Where Did the Money Go? Katrina..... Hold them ACCOUNTABLE!

[julialnyc]

SNIPPED....
Where Did the Money Go?
Everyone who visits New Orleans asks the same question that locals ask -- where is the money? Congress reportedly appropriated over $100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion was allocated to temporary and long-term housing. Just under $30 billion was for emergency response and Department of Defense spending. Over $18 billion was for State and local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure. $3.6 billion was for health, social services and job training and $3.2 for non-housing cash assistance. $1.9 billion was allocated for education and $1.2 billion for agriculture.

One hour in New Orleans shows the check must still be in the mail.

Not a single dollar in federal housing rehab money has made it into a hand in Louisiana. Though Congress has allocated nearly $10 billion in Community Development Block Grants, the State of Louisiana is still testing the program and has not yet distributed dollar number one.

A lot of media attention has gone to the prosecution of people who wrongfully claimed benefits of $2000 or more after the storm. Their fraud is despicable. It harms those who are still waiting for assistance from FEMA.

But, be clear -- these little $2,000 thieves are minnows swimming on the surface. There are many big savage sharks below. Congress and the national media have so far been frustrated in their quest to get real answers to where the millions and billions went. How much was actually spent on FEMA trailers? How much did the big contractors take off the top and then subcontract out the work? Who were the subcontractors for the multi-million dollar debris removal and reconstruction contracts?

As Corpwatch says in their recent report, “Many of the same ‘disaster profiteers’ and government agencies that mishandled the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the failure of ‘reconstruction’ of the Gulf Coast region. The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same ‘contract vehicles’ in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are ‘indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity’ open-ended ‘contingency’ contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also ‘cost-plus’ contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend.”

We do know billions of dollars in no-bid FEMA contracts went to Bechtel Corporation, the Shaw Group, CH2M Hill, and Fluor immediately after Katrina hit. Riley Bechtel, CEO of Bechtel Corporation, served on President Bush’s Export Council during 2003-2004. A lobbyist for the Shaw Group, Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA Director and friend of President Bush. The President and Group Chief Executive of the International Group at CH2MHill is Robert Card, appointed by President Bush as undersecretary to the US Department of Energy until 2004. Card also worked at CH2M Hill before signing up with President Bush. Fluor, whose work in Iraq was slowing down, is one of the big winners of FEMA work and its stock is up 65 percent since it started Katrina work.

Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota has raised many protests and questions over inflated prices. “It is hard to overstate the incompetence involved in all of these contracts -- we have repeatedly asked them for information and you get nothing.” Republican U.S. Representative Charles Bustany, who represents an area heavily damaged by Hurricane Rita, asked FEMA for reasons why the decision was made to stop funding 100 percent of the cost of debris removal in his district. FEMA refused to tell him. He then filed a Freedom of Information request to get the information, and was again refused. When he asked to appeal their denial, he was told that there were many appeals ahead of his and he would have to wait.

If a US Senator and a local U.S. Republican Representative cannot get answers from FEMA, how much accountability can the people of the Gulf Coast expect? There are many other examples of fraud, waste and patronage.

How did a company that did not own a truck get a contract for debris removal worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Miami Herald reported that the single biggest receiver of early Katrina federal contracts was Ashbritt, Inc. of Pompano Beach, FL, which received over $579 million in contracts for debris removal in Mississippi from Army Corps of Engineers. The paper reported that the company does not own a single dumptruck! All they do is subcontract out the work. Ashbritt, however, had recently dumped $40,000 into the lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, which had been run by Mississippi Governor and former National GOP Chair Haley Barbour. The owners of Ashbritt also trucked $50,000 over to the Republican National Committee in 2004.

How did a company that filed for bankruptcy the year before and was not licensed to build trailers get a $200 million contract for trailers? Circle B Enterprises of Georgia was awarded $287 million in contracts by FEMA for temporary housing. At the time, that was the seventh highest award of Katrina money in the country. According to the Washington Post, Circle B was not even being licensed to build homes in its own state of Georgia and filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

The company does not even have a website.

FEMA spent $7 million to build a park for 198 trailers in Morgan City Louisiana -- almost 2 hours away from New Orleans. Construction was completed in April. Three months later only 20 of the trailers were occupied. One displaced New Orleans resident who lives there has to walk three miles to the nearest grocery.

Hurricanes are now a booming billion-dollar business. No wonder there is a National Hurricane Conference for private companies to show off their wares -- from RVs to portable cell phone towers to port-a-potties. One long time provider was quoted by the Miami Herald at the conference that there are all kinds of new people in the field -- “Some folks here said, ‘Man, this is huge business; this is my new business. I'm not in the landscaping business anymore, I'm going to be a hurricane debris contractor.’”

Much much more at link:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Quigley22.htm

[acmavm]

1. Seriously folks, we need to be taking a lesson from the

people down in Mexico who are fed up with the corruption in their government.

[julialnyc]

2. I just hope the Democrats are smart enough

To repeat this information as often as possible. This is truly disgusting!

[julialnyc]

3. Link:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082406S.shtml

[julialnyc]

4. More info

snipped....

CLEANUP: The job still isn't done. More than 100 million cubic yards of debris have been cleared from the region affected by Katrina. So far the government has spent $3.6 billion, a figure that might have been considerably smaller had the contracts for debris removal been subject to competitive bidding.

Working through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA gave each of four companies contracts worth up to $500 million to clear hurricane debris. This spring government inspectors reported that the companies - AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., Ceres Environmental Services Inc. of Brooklyn Park, Minn. and ECC Operating Services Inc. of Burlingame, Calif. - charged the government as much as four to six times what they paid their subcontractors who actually did the work.

HOUSING: In his Jackson Square speech, Bush said his goal was to "get people out of shelters by the middle of October."

By and large that goal was met, with all but a few thousand of 270,000 Katrina evacuees out of shelters by mid-October.

But that didn't solve the monumental housing problem created by Katrina. Most of the people who had been in shelters went to hotel rooms, with FEMA picking up the bill. About 50,000 families who had evacuated to other cities were promised a year of rent assistance, though in April FEMA began cutting off some who the agency said did not qualify for the program. More than 100,000 families moved into trailers or mobile homes parked either in the yards of their damaged houses or in makeshift compounds.

Meanwhile, FEMA flailed and flip-flopped on its contracting policies for trailers, mobile homes and other temporary shelter. The first big contracts were handed out non-competitively to four well-connected companies - Shaw Group, Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc. and Fluor Corp. Then in October FEMA director R. David Paulison promised to rebid the contracts after Congress complained that smaller companies, especially local and minority-owned firms, should have a chance to compete for the work.

A month after that, FEMA said the new contracts would not be awarded until February. That deadline came and went, and then in March a FEMA official announced that the contracts weren't going to be rebid after all.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1151AP_Katrina_Promises.html

[julialnyc]

5. kick!!!!!

[Hidden Stillness]

6. It Has Been Nothing But Crime and Graft!

This is an explosive issue, a National scandal, and Democrats have not done anything with it, either as an investigation or as a thing to keep hammering these criminal Republican profiteers with. Apart from the really great information on this thread--which should make everybody outraged--there was a comprehensive study last year, I think by the General Accountability Office or Congressional Budget Office, that added up all the very strange things that FEMA and the Bush Administration did, and came to an infuriating conclusion. Putting together all the ice trucks sent from one part of the country to another, never to the Gulf area, all the FEMA trailers and trucks no one got the use of, all the strange deals with luxury liners and cruise ships that had people staying on huge cruise ships, while they were homeless and no one was cleaning up their neighborhoods, and all the rebuilding contracts that produced no work, and actually demonstrated that if they had just given a DIRECT CASH PAYMENT to each and every family for the total value of their lost houses, etc., and rebuilt them all by direct payment, it would have cost LESS than all of the multiple secret layers of corporate contracting carried out by the Bush capitalists; absolutely disgusting.

I have also heard, on C-SPAN, talking on the floor of the Senate, I think it was Sen. Byron Dorgan, on the multiple layers of contracting and sub-contracting that has run up the cost to such astronomical amounts, produced so little work, been so untraceable, and led to such huge amounts of graft, fake billing, double and triple billing, etc., etc., just exactly like Iraq, and for the same reason. I am baffled as to why Democrats have not been incensed by all this, and demanding answers; they must all be at a "D"LC "framing" convention.

[julialnyc]

7. I agree with you

It is sad, stupid and strange that the democrats aren't shouting about this.

[earth mom]

8. Those fuckers are ripping off ALL of us blind! It's OUR tax money

they are giving away to corporations who are taking the money and running from the sound of it! And our democrats in office aren't doing shit about it either! Bastards!

GOD DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL! :argh: :grr: :mad:

[julialnyc]

9. kick again!

[spanone]

10. Aw, C'mon, there's only TWO BILLION missing....

That's just pennies compared to Iraq. We're doing fucking GREAT!:sarcasm: