Remember Hurricane Katrina? Anyone? If you ask this question to a room full of politicians you are likely to receive stone silence, because they seem to have forgotten. After asking this question, this is what you would see: our ‘representatives’ standing around with their heads bowed, hands in their pockets, shuffling their feet.
The rest of the country remembers. And what we remember is Bush flying down there in the aftermath and giving a fine political speech about how he is going to put the full force of the federal government behind cleaning up this mess and getting victims lives back together.
Well it has been two years, and what has been done?
On the federal governments side, nothing more has been done than the awarding of high dollar contracts to large companies that have supported the Bush administration. Those small, Gulf Coast businesses that were promised the lion share of the contracts, well, a few 'token' businesses were awarded small contracts but the money was taken away due to the Department of Homeland Security ‘re-writing’ their contracts.
The review of federal contracts from five government agencies, conducted by the House Small Business Committee, is the latest to document 'missteps' in the award of billions of dollars of lucrative government work since the 2005 storm.
'Missteps'. You have to admire the number of ways these people come up with euphemisms for theft and mismanagement.
The federal government has failed us: The committee’s review found that small businesses in Louisiana had an overall net loss of $8.9 million in contracting dollars since April of this year, when the agencies reaffirmed their commitment to give smaller companies a share of the work. The loss was due in part to a decision at the Department of Homeland Security to modify several existing agreements instead of awarding significant new contracts.
And, they have lied to us: In addition, the review found the five agencies — Homeland Security, General Services Administration, Defense, Veterans Affairs and Small Business Administration — had claimed falsely that 259 contracts were awarded to small businesses when in fact they went to large companies or ineligible recipients. That created the false impression that more than $95 million in contracts was awarded to small companies, when they actually went elsewhere.
Only 7.4 percent of Katrina contracts have gone to small businesses in Louisiana, down from 12.5 percent in April.
Representative Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., who chairs the House panel said “There is absolutely no excuse for failing to use local companies that are responsible for this region’s recovery. I can assure you that this committee will continue to hold the federal government accountable for making sure this money is properly invested in the region.”
Well, Mr. Velazquez, your threat to hold the federal government ‘accountable’ is weak. It’s been two years and they are still dragging their feet and mis-directing and lying. What are you going to about it besides threaten them?
Russ Knocke, a DHS spokesman, responded that the department has been working to fix errors but could not immediately say how many. He said the committee had not provided its information to the department despite requests by DHS; the committee said the data on which it based its analysis was available publicly.
You are at best ineffective in your work to ‘fix errors’ and you don’t know how many errors? Who are you anyway? The House committee hasn’t given the requested data to your department yet it has given the data to the public? Where is the respect? Is the House Small Business Committee telling you that you cannot have the data whenever you want it? Are they saying they will give it up when they are good and ready? Is this just more ‘power game’ playing that Washington politicians have become so famous for?
For many weeks after the 2005 hurricane, small and local companies were shut out of Katrina work in favor of large concerns with extensive government and political ties. I guess these ‘small businesses’ in Louisiana should have been ‘paying off’ and ‘sucking up’ to federal government officials just ‘in case’ they ever needed assistance. Just being American companies wasn’t enough. They had to have a lot more money too. And they had to give a bunch of that money to the political machine.
Following public criticism of the way FEMA handled the awarding of contracts, they pledged to rebid four large trailer contracts and give the work to small companies. FEMA ultimately rebid only portions of the work. Government investigators later found FEMA did not take adequate legal steps to ensure that the new companies were small and locally operated, resulting in a questionable contract award to a large company with ties to the Republican Party. Right, so the plan is tell them what they want to hear and do whatever we want to do and hope we don’t get caught. And, actually there’s no big worry about being caught because this government is so inept at every level that nothing will ever come of it.
Even after the public criticism and after the GSA testified in Congress about their screw-ups, Homeland Security still handed out 43 new contracts worth nearly $12 million to large companies or ineligible recipients. What it did to small companies in the gulf region was to modify their contracts which resulted in a loss of $9 million for them. So, they took away from the small businesses that Bush promised to help so that the money could be given to large companies that backed the republican party.
What a country! What a fine definition of what this government has become. The Department of Homeland Security has become the poster child of everything that is wrong with this administration.
They completely and totally took advantage of a natural disaster that destroyed millions of lives and reaped millions of dollars from these peoples misfortune.
I’ll bet the department was told when they were first formed that they would have the total and un-prosecutable right to do whatever they wanted with the money they received from the federal government. And they took it to heart.
Paul Schneider, DHS undersecretary for management, acknowledged in April that “there clearly has been errors in coding” and pledged action to fix them. These were not ‘errors’ sir. They were criminal acts of mis-appropriation of funds.
Knocke said Wednesday the department believed they have corrected those ‘errors’, but contended it couldn’t fully address the committee’s concerns without its data. That’s right hide behind the lack of respect the House Small Business Committee has shown you by not giving you that data.
Out of the $95.6 million in total contracts that were inaccurately claimed as going to small business, more than $77 million, or 81 percent, were awards by the Defense Department.
This is very disturbing proof that this government cares more about its own political backers than about the public who gave them the money in the first place through forced taxation.
It is also very telling in that this government knows it can award money to whomever it pleases without any backlash or penalty.
This government is more and more out of control everyday and absolutely shuns the notion of government ‘for the people’.
Turns out that ‘cruel and wasteful storm’ was even more cruel to the citizens of the Gulf Coast than any of us realized.
See the text of the Katrina Speech here.
On the other side of all of this deceitfulness by the federal government is the fact that contractors are setting up multiple ‘levels’ of subcontractors so that they can get even more money awarded to themselves rather than trying to save the taxpayers dollars and trying to make it last longer. And guess who is actually doing the ‘grunt’ work, Spanish-speaking crews who are paid the least. These contractors sit back and collect millions from the government by marking up the actual cost of the job by 40 percent to as much as 1,700 percent.
If we had ‘honest’ government officials to oversee these companies that money could be spent in a much more beneficial method that would help society as a whole rather than buying new cars and homes for these short-sighted ‘slugs’ who think it is okay to steal from the rest of us.
These contractors actions drive the cost of cleanup higher than it needs to be. Their greed is costing us taxpayers, and ultimately themselves as taxpayers, ever more and more money. They say this is the way the system works. They know the government is screwing them out of money and so this is a chance to get some of it back.
What is the answer? This greed and mis-handling of money will never change. We are all screwing ourselves right into the ground and pretending we are blind to it.
The federal government sets up ‘oversight’ committees, one of their favorite answers to combat these problems, but are so ineffective that they become just another ‘mouth to feed’ at the giant lucrative tit that has become this government.
Honest people, trying to do the right thing, get the worst end of everything.
All in all, we, as a race of people, have turned out pretty poorly. Or is it just Americans?
No comments:
Post a Comment