The Bush administration has made it official NYT Story. The next massive disaster like Katrina will be handled with new rules. Most notably, families will receive far less cash assistance than they did last year, when FEMA provided $2,000 per family. The new limit is $500 per family.
The announcement comes in the wake of criticism that FEMA's cash assistance program was victimized by "breathtaking" fraud earlier NYT story summary, according to the GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress. Headlines indicated that as much as $1.4 billion in assistance "may have been given based on fraudulent, inaccurate, or improper claims," or 25% of the total.
A closer look at that report, however, reveals that the Congressional auditors estimated that the range of likely fraud was between $600 million to $1.4 billion. Headline writers grabbed the upper estimate and ran with it, a nice example of how the news got sensationalized.
If you use the lower figure, only about 11% of the cash assistance went to victims on questionable grounds.
The release of the GAO was accompanied by lurid details. FEMA cash had been spent on liquor! Gambling! Porn!
My question is simple: Have any of these auditors ever visited South Mississippi? What the hell else do you think people would have spent their money on? Food rations were freely available, as were clothes (until the weather turned) and shelters to stay in.
There appears to be a moral battle going on, where conservative Republicans are at war with their own contradictory impulses. Mississippi is as GOP as the GOP can get -- a Red state all the way. It is the Republican leadership that has purposely developed the casino culture along that coast to goose the economy. That this was controversial is an understatement, because this is also the heart of the Bible Belt.
Therefore the casinos were never allowed to establish themselves on land, but were instead anchored on giant barges anchored offshore. Katrina picked these heavy monstrosities up and tossed them like bathtub toys inland. The problem is they weren't bathtub toys, they were agents of death and destruction that is visible to this day in the naked landscape they plowed through before coming to rest, on top of crushed houses and bodies, far inland.
Those same state officials as their first act after Katrina decided the casinos could rebuild their operations on land now. So, as soon as three months after the worst hurricane in Gulf Coast history, residents could once again gamble away whatever cash they could lay their hands on.
The contradictions and hypocrisies go on and on, back and forth between Capitol Hill, the White House, and the Gulf Coast. One thing for sure: the victims have been officially blamed for FEMA's incompetence, so next time their assistance will be reduced by 75%.
Five hundred dollars per family. In the richest land on earth. The shame coats all of us, because we are witnessing class and race discrimination in the twenty-first century. That bridge from the old century to the new one that Clinton used to talk about may have a fast lane, but you can be sure the poor down yonder won't be having access to it.
1 comment:
It helps enormously to have this laid out this way. 11%. This sounds right given the human condition. And when this is compared with the reality in Mississippi as you describe, it seems incredibly low. It is incomprehensible that an individual, let alone a family, could restart on $2000 -- what could they possibly do with $500? Alongside this is the purpose of the leaders and owners to rebuild one of the economy's pumps as you identify it while they continue to kill off the culture that created the environment to begin with. Shame might be too tame a word.
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