FEMA: Still F’d Up

[marmar]

From The Nation:


BLOG | Posted 07/12/2007 @ 12:28pm
FEMA: Still F’d Up

Ari Berman


Written and Reported by Matthew Blake

Gulf Coast residents who've witnessed the incompetence of FEMA might find dark humor in the federal agency's unifying effect. Democratic and Republican Senators, Louisiana and New Orleans government leaders, and even former FEMA officials say the agency remains a major obstacle to Hurricane Katrina disaster recovery.

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska upped the ante at a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee hearing Tuesday, decrying FEMA as fundamentally incapable of correctly spending and allocating the $110 billion dollars it was given by Congress to rebuild the Gulf. The Republican Senator compared the damage from Katrina to France and Germany after World War Two concluding, "You need a new Marshall Plan for this area, not just FEMA."

That comparison struck a chord with Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu ?, who convened the hearing. "You really hit the nail on the head comparing it to parts of Europe after World War Two," she said. The city's population is 60 percent of what it was before Katrina, murder rates have climbed to the deadliest in America and areas like the Lower Ninth Ward remain blighted and barren.

Stevens, one of the oldest and most conservative members of the Senate, would seem an unlikely champion of aggrieved New Orleans citizens. But he effectively conveyed both the magnitude of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita's devastation and the structural problems FEMA has encountered under the Bush Administration and the four year-old Department of Homeland Security.

Additional voices in the anti-FEMA chorus Tuesday included Mark Merritt, an assistant director at FEMA under Bill Clinton; Jeff Smith, the Louisiana governor's office executive director for homeland security and emergency preparedness, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Nagin told the committee that, "There needs to be some consistency. Every two months we deal with a different FEMA representative. It's like we're always starting from scratch." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. What I wonder is, into how many private pockets is that $110B going?

Corruption seems to be the standard meme and/or more these days, many thanks to the For-Profit BushCo/Pnac Terror Regime.

[bullimiami]

2. the reformed fema was designed as a crony-captialist front.

they are very effective at transferring public funds to friendly private corps.
anything else is window dressing.

[19jet54]

3. "The Poor Blacks don't need the money anyway"

"but it is just a gut feeling" - Directory Homeland Security

Just exactly what color is that? :rofl: