Josh Marshall red flags the latest Bush/FEMA nexis of evil:
This just seems amazingly misguided. And I don't understand why more is not being made of it.
Fully $50 billion of those recovery and reconstruction funds passed by Congress today are going to FEMA. FEMA is going to administer those funds. That is just friggin' crazy.
Even if FEMA were still a model government agency, as it was by most accounts in the 1990s, this would still be a really, really bad decision. As the title says, FEMA is an emergency management agency, not a reconstruction agency. It doesn't have the organizational structure or competence to run the economy of a significant chunk of the United States for the foreseeable future, which is what this amounts to.
Read the rest at TalkingPointsMemo. And then write your Congresspersons and Senators. Ask them which is the kind of "looting" we should be concerned about: people taking food and meds to survive, or FEMA getting handed $50 billion for God knows what?
Randi Rhodes is already offering a big ugly dot to connect to this. In 2004, an election year in which Florida was kinda important to Bush, FEMA conducted extremely questionable actions in Florida. Here's just one example, from the diligent Florida Sun-Sentinal:
Florida officially recorded 123 fatalities from last year's hurricanes, but the federal government has paid funeral expenses for at least 315 deaths, including those of a man who shot himself and a stroke victim hospitalized more than a week before the last storm hit.
In one case, a Federal Emergency Management Agency worker tried unsuccessfully to persuade a coroner to count among the hurricane casualties a "morbidly obese" heart patient who purportedly was "scared to death."
"If you were to call around to all the medical examiner offices, people would say, `No way did we have as many deaths as FEMA is saying,'" said Dr. Stephen Nelson, head of Florida's Medical Examiners Commission. "It's just an incredible number -- a difference of 192. This is the Free Funeral Payment Act."
It gets worse. Go to the Sun-Sentinal and look at their EXTENSIVE series of reports on many, many different aspects of FEMA corruption. You'll notice Michael Brown's name comes up a lot.