Not News
I don’t have any words to add to this:
FEMA gave away about $85 million in household goods meant for Hurricane Katrina victims, a CNN investigation has found.
The material, from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities, sat in warehouses for two years before the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s giveaway to federal and state agencies this year.
James McIntyre, FEMA’s acting press secretary, said that FEMA was spending more than $1 million a year to store the material and that another agency wanted the warehouses torn down, so “we needed to vacate them.”
“Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that they were excess to FEMA’s needs; therefore, they are being excessed from FEMA’s inventory,” McIntyre wrote in an e-mail.
He declined a request for an on-camera interview, telling CNN the giveaway was “not news.”
Hell, yes, I do have some words. Since when is “excess” a verb? And one question: the government – or at least one of its agencies – admits to determining what is “news” for the rest of us?
But – here’s the punch(line) in the face:
These items also were offered to all states — yet Louisiana, where most of the people displaced by the storm live, passed on taking any of them.
John Medica, director of the Louisiana Federal Property Assistance Agency in Baton Rouge, said he was unaware that Katrina victims still had a need for the household supplies.
“We didn’t have anybody out there who told us they wanted it,” Medica said.
You can’t make this up, can you?
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