Who’s Getting the Money to Rebuild the Gulf Coast?

by James Parks, Feb 28, 2006

Federal contracting to rebuild the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast has slipped big money to politically connected contractors and allowed gross worker abuse, including wage theft, according to comprehensive review of contracting practices by the Gulf Coast Commission on Reconstruction Equity, a group created by Interfaith Worker Justice and Good Jobs First.

The report gives the Bush administration failing grades for “overseeing an orgy of profiteering in the midst of immense human tragedy.”

After its disastrous failure to respond to the immediate needs of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration had an opportunity to redeem itself in rebuilding. But:

Instead the federal government turned taxpayers’ dollars over to private contractors in a manner so haphazard and susceptible to fraud that criticism and ridicule continues from all quarters.

Relying on the Bush administration for help has been grueling. Maria Morantine, who recently visited Washington, D.C., to demand that Congress help storm victims, is still waiting and hoping. “You’ve got to have hope,” she says. “In September, I said I’m going home in October. In October, I said I’m going home in November. I said I’m going home by Christmas. Now, maybe I’ll go home this month.” Morantine can’t find a job because public school teachers have been fired by the city.

And while she has been waiting, contracts have been awarded to politically connected companies, many of whom are committing egregious abuses of workers. An ugly example are the 85 mainly immigrant workers on the Naval Seabee Base in Gulfport, Miss., who were hired through KTC Services, a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a division of Halliburton, the company formally headed by Vice President Dick “Don’t Forget to Duck” Cheney. The workers were not paid, some for as long as five weeks. The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor in October 2005, and to date Halliburton has paid about $141,000 in back wages with more pending.

In the report, Bishop Thomas Hoyt, prelate of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Louisiana and Mississippi, asks:

Who has the contracts? People out of work want jobs. Those deprived of homes want a place to live. Those separated from family members desire reunification. But who has the money, and is it benefiting the people of the Gulf Coast?

A group of unions and community and religious groups and financial institutions wrote President George W. Bush and Congress Feb. 27 asking for substantial and immediate aid to help homeowners in the Gulf region to rebuild. Unless the homeowners, many of whom can’t afford to rebuild or pay mortgages, get relief soon, the Gulf Coast will lose them.Yet the Gulf Coast spirit that inspires a country keeps on going. On the same day, The Washington Post reported that charities have spent more than $2 billion of the $3 billion donated for hurricane relief, the city of New Orleans was celebrating Mardi Gras. The Post report says less than $1 billion is left to help people who do not qualify for federal home-rebuilding assistance and to aid private institutions in rebuilding community life. (Working families and their unions donated $666,838 to the AFL-CIO Union Community Fund’s hurricane relief fund and hundreds of thousands more through their own unions.)

As the charitable donations are drying up, report after report makes clear how badly Bush administration officials failed the stricken residents of the Gulf Coast—but how well the rank-and-file federal workers, members of AFGE, performed.

According to a White House report (The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned, released Feb. 23):

Staff within the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] worked hard to deliver aid and services to those affected by the hurricane and flood. Drawing upon their previous experiences with natural and manmade disasters, FEMA staff distributed more than $5 billion in federal aid to more than 1.7 million households in the affected region by February 1, 2006. FEMA also mobilized elements of the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS), such as Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMATs), deploying them to the Gulf States to assist with emergency health care delivery.

A report by the U.S. House of Representatives also praises FEMA staffers, who acted to send food into the affected areas before their managers addressed the problem.

The same House report lambasted pretty much everything the Bush administration did following the storms:

…a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare. At every level—individual, corporate, philanthropic, and governmental—we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina. In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw.

 It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which specific dire warnings had been issued for days. This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted. If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not. Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for prime time.

“I listened to President Bush when he came to New Orleans,” Olton Holmes, another Gulf Coaster who lobbied Congress recently, told us not long ago. “He was really saying, we’re not going to do anything for you. Then in his State of the Union, he gave maybe a couple minutes to the victims of Katrina. I look at my check stub. I pay my taxes every paycheck. Why can’t we get some help when we need it?”

Or as one Mardi Gras marcher put it on a sign he was carrying: FEMA Called. The Beads [a famous Mardi Gras trinket] Will Be Here in April.”