8-28-06, 9:07 am
A recent poll conducted by ABC News indicates that two-thirds of the residents of New Orleans believe that the relief efforts have been mainly wasted. About 80 percent of the people in the damaged areas along the Gulf Coast are frustrated with the slowness of the recovery and reconstruction efforts.
They have good reason to be, according to the CorpWatch report. Cronyism and no-bid contracts are among the biggest causes of waste and abuse in the reconstruction process. The report cites numerous instances where large companies, mostly based far from the damaged areas, won expensive, no-bid contracts from the federal government because of their political ties to the Bush administration.
For example, Ashbritt, a company that does clean-up and recovery after natural disasters, raked in $500 million taxpayer dollars because of its relationship with Florida governor and presidential brother Jeb Bush and Mississippi governor and former Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour. Fluor, another recovery corporation, took in $1.6 billion to build housing and for other reconstruction projects. On its board sits Suzanne H. Woolsey, wife of former CIA director James Woolsey turned Washington lobbyist.
Other companies like Americold and Carnival Cruise Lines won expensive contracts through their ties to former FEMA director James Lee Witt and Florida Governor Jeb Bush respectively. Akima, a company that won a contracts worth about $40 million to build 450 portable classrooms, has financial and political ties to former Department of Homeland Security head Tom Ridge.
Some companies like Emergency Disaster Services (EDS) were paid millions to provide meals to emergency workers. At one point in the contract, the report states, the contracted service works out to somewhere between $100 and $279 per meal provided. Instead of having EDS’s contract withdrawn due to the immense waste of taxpayer dollars, it was renewed two more times.
Yet, as the report notes, 'the Gulf continues to stagger along, wounded, with mattresses still in trees, no reliable electricity, boats on the shoulders of highways, crushed houses slumped and moldering where they fell, and public school instruction still being held in portable classrooms or tents, if at all, while some hospitals remain understaffed and others are too damaged to ever reopen.' Because recovery and clean up have been so slow, many bodies in predominantly African American sections of New Orleans have yet to be identified, and, according to the report, some are still being discovered in the attics of destroyed homes a year later.
Environmental damage and dangers also remain. Studies indicate 'the presence of arsenic, heavy metals, pesticides, diesel, benzene and other toxic compounds' in the soil, according to the report. 'What had been an unhealthy place to live became far worse immediately after the hurricane.'
In turn local businesses, who by federal law are mandated to get the majority of federal contracts received only 13% of the value of all federal contracts in the first wave of massive spending following the hurricane. By July 2006, after a storm of controversy and congressional investigations, 'companies from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had increased their share of the total contracts to a combined 16.6 percent.'
Some companies profiting from the disaster have also abused their employees with impunity. Belfour USA Group, after winning its big government contract for clean-up operations, recruited thousands of immigrant workers for the job. Now, a group representing at least 1,000 of those workers is suing the company for refusing to pay overtime wages. Other labor groups say that many workers have been forced to live in cramped, rat-infested housing and have not been fully compensated for the work they do. They also say that some immigrant workers have been threatened with deportation if they complain.
The CorpWatch report states that runaway cronyism and waste have simply gone unchallenged by the Republican-controlled Congress and the Bush administration. 'The lack of a competitive bidding system in the earliest days, the gutting of FEMA, and continued chaos on the Gulf Coast,' the report argues, 'has also made it nearly impossible to impose any meaningful accountability on those companies staking claim to the billions in federal recovery dollars.'
Part of the problem lies with the right wing's anti-government ideology. For years, anti-government Republicans have promised to gut federal programs like FEMA as part of a downsizing of government. They believed that the private corporations could do the same jobs better. To accomplish this, the report points out, 'FEMA was reconfigured and downsized in the 1990s under the guise of reform.'
Under the Bush administration, 'the agency has been primarily focused on counterterrorism, not natural disasters.' As a result, FEMA was simply incapable of dealing with the disaster following the storm. The administration’s misleading claims that the severity of the storm and the subsequent damage could not be foreseen, the report finds, are 'laughable.'
And still the majority of the money allocated by Congress for recovery and reconstruction has 'yet to be designated for actual work, while the federal and local governments duke it out over a grand plan for rebuilding the region,' the report notes.
'One year after disaster struck, the slow-motion rebuilding of the Gulf Coast region looks identical to what has happened to date in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see a pattern of profiteering, waste and failure – due to the same flawed contracting system and even many of the same players,' says CorpWatch Director Pratap Chatterjee.
The CorpWatch report comes just as other media outlets are reporting on additional corporate fraud related to the hurricane disaster. ABC News reported last week that the FBI is investigating accusations that State Farm Insurance bilked hurricane victims out of untold amounts of money claimed for damages caused by the storm. Two former insurance adjusters who worked with State Farm say the insurance giant purposely and systematically lost or destroyed damage reports in order to avoid paying policyholders' claims. They also say they saw State Farm supervisors pressure engineers to report that damage was caused by water not by wind in order to avoid paying claims, according to the ABC News report.
Immediately after the storm, and as it became apparent that the rescue operations were a failure, the Bush administration tried to deflect criticism by saying that the disaster should not be politicized, and that we all should get together and work on recovery and rebuilding the damaged areas. As the one-year anniversary of the disaster and the administration’s failures comes around, we will likely hear right-wing media pundits saying similar things.
Unfortunately for the people of the affected areas, this rhetoric rings hollow. It is no secret that the African American and working-class people who comprise the majority of the victims of the disaster were not considered a high enough priority by the Bush administration to warrant protection from disaster or for focused efforts at rescue when it did occur. Now they have been all but abandoned.
The recovery and rebuilding the Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress promised has been an unmitigated failure. It has been mired in fraud and waste. Private companies have lined their pockets while proving incapable of delivering the goods. The Republican ideology of letting the private sector and free markets handle the reconstruction has delayed allowing people to put their lives back together.
Profit motivated individuals and companies simply cannot be trusted to care for people’s needs. When it comes to protecting people from disaster or provision in the rebuilding process, corporations will always fail. They look only at their bottom line, at how many corners they can cut, and how much of the pie they can take home with them.
The Gulf Coast needs a New Deal, and the Republicans who control the federal government, with their ideology of the rich first above all and then endless war, cannot be trusted to provide that New Deal. We cannot afford the risk of keeping them in power after the elections this November 7th.
-Joel Wendland can be reached at
