The beginning of the effort

The Vice President had a few things to say on Monday.

Vice President Mike Pence is stressing that the federal government will support Harvey recovery efforts going forward.

In an interview with Houston radio station KTRH Monday morning, Pence said the federal government will make the resources available to see Texas through rescue operations and recovery.

Pence noted that given the “magnitude of the flooding” that “it will be years coming back.”

The vice president stressed that President Donald Trump has been “continuously engaged” on Harvey, noting that it is still the “beginning of the effort.” He said details of Trump’s visit to Texas will be “forthcoming.”

We can't wait to see what that effort looks like once it really gets rolling.  The good news for Pence is, he's probably already got a template to work with.  He helped put it together after Katrina.

At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus of conservative lawmakers. On 13 September 2005 – just 15 days after the levees were breached, and with parts of New Orleans still under water – the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices” – 32 pseudo-relief policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.

Pence's group recommended the suspension of labor laws and environmental standards, a school voucher scheme, as well as a number of tax breaks and "incentives" benefiting the wealthy contractors and developers who turned a city's misery into profit. You know, standard disaster response type stuff. Some of the worst elements of what we still insist on calling the "recovery" of New Orleans after the flood can be traced back to the opportunism expressed in Pence's response plan. The smaller, whiter, tenuous, unsafe, unhealthy, and somehow unaffordable city we've built in the past 12 years owes much to that "pro-market" neoliberal blueprint.

Today, on the anniversary of the day that set us in motion toward this fate, we look out our windows (we aren't allowed outside) to see conditions reminiscent of, though thankfully not identical to, those of this day in 2005. We look just one state over, though, and find drama and devastation on a scale much more comparable to that in our memory. We also find Mike Pence telling us this is the "beginning of the effort" for recovery there as well.  That is already beginning to look familiar.

Michael Brown is currently on CNBC pushing for flood insurance privatization.

— Niels Lesniewski (@nielslesniewski) August 28, 2017

Also:

As surely as flooding disasters like Hurrricane Harvey are followed by health concerns and homelessness, they’re followed by calls to legalize price-gouging.

And sure enough, the waters were still rising all across the Houston area when the first such calls were heard. They came from conservative economists Tim Worstall of Britain’s Adam Smith Institute, writing in Forbes, and Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, whose piece appeared on the AEI website and at Newsweek. Both demonstrated the chief flaw of such analyses: They were based on irreproachable textbook economics, and showed no sensitivity whatsoever to how things work on the ground during a major catastrophe.

And this is just the beginning.  No doubt Vice President (for now?) Pence has plenty more in store for the next 12 years or so.