Boston Globe
by Thomas Oliphant

12/22/05

In attempting to understand the shameful puniness of the response by President Bush and Congress to the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, I ran across an interesting number the other day. That number is $29 billion. This is presumably the sum just voted for the task of shifting from cleanup to actual reconstruction -- of both properties and lives. I say presumably because the number turns out to be a fraud. In fact, it represents the allocation of large sums of money that Congress has already appropriated. ... Perhaps you recall the atmosphere in September in the immediate aftermath of the horror that Katrina wreaked. Within three weeks, Congress had passed, and Bush had signed into law, roughly $62 billion in appropriations to pay for the massive cleanup. Nearly four months later, depending on which agency's figures you prefer, no more than a third of that money has been spent. ... Always inventive, what the government really did was repackage all this 'assistance' for the purpose of creating the illusion in the current budget mess that something meaningful is happening when nothing could be further from the truth...

http://tinyurl.com/d7erx


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp