A Nation of Moochers (9 page)

There is no gainsaying the amount of suffering, poverty, and genuine urgency caused by the hurricane and the flooding. But it is one thing for a genuine victim to be knocked down and quite another to be playing that same card years later. What began as an outpouring of generosity and commitment to help the victims of Katrina turned into what
The New York Times
described as “one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion.”
¹

The
Times
noted that there were worse cases of government waste and fraud in history, including the 2001 discovery of as much as $12 billion in bogus Medicare benefit payments and the 2005 revelation that the Earned Income Tax Credit program had paid out $9 billion in unjustified claims (more about that later). But what the Great Katrina Rip-off lacked in dollar amounts, it more than made up for in dazzling details.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has estimated that more than one out of every five dollars given to “victims” of Katrina might have been improperly distributed. Post-Katrina stories of waste and fraud are legion: the $10 million paid out to more than a thousand prison inmates for “rental and disaster-relief assistance”; the half billion dollars worth of mobile homes that sat empty because of bureaucratic incompetence; the fiasco of the $2,000 debit cards that were used to buy diamond engagement rings, pornographic movies, football tickets, Caribbean cruises, a $450 tattoo, bottles of champagne at Hooters, and even $300 worth of
Girls Gone Wild
videos. The debit cards were used to make bail, pay outstanding parking fines, buy a sex change operation, and retain a divorce lawyer. Not surprisingly, many of the debit cards were issued to applicants using duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, false addresses, and fictitious names.
²

A program to provide free hotel rooms run by the Red Cross and paid for by FEMA resulted in what investigators later called “extraordinary abuse and waste.” With good intentions exceeding caution or even basic prudence, the Red Cross didn’t bother to keep track of hundreds of thousands of recipients. The GAO later found that because they asked only for zip codes—and no other documentation—the government cut rental assistance checks to people who were also getting free hotel rooms.
³

Still, this only scratched the surface. Evacuees were put up in $438-per-night hotel rooms in New York and $375-per-night condos in Panama City, Florida, courtesy of the taxpayer. When the bills came due, taxpayers shelled out more than $62 million for hotel rooms at an average cost of $2,400 a month. Critics pointed out that this was at least three times what a two-bedroom apartment would have cost. Even this paled next to the $249 million paid out for 8,136 cruise-ship cabins to house hurricane victims for six months. Department of Homeland Security inspector general Richard L. Skinner estimated the cost of the luxury cabins to taxpayers at $5,100 a month per passenger.
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The tsunami of free cash also turned the heads of government employees, who did not pass up the opportunity to snag some of the bulging stash of OPM for themselves. Before officials realized this was a colossally bad idea, bureaucrats had run up millions of dollars of charges, including $150,000 worth of Jockey underwear. In most cases the government employees paid retail, apparently unaware of the concept of buying in bulk or wholesale, as most consumers using their own money would have done.
⁵

Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco also chose the occasion to spend $564,000 to remodel her staff’s office. As Citizens Against Government Waste reported: “The newly refurbished office space on the sixth floor of the State Capitol includes hookups and mounts for two flat screen televisions, Swedish granite countertops, walnut paneling and frosted laminated glass. The floor, which will not be accessible to the public, was redesigned to add three new offices, a conference room and file storage areas.”
⁶

Learned Helplessness

But this is not a book about waste or fraud or even greedy politicians. It is about mooching; and the aftermath of Katrina is relevant here primarily as a microcosm of the addictive power of dependency, which is manifested in the learned helplessness of dependency.

“Learned helplessness” is a psychological term that describes someone who gives up striving because their actions have no effect on their environment or because they have been led to believe they have no control over circumstances or events. The term, developed by psychologist Martin Seligman, applies to both animals and humans who learn that effort is futile and therefore behave in a passive or helpless manner.

But the same concept can be borrowed to describe the sense of futility engendered by the dependency culture. The Assumption of Incompetence that pervades the welfare culture leads ineluctably to the Learned Helplessness of Dependency.

When victims are responsible for nothing, then nothing they can do will appreciably change or improve their lives. That is up to someone else, someone who pays for their housing, food, and transportation, and to whom they look to solve their problems and plan for their future. The tragedy of the cycle of poverty is that it passes this helplessness of dependency from generation to generation.

In the face of adversity, people accustomed to the lack of responsibility or independence are unlikely to respond either by taking control of the situation or by taking the initiative to extricate themselves or others from it. More likely, they will wait on others to act.

This, of course, was a scene repeated again and again in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Along with bureaucratic incompetence and political ineptness, the aftermath of the disaster also exposed the soft underbelly of the learned helplessness begotten by decades of dependency.

After All These Years …

Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005; but nearly a year and a half later,
The New York Times
was reporting that “life is still precarious and unpredictable for many evacuees, especially those who have depended on the government for a modicum of stability.” A key measure of that dependency: More than seventeen months after the disaster, 102,000 families were still living in FEMA trailers and “an additional 33,000 [were] living in apartments paid for by FEMA.”
⁷

Throughout 2006 and beyond, there were stories of Katrina evacuees who had settled into their subsidized digs, reluctant to make any move. In May 2006,
New York
magazine profiled “victim” Theon Johnson, who had spent the winter after Katrina as a guest of the federal taxpayer at the JFK Holiday Inn in New York. As the magazine noted, most evacuees had gotten on with their lives, but because of the city’s generous “squatters law,” a judge’s order was required to evict the remaining evacuees like Johnson.
⁸

Johnson, forty-nine, had settled easily into his dependency. According to the account, he was usually up all night, but occasionally he would go outside and beg for change. “When Johnson’s caseworker, Sharon, comes around,” the magazine reported, “she gives him some bus passes and maybe a few bucks, but she’s getting frustrated. ‘They sit around on their butts watching TV. There’s only but so much I can do if they’re not willing to help themselves.’”

Johnson was given $9,000 in housing aid by FEMA, but “he spent it all on booze, cigarettes, some clothes, and food—partying, mostly.” So, naturally, he waited around for the government to give him more. “I spent my money just the way I wanted, and I think [FEMA] should send me some more,” he told the magazine. But that trough was closed to Johnson. His FEMA caseworkers offered to buy him a free ticket home to New Orleans, but he turned it down, instead choosing to wait until the Holiday Inn offered him a “buyout” deal, which he was hoping would be about $1,200.

A few months earlier, self-appointed “representatives of Hurricane Katrina evacuees” holed up in New York hotels demanded that the hotel’s management pay families $2,500 in return for leaving.
⁹
What began as a public service had morphed into a shakedown that took various forms over the next few years.

In mid-2010, the Associated Press profiled residents of state-owned cottages who complained they were under pressure to move out of the free homes they had lived in since Katrina left them homeless—five years earlier. Even half a decade after the disaster, taxpayers were still paying for eight hundred state-owned cottages, in addition to two hundred federally supplied FEMA trailers.

One resident, Pete Yarborough, had spent years living in a four-hundred-square-foot cottage that sat on cinder blocks, but he was one of the squatters who refused to buy the tiny homes for as little as $351 and move them to higher ground.
¹⁰

In fairness, Yarborough said he was put out of work by the BP oil spill in mid-2010 and complained that he was having a hard time paying his car, light, and phone bills. “Everything,” he explained, “is past due.” This, of course, was meant to induce sympathy. But it is worth asking: Was he unemployed for the entire five years since Katrina? According to the story, he had been hauling seafood until the BP spill, which suggests he was gainfully employed while living in the free cottage and that he stayed in the cottage as a matter of choice rather than move on with his life. And why not? For five years he lived rent free with no incentive for him to seek out better accommodations that would have required him to contribute. Far easier to stay put.

Liberal critics were quick to see the Katrina disaster as an indictment of the gap between haves and have nots and a black mark on small-government conservatism. Intoned the late senator Edward Kennedy: “What the American people have seen is this incredible disparity in which those people who had cars and money got out, and those people who were impoverished died.”

But isn’t it more appropriate to see Katrina as the fallout from a culture that had for decades encouraged dependency, while failing to eradicate poverty? Despite billions of dollars spent on antipoverty programs, a quarter of New Orleans residents lived in poverty, many of them in public housing even before the disaster. Dependency was already a way of life long before Katrina. As
The Wall Street Journal
’s Brendan Miniter said in the days after the flood: “These are the people who were left behind in the flood and who have long been left behind by failing schools, lack of economic opportunity, and crime well above the national average.”
¹¹
Those who could do so on their own had gotten away before the flooding. But, Miniter wrote, “those who depended on the government (and public transportation) were left for days to the mercy of armed thugs at the Superdome and Convention Center.”

Even as the political class was rushing to assemble new programs, Miniter saw the disaster as a symbol of the welfare state: “Use the promise of food, shelter and other necessities to lure most of the poor to a few central points and then leave them stranded and nearly helpless.”

Many of them were still stranded five years later.

Chapter 6

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