Apparently it's becoming a thing on the right to claim that North Carolina is being ignored and Biden/Harris are slow rolling federal aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. This is nuts even from a cynical political perspective, since Democrats desperately want to win NC in November and this a great opportunity to show how much they care.
In any case, the reason you haven't yet seen huge convoys of trucks rolling into Asheville isn't because the trucks aren't ready. They're ready. But they can't get in until the water recedes and the roads are passable. Which will be soon.
The Army has been handling debris management and is gearing up to establish temporary power supplies near Asheville. FEMA is working with the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild washed out roads and bridges and connect cut-off communities. They are also working with the US Department of Defense to set up air bridge locations to airlift supplies into storm-damaged areas not accessible by roads. Initial staging has been set up at Ft. Liberty, and airplanes and helicopters will be used to bring supplies in by air.

FEMA officials say supplies for those stranded in western North Carolina have already been staged for delivery. According to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, those supplies have begun to be airlifted into place.
Three tractor-trailers full of water arrived in the county early Monday morning, enough to provide one day’s water supply for each resident.
Etc. etc. Private aid organizations are also starting to arrive in Asheville and elsewhere in western North Carolina. Before long, Asheville will be inundated with food, water, ice, blankets, tents, and insurance adjusters. It's all going perfectly normally.
I love hearing people who blocked aid following Hurricane Sandy now complaining that aid didn't happen instantaneously.
Yes, but where is Trump with the paper towels?
What is the conservative/libertarian/states rights take on FEMA and Federal Diasaster Relief in general ?
Their take is that, when there's a Republican administration, FEMA is an example of a well-managed federal office. And when there's a Democratic administration, it's an example of gross incompetence, corruption, and wasted tax dollars.
Not quite. When aid goes to them, it's a necessary function of government and they should get more and faster. When it goes to "those people" it's a waste of tax dollars and "those people" should be more self-sufficient.
It's like a graph with four quadrants. One axis is the party affiliation of the administration, and the other is who is getting the aid.
No, it's the party affiliation of who's getting the aid. And only two quadrants are populated. The difference between the R's and the D's is which two.
No, it's the party affiliation of who's getting the aid.
Seems a stretch. Your take assumes Republican officials care about their own constituents, But nothing could be further from the truth. They're constantly pursuing policies that screw over their own supporters.
Their main interest with respect to disaster relief is scoring political points. Which usually involves a lot of lying.
These are all the de facto answers but I am curious about the philosophical/ideological answer. What do they profess to believe about the limits of the federal government ? It seems to me that once up on a time even an agency like FEMA was frowned on on principle but I don't hear almost anyone saying that now.
As evidence I offer their response to Hurricane Sandy, which effected NY and NJ. R's slow walked aid and limited it severely. Disasters in mostly red states get immediate response and whining about why it's not more and faster. It's already started.
The conservative position is they adamantly oppose aid to democrat parts of the country and believe no amount of aid is sufficient for republican parts. Libertarians are less hypocritical opposing aid equally to both, but if the liberals get it, then the conservatives should also get it.
Very simple. Aid must be dispensed liberally [sic] and immediately whenever it rains in the Confederacy. And it must be paid for by the good folks who live in the financially successful (IOW blue) states, to whom disaster aid is never justified regardless of the cause.
This is nuts even from a cynical political perspective, since Democrats desperately want to win NC in November and this a great opportunity to show how much they care.
No. It's not nuts at all "from a cynical political perspective."
Given a sufficiently cynical political perspective, it's perfectly rational for them to try and gaslight as many voters as possible into thinking the current, Democratic administration is incompetent and/or their enemy. North Carolina looks like it's going to come down to the wire. Georgia, too. Even Florida might be close. You never know what the difference maker will be.
(I know what Kevin's saying, but still!)
"I'm from the government and I'm here to help" !!!
Yes, Reagan was an evil monster.
"We're here from the business community, we're here to make money off of your misery."
Bingo. Everything at every stage in the process has somebody in the background counting cash. I always find it funny how people complain about socialism yet they scream when corporate capitalists set prices at whatever the market will bear. If I see "Bidenomics" one more time from somebody complaining about prices who can't be bothered to look at profit margins and what's really driving prices... But price controls are socialism.
Exactly.
+1
The free market is the mechanism for price control. But a free market requires low cost of entry and perfect knowledge. Because it's expensive to start up a business and knowledge is never perfect, and business-school MBAs have heralded an era of mergers and acquisitions, we have oligopoly and its near-monopoly pricing and profit margins. Most of the theory is from college Econ 101-102; advanced courses would have covered the data and statistics and how to show that this is indeed the case.
Very good – err – the quip I mean.
"Before long, Asheville will be inundated with food, water, ice, blankets, tents, and insurance adjusters."
Last night, 60 Minutes did a story on the crooked practices of the insurance business in Florida. A different hurricane, a different year, but apparently a common practice. Insurance adjuster assesses the damage, files a report with the insurance company, insurance company sends homeowner a check for much less than the adjuster assessed. Not just 10% less, but sometimes 75% or 90% less. One egregious example: adjuster assessed damage of about $250,000 and company paid homeowner $15,000. Now a legal dispute, outcome pending. But most homeowners don't have luxury of fighting the insurance company. They take what they're offered because they need to repair their home asap.
With bigger storms, greater damage, more financial pressure on companies, scamming customers may become a bigger and bigger problem. Expect this to become a political issue. Government oversight is needed. The anti-regulatory GOP won't be the answer.
Insurance is just a scam anymore, anyway. Pay huge premiums to companies with shareholder expectations and eight figure CEO salaries. State Farm, for example, is cutting policies everywhere and raising premiums - their CEO makes 24M per year. At some point, insurance will be for suckers who have a mortgage and can't get out of the obligation.
We going to self insure for our next house and put away enough money in a high interest account (or index fund) to cover replacement.
I realize that CEO salaries are a favorite, visceral target, and perhaps are too high, but even if they were reined in 90% the effect on the bottom line would be epsilon.
Oh, I get that. It's pennies in comparison to the overall operating cost of the company - in fact it won't cover the damages from even a small tropical storm, let alone a major hurricane.
My broader point was about demanding ever increasing profitability from Wall Street shareholders, achieved by denying exactly the claims they are supposed to cover. If the they can't stand the heat, they should get out of the kitchen and stop taking people's money without providing the service they've promised. If they just flat out can't operate in a modern sphere were climate change is leaving vast swaths of massive damage, then the entire idea of "insurance" needs a rethink because what we have not isn't working for the people paying into it.
"My broader point was about demanding ever increasing profitability from Wall Street shareholders, achieved by denying exactly the claims they are supposed to cover."
Have insurance industry profits increased significantly over time? My sense is that they haven't, and that the insurance industry generally is lower-profit than most others.
Now, it could be that an increasing amount of revenue may be going to stupid inneficient stuff like overcompensating management, but even so, I'd bet that the primary driver of underpayment on policies in Florida is that rationally-set premiums actually reflecting the property risk millions of homes in what's basically a giant sandbar (average elevation a mere 100 feet!) jutting out into the Atlantic/Gulf hurricane central are too high for homeowners to afford.
Thus, insurers either (a) charge too much for people to actually buy insurance, or (b) try to avoid payouts, because (c) it's ridiculously risky to build things in coastal Florida and people really shouldn't be doing it.
Blue states tend to have better insurance regulators in place to keep the insurance companies from totally scamming their customers in need. But then again, blue states also tend to regulate development so that insurance companies aren't always inundated with damage claims. The flipside of Florida's insurance companies having crooked practices is that the state government allows irresponsible development everywhere.
They don’t want government help (except in liberal Asheville). Their church charities, fellow Christians, and god itself will save them from its flood.
"In any case, the reason you haven't yet seen huge convoys of trucks rolling into Asheville isn't because the trucks aren't ready. They're ready. But they can't get in until the water recedes and the roads are passable.
Not only that, there literally are no roads! in many places in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. They were completely destroyed along with bridges as well. You're talking one of the most remote, most difficult areas to get around in even if things were hunky-dory. Airlifts are going to be the only to help people for months.
https://jeffjacksonnc.substack.com/p/helene-relief-update
Jeff Jackson is a Democratic congressman from suburban Charlotte, gerrymandered out of his district, now running for state AG. Also National Guard JAG. Very good guy.
Jackson is the real deal and an asset to the country.
One of the nice things about the large military budget is that the US Army, and most state's national guards, have a large number of people trained and equipped as engineers whose main task is to facilitate getting large numbers of troops and vehicles where they're going quickly. Bridge building and road construction and repair are jobs they're trained and equipped to do. Paved roads and permanent high-level bridges will probably take a while, but passable roads with temporary bridges should be in place quite soon.
"One of the nice things about the large military budget is that the US Army, and most state's national guards, have a large number of people trained and equipped as engineers whose main task is to facilitate getting large numbers of troops and vehicles where they're going quickly."
Good lord. That's like saying a nice feature of the government hypothetically spending a cool trillion a year on broadway musicals is that there'd be large number of people trained and equipped as carpenters who can, when disaster strikes, build temporary housing.
It would be far, far, far more efficient to have a larger and better funded FEMA and other civil disaster response infrastructure than it would be to hope that the military can fill the breach as a side effect of its training millions of people in the fine arts of pushups, shooting, and how to follow orders.
I know the header photos keep changing, but the businesses in the strip mall in Santa Ana in one photo are hilariously low rent - like what you would mock up for a satirical comedy film like Idiocracy or something.
FEMA? The National Guard? Pshaw! Trump would have been down there within 24 hours tossing paper towels at people's heads.
I have no problems with lots of federal aid at this point, especially in the hill country as described. There was really no way for them to be prepared. However, I do have some qualms about the coastal areas. People in the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, etc brag about their good weather and paying lower taxes. Some of that is because all of the rest of us subsidize their low tax rates. The federal govt can pick up some of this but their state governments should be paying a lot fo this.
Steve
NC is more like NY and less like the deep South regarding dependence on the rest of "us"
Too many people think what they see on TV shows and movies can inform them on reality. People think Law and Order replicates reality and that reality-TV shows capture chunks of reality, particularly humanity.
As such, many people have built-in expectations of what can and can't be done, and how long it takes for things to be done.
The average person probably thinks it takes a year to build a skyscraper.
The hurricane would never have happened if Trump had been president.
Many good points here. But please, remember that "Asheville" is not Western North Carolina. There are many many towns that have been destroyed, many more cut off. As I type, you can only get into Asheville by road by going through South Carolina, which has itself been hit very hard. This storm has created a logistical mess. So many roads washed away, so many bridges out. Please donate what you can, and send us all good vibes here!
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