Working on the right things
On the N&R's front page today, you will see an Associated Press report on fraud being committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I'm all for locking up swindlers, but both the substance and the display of this particular story give me pause.
For one thing, this story doesn't fully grasp the level of fraud being committed by small and large companies, rather than individuals -- the kind of thing that even simple due diligence would turn up, such as the fact that the government had more home-repair grants than homes in nearly one out of five neighborhoods since Katrina. A simple search of Census data would have turned that up.
For another thing, looking at the play (front-page lede) and the size of the headline type, I might think that the incidence of fraud after this disaster was much greater than after previous disasters. And it might be. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), whose handling of all things Katrina has come to seem, well, questionable says that the numbers aren't excessive in proportion to the number of people left homeless, etc.
But the starkest accusations are being made by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress. The GAO is so insistent on nonpartisanism that it bleaches every last bit of both politics and emotion from its reports, even when it finds itself returning to congressional panels year after year after year to report the same problems (as it has in, for example, certain Veterans Affairs issues). So when a GAO spokesman stands up and snarks, we should pay attention: The AP article quotes GAO spokesman Gregory Kutz on FEMA as saying, "I don't think they know the magnitude of the problem."
They probably don't. But neither do most Americans, which is why bloggers such as Scout have been spending so much time in areas hit by Katrina. There's not much they can personally, but they do what they can, and, perhaps more importantly, they continue to send out a distress beacon to the rest of the country: Our fellow Americans are in a world of hurt.
You can decide what's more important, that or the fraud. (And don't try to give the nonstarter answer that America is neither rich nor competent enough to handle that kind of multitasking.) But a year and a half after Katrina, we still have plenty to do. Whether or not we do it will tell Americans, and the rest of the world, whether we still aspire to be the country we always have aspired to be or whether we're now coasting on our reputation as other countries gaze, sick and angry, at the courage we exhibit in the face of our countrymen's suffering.
UPDATE: More info on NOLA bloggers and their subjects' plight here and here.
