Project Katrina

Talking Points Memo has this little tidbit today:

As both The Wall Street Journal and AP report, it’s unclear why Jackson is resigning. Or, rather, it’s unclear what reason he’ll give for resigning. We hotly anticipate his statement this morning, but chances are you won’t hear any mention of the grand jury investigation that’s probing the depths of his cronyism. Both pieces make mention of the fact that with the country facing a mortgage crisis, Jackson might not be the best man for the job. He’s certainly not the best man to be working with Congress, since he’s stonewalled Congress’ questions about the investigation and allegations that he retaliated against Philadelphia’s public housing director when he didn’t agree to dish a property to one of Jackson’s buddies. Oh, and the senators who chair the two oversight committees think Bush ought to fire him.

And to think this man was a vital part of working to rebuild New Orleans.

Louisiana 1976 at Daily Kos has done an outstanding job of covering Katrina related issues. This post hits at the core of the issue based on an article via the weekly New Orleans Gambit.

But back to the levees themselves—every time federal culpability for their failure has been brought up, there have been those who’ve propagated the meme—a Big Lie first set into motion by a BushCo intent on discrediting Louisiana, Gov. Blanco, and her other Democratic leaders at the time—that Louisiana and New Orleans had been responsible for levee maintenance and upkeep.

This spin is counteracted by the following comment, which also contains detailed info on how previous presidents of both parties have more competently handled major disasters, and how Dubya himself dealt with 2004 hurricanes in an electoral vote-rich Florida led by his brother in that election year by azureblue:

…. here are a few tidbits about Bush’s string of failures, the first showing how Bush caused the flooding of new Orleans:It is simple: no money to repair, things (levees) fail. The ACOE gets blamed rightly, but the truth is the ACOE had been begging for money rom Bush & Bush kept cutting the fund to rebuild the levees and stopping work in progress:

February 2001

Bush proposed half of what his own officials said was necessary for the critical Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA)—a project started after a 1995 rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes and caused a half billion dollars in damage

February 2002

Bush provided just $5 million for maintaining and upgrading critical hurricane protection levees in New Orleans—one fifth of what government experts and Republican elected officials in Louisiana told the administration was needed. Bush knew SELA needed $80 million to keep working, but the he only proposed providing a quarter of that.

February 2004

The SELA project sought $100 million to strengthen the levees holding back the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, including the industrial canal- which is where the levee gave way, but Bush offered only $16.5 million. The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $27 million to pay for hurricane protection upgrades around Lake Pontchartrain—but the White House cut that to $3.9 million. Levee repairs around Lake Pontchartrain and the IC, stopped because of budget shortfalls.

Comparing previous disaster responses:

President Nixon: August 1969 when Cat-5 Hurricane Camille hit the MS coast, President Nixon had already readied the National Guard and ordered all Gulf rescue vessels and equipment from Tampa and Houston to follow the Hurricane in. There were over 1,000 regular military with two dozen helicopters to assist the Coast Guard and National Guard within hours after the skies cleared.

President Clinton: September 1999, Hurricane Floyd—Cat-3, was bearing down on the Carolinas and Virginia. President Clinton was in New Zealand meeting with President Jiang of China. He declared the area a Federal Disaster so the National Guard and Military can begin to mobilize. Then he cut short his meetings overseas and flew home to coordinate the rescue efforts. All one day BEFORE a Cat-3 hit the coast.

President Bush (41): August 1992—was in the midst of a campaign for re-election. Yet he cut off his campaigning and went to Washington where he martialed the largest military operation on US soil in history. He sent in 7,000 National Guard and 22,000 regular military personnel, and all the gear to begin the clean up within hours after Andrew passed through Florida.

But look what Georgie does for FL:

Right after Hurricane Charley first made landfall on Aug. 13, 2004, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.

Illegitimus non carborundum

Imagine this situation. You work for ICF International. After Katrina hits you secure a government contract to provide a service to taxpaying citizens. You do the work on the contract but you make mistakes. Thousands of mistakes actually, that could total millions and millions of dollars. So what do you do? Well, according to MSNBC you attempt to get the citizens to actually pay for your incompetence :

Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.

Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

For thousands of Katrina victims, this may be a reality.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle “approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort.”

The bid invitation said: “The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000.”

It might be important to note that 2007 ICF International reported gross revenue of $727.1 million.

Update: Full disclosure, here is a detailed response from ICF. In a nutshell it isn’t their fault. I’ve read the response twice and was almost surprised not to see the comment of “How could have foreseen.”

Via the Times-Picayune’s farewell interview with Recovery Czar Donald Powell’s :

But none of the three U.S. senators still running for president showed much of an interest in working with him, he said. Powell recalled talking with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., a couple of times about recovery issues, but said he spoke with former President Clinton more often because of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. Powell said he didn’t recall talking to the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, nor to Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, although his staff dealt with Obama when he accompanied Lieberman on a tour of New Orleans in early 2007.

Now Powell has been a complete failure so I don’t put a lot of worth behind anything he has to say. But ask yourself can any of you recall McCain (R_AZ), Clinton (D-NY) or Obama (D-IL) saying anything about their plans to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I didn’t think so. I should also note that George W. Bush has not appointed anybody to replace Powell.

Via Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, on why he is trying to enlist “A-list” architects to help rebuild New Orleans’ Ninth Ward:

I’ll tell you why. Because these people suffered a horrific event, and truthfully great injustice in the aftermath, and they’re still suffering that injustice. So what are you going to follow that injustice with? Crap houses with toxic materials and appliances that run up their electricity bills and may lead to a foreclosure? I mean, really. This to me is a social-justice issue. And to create something that’s equitable and fair and has respect and provides dignity for the family within is absolutely essential to rebuilding here.

Yeah got to love the fact we have a well known lawyer being found guilty of trying to bribe a judge related to a Katrina lawsuit. How much you want to bet his client wasn’t a family living in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans trying to get their insurance claim paid.

Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the legendary trial lawyer who made Big Business tremble every time he set foot in court, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiring to bribe a judge—a crime that could send him to prison and spell the end of his storied legal career.

Federal prosecutors are asking for the maximum of five years behind bars for the 61-year-old Scruggs, the multimillionaire “King of Torts” who combined a shrewd legal mind and aw-shucks country-lawyer charm to extract billions of dollars from the tobacco and asbestos industries, among others.

[….]

Scruggs and another lawyer in his firm, Sidney Backstrom, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud for offering a $50,000 cash bribe to a Mississippi judge for a favorable ruling in a dispute over legal fees from a Hurricane Katrina insurance lawsuit.

Via TPMMuckraker:

According to The New York Times this morning, it all began to unravel when Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), a CPA, asked to meet with the audit firm that was supposedly checking the NRCC’s books, an idea that apparently no one had had for several years. Christopher Ward, then the NRCC’s treasurer, finally relented, but then chickened out 30 minutes before and fessed up that there actually hadn’t been any audits.

It was ultimately discovered that Ward had been faking the audits since 2003. The Politico, which laid out this general outline of events early last month, reported that Ward had forged everything, including the letterhead. So when it came time to actually talk to the people who’d supposedly written those fake reports, it all unraveled.

See, the NRCC is the National Republican Congressional Committee, one of the most powerful arms of the Republican party. If they can’t even balance their own books how the hell do we think they can even begin to allocate and manage the billions to rebuild the Gulf coast. Oh wait that is right, we already know they can’t.

Writer Charlotte Allen has responded to questions finally about her Washington Post op-ed from last Sunday that pissed off more than a few folks. In the piece she argued that women “are kind of dim.” In an online chat today Allen restated another claim she’d first made in 2005 that “Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans:”

I said Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans because it finally opportunity to a huge number of New Orleans residents living in passive dependency on welfare to get out of New Orleans and change their lives for the better. Thousands of them did exactly that–which is why there hasn’t exactly been a huge flood of those former residents flocking back to live in passive dependency and do just that. New Orleans itself now has a chance to change into a more self-reliant city.