly a sight to see.
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I was there a couple of days after Christmas last year. It's bizarre to see new, shiny buildings next to or across the street from piles of rubble.
The original snaps and video, I shut out after a few seconds of viewing. I simply could not take the devastation without feeling ill. It was that bad.
Living fairly close (Springfield is about sixty miles away), it hit close to home. Talking to people who survived was painful; some lost everything they had minus what they had on them at the moment. Way sad.
It was heartening to see that there was so much help, not all the volunteers could get in TO help at the same time. Shows how generous people are, despite what leftists say.
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Shows how generous people are, despite what leftists say.
Are you sure that those "volunteers" weren't being forced to help? After all, extracting tax money from the citizenry is The Only Way™ to assist certain programs or groups.
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People are plenty generous when it's obvious that people are suffering through no fault of their own. The generosity decreases as the fault issue becomes less clear. That's what leftists have a problem with.
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I've talked to a lot of people who helped, either by physically going to Joplin or just gathering donations and taking them down there.
None of them reported any guns to their heads, thankfully.
But it is conceivable.
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Tornado kittah rescue mission?
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Joplin’s recovery contrasts with the fitful, fraught response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans
this is not a contrast in FEMA ability or in bureaucracy/red tape or in much of anything beyond local mentality. NOLA has a large dependency society, folks who were not even willing to hop of their roofs and get to shallower water after Katrina, and it had a mayor who did his best to ensure that no local resource would be marshaled. The attitude was very much "someone else will take care of it."
Contrast to Joplin where the sentiment was "we better get to work" and whatever outside help arrived would be added to existing efforts. Not a community accustomed to handouts, surrounded by other towns also not accustomed, so a lot of them did what folks have done for centuries - help your neighbor when he is in bad shape.
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Same thing happened during the ice storms of a few years ago. Total strangers helping other total strangers.
Voluntarily.
The worst nightmare of leftists.
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Each time I see stories like this - where people take matters into their hands - I wonder what goes through the mind of a hard-core leftists who basically exist to live vicariously through the state.
I can just picture people like Tony screaming, "it's not supposed to go down this way! People stop picking up those boxes! The government in all its compassionate glory will do THAT! Argghhhhh!"
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Exactly. THIS is the generosity and charity that we need. Not government programs that supposedly help the poor or misfortunate through force unto others. Free people helping each other on their own free will is much more effective.
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Since no one is willing to ask, I will.
New Orleans is mostly black. Correct? They sat waiting while their faux-leaders played ignorant politics. Correct? They waited for someone to come and pluck them out of their misery even though some had been forewarned in advanced?
And when that didn't pan out they called "racist!" Correct?
There's your mindset problem.
Contrast to Joplin...
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Partly, it's just how we roll in the "heartland".
The other part is what leftists always ignore.....human nature. Humans are hardwired for empathy. They are also hardwired for reciprocity.
I have spent an entire weekend helping a neighbor with a project, because I KNOW (or at least I'm pretty sure) that he would do the same for me.
I also know that if he DOESN'T return the favor when I need it, it's the last time he's getting shit from me.
It's called justice.
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Or contrast to Nashville, TN flood of 2010.
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cial and unofficial responses after the http://www.ceinturesfr.com/cei.....-c-17.html initial damage. While the people of Joplin largely took matters into their own hands, pushing aside burdensome rules and refusin
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After the Storm
How Joplin, Missouri, rebuilt following a devastating tornado by circumventing bureaucracy.Tate Watkins from the August/September 2012 issue
On May 22, 2011, a tornado ripped through the town of Joplin, Missouri. The multi-vortex storm cut an eerily straight west-east line through Joplin’s downtown street grid, growing to three quarters of a mile wide at its peak. In the end, the Category 5 twister physically picked up and slammed down about one-quarter of the town, creating 3 million cubic yards of debris. It flattened big-box stores such as Home Depot and Walmart and left a desert of concrete foundation slabs covering a six-mile stretch of destruction. The storm killed 161 people, displaced 9,000 more, and completely wiped out more than 4,000 structures while damaging another 3,000. It was the deadliest tornado since modern recordkeeping began in 1950, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But as the one-year anniversary of the storm approached, Joplin found itself in startlingly good shape. Local officials estimate that insurance claims will total $2 billion, yet the town’s business tax revenues are actually up for the year. School enrollment is 95 percent of what it was before the tornado, and the vast majority of displaced residents have secured lodging in or near the area.
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Oh the irony...
When most midwestern towns were created, settlers didn't give a second thought to whether those on the Hill (whether federal or state) would give them the stamp of approval. The primary difference of course being that the federal government NEEDED its citizens in order to justify their existence. Sadly, it seems as though the opposite is now true.
When citizens feel that they must ask government for permission, assistance or acceptance to carry out the most basic behaviors, clearly government is a society of laws and not men.
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thank you