Fact-Checking McCain on Katrina

From FactCheck.org.

A New Orleans television reporter asked John McCain at a June 4 town hall meeting in Louisiana why he had voted twice against the creation of a commission to investigate preparedness for Hurricane Katrina. McCain responded that he "supported every investigation and ways of finding out what caused the tragedy." That's not true.

McCain did, as the reporter said, twice vote against legislation that would have created an independent commission, much like the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the government's role in preparedness for and response to the hurricane. Here's the exchange:

Reporter: Senator, Maya Rodriguez at the CBS station out of New Orleans. My understanding is you have voted twice against the creation of a commission to investigate the levee failures in New Orleans. And my question is, why have you voted against that?

McCain: I’ve supported every investigation and ways of finding out what caused the tragedy. I’ve been here to New Orleans. I’ve met with people on the ground. I’ve met with the governor. I’m not familiar with exactly what you said, but I’ve been as active as anybody in efforts to restore the city.

(snip)

McCain lined up with his party at a time when the White House was being accused on all sides of withholding information from the Senate.

Before the second vote, on Feb. 2, 2006, Clinton charged: "We are seeing the administration withholding documents, testimony, and information from the ongoing investigations by the House and Senate."

(snip)

McCain suggested that he was merely voting against wasteful spending. He told the Louisiana reporter that he voted against "one of the bills" because it was riddled with pork.

McCain: I also voted against one of the bills that came down that was loaded with pork barrel projects that had nothing to do with New Orleans too. It had billions for projects and programs that had nothing to do with the recovery of the city of New Orleans.

The Clinton amendments, however, would have provided $3 million for the investigation but no funds for anything else.

Again, guys. Not only did the government fuck up, they did their damndest to cover it. Judging by a lot of people's rosy views of the rebuilding process, they more or less succeeded.

Katrina

Wow. There are evidently people who believe that Katrina victims are freeloaders who got more than enough help and should damn well have fixed their city by now. We're not just talking about the predictable sample of people who were inclined to take advantage of the nation's sympathy for their own profit. We're talking about anyone who was hit by Katrina and dares to treat it as anything worse than a minor speedbump in their lives.

The articles I find on it are old, mainly because Katrina doesn't even really get talked about anymore. We lose interest in our tragedies rather quickly these days. This article was... something special.

In the weeks after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, people across the country opened their wallets, homes and hearts to the victims. But three months after thousands of evacuees arrived in Georgia, some attitudes have shifted from compassion to something very different.

For Anna Corley, a 39-year-old communications worker from East Point, the change in attitude occurred while she was watching a television interview with a female evacuee. The woman was living in a Georgia hotel, in a room paid for by taxpayers, and complaining she wasn't getting enough help.

With that, Corley — who had donated clothes and money, and dropped off spaghetti and tomato sauce at a supermarket bin — changed her mind.

"Come on, people," Corley said. "Three months and they can't find a place to live? Oh, wait, they want to see how long Uncle Sugar will pay for it. How long did they think the gravy train ran? Have some self-respect and pride."

Now, I'm sure that people who read my blog are (for the most part) pretty well aware of why this is utter bullshit. But in case you aren't, here's news for you: a bunch of aid was hardcore mismanaged and to top it off there just plain wasn't enough for everybody. First off, whether there was enough.

Katrina Aid Program is $9 Billion Short. (from May 2007)

More than 20 months after the Katrina catastrophe, tens of thousands of houses remain vacant, in part because of administrative delays in the aid program, the largest single source of direct federal help for homeowners. To date, only 16,000 of 130,000 applicants have received money.

And to think, Corley (mentioned above) was pissed that they hadn't rebuilt their lives in three months! That they hadn't rebuilt their homes and communities in a matter of months. Never mind that building a house alone can take longer than that, and never mind that thousands of people were all trying to rebuild at the same time. And never mind that people were planning on money that didn't come. As they're so often told, they need to "get over it."

Also, while we're all breathing a sigh of relief that Myanmar's junta is finally letting in foreign aid, let's remember that the USA wasn't exactly great about letting in similar help during Katrina either. What the fuck, you ask? Most Katrina Aid from Overseas Went Unclaimed (from April 2007).

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

(snip)

The struggle to apply foreign aid in the aftermath of the hurricane, which has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $125 billion so far, is another reminder of the federal government's difficulty leading the recovery. Reports of government waste and delays or denials of assistance have surfaced repeatedly since hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

Administration officials acknowledged in February 2006 that they were ill prepared to coordinate and distribute foreign aid and that only about half the $126 million received had been put to use. Now, 20 months after Katrina, newly released documents and interviews make clear the magnitude of the troubles.

And while television sets worldwide showed images of New Orleans residents begging to be rescued from rooftops as floodwaters rose, U.S. officials turned down countless offers of allied troops and search-and-rescue teams. The most common responses: "sent letter of thanks" and "will keep offer on hand," the new documents show.

Overall, the United States declined 54 of 77 recorded aid offers from three of its staunchest allies: Canada, Britain, and Israel, according to a 40-page State Department table of the offers that had been received as of January 2006.

Hell, even Cuba offered to help. No really. We told them no, of course. We don't need help from those fucking *spit* Communists.

But this is all okay if we can just make sure the money that we've got (from acceptable domestic sources, at least) goes toward helping the victims. We can make do, and we can make the best of what we've got. Or we can get new condos in Tuscaloosa. Here's where the mismanagement comes in.

Katrina Aid Goes Toward Football Condos (Also from April 2007)

With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama's football stadium.

About 10 condominium projects are going up in and around Tuscaloosa, and builders are asking up to $1 million for units with granite countertops, king-size bathtubs and 'Bama decor, including crimson couches and Bear Bryant wall art.

While many of the buyers are Crimson Tide alumni or ardent football fans not entitled to any special Katrina-related tax breaks, many others are real estate investors who are purchasing the condos with plans to rent them out.

And they intend to take full advantage of the generous tax benefits available to investors under the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, or GO Zone, according to Associated Press interviews with buyers and real estate officials.

The GO Zone contains a variety of tax breaks designed to stimulate construction in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. It offers tax-free bonds to developers to finance big commercial projects like shopping centers or hotels. It also allows real estate investors who buy condos or other properties in the GO Zone to take accelerated depreciation on their purchases when they file their taxes.

The GO Zone was drawn to include the Tuscaloosa area even though it is about 200 miles from the coast and got only heavy rain and scattered wind damage from Katrina.

The condo deals are perfectly legal, and the tax breaks do not take money away from Katrina victims closer to the coast because the depreciation is wide open, with no limits per state.

But the tax breaks are galling to some community leaders, especially when red tape and disorganization have stymied the rebuilding in some of the devastated coastal areas.

"The GO Zone extends so damn far, but the people who need it the most can't take advantage of it," said John Harral, a lawyer in hard-hit Gulfport, Miss.

"It is a joke," said Tuscaloosa developer Stan Pate, who has nevertheless used GO Zone tax breaks on projects that include a new hotel and a restaurant. "It was supposed to be about getting people ... to put housing in New Orleans, Louisiana, or Biloxi, Mississippi. It was not about condos in Tuscaloosa."

Look at this shit and tell me that Katrina victims have had all the help they could possibly hope for, and that they need to "get over it." It seems like every few months we hear some new and horrific setback in rebuilding the area hit. And yet, despite the fact that they haven't been able to get things going again, they're being asked to "suck it up," and are even now (in many cases) being required to pay back the assistance they were given. WTF again, you ask? Here's where we get to even more mismanagement of aid money.

Katrina Victims May Have to Repay Money. (March 2008)

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

(snip)

Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a 4-percent error rate for the Road Home that is "quite good for large federal programs."

Frank Silvestri, co-chair of the Citizen's Road Home Action Team, a group that formed out of frustrations with ICF, sees it far differently.

"They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments," he said. "People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them."

(snip)

Melanie Ehrlich, co-chair of Citizen's Road Home Action Team, which has documented Road Home cases that appear littered with mistakes, said she had no confidence that ICF had correctly calculated overpayments. She charged that the company was more likely using collections as retribution against people who had appealed their award amounts in effort to get the aid they deserved.

I'll admit up front that I haven't emptied my pocketbook for the effort to rebuild, but for the gods' sake, at least I'm not blaming the victims when the odds have been stacked against so many people. Even my love of ironic payback couldn't compel me to hope that folks like Corley find themselves on the receiving end of shit like this. But I will say this... I wouldn't grieve too hard over 'em. Call that my failing of charity.

CIC Triple Advantage

I found these charges on my account coming from CIC Triple Advantage. What the hell is that, I asked myself. Turns out it's a fucking scam is what it is.

So for all those people who, like me, were told by their Financial Aid offices to go to Freecreditreport.com to get a free credit report... don't. I just reported them to the Better Business Bureau, and I'm astonished that they even have a B rating. They've received over 3900 customer complaints, and every review is negative. Every review says basically the same thing, and it's the same thing they were sued for last year.

"On January 8, 2007 Consumerinfo.com entered into a Stipulated Judgment and agreed to an Order for Permanent Injunction to settle charges that the company's "free credit report" offer failed to explicitly disclose that subscribers would be automatically signed up into a paid credit-monitoring program.

...The FTC charged that ConsumerInfo.com had engaged in deceptive marketing practices through requiring credit card information for consumers to purchase their "free credit report," then billing them $79.95 annually unless they opted out within 30 days."

So yeah. If you ordered a credit report from these people and didn't immediately cancel, do it now. Further, make sure they haven't been automatically charging your account. I just caught this, and so I'm trying to get over a hundred dollars refunded to me. Thankfully, the BBB review makes it look like it's fairly common to get a refund, probably because they've nailed these guys for deceptive marketing before.

So if anyone tells you to do business with these folk, just don't fucking do it. Don't give them your account information, even if you plan to cancel immediately because guess what! They won't always let you. Just stay the hell away from them. If you have already gone through these guys, I strongly suggest you check out this page.

Canceling CIC Triple Advantage: Get Your Money Back and Get Justice!

Go through the steps it gives you, and if the bastards still don't listen... report them. This is bullshit, and they don't deserve your money.

Edit (6/4/2009): Evidently they're not going to be allowed to do this anymore! Hooray! That's good news to all you people who get to my blog through queries about CIC Triple Advantage.

Compartments

I've added a new blog to my little list. Compartments: Secrets, Lies, and Living a Double Life

It's written by a callgirl, and goes through a surprisingly informative bit of her daily life. As an anthropologist, these are the details that tell me the most. The thing is... I knew in my head that a lot of women find sex work fulfilling and practical (at least as much as nine-to-fivers, that poor despairing cube-farming lot), but reading someone talk about daily life like this is just... different.

She's not blind to the practicality, or to the sexism. She's not blind to the emotional drain or the ego boost. She's not one of those victimized and exploited women who simply don't have the will or motivation to go get "real" jobs.

There are some things that are just about her, things like Lying to a Boyfriend, and the occasional entry about the jobs themselves, such as Fat Men Can’t Come. What was most interesting to me was not the humor or the frankness of the entry, but the conversation afterward. I'd never gotten a chance to hear about the "afterward." After the job's technically done, after obligations on all sides have been met. What is there? Sometimes a conversation about porn. Not so different from anyone else's post-sex familiarity, but certainly just the "single serving" version. She talks about that too, in Immediate Intimacy.

The temptation is always to look at this journal and treat it like a side-show curiosity. "Lookie there! One o'dem there whores just like on da HBO!" But that wouldn't be fair to the candid and sometimes moving accounts here. I knew before that sex work couldn't be all terror and desperation and sleaze, but even though I don't know where she lives or what she looks like or whether she'll have a call today... even if I don't know her as well as I feel I do... there's a person out there.

The "Ron Paul Revolution"

I was initially very interested in Ron Paul, because at least he was a Conservative willing to be a Conservative. If nothing else I had some respect for that. You don't have to dig too terribly deep to figure out what he's about.

Unfortunately this kinda stopped working in his favor. Checking out things like this kind of... turned me off.

I mean, being pro-medical-freedom or whatever is troubling when he's opening the door for his pseudoscience backers, particularly when you contrast "medical freedom" with "pro-life." I mean, either one of these alone is a different story but together? I dunno. I feel like he's looking for the freedom of pseudoscientific quacks to scam people, but not for women's reproductive freedom.

Then there are racist statements that kinda worried me. I don't put much stock in the supposed endorsements by white supremacist groups in the US, since those seem just a little too conveniently damning to be true. However, he did sponsor a bill to make all Iranian Students in the United States ineligible for any form of federal aid.

His views on citizenship are kind of interesting. Here is the first of three attempts to amend the Constitution to "deny United States citizenship to individuals born in the United States to parents who are neither United States citizens nor persons who owe permanent allegiance to the United States." Nor persons who owe permanent allegiance to the United States? The heck does that mean? I have these visions of people being deported because their parents lacked sufficient allegiance. Yikes.

He also wanted to repeal OSHA Actually he tried twice. Another yikes. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm kinda into the whole workplace-safety thing. Also, he doesn't like the idea of a minimum wage, which will be pretty hard to swallow for people who're trying to survive at the minimum wage level. He's not a big fan of anti-trust laws, either. Big surprise.

He sponsored another bill (well, twice actually) "to prohibit the Federal Government from planning, developing, implementing, or administering any national teacher test or method of certification and from withholding funds from States or local educational agencies that fail to adopt a specific method of teacher certification." Our education system here is a global laughingstock as it is, thanks. Please don't take away what accountability we do have.

He also wants all 50 states to have their own currency, along with separate federal money. What? Why?

He's so proud of claiming that he's never voted to raise taxes (see his commercials), but he wants people's taxes to hit them harder so that he can "restore to taxpayers awareness of the true cost of government." WTF. Either you want people to burdened by their taxes or you don't!

All in all? Not liking this voting record. Seems.... kind of bad.