Say What?

FEMA spends $250,000 a month to store about 10,000 empty mobile homes at this airfield in Hope, Arkansas. Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina, you can now add this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history.

We're up to $2 billion dollars that are gone forever.

The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, and the scale of the waste — it's just breathtaking. My work at the Red Cross last year amazed me, and many of the people I was working with were shocked as well. That $2 billion in fraud and waste represents nearly 11% of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June, or about 6 percent of total money that had been set aside by the US Government for relief.

The Red Cross gave away a billion in liquid cash to people. I understand that they claim there was no way to prepare for this scale of a disaster, and that the fraud was merely a result of the volume of assistance needed, but I call bullshit on that one.

They claim that the need was so great that it forced them to enact policies and relief procedures that removed checks and balances so it wouldn't bottleneck the relief money. They were afraid that they would get bad PR if they didn't give it all away as fast as they could. I heard them discuss this. I saw them with my own damn eyes. They didn't want bad PR.

This is not a joke. This is not an opinion.

There was a hotel in Sugar Land, Texas that billed us for $232,000, to house phantoms. Over a thousand inmates around the Gulf Coast got a cool $10 Million in assistance, and there was a $500 Million dollar mobile home purchase, made soon after the disaster, that including somerenovations for a shelter (at an old Alabama Army base) cost us about $416,000 per evacuee.

Oh, and nobody has ever moved into those mobile homes either. They're just sitting in Arkansas now. Empty. Rotting. Now consider that they spent $50,000 per unit for temporary housing, and they didn't get a soul to move into them. (10 people showed up to the center for housing)

50k can purchase a nice home throughout most of this country. Can you imagine how many people this government could have turned into equity-building, tax paying, proud and secure home owners with 10,000 new houses? Could you imagine how history would look at that?

The most recent audit came from the Government Accountability Office, which this month estimated that perhaps as much as 21% of the $6.3 billion given directly to victims might have been "improperly distributed". That's the cash, people.

"There are tools that are available to get money quickly to individuals and to get disaster relief programs running quickly without seeing so much fraud and waste, but it wasn't really something that FEMA put a high priority on. So it was easy to commit fraud without being detected." -- Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of the forensic audits unit at the G.A.O.

I think the legacy of this hurricane won't be the lack of help, or the Bush administrations boggle of the relief effort. I think the legacy will be how it exposed such the large underbelly of corruption, greed, and indifference that we wallow in everyday.

This country is diseased with people like the 75 Red Cross Call Center workers right here in Bakersfied, who (with the help of their families) bilked hundreds of thousands of dollars in relief. What worse is that every once of those 75 people, fielded the same calls as I did, and they heard the pleas from the hungry, homeless, dying, and terrified victims. The men, women and children of the Gulf Coast were calling us 24 hours a day, for months, begging for our help.

And they took the food right out of the mouths of those poor people.

The justification they made was that there was so much money, nobody would miss it. It wasn't hurting anyone. It's not a big deal. Those worthless wastes of humanity aren't sorry for what they did, and if given a second chance, would have merely done it again a little differently so as not to get caught.

I personally believe that the people caught here in Bako, were influenced by the countless numbers of fraud calls we took everyday. At one point, the ratio of real people to fraud calls were 10 to 1. Then within weeks, those numbers swapped. Eventually it got so bad, you could work for 8 hours and only speak to a handful of real victims who hadn't already been paid a few times. It was a constant battle with people to verify identities and need. We had to trick them into making mistakes, and procedures were enhanced daily to combat their new scams.

And that barrage for the Red Cross was only a fraction of what it was for F.E.M.A.

It's disheartening, and the numbers just disgust me. I need to do something to renew my faith in humanity again...or just lose all hope that we can ever be the kind of America we used to be.