If you think the government’s initial response at all levels to
Hurricane Katrina was incompetent wait till you see the tidal wave
of ineptitude, cronyism, irrationality, waste, and thievery that’s
guaranteed to be involved in the clean-up and rebuilding.
“It’s gonna cost whatever it costs,” explained President Bush,
sounding not unlike someone who’s used to spending other people’s
money, and not too worried that he was already operating,
pre-Katrina, at the bottom of a fiscal hole that was gushing out
nearly $1 billion per day in new red ink.
The first price tag we’re hearing for reconstruction is $200
billion, or approximately $2,000 per U.S. household. Explains
Stephen Moore, a senior economics writer for the Wall Street
Journal: “When President Bush announced that the feds would
take the lead role in the reconstruction of New Orleans, he in
effect established a new $200 billion federal line of credit. To
put that $200 billion in perspective, we could give every one of
the 500,000 families displaced by Katrina a check for $400,000, and
they could each build a beach-front home virtually anywhere in the
United States.”
Or if Moore is underestimating and it turns out to be a million
displaced households, that’s $200,000 each for a free house, enough
for a place a few houses back from the beach.
In any case, President Bush is promising a resurrected New
Orleans, “even better and stronger,” but still below sea level,
combined with higher levels of “racial healing” by the government
and a new war on poverty, one that’s more incentive-based and
capitalist than the one in the 1960s.
In addition to new roads and levees, there’s $26,000 in the
pipeline for each Katrina-victimized household, and more money and
power for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As one of
its first efforts at reconstruction, the federal government has
purchased more than 200,000 trailers for evacuees — the worst kind
of housing when a Category 3 blasts through the neighborhood.
Instead of 200,000 mobile homes, Washington Post
columnist Sebastian Mallaby asks why President Bush didn’t take the
safer and cheaper route: “Why doesn’t he believe in the private
rental market of the South, which is offering 1.1 million units of
vacant property?”
Others questioned the Bush administration’s efforts to hand out
free $2,000 debit cards to tens of thousands of alleged victims of
Katrina, a program that’s now been scrapped. “It’s only been 10
days since the reconstruction funds were voted out of Congress, but
there are already stories of misspending,” reported Moore in the
Journal. “For example, the Louis Vuitton store reported
selling two monographed luxury handbags for $800 each, both paid
for by women with FEMA’s $2,000 emergency disaster relief
cards.”
In Houston, KPRC-TV discovered that some of the $2,000 debit
cards found their way into local strip clubs. A manager at Caligula
XXI Gentlemen’s Club told KPRC that he has seen at least one card
used at his club. Across the street, a bartender at Baby Dolls,
another adult entertainment club, was more forthcoming. “A lot of
customers have been coming in from Louisiana and they’ve been real
happy about the $1.75 beers,” she told KPRC.
The bartender at Baby Dolls explained to KPRC that she didn’t
blame her new customers for using federal dollars: “You lost your
whole house, then, why not? You might want some beer in a strip
club. There are a lot of guys out there that like to do that.”
Unfortunately, the mismanagement of tax dollars by FEMA that was
in plain view at the Houston strip clubs is nothing new. When
Hurricane Frances hit Florida last year, an investigative report by
the South Florida Sun-Sentinel showed that President Bush
declared Miami-Dade and other counties a disaster before the storm
had passed through the state, a decision that resulted in nearly
13,000 Miami-Dade residents pocketing FEMA money even though they
hadn’t experienced any damage from the hurricane.
With the wildfires that burned through Southern California in
2003, according to a report by the Press of Atlantic City,
FEMA awarded $5.2 million to more than 5,000 applicants in Los
Angeles even though the fires never burned in the city.
Overall, FEMA has become little more than a mismanaged and
costly joke. “In disasters reviewed by the Sun-Sentinel,”
reports he Press, “FEMA officials never consulted
meteorologists or local officials most familiar with damage in
their communities before approving claims.” Bottom line, it’s worse
than drunken sailors. At least they’re spending their own
money.
