FEMA was aggressive about one thing...

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:


FEMA was aggressive about one thing...
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on September 4, 2007 - 12:06pm.



I've been following this story for months. Glad to see CBS News finally give it the prominence it deserves:

Hurricane Katrina stole just about everything Sheila Moore had in this world.... So when FEMA told her she qualified for thousands of dollars in emergency assistance, she took it. Then, seven months later, in July 2006, Moore received a letter from FEMA demanding its money back; $14,749.51 to be paid in full in 30 days....The emergency funds were spent on food, clothing, and a used car to get to her full-time job. The car even ended up becoming her home for a while.


Sheila Moore was one of the 150,000 relief recipients—out of a total of 700,000—who got letters claiming they never deserved FEMA money in the first place. Even if Moore had in fact received money she didn't deserve this whole story would be a scandal—what kind of screw-ups misappropriate funds about 20 percent of the time? Here's the greater scandal: in Moore's case—and how many others?—the funds weren't misappropriated at all. The government was asking for her $14,000 back because someone had misspelled her name on some internal paperwork. Though it took a year and a half, and a lawyer, for Moore to pull that admission out of FEMA.

They had other priorities than accuracy, it turns out:

A CBS News investigation has found that FEMA call center workers were under extraordinary pressure to move as many cases as possible. Clark Browne was a case worker at a FEMA call center in Hyattsville, Md.

"They had quotas.... Twenty cases a day. Some of those cases got messed up because people were rushing."

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/fema_was_aggressive_about_one_thing?tx=3

[Bluebear]

1. k/r

As usual, crucial information from you, marmar.

[marmar]

2. I try to be crucial, Bluebear....

:)

[Hydra]

3. K&R

"Give us that money back! It was earmarked for Haliburton!"

[ananda]

4. ethnic cleansing

If the idea was to make NOLA white and a development playground
for the rich, thus moving Black people out and making it next to
impossible for them to return.. it sure has worked.

Ugghhh.

[ananda]

5. False meme operating.

The meme that America is the land of opportunity and
that the philosophy of work and individual success is
to be promoted is a false one, but it is still believed by
almost everyone.. including the victims of NOLA obviously.

What's really operating behind this meme is the idea that
the rich, the white, and the white wannabes are entitled to
everything at the expense of everyone and everything else.

Sue

[gratuitous]

6. Okay, $15K times 150,000 recipients

My math makes that $2.25 billion. About what we spend every week in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's assuming all 150,000 recipients were not "entitled" to any relief, and that they received $15,000 each, so we're talking about the upper, upper limit here.

How much was in those bundles of cash the Bush administration airlifted into Iraq in the first weeks of the invasion? Something like $9 billion, as I recall. And it just vanished into the desert. If you ask the Bush administration where that cash went, who pocketed it, and was it really such a brilliant idea in the first place to ship bundles of cash into a war zone, you're a traitor or something. And that's four times what was "misappropriated" to the victims of New Orleans.

These are some fucked-up priorities our government is pursuing.

[Usrename]

7. That's hardly a fair comparison.

You can bet that no one in Iraq wasted any of those billions on things like food and transportation. :sarcasm:

[onethatcares]

9. or sleeping in their cars

sheesh, get your priorities straight.

[cutlassmama]

10. $8.8bn of that money has disappeared.

[Flabbergasted]

8. kick