Stop Wasting Money on Katrina Recovery Efforts

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Chinese Proverb

Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo continues to defy the rules of political correctness with the hard truth. There is only one problem- no one wants to hear the truth. He has cut through the politically correct babble of illegal immigration and identified the problems along with solutions. He is now taking on the cesspool of Louisiana politics and the absolute inability of an entire state, city and residents who are incapable of taking care of themselves on any level without government assistance.

Tancredo: High time to shut off ‘runaway’ Katrina spending Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Republican presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo says it’s time to stop “runaway government spending” on post-Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

“Enough is enough,” the Colorado congressman said in a statement today, aiming to head off requests for more money to help New Orleans recover from the hurricane that ravaged the city and much of the Gulf coast two years ago this week.

Tancredo’s statement comes two days after President Bush visited New Orleans and promised residents there that “better days are ahead” and “we haven’t forgotten, and won’t.”

Katrina smashed through levees in New Orleans and flooded 80 percent of the historic city on Aug. 29, 2005. It also obliterated coastal Mississippi and killed 1,600 people.

Several New Orleans neighborhoods still look like a wasteland, and Tancredo says the federal government is partly to blame. It has spent about $114 billion – or around $1 billion per week – but hasn’t paid enough attention to how the money has been used, he said.

Citing a Government Accountability Office report, Tancredo said potentially more than $1 billion in taxpayer money has been “squandered through waste, fraud and abuse.”

“This whole fiasco has been a perfect storm of corruption and incompetence at all levels” Tancredo said. “It’s time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station.”

Tancredo said he had earlier warned that Louisiana officials could not be trusted with federal money.

“State and local officials have been shirking their responsibilities and taking advantage of taxpayers since before Day One,” he said. “Throwing more money at this debacle will do nothing but perpetuate more of the same.”

The government has wasted at least $1.4 billion in scams to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Here are a few examples of how your tax dollars were and are currently being spent on “victims:”

• A tropical vacation
• Prison inmates asking for and receiving money
• A supposed victim who used a New Orleans cemetery for a home address
• A person who spent 70 days at a Hawaiian hotel-and an all-inclusive, one-week Caribbean vacation in the Punta Cana resort in the Dominican Republic
• Five season tickets to New Orleans Saints football games
• Adult erotica products in Houston and “Girls Gone Wild” videos in Santa Monica, Calif.
• Dom Perignon champagne and other alcoholic beverages in San Antonio.
• A divorce lawyer’s services in Houston.
• FEMA paid millions of dollars to more than 1,000 registrants who used names and Social Security numbers belonging to state and federal prisoners for expedited housing assistance.
• There was a half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee.

Yet after all the federal government has spent and done to help the cities and residents of the cities effected by Katrina, 84 percent in New Orleans, and nearly six in 10 in the Gulf Coast area, give negative ratings to the way the government has dealt with Katrina recovery. 6 in 10 residents in New Orleans, and 4 in 10 across the disaster counties say the experience has weakened their overall trust in government to help people in need.

These stats show how pathetic certain sections of our citizenry have become. The federal government was not created to help municipalities and their citizenry. That starts at the individual level and works its way up to the state government where it was designed to dead end. This is the direct result of liberal politicians with socialist agendas placating to anyone who will take money in return for a vote. If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on Paul’s vote. The federal government is not mandated to assist, but these Pavlovian parasites have been programed to rely on the government for their existence, and when manna from the federal government is not enough, they complain. Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco are who they should be blaming for the human disaster and the take over of the city by looters that Katrina caused in New Orleans–not the federal government for their inability to get these areas and cities rebuilt.

The city of New Orleans has a definitive and comprehensive emergency plan. A few of the rules in it directly relate to the preparedness and actions to be taken in case of a Katrina type emergency by the mayor:

The conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed.

Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco blew it. They made every conceivable mistake that could be made. They waited until 20 hours before Katrina hit to order mandatory evacuation. They were aware that it would take a minimum of 48 hours to evacuate the city. Blanco was too busy crying and wringing her hands on national television rather than acting as a leader should and activating the Louisiana National Guard in a timely fashion, which is under her command, on the streets to try to establish security. Ray Nagin had at his disposal the week before Katrina hit 450 city buses, 300 school buses and the offer from Amtrak to ferry people out of the city on the empty trains Amtrak was evacuating from the impending disaster. He passed on the Amtrak offer and never considered utilizing the buses. Nagin was responsible for the ensuing human disasters that played out on national television and Blanco can be blamed for the looting that turned the city into the equivalent of a third world country encased in a war because of her inability to handle the crisis and activate the National Guard.

Ray Nagin has a plan to rebuild New Orleans with your money:

It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans — the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans,” the mayor said. “This city will be a majority-African American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn’t be New Orleans.” “I, to this day, believe if it happened in Orange County, Calif., or South Beach, Fla., it wouldn’t have happened,” Nagin said.

Nagin makes a very good point about Orange County, California or South Beach, Florida. And I agree with him, it probably would not have happened. Regardless of the levies breaking, the areas would have been evacuated. And what about the aftermath and rebuilding? Would the state, city officials and residents be standing around with their hands out for Uncle Sam and pointing fingers? Times have changed and there would be some federal assistance, but not at the wholesale level we are seeing in Louisiana. There would be a significant contrast of self reliant people vis a vis people depending on the government for their livelihood and housing. We, as a country do have a history of tragedies on the scale of Katrina or larger. Here are four examples on a larger scale than Katrina of four cities that were wiped out by disaster. They pulled themselves up off the ground and rebuilt their cities themselves-that’s just what you did. The federal government wasn’t in the mommy business then and there were no no other alternatives. It was a different class of people then who were self sufficient and weren’t that far removed from the people who built this country with their own hands. Their self reliance also had not been decimated by the federal government.

1871 Chicago Fire …The fire killed perhaps 300 people, destroyed 18,000 buildings, left 100,000 Chicagoans without homes and caused some $3.2 billion in damages, at today’s prices. Half of the city had insurance, but only half of those actually got paid from their policies. … Yet almost as soon as the embers had cooled, Chicago business leaders deployed to New York to persuade investors that this was the time to put more of their money into Chicago, not less. The stockyards had been spared the flames, as had much of the city’s heavy industry. Chicago was a crucial crossroads of agriculture and industry, too valuable to give up. By the end of the decade Chicago was bigger and better than before. The city had a population of roughly 300,000 before the fire. In 1880 it was home to half a million.

1906 San Francisco Earthquake When the last fire was extinguished after the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906, survivors emerged from their makeshift shelters to find three-quarters of their city in ruins. All telephone and telegraph communications had ceased. There was little water for drinking. The railroads had been destroyed; the port was completely blocked by debris. Few, if any, hotels, restaurants or cafés survived, and 300,000 people were homeless. Banks were closed, and would remain so for a month. Despite martial law, looters roamed the streets, and the mayor ordered them to be shot on sight. “As regards industrial and commercial losses, the conditions are appalling,” wrote Victor H. Metcalf, secretary of labor and commerce, in a report to President Roosevelt. “Not only have the business and industrial houses and establishments of one-half million people disappeared, leaving them destitute financially and their means of livelihood temporarily gone, but the complicated system of transportation indispensable to them has been almost totally destroyed.”

In the first days and weeks after the disaster, that meant trying to feed, clothe and shelter survivors while raising money to repair the city’s infrastructure. … Engineers, contractors and draftsmen were recruited from other parts of the country, and the city began trying to buy all the lumber, cement and glass it could find. Temporary structures were erected in several centrally located squares for use by architects, transportation and insurance officials and lawyers. Labor unions quickly … set rules for the coming boom. The painters’ union, for example, suspended many of its trade rules: “No overtime will be allowed; straight time for night or Sunday work. The brothers are requested to be satisfied with eight hours’ work and give unemployed brothers a chance.” … three months later, in July 1906, the St. Francis Hotel Annex re-opened, and hundreds of buildings were under construction…

1889 Johnstown Flood It could be argued that the Johnstown flood of 1889 wasn’t a natural disaster at all, but the inevitable consequence of humans thinking they could control nature. Whatever the cause, the day after a dam burst, unleashing 20 million tons of water on the residents of Johnstown, Pa. … Pennsylvania’s governor, James Beaver, created the Pennsylvania Relief Committee to coordinate cleanup and restoration, while the state militia kept order. With thousands of men working, the Pennsylvania Railroad rebuilt 20 miles of track in two weeks. One gang of workers … did nothing but sprinkle disinfectants over the entire area. Hundreds of cellars, flooded with “every kind of filth,” had to be dug out by hand. But there was no hope the area would survive unless its biggest employer, the Cambria Iron Works, re-opened. On June 9, company officials announced that it would…

1900 Galveston Hurricane During the afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900, the town of Galveston, Texas, became part of the ocean floor. … a hurricane … hit Galveston, and … “Every part of the island was covered in water,” says Christy Carl, director of the Galveston County Historical Museum. The row of wooden houses nearest the shore crumpled with the impact of the waves, and the debris slammed into the next block. And the next. And the next, until the detritus itself formed a wall to stop the advancing waters. All told, some 3,600 buildings were destroyed. …Galveston, a prosperous island of cotton merchants, bankers and shippers, boasted a population of 37,500 on Saturday morning. By day’s end, as many as 8,000 residents were dead, along with 2,000 or so more on the mainland, making the Galveston hurricane the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the U.S. … town leaders and Army engineers launched an extraordinary effort to insulate the exposed barrier island from the fury of nature. Between 1902 and 1904, the Army Corps of Engineers built a seawall that now stretches more than 10 miles and stands 17 feet high. And in case the seawall didn’t deflect the cresting waters, the engineers raised the city. They put each home on the Gulf side of the island up on stilts and pumped wet sand underneath to elevate it. Brick homes couldn’t be raised, so the owners had to fill in their basements instead. The island’s terrain was graded to slope gradually down toward Galveston Bay. The project took eight years to complete.

These cities, their residents and leaders survived with a self sufficient mindset and unbounded ambition. There was no higher bureaucracy to depend on, this country was not set up that way and did not operate that way. New Orleans, it’s leaders and citizens have been decimated by a governmental nanny state and it would be incomprehensible for them to take on the challenge of rebuilding their city themselves. They expect the government to do something and everything.

Michael Chertoff summed up the lack of federal relief this way: one reason federal assets were not used more quickly was “because our constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state with the governor.”

A lot of people still see Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco as great leaders and heroes of the Katrina disaster. But not everybody in the African-American community see it that way.

“Mayor Nagin has blamed everyone else except himself,” said the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder and president of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny. Lee Peterson is a strong advocate of taking responsibility.

“The mayor failed in his duty to evacuate and protect the people of New Orleans. … The truth is, black people died not because of President Bush or racism, they died because of their unhealthy dependence on the government and the incompetence of Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco.”

The City of New Orleans re-elected Ray Nagin mayor despite the fact he demonstrated he is completely void of leadership qualities and is a racist. Ray Nagin was re-elected because of his ethnicity and playing the race card. This highlights the unadulterated irresponsibility of the electorate of New Orleans. Possibly they feared a Mayor that would actually make them rebuild their own city. If there was a breaking point where federal money should have been suspended this would have been it.