These people saw an opportunity to steal and scam as soon as Bush allowed himself to be politically outmanuevered by the left and announced 200 billion to rebuild Nawlins. The chickens have come home to roost. What makes this newsworthy?
I guess the scale.................
* An estimated 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast collected in excess of $10 million in rental assistance and disaster-relief money. Crime pays! FEMA, in addition, distributed millions of tax dollars to people who used names and Social Security numbers belonging to state and federal prisoners.
* A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Texas, has been charged with submitting $232,000 in invoices for evacuees who allegedly never stayed at his hotel, billing FEMA for purportedly empty rooms or rooms occupied by paying guests or hotel employees.
* An Illinois woman who was living in Illinois at the time of the storm sought relief benefits by claiming she had watched her two daughters drown in the flood waters of New Orleans. The children never existed.
* A Department of Labor employee in Louisiana, appropriately named Wayne Lawless, has been charged with handing out nearly 100 falsified disaster unemployment benefit cards in exchange for kickbacks of up to $300 per card.
* In New Orleans, two FEMA officials have pleaded guilty to pocketing $20,000 in bribes in exchange for inflating the count on the number of meals a contractor was serving to relief workers.
* With the $2,000 debit cards distributed by FEMA for disaster relief, an estimated 5,000 people have double dipped, receiving both the $2,000 plastic card and a second $2,000 by check or electronically.
* Two men, one a representative of the Army Corps of Engineers, have pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks in exchange for approving payments for removal of nonexistent loads of hurricane debris. In contrast, with loads of debris that were not nonexistent, a councilman in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, has been charged with attempting to extort $100,000 from a debris-removal contractor.
* One creative scam artist is charged with collecting 26 federal disaster relief checks totaling $139,000 by using 13 Social Security numbers and fake claims of damage at bogus addresses. Others collected and pocketed hurricane relief donations by posing as Red Cross workers.
I don't really think Bush allowed himself to be politically outmaneuvered- that would imply that he wasn't all for the growth of government in this thing.
He's simply not a conservative on domestic spending issues like this.
It was a crisis...a big city DESTROYED, what was Bush supposed to do, sit back and say, "now, just wait, everything wil be fine".....of course not.
The HUGE percentage of people on welfare in LA was a recipe for corruption and greed and theft, but what was he supposed to do??