The White Houses Failure in Puerto Rico Was Even Worse Than We Knew

[babylonsister]

Somehow, they need to pay for their horrific negligence.


February 6, 2018 6:06 pm
The White House’s Failure in Puerto Rico Was Even Worse Than We Knew
By Eric Levitz


In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Congress launched a bipartisan investigation into how the Bush administration’s response had fallen so fatally short. That probe found, among other things, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had neglected to line up potential contractors in preparation for a major natural disaster — an oversight that led FEMA to rely on wasteful, fraudulent, or inefficient partners once the levees broke.

Now, some on Capitol Hill are beginning to suspect that FEMA made the same error under Trump, in the run-up to last year’s devastating hurricane season. Cause for such concerns isn’t hard to find. In November, the Associated Press revealed that the agency paid a single firm $30 million for emergency tarps and plastic sheeting — none of which was ever delivered.

And on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that FEMA handed off responsibility for providing Puerto Rico with much of its emergency food aid to “Tiffany Brown, an Atlanta entrepreneur with no experience in large-scale disaster relief and at least five canceled government contracts in her past.” The agency struck a $156 million contract with Brown, which required her to deliver 30 million meals to hungry Puerto Ricans.

Mistakes ensued:

Ms. Brown, who is adept at navigating the federal contracting system, hired a wedding caterer in Atlanta with a staff of 11 to freeze-dry wild mushrooms and rice, chicken and rice, and vegetable soup. She found a nonprofit in Texas that had shipped food aid overseas and domestically, including to a Houston food bank after Hurricane Harvey.

By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000. And FEMA inspectors discovered a problem: The food had been packaged separately from the pouches used to heat them. FEMA’s solicitation required “self-heating meals.”

…FEMA insists no Puerto Ricans missed a meal as a result of the failed agreement with Tribute. FEMA relied on other suppliers that provided “ample” food and water for distribution, said William Booher, an agency spokesman.

But there is little doubt that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans struggled with access to food. The storm shut down ports on an island that imports about 85 percent of its food supply. Farms were flattened. Supermarkets lost electricity and could not find diesel to run their generators. The stores that opened using generator power could not offer much from their understocked shelves.

more...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/trumps-failure-in-puerto-rico-was-even-worse-than-we-knew.html

[malaise]

1. Get thee to the greatest page

NOW

[spanone]

2. K&R...

[IluvPitties]

3. The white supremacists in the WH could not care less about PR.

[SWBTATTReg]

4. Another black mark for our idiot president. Also, where is ...

Congress as part of their oversight of the executive branch?

If possible, this GOP-controlled congress oversight mandate of the executive branch is zilch, zero, nada...How else would anyone ever think that Tribute achieved its goals of even feeding 1% of Puerto Rico during this difficult time?

Company should be required to pay back every dime, every nickel, every dollar, w/ penalties imposed, in such an epic failure to perform even 1% of its' goals (and I even doubt measurable goals were established).

I fear for this country, in the event of a big natural disaster (for the sake of ALL of us). States when slammed w/ such big natural disasters as the hurricanes that ravished the Gulf in 2017, are overwhelmed by demands for basic needs and doing urgent repairs to damaged infrastructure, thus need to rely on the Federal Government. Otherwise, where else would we go?

I thought tRUMP was supposed to fix this crap? He, alone, will do it all! What a joke, and simply another example of his supreme unfitness for duty, as president of this country, let alone being a dishwasher. No excuses, GOP has full control. Period.

[tanyev]

5. That's not an 'error'. At best, it's criminal negligence.

[certainot]

28. worse. at some level (cheney? rove?) the bush admin purposefully withheld

support in new orleans in hopes there would be black on white violence they could use in upcoming elections.

their total control of RW radio gives them the confidence to try this shit and then get away with it. they know they can sell these 'disasters' for their purposes - in louisiana they didn't get the black on white violence their racist minds envisioned as inevitable but they used it to blame local dems and beat them in elections, rebuild new orleans with fewer black 'riff raff' etc.

their excuses for letting people die were ridiculous - so national guard helicopters couldn't get to people in the superdome because gang bangers were shooting at them? they were expecting local politicians to arrange for local school bus drivers to abandon their families so they could drive evacuees out?

that's what rw media/radio was selling this shit with, while limbaugh was saying shit like, paraphrasing only a little - limbaugh: "everyone in new orleans had the same god given american opportunity to have a good job and be able to afford an SUV to evacuate in time" on 600 radio stations - half of them endorsed by pro and college sports teams

[HipChick]

6. This is his Katrina and a huge scandal...

[Squinch]

8. And no one is reporting it.

[HipChick]

13. Exactly..and media is part of the problem...

[certainot]

29. if this was a dem president she'd be doing all possible to help but

1500 radio stations would fault her for not delivering the help herself

that is the difference. if those 1500 radio stations weren't the megaphones for 300 fascist lying blowhards a good many of them would have thom hartman and steph miller and norman goldman and ed shultz and randi rhodes and trump would have to do something to help in PR.

instead they use the public airwaves and stations licensed to operate in the public interest, many of them using the community cred of our universities, to deny global warming and praise and make excuses for trump and attack mueller and schiff and scream for the memo and ask "what's wrong with a military parade? aren't these democrats patriots? why don't we attack iran? why don't we attack north korea?"

[malaise]

30. It's not getting enough coverage

[panader0]

7. My outrage, shock and disgust meters are all broken.

They were overamped months ago and now I just shake my head.
The tRump administration is having a negative effect of the nation's
mental health....
I feel like the father of that Olympic gymnast who asked the judge
for five minutes alone with Nasser.

[Roy Rolling]

14. We are shocked out

We must triage where to apply our outrage in the midst of a "battlefield" full of casualties of the truth.

[LittleGirl]

23. I call it outrage fatigue. eom

[lark]

9. Lock up these criminal thieves.

Wonder who this woman knew in the drumpf cabal? Wonder how much she paid them to get the contract? That is the only possible explanation for this. We don't know why, but we do know they deliberately ripped off the taxpayers to the tunes billions of $$ of it's paid for services not rendered in Puerto Rico just because they are brown and they thought they could get away with it. Hope someone runs really hard hitting ads at repugs about being thieves and murderers to American citizens who are brown or black and far away.

[Ilsa]

15. From local news, it appears she hasn't been paid much.

She is suing for $250k for the tidbits she delivered.

Still, we know the whole thing is corrupt, and people are dying over their corruption, apathy, and stupidity.

[lark]

19. If she didn't get it, where is the money?

If the money wasn't distributed, don't they owe it to get this done and have some company complete this order? Paying money to Puerto ricans restaurants to feed the homeless would help, getting a food service company involved that has experience is even better.
But still, why did they contract with a company clearly not ready for prime time, theres some reason the government keeps doing this and I'm sure getting their share is part of it. I'm also sure hate for brown people is also a huge part of the reason for this utter BS.

[Ilsa]

22. I don't know. I haven't seen a chart or

Calendar of what was paid, when, and whether any was seed capital. But the whole thing needs to be investigated.

Brock Long, head of FEMA, is supposed to be very experienced in emergency management, but he tends to push for more responsibility at state and local level. Of course, that doesn't work except in geographically large states where you don't have total collapse of infrastructure with one major disaster.

[notdarkyet]

24. Lock them up. Trump and his gang are all criminals giving money needed for rescue of PR instead to

Rip offs and cronies.. We need to get that money back.

[pandr32]

27. It's not just the looting and stealing of government funds for brown people

They are doing the same with our public lands, services, institutions, agencies, programs, utilities, resources, and everything that has any value. Look at the people named to run our agencies--no related expertise. Trump is rewarding friends (fellow pirates) by divvying up our country as though it is one gleaming treasure chest.
He and his Republican crew must be stopped.
Sadly, there is so much of this going on that pointing to any one thing that shows looting is difficult. I mean even our Post Office building in DC is now a Trump hotel. It's everything and everywhere.
Trump knows more crooks, cons, and gangsters than is fathomable.

[GetRidOfThem]

33. Google Tiffany Brown Atlanta Fema and look at her

She does not look like Trump constituent.

No, what I think happened here was that her entrepreneurial spirit took over, she had no idea what she was really getting into, and there absolutely no capacity to provide proper oversight at FEMA. It is just plain stupidity. I don't think there was criminal collusion.

[jmowreader]

34. I think you're absolutely right.

This is her Inside Government page: http://government-contractors.insidegov.com/l/416996/Tribute-Contracting-LLC

I went through her contracts, and her almost exclusive customer is the Department of Justice - a lot of bulk food for prisons, and her biggest contract is mattress covers for a prison. She's running a "middleperson" firm, and most of the little shit the government buys comes from those companies. If Shell wants to sell a million 5-gallon cans of diesel engine oil to the Army at $65 per can (that can would cost you $90 in a store, so $65 is not a bad price) they know the government prefers to let small contracts to small businesses, minority-owned businesses, woman-owned business and African American-owned businesses, so they call someone like Tribute Contracting - which is all four - and tell her, "bid $66 a can and tell the Army you can have it to them the week after the bids are opened; we'll charge you $65 and we'll both make money." Everyone wins: Shell sells five million gallons of oil at a profit, Tribute makes a million bucks and the taxpayer gets enough oil to do an oil change on every ground vehicle the Army has for $24 a can cheaper than letting supply sergeants run down to NAPA with their government credit cards.

The problem here is the government REALLY needs to start looking at a firm's capabilities before it accepts a bid. Our intelligence agencies did that when I was in the business, and it works well: if you need a new 1000-ton air conditioner, you don't go to the people who make nothing but window air conditioners and swamp coolers for 50-foot mobile homes; you go to the three companies that make 1000-ton air conditioners. If anyone else was president, a requirement for 30 million meals would have ended with a phone call to the company that makes T-rats for the Army: "We need two and a half million rations packed into 20-foot ISOtainers, when will they be here?"

[MyOwnPeace]

10. Gotta' say..............

I think I'm getting tired of all the winning......................

[llmart]

11. Our media is complicit...

in ignoring these stories. I guess they're not salacious enough. What we really need and want are more stories about what the stars are wearing to the awards ceremonies or who did a better half time show at the super bowl. Also, the media hangs on every asinine tweet the idiot in chief puts out there. In my estimation, the whole twitter phenomenon could go away tomorrow and I'd be happy.

Most Americans don't even know where Puerto Rico is on a map.

[Wounded Bear]

12. SSDA...

Same shit, different Administration.

[MsLeopard]

16. Always Republican. nt

[smirkymonkey]

17. I knew they wouldn't come through for PR. That is why I directed 60% of my United Way

contribution this year to PR Hurricane relief. The rest went to Mexican earthquake relief and the Boston Food Bank.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

18. And Trump knows the best people

[ancianita]

20. Voluntary -- not involuntary -- manslaughter. nt

[Hortensis]

21. Their response is depraved indifference to life AT BEST.

I strongly suspect it's worse than that, that abandonment and all its consequences are intended.

Almost all that has been done for PR has been because of pressure by the Democratic Party and good people who cared and continued to care, private citizens and agencies. Far, far too little for the giant scope of this disaster of course, but does anyone imagine the funding bill just passed would have included significant aid for PR if it weren't for the Democrats in congress using Repub desperation as leverage to get it in?

Btw, Maria hit PR and VI around September 19. On October 1 the Las Vegas shootings occurred, and almost all coverage of the ongoing deaths and desperation in Puerto Rico disappeared from screen media. And thus from the minds of most Americans as old news months ago. It wasn't political pressure that caused our Democratic representatives to continue fighting the Republicans for more aid to PR and VI.

[jmowreader]

31. I hate to sound like the Alex Jones of the Left...

However...your timeline, in which someone shot up a concert two weeks after Maria wiped Puerto Rico off the map, looks mightily like a false flag operation.

I seriously doubt it is, though. Trump has fucked up so many things in so short a time, if he DID try launching a false flag the shooter would have gone to Vegas and all his guns to Spokane...where someone would have accidentally picked up the package off the luggage belt, gone home, discovered what was in it, and kept it.

In reality, if Trump wouldn’t have had Vegas he would have had to rely on cutesy tweets to distract from his administration’s fuckups in PR.

[GETPLANING]

25. When profit is the objective, and the task at hand is the means,

This is what you get. If saving lives and feeding hungry people were the objective, we would not be reading about these fiascoes.

[Angry Dragon]

26. just shaking my head

[shadowmayor]

32. Mr. President

OK I'll admit it. You were right. I am tired of "winning".

[cbreezen]

35. 18.5 million meals is a lot of food

for an island of 3.7 million people.

"Heck of a job, Brownie"

[Solly Mack]

36. K&R

[jimlup]

37. Thanks for this - this story isn't getting enough attention /nt

[Tipperary]

38. Tiffany Brown should face charges,

[dembotoz]

39. this has legs, brought it up at to congress thug town halls

stress these are americans
stress real damn hard to run a business with no power.
stress in past century we did rural electrification and marshall plan but this island is now too hard?

both congress thugs were a bit unnerved by this