OpEdNews - Article: GREED AND SCANDAL RULE GULF COAST RECOVERY EFFORTS

Rivero's Rule of mass morals is that all organizations inherit the personality and ethics of the person at the very top. When you have a nation run by a liar and a cheat, you will soon evolve a nation where lying and cheating is seen as acceptable behavior:Allen L Roland

No where is Rivero's Rule of mass morals more evident than the Gulf Coast ~ where the same fraud, greed, scandal and ineptitude that permeates Iraq has now been laid bare in America by the Cheney/Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina .

Last year, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu was so frustrated by Bush's inept response to Hurricane Katrina that she threatened to "punch him." Alternet posts her response to the recovery effort a year later, lamenting that only 12 percent of the $110 billion Katrina relief package has actually reached the people who need it most.

Frank Rich, New York times, nailed it in his Sunday column; " The ineptitude bared by the storm - no planning for a widely predicted catastrophe, no attempt to secure a city besieged by looting, no strategy for anything except spin - is indelible. New Orleans was Iraq redux with an all-American cast . "

Jordan Green, Counterpunch, lays out the grim details of this blatant greed and scandal ~

Excerpt:"A review of congressional testimony and other documents by Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch found a total of at least $136.7 million in corporate fraud in Katrina-related contracts. In addition, government investigators have highlighted contracts cumulatively valued at $428.7 million that they found troubling because of lack of agency oversight or misappropriation... When Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, the government agencies and private contractors seemed to occupy the same insider Washington milieu, where human suffering was an abstraction and tending to relationships around the public trough claimed first priority... Other instances of fraud and overcharging appear to have taken place because the government awarded advance contracts to large, out-of-state companies that had little notion of how to do business in areas hit by the hurricane... When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, it exposed more than poverty, environmental fragility and compromised infrastructure: It laid bare a national system of political patronage that has enriched a handful of powerful corporations and deepened the despair of those on society's margin."

Allen L Roland

Profiting from Disaster
Fraud, Scandal and Greed Has Crippled the Gulf Coast's Recovery, But Made Some Very, Very Rich
By JORDAN GREEN

http://www.counterpunch.org/green08262006.html

It had been over three weeks since Katrina made landfall, but when David Bailey and his group of Virginia firefighters arrived in St. Bernard Parish to help, it looked like the storm had only hit days ago. "The whole parish is a soup bowl," said Bailey, battalion chief with Chesterfield Fire and EMS. "It's under sea level."

St. Bernard, a mostly white, working-class community immediately east of New Orleans, was hit by the infamous "wall of water" that forced residents to hack through their attics to survive after a storm surge combined with breaches in the Industrial Canal and Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet to inundate the community.

Given the level of destruction, the Virginia volunteers were astonished to discover members of the St. Bernard Fire Department already working full-tilt. Local firefighters, many who had lost their homes, were taking four- or five-day shifts and then rotating out to recuperate and join families evacuated further from the coastline.

"I don't know how they held up like they did," Bailey said. "Your family's devastated and you're still making the rescues. They saved a lot of lives."

But soon after Bailey's team arrived, another group entered the picture, seemingly out of nowhere. On Sept. 18, the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded a $5.2 million contract to Gary Heldreth, a West Virginia pastor, and his company, Lighthouse Disaster Relief, based on the company's assurances that it could set up a base camp within 48 hours to support 1,000 first responders in St. Bernard Parish. The results were disastrous.

"[Lighthouse] billed the entire $5.2 million in advance of beginning work in violation of the contract terms, and upon receipt of the proceeds began spending them at an incredible pace, buying cars and real estate, withdrawing large cash withdrawals, and transferring tens of thousands of dollars to family members," a federal lawsuit would later allege.

Around Oct. 2 Lighthouse finally opened the camp, but that only happened because FEMA brought in firefighters to help Lighthouse finish the job, the government contends. "Even with this assistance, the base camp was not sufficient to perform the contract," the government investigators charge. "While the contract provided for a camp able to house and feed 1,000 emergency workers, the camp was never able to support more than 400 people." The company argues the project's failure is the result of a mix-up in FEMA's orders.

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