RE: Searching for the Face of Katrina and a Sign of Hope

Good article in the LA Times about tracking down one family of survivors of Katrina. 

But as he notes at the end there doesn't seem to be a happy ending.

News and entertainment is always looking for the easy happy ending.

Thankfully Scott Gold did not feel a need to make one up, or more than a temporary one.

George Bush is making up a false happy ending though.  His simpering little speech in Mississippi makes you wonder what treacle he'll dredge up for New Orleans.

"It may be hard for those of you who have endured the last year to really have that sense of change, but for a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back -- things are changing," Bush said. "You know, each visit, you see progress."

It's like something from his mother!

Remember last year as hermajestytheMotherofPresident visited the Astrodome and pissed out something like "These people have it pretty good here. After all they were really poor, you know."  As if  poor people have no right to decent accomodations.

Hey, Bush while you've have been relaxing in your big White House, camp David, Prairie Chapel, or Daddy's Compound in Maine  in front of a big screen plasma watching John Wayne movies and imagining you're the "Duke", these people have had to live through kinds of things that would have had you screaming in fear, anger, and frustration and running for the hills.  You owe them more than your idiotic little speech.

Bush hopes you don't hear about this other report:

Katrina Aid Far From Flowing

It could make you cry and then make you mad.

Excerpts of immediatelly above named article:

...the federal government has spent less than half the rebuilding funds that it amassed for Katrina recovery, which has raised sharp questions about the Bush administration's stewardship of the Gulf Coast's reconstruction and has provoked a chorus of complaints about excessive delays and government sluggishness.

But after a year of fielding constituents' pleas for help, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) said, "We're seeing the same thing going on with the recovery as we did with the immediate response. We're going through another unfolding disaster."

In the Democratic response to Bush's radio address Saturday, Landrieu said, "Too often federal agencies are slow to move and encumbered by red tape."

In July, Congress' nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reported that disbursement of Small Business Administration recovery loans was marred by "significant delays." A report last week from Democrats on the House Small Business Committee said that of $10 billion approved for such loans, just 20% had reached recipients. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration's top recovery authority, already attacked for its response to the storm, has again taken heat.

"It's not only that we don't know what's been spent. We haven't even had an accurate description of what 'spent' means," said Rob Nabors, Democratic staff director for the House Appropriations Committee. "They talk about 'commitments' and 'obligations' — they've invented new terms for not spending money."

And a right wing think tank Agrees:

Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said: "The government is barely adequate at counting how much money goes out the door, but it's terrible when it comes to tracking how much reaches the ground."
...

At times, FEMA's slowness to provide funds has paralyzed state agencies required under federal law to match 10% of the cost of repair work, said Amy Liu, deputy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank. Local governments confronting damaged roads and buildings have sometimes waited months for funding, Liu said.

"FEMA provided the most cumbersome, reflexively slow response we've ever seen when it comes to disaster assistance," said Liu, a former Clinton administration official who studied the allocations for a recent Brookings assessment of Katrina aid.

When the Office of Management and Budget released its spending overview last week, the numbers did little to dampen criticism. The figures showed, for example, that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had committed $11.5 billion in block grants, mostly through housing reconstruction programs administered by Louisiana and Mississippi. But the same breakdown showed that HUD had spent only $100 million of its overall $17.1 billion congressional allocation.

The failure to start a full-scale housing reconstruction program until nearly a year after Katrina, critics contend, left thousands of storm and flood victims in the lurch.

A senior Senate Republican aide said the Bush administration was largely to blame for the late start. The administration's first request for Katrina aid, in October 2005, included only $1.5 billion in HUD block grants. "It was a token," said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "By the time we got real money in the pipeline, six months had passed."

Louisiana's $10.2 billion in federal housing obligations were not secured until June 15, after a rancorous debate between state and federal officials over how housing money would be administered. More than 100,000 homeowners have since applied for HUD-originated grants under Louisiana's Road Home program, which is to provide up to 60% of a home's pre-storm value (capped at $150,000).

The first money to reach homeowners under that program arrived Friday . Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco announced that 42 homeowners were expected to get $1.5 million in aid "in the next few weeks."

n neighboring Mississippi, displaced Gulf Coast homeowners are frustrated by the late start of a $5 billion federal block-grant program that is the cornerstone of the state's recovery plan. About 17,000 Mississippi households have applied for grants of up to $150,000 to repair their homes. But the state has sent out only about two dozen checks so far, said Scott Hamilton, a spokesman for the Mississippi Development Authority.

Some say Gov. Haley Barbour — a Republican stalwart and Bush ally who designed the rebuilding plan...unwisely earmarked much of the HUD money for one group of homeowners — those who lived outside the flood zone and had homeowners' insurance — while neglecting owners inside the flood zone, renters and the poor.

"The people who need it the most are not getting the assistance they deserve," said Minor Sinclair, U.S. regional grant-making director for Oxfam America, a nonprofit aid group.

tags: katrina  new orleans  gulf coast  rebuiliding  

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