I am calling for the firing of FEMA Director Michael Brown. If you have been following the news closely, you may already know why, and you can stand with me in demanding that President Bush give the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast a better chance by signing this petition now:
Tell the President: We Need New Leadership at FEMA.
http://dccc.org/get_involved/petitions/newleadershipforfema/Like me, you may have spent your Labor Day weekend watching with terror and grief the suffering of so many thousands of our fellow Americans in Louisiana. On NBC's Meet the Press I saw Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, weeping as he told of the horrors he had seen as a result of Hurricane Katrina. But he also told of a second disaster -- the response of our federal government.
He told a story of how FEMA, an Executive branch agency, turned away three truckloads of water, saying they weren't needed. He told a story of how the Coast Guard arrived with 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel -- desperately needed -- only for FEMA to tell them not to give the fuel to Broussard. President Bush must give FEMA qualified, competent leadership now.
Tell the President: We Need New Leadership at FEMA.
http://dccc.org/get_involved/petitions/newleadershipforfema/Michael Chertoff, President Bush's director of Homeland Security, had just given host Tim Russert his explanation of why there should be no accountability for the White House. Mr. Broussard responded that determining who was responsible was absolutely necessary:
"And believe me, they need to be fired right away, because we still have weeks to go in this tragedy. We have months to go. We have years to go. And whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership."
The White House has insisted over and over again that accountability is simply a matter of political gamesmanship. This could not be further from the truth.
Accountability ensures that our government can function as the American people deserve -- and for the past week and a half, it clearly has not.
Tell the President: We Need New Leadership at FEMA.
• The President now says he is going to head the investigation into what went wrong. President Bush need only to look in the mirror and ask himself why he appointed someone unqualified to lead the agency responsible for protecting Americans against disasters like this.
• Michael Brown was given the job of FEMA Director, with virtually no prior experience, apparently because he was the college roommate of one of President Bush's chief 2000 campaign strategists, who became his first FEMA Director. Brown was previously a legal counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association, where he was reportedly fired for incompetence.
• Brown joined Chertoff in claiming that nobody could have expected the damage, though we now know that both of them were briefed as much as 32 hours before the hurricane hit that the levees were likely to be breached.
• With thousands having spent days in the Convention Center in New Orleans with no food, water, or transportation available, Brown admitted to not even knowing about the people there until late in the week.
• And finally, to top it all off, he blamed the victims for not leaving -- even after it was revealed that many of them were simply too poor to find a means to evacuate.
When I called for Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation over Abu Ghraib and post-war planning, it was not partisan sniping -- it was because I knew we needed a better Secretary of Defense for the sake of the mission. A year later, White House investigations have "cleared" Secretary Rumsfeld, and yet Iraq has fallen into even greater danger. President Bush's previous investigations have failed to provide any accountability or solve the problems that provoked them -- we cannot afford this again.
Time is of the essence, lives are on the line.
It does not matter whether Mr. Brown's replacement is a Democrat, Republican, or Independent -- this is a matter of competence at a time when it is most needed, not partisanship. We need qualified leadership.
Tell the President: We Need New Leadership at FEMA.
http://dccc.org/get_involved/petitions/newleadershipforfema/A sincere thank you, and I promise that we are working as hard as we possibly can to help those in need. You will hear much more from us on how we can help them in Congress soon.
Nancy Pelosi
House Democratic Leader
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