The Real Looters of Katrina

This morning's Washington Post puts the numbers to the sad story we saw in the making months ago, when Bushcorps sold off pieces of the Katrina tragedy to its corporate cronies, who have already proven themselves more than adept at sucking up and squandering tax money at the expense of the welfare of American soldiers and the people of Iraq. Now they've done it again to the people of New Orleans, with our money. Like wasting a billion of it.

...a hastily improvised $10 billion effort by the federal government has produced vast sums of waste and misspent funds, an array of government audits and outside analysts have concluded....the toll of false starts and missed opportunities appears likely to top $1 billion and perhaps much more...

Some of the findings:

FEMA spent $900 million to buy 25,000 manufactured homes and 1,300 modular homes, most of which cannot be used because agency rules say they are too big or unsafe in flood zones.

· The agency spent $632 million to subsidize hotel rooms for tens of thousands of families at an average cost of $2,400 a month, three times what it later paid families to rent two-bedroom apartments.

· The agency spent $249 million to secure 8,136 cruise-ship cabins for six months, at a cost that Inspector General Richard L. Skinner estimated at $5,100 a month per passenger. That is six times the cost of renting two-bedroom apartments.

So far the story is incompetence, but it won't stop there. This is probably only the beginning of this story, as it becomes clearer who got the money to do what.

As for whether FEMA and Homeland Security screwed up in the first place by being unprepared for Katrina, the Inspector General's report to be issued today says, you bet, bigtime. While it's tempting to call this another vast waste of money, the report has detailed reccommendations for change. The basic one will have to wait: regime change. It just took Homeland Security too much time to figure out how to make as much money for corporate cronies from hurricane disasters as it was doing for so-called terrorism prevention, which as other reports have shown, has been all about political payouts and crony high tech contracts.