Interview With Representative Bobby Jindal
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's check the headlines. Carol Costello here with that. Good morning, Carol.</s>CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, Miles. Good morning to all of you. Now in the news, President Bush is now touring the area hit by Hurricane Rita. The president left Andrews Air Force base in the last hour. He's expected to get an aerial tour of the battered Texas- Louisiana border. He also plans to meet with storm victims. The trip comes one day after the president urged Americans to conserve fuel. There is word the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, as its known, is planning to reimburse churches and other religious organizations for their help in the wake of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. That's according to "The Washington Post." Religious groups that operated at the request of officials in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama would be eligible. It would be the first time tax dollars are paid to faith-based groups. Second-most wanted Al Qaeda member in Iraq has been killed. A U.S. military spokesman confirms the man now known as Abu Azzam was shot in a gun battle in Baghdad. It's believed he was responsible for supplying money to terror cells in Iraq. The Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is speaking out for the first time about claims he had inside information before selling off some stock. Frist sold his holdings of Hospital Corporation of America just one month before a weak earnings report sparked a drop in its price. Frist denies having any information that was not public. The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are now investigating. And more debate expected to resume this hour on John Roberts' nomination to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. The full Senate is expected to confirm Roberts in a vote possibly as early as tomorrow. Once Roberts is confirmed, President Bush is expected to announce his choice to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. So a lot of debate on Capitol Hill today and in the days to come.</s>SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's talk business, because of course business needs to recover here in New Orleans before really the city can get back on its feet economically, of course. We've seen today lots of efforts. Business owners coming in to figure out at least what they've lost. Adaora Udoji has been covering this story, really seeing firsthand people who are getting a sense of, in some cases, how good it is, and in some cases how bad it is. Good morning.</s>ADAORA UDOJI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. Exactly. There are thousands and thousands of business owner who are just now getting a sense of the kind of damage that their businesses have suffered after both Katrina and Rita, and many of them are learning that there is just an enormous amount of work that's going to have to take place in order for them to recover.</s>UDOJI (voice-over): Scott Boswell had not one but two big dreams of restaurant grand openings. In the best of times not an easy task here in the Big Easy, but these are hardly the best of times.</s>SCOTT BOSWELL, RESTAURANT OWNER: Thanks for supporting us, man, really appreciate it.</s>UDOJI: Somehow in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's chaos, he opened "Stanley's," his second restaurant in the French Quarter. It was the only thing open for blocks.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Order up.</s>UDOJI: But banged up around the corner, his first restaurant, the four year old smash hit "Stellas" is a mess. He had just started renovating before the storm.</s>BOSWELL: It was devastating for me, because, we don't have any money coming in. Progress. Progress.</s>UDOJI: He does have determination, so did his mother, his sous chef and the sous chef's girlfriend. The four of them started things going. Five more workers showed up four days later and now, they're all working day and night serving up simple meals.</s>PAT BOSWELL, SCOTTS'S MOM: He needed to work. The people here needed food. And I said, "we can do this." He said, "how?" and I said, we just serve cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers.</s>UDOJI: No classic New Orleans, but good enough, especially since the generator they're using almost ran out of diesel fuel. Ingredients? They scour streets far away from the city for open stores, making daily trips, this one for $1,600 worth of food and drink. Boswell delivery trucks are not allowed back in the city. The sous chef on the grill, he flew all the way home from culinary training in France just for his friend.</s>JUSTIN GIROURARD, SOUS CHEF: I knew he would want to open up and sell burgers, so that was a good reason to come back.</s>UDOJI: Others want the same thing. West of them in Jefferson Parish business owners paste on poles and lawn signs displays declaring they're open. Some big chains like Lowe's not only got up and running fast but they're selling the goods to help everyone else get going and Outback serving up steaks.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Joel, party of two.</s>UDOJI: Most of the area is roughly 70,000 businesses, though, are still abandoned. A great many of them small businesses like Boswell's that employ 20 people or so and they need everyone which, right now, is a big problem.</s>BOSWELL: All my employees are scattered all over the United States.</s>UDOJI: And getting them home is just the first step.</s>BOSWELL: I have to figure out housing for them, because some of their houses have been destroyed. They don't have places to live.</s>UDOJI: They don't have places to live or furniture or clothes. (on camera): Did you ever think that that would be one of your main issue, was getting your employees some clean clothes?</s>BOSWELL: I told them, I said every day here we do things I never dreamed I would be doing ever in my life.</s>UDOJI (voice-over): As word of mouth travels, more hungry customers are showing up. That's their great reward in the city they love.</s>P.  BOSWELL: One lady came and said, "Thank you. It's the first day we felt normal in 23 days."</s>UDOJI: Like everything else here, it's all upside down. If the general rule for a restaurant is the customer doesn't want to see how you cook then here in the Big Easy, the secret to customer satisfaction may just be show 'em how you do it. That's what makes it so good.</s>UDOJI: Now, in the case of Scot Boswell, he's in contact with all 25 of his employees, expecting that many of them will come back. But there are many, many, many companies that have absolutely no idea where their employees are. And a good example of that is the Royal Tenesta (ph), where we're staying. I mean, they usually are running with 500 employees. Now they're doing it with 40. They don't where some of their other employees are. They don't if they're going to come back. So it just creates an incredible amount of complication and confusion as the economy starts to get going again here.</s>S. O'BRIEN: And if those employees have now relocated to, let's say, Houston or -- and other states, and they've got kids that they've now enrolled in schools, who they are trying to get their lives restarted, who knows how many are going to come back and how many are not. That was a nice piece. Did you get to taste the burgers?</s>UDOJI: We did. They were good.</s>S. O'BRIEN: Oh, cooked food. That sounds good. Let's go back to Miles.</s>M. O'BRIEN: I'd say. That's a lot better than I was eating when I was in New Orleans last time. Glad to see the burgers.</s>S. O'BRIEN: I thought the same thing.</s>M. O'BRIEN: Glad to see the burgers, burgers on the grill. When I come back, that's where I'll be going, for sure. Thank you, ladies, very much. Former FEMA chief Mike Brown will testify before Congress today about the federal government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina. No doubt he will be asked why he is still on FEMA's payroll. U.S. Congressman Bobby Jindal represents parts of six Louisiana parishes. He joins us now from Washington. Good to have you back on the program, Congressman Jindal.</s>REP. BOBBY JINDAL, (R), LOUISIANA: Good morning. Thank you for having me.</s>M. O'BRIEN: Why in the world is Mike Brown still being paid?</s>JINDAL: There are a lot of questions we have down in Louisiana. I think my constituents are going to be very interested in moving forward. What can be done to make sure we don't have this same kind of response in the future, God forbid, if there's another hurricane or there's a manmade attack. In the first days after the hurricane, there was just not a coordination, there was not a sense of urgency, at both the federal and the state level. Federal and state agencies, neither of them really distinguished themselves on the first days after this hurricane. Now there were heroes -- the coast Guard, the Wildlife and Fisheries agents, local sheriff departments, local fire departments, state police. These first responders did an amazing job.</s>M. O'BRIEN: Yes, but they did so in spite of the system.</s>JINDAL: You're exactly right. My office was very frustrated. So often the paperwork and the bureaucracy got in the way of people trying to save lives. And so I think there should be some very tough questions asked, not to point blame, but to say, going forward, how do we make sure this doesn't happen again? How do we make sure that -- when the military arrived we had a unified chain of command.</s>M. O'BRIEN: I think perhaps a little blame is OK, as long as it's constructive. In this case, though, how much blame rests on Mike Brown's desk?</s>JINDAL: Well, I think that, obviously, FEMA didn't respond the way it should have, and as the head of FEMA, obviously, he should take some responsibility for that, whoever heads up the organization. You heard the president say that, you heard the governor say that. FEMA clearly didn't do what it could have done in those first days. We have horror stories of people looking for paperwork when they should have been focused on saving lives. But the blame is not only on his shoulders. Again, there was enough of a breakdown. There's plenty of blame to go around. The federal and state agencies, again, did not distinguish themselves. At either level, there just wasn't the coordination, wasn't the kind of sense of urgency. And I do want to say the military improved things dramatically. When they got there, we saw the situation improve almost overnight.</s>M. O'BRIEN: Well, you know, Nancy Pelosi, who leads the Democrats on the other side of the isle, is saying this whole thing is kind of a sham, a photo opportunity, and that, essentially, Mike Brown has become a sacrificial lamb for the Republicans to sort of be done with this. Would you go along with that in any way?</s>JINDAL: Well, I don't think we're placing him alone to fix the problems with FEMA and with the federal and state response. I think that there's something much more organizational. I think we have to study why it was that bureaucracy took over. We literally had pilots that wanted to save people that were told they couldn't get permission. We literally had truckloads of water that were turned away. We had a sheriff that was told he couldn't get help unless he e-mailed his request in. Again, that happened repeatedly at the state and the federal levels. It's fine that we...</s>M. O'BRIEN: Yes, this is a sheriff who's underwater with no power and they say, oh, send us an e-mail. Got to love that.</s>JINDAL: Well, that's right. And at one point, I had sheriff tell me, look, if the government worked as efficiently as a private sector, more people might be alive today. One sheriff said, look, I don't have electricity, my parish is underwater. I requested help. The said to send an e-mail. When I was there in his office, I saw volunteers the first days after the hurricane. I saw volunteers from Michigan. They were told Louisiana does not need help. You'll be turned away at the state border, do not come. I'm grateful, my sheriff was grateful, they broke the rules, they came anyway. They're heroes in this, often said, look, we'll ask for forgiveness later. We don't have time to ask for permission. What I want to know why wasn't there that same sense of urgency in the federal and state bureaucracy? Again, it's great that one or two people may have been replaced, but that's not going to solve this. We need to look organizationally at how can we change the culture of those agencies?</s>M. O'BRIEN: Well, it's changing the culture, but it's also changing some rules. One of the things that the president would like to do is federalize this in a way that sort of has, you know, creates, I guess, a federal militarized go-team, if you will. You think that's a good idea?</s>JINDAL: I think in normal disasters, we have to have local and state first responders on the ground, making the decisions. When we have catastrophic disasters, either manmade or natural, if we -- if God forbid, we had a weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear device, absolutely. You can manage a scenario where the local responders are going to be overwhelmed, the decision-makers may be incapacitated. I think it is smart to have some kind of federal team, whether it's led by the military, led by a beefed up, a restructured FEMA or however the best way is to deliver that. Clearly in this case after Katrina, the military's presence, active and reserve -- the National Guard, as well as the active military -- did an amazing job. They're part of the resources, the chain of command. That worked tremendously well.</s>M. O'BRIEN: But of course, as you just pointed out, if there were federal government failings to federalize the response the next time, maybe that isn't the solution.</s>JINDAL: Well, no, that's right. And that's why I don't want to see a federal response in every circumstance. What I'm saying is if there's an overwhelming catastrophe, a national tragedy where maybe your local decision-makers are cut off by communications, maybe they themselves are victims, maybe your first responders don't have the ability to organize and respond, then we need to be ready. And again, the tragedy is, after 9/11, we've had four years, billions of dollars. We should have been better prepared this time...</s>M. O'BRIEN: You bet.</s>JINDAL: ... at the state and federal level.</s>M. O'BRIEN: You bet. We sure should have. What would be the one question, top question you'd ask him today?</s>JINDAL: Well, I -- the top question is going forward in his mind what could he done to create a sense of urgency in the organization that he until recently ran. What can be done to replace the bureaucracy and the paperwork with a culture that says let's save lives, let's get people out of harm's way and then figure out all the paperwork later.</s>M. O'BRIEN: Congressman Bobby Jindal, thanks for being back with us. Always a pleasure.</s>JINDAL: Thank you.</s>M. O'BRIEN: Soledad?</s>S. O'BRIEN: All right, Miles, thanks. As you look at some of the damage along Magazine Street, we all know that, clearly, the business districts in New Orleans have taken a big financial hit, big financial toll. But what about the emotional toll. How will people here recover psychologically? We'll talk about that ahead on AMERICAN MORNING. Stay with us.