From Diane
@Teacher
There are no words to express my disappointment at your post.
The reference to $20B of insured losses is the dollar amount INSURANCE COMPANIES are expected to lose as a result of COMMERCIAL claims – http://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/detail.cfm?pr_id=778925
It shouldn’t take a lot of smarts to figure out that disaster relief includes losses NOT covered by insurance and that businesses aren’t the only ones to suffer losses. Let’s get real.
ABC News, 30-Oct-12: “U.S. economic losses could range around $35 billion to $45 billion.”
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/10/hurricane-sandy-losses-estimated-at-45-billion/
NY Times, 01-Nov-12: “Losses from the storm could total $30 billion to $50 billion, according to Eqecat” and “Moody’s Analytics also put the impact in the $50 billion range”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/business/estimate-of-economic-losses-now-up-to-50-billion.html?_r=0
Minnpost, 03-Jan-13: “Hurricane Sandy over the northeastern Atlantic coast and inland, October 30-31; 131 dead and losses estimated at $62 billion.”
http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2013/01/losses-catastrophic-weather-events-rank-2012-among-worst-record
Wikipedia, 8 January 2013 at 05:37: “Damage in the US is estimated at over $63 billion (2012 USD).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy
Notice how the estimates of total losses go up over time as the extent of the damages becomes clearer.
I have not knowingly misrepresented facts on the Café or said I did something that I didn’t. I HAVE gone to great lengths, particularly on this issue, to show where I have gotten my information; I showed my sources. I acknowledged that there may be a better source for the Senate bill. But YOU didn’t find it or cite it!! What did you do? You parroted a list of 10 items from “another site” and then didn’t have the guts to name it, to tell us where you got those “facts.” So, where did you “find” them? What were THEIR source(s) and are those sources the Senate bill or just other ultra rightwing websites and/or pundits?
You said you found references to ALL of those items in the bill. That statement is untrue. You did not. Scan the document for the word “roof,” for instance. Hello, IT’S NOT THERE. Try “military base” or “Guantanamo.” THEY’RE NOT THERE. How about “Kennedy” or “Florida” or “Plum” or “animal?” NOT THERE EITHER.
1) “$28 billion for future ‘disaster-mitigation’ projects.” Just as you acknowledged, it is difficult to parse some items between emergency and longer term mitigation efforts. However, your original comment was that the bill was “insanely pork riddled.” Perhaps you could find at least a few billion dollars in disaster-mitigation projects that are pork. Direct quotations would be nice.
2) “$100 million for the repair of all 265 Head Start centers around the country.” The ONLY reference in the bill to Head Start begins on page 78 under the title “CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES PROGRAMS” and allocates $100 million “…for activities to assist affected Head Start agencies… (including supportive services for children and families, and provision of mental health services for children affected by Hurricane Sandy), and costs of renovating, repairing, or rebuilding those Head Start facilities damaged as a result of Hurricane Sandy…” Not only are the funds restricted to the effects of Sandy, they are further restricted as to not being able to be used for anything reimbursable by FEMA. So Teacher, THIS CLAIM IS A LIE.
3) “$8 million (+) to buy cars and equipment for the Homeland Security and Justice departments.” The bill says, “the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security shall identify and relocate any vehicles currently based at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of such agencies used for non-operational purposes to replace vehicles of those agencies damaged by Hurricane Sandy.” Furthermore, the only allocation to the DOH is $20,000 “for necessary expenses related to the consequences of Hurricane Sandy,” and to HS, $1,667,000 “for ‘‘Salaries and Expenses’’ for necessary expenses related to the consequences of Hurricane Sandy,” – no references to “cars and equipment.” Teacher, again A LIE.
4) “$150 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dole out to fisheries in Alaska.” This item, as worded, IS for more than just Hurricane Sandy relief but NOT just for Alaska as claimed. The $150 million is ”…for necessary expenses related to fishery disasters as declared by the Secretary of Commerce in calendar year 2012: Provided, That the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shall submit a spending plan to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate within 45 days after the date of enactment of this Act: Provided further, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement…” The fact is that on September 12 & 13, 2012, 3 fishery disasters were declared: one in Alaska, one in Mississippi and one in the Northeast covering 6 states. At the time of the Sandy relief bill, no funds had been appropriated for these declarations. This item could, but does not necessarily, provide funding for the aforementioned fishery disasters declared by the Secretary of Commerce plus the fishery disasters resulting from Hurricane Sandy. While funding prior disaster declarations is not “Sandy relief,” neither is such funding pork.
5) “$2 million for the Smithsonian Institution to repair museum roofs in Washington, D.C.” Again, no “roof” in the bill, only “ ‘Salaries and Expenses’ for necessary expenses related to the consequences of Hurricane Sandy…” So, are you saying that repairing damage to the Smithsonian caused by Sandy is “pork?”
6) “$207 million for the VA Manhattan Medical Center” “for renovations and repairs… as a consequence of damage caused by Hurricane Sandy” (pg 83). This is “pork?”
7, 8 & 9) Are completely bogus, aka, LIES. No such, nada, nothing.
10) “$1.1 million to repair national cemeteries” which according to the bill are “for necessary expenses related to the consequences of Hurricane Sandy: Provided, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement…”
Diane, you can’t just use the “find” feature, search the word ‘roof’, not find it, and proclaim no money has been allocated for that. Do you know what each and every organization listed to get money is in charge of? Do you know how each has noted they will use the money? The list of non-Sandy expenditures has been published time and time again, and never disputed by the side supporting the measure. Maybe the politicians know how to read and interpret the package a bit better than you or me. Here’s a non-judgemental listing in the New York Times of the disputed spending. Find anyone (other than you) that disputes these claims.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/nyregion/expenditures-for-a-hurricane-and-beyond.html?ref=nyregion&_r=1&
Diane, the Smithsonian is in DC. SO yes, money to fix the roof in an area not affected by Sandy would be pork. You really think Sandy did $100 million of damage to one roof in DC?
Oops, I meant $2 million dollars to the roof.
The Smithsonian is not just in Washington DC. For example, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is in NYC.
Thanks,
Kevin
OK Diane, after some extensive research, I think the problem has become evident. While your research includes the basics of the bill, it does not include the appendix that explains how the money allocated to each group will be spent. I found the document on the whitehouse.gov site. I think you’ll find money allocated to “roof” repairs in this document, as well as many others. Here it is:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/supplemental__december_7_2012_hurricane_sandy_funding_needs.pdf.pdf
This document makes it clear, for example, that money is being spent on the roofs of several Smithsonian Museums. It also clearly designates about $13 billion for mitigation projects to reduce the damage of future disasters.
“In addition to the funds necessary for recovery and repair of damage caused by Hurricane Sandy,
the Administration estimates an additional $12,970 million is necessary for mitigation projects to
reduce the risk of damage from future disasters.”- p. 64.
There is also a table included and more information on these projects. As stand by my opinion that, while mitigation projects may be advisable, calling the “Sandy Relief” is not accurate.
Also, 7, 8, and 9 are not lies.
“This request would provide $41.2 million in response to Hurricane Sandy to fund repairs
of damaged facilities and equipment as well as debris removal at the following installations:
Fleet Logistics Center Norfolk, Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, Naval Air
Station Oceana, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Norfolk Naval Station and Naval Support Activity
Hampton Roads in Virginia; Naval Weapons Station Earle, New Jersey; United States Naval
Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Other facilities and equipment damaged in Connecticut,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island will also be repaired.”- pg. 8
“This request would provide $4 million to repair damaged and eroded sand berms and
dunes that protect launch sites at Wallops Flight Facility and Kennedy Space Center, due to
Hurricane Sandy.”- pg. 56
“This request would provide $3.2 million for erosion control and repair work to the Plum
Island Animal Disease Center in New York and to reroute and retrench the undersea power cable
that supplies the island with backup in response to damages caused by Hurricane Sandy.”- p. 26
This document actually does reference everything I listed. Now, you may believe that this money is not pork, and is needed. Others don’t believe it. However, to say it is a lie that money is being allocated to these places is simply not true.
I stand by what what I said, this bill is riddled with pork. Mitigation projects are not “Sandy relief”. Unless you consider money spent on gun buy back programs in CT to be Newtown relief?
However, I do recant part of what I said. It seems to be an overstatement that the majority of the bill is not going directly to Sandy relief. I think the majority is going to Sandy relief. However, I still feel there is way too much pork in this bill. There is spending that may be necessary, but should not be classified as Sandy relief, and should be voted on in a separate bill.
I apologize for taking so long to respond; ISP probs.
@TPOV – To you personally, I am sorry for accusing you of lying. I read the bill, it didn’t say what you said it did, so I jumped the gun before performing due diligence. I apologize.
Some points follow.
It was the responsibility of the House leadership to come up with a bill that would provide emergency relief for the victims of Sandy. The word emergency means NOW, not 2-6 months down the road. They did nothing. That is despicable. They had NO problem acting promptly after Katrina when their OWN President Bush was getting his tail caught in the wringer because of FEMA screw ups but delayed unconscionably just to embarrass President Obama. That failure SHOULD make every true Conservative and Republican loyal to the American people cringe in shame. There is simply no excuse for having failed to send an EMERGENCY relief bill to the Senate within 7-10 days after Sandy made landfall. And that wasn’t the first time they placed anti-Obama politics over doing the right thing with respect to natural disasters.
With NOTHING forthcoming from the House, the President put together a proposal (remember – not his job), sent it to the Senate which worked on it for a few weeks then passed an amendment (28-Dec-2012) with less specifics than in the President’s letter and sent it to the house where John Boehner effectively vetoed it.
@TPOV
Please consider, “What is pork?” The various lists include a number of items labeled pork which are funds for repairing damage by Sandy and other as yet unfunded federally declared disasters. Why is fixing Sandy damage to a museum or a medical center or ANY federal facility pork? If you had stated that only appropriations for Sandy emergencies should be in the amendment and that all the other appropriations, though valid, belonged in a subsequent bill, I would have conceded that some of your arguments had validity. But “pork”? Maybe it’s your definition of “pork.” I thought pork was money that congress people got for their constituents by tacking an unrelated provision onto a bill or stuffing a “pet project” into an annual appropriations bill. I don’t think of funding repairs for damage caused by natural disasters as pork when it is in a bill for funding repairs to damage caused by natural disasters
@TPOV
Thank you very much for putting the effort into running down a legitimate source for the specific allegations of “pork” that are being bandied about. I too have been hunting and uncovered four things of interest.
1) There is a document describing similar items as those in the one you found, a US Senate Committee on Appropriations Press Release dated December 12, 2012 entitled ” SUMMARY: FISCAL YEAR 2013 DISASTER ASSISTANCE SUPPLEMENTAL.”
2) An article on NorthJersey.com stated that there had been “… a Senate bill that once included $400 million for projects like a new roof on the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and funding for fisheries in Alaska — allowed critics in Congress and elsewhere to claim the aid package is laden with ‘pork,’ or unnecessary spending.” This reminded me that most bills go through a lot of iterations and this one is no exception. There were over 86 amendments proposed to H.R.1 in December, 2012. Some failed to pass and even for those incorporated into the final Senate bill, not all provisions thereof were included without modification.
3) While the major thrust of this bill is to provide emergency funds to the victims of Hurricane Sandy and it is being called the Sandy Relief bill in the press, that is NOT its title. The bill’s title is NOT “Emergency Sandy Relief” or “Sandy Relief” or “Sandy” anything. Its title is, “SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR DISASTER ASSISTANCE.” So while the Republicans in the House would like to paint this amendment as all about and only about emergency relief for Hurricane Sandy, it was never framed that way. And they know it. It is quite reasonable that you and I got this far in our discussion without tripping to that fact because we are just regular citizens trying to understand but the House Republican leadership, as you suggested earlier, should be able to read things in bills that we don’t see. So for them, there is no excuse. Let me be perfectly clear.
4) THE HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP KNEW FROM THE GET GO THAT THIS WAS A DISASTER FUNDING BILL AND THAT IT WAS NOT JUST ABOUT HURRICANE SANDY OR EMERGENCY RELIEF BUT THEY DISINGENUOUSLY TRUMPETED IT AS SUCH TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SO THEY COULD LAMBAST OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS FOR PUSHING “PORK.” Look at the alleged “pork” in light of this amendment not being JUST an emergency measure for Sandy and see if you still consider it pork. [Ignore the items that are fraudulent.]
If #3 sounds like I am weaseling, I agree. It does. However, before you criticize me too harshly remember. According to the Constitution it is the responsibility of the House to propose funding bills, not the Senate and not the President. And how did the House Republicans fulfill their duty to the victims of Sandy? They did nothing. That’s how. No emergency relief bills, no amendments to H.R.1, not a frigging penny… for almost two months! It was only AFTER the Senate amendment passed that House Republicans came up with something – a funding measure which panders unabashedly to the “small government”, “save money by screwing the American people” crowd in their own party. $28 billion is woefully inadequate. With costs for Sandy rising towards $100 billion, $28B is almost a slap in the face.
Re: fisheries. Despite four federal disaster declarations by the Sec’y of Commerce on 12-Sep & 13-Sep, the House refused to fund those declarations. If you have in place a procedure (federal disaster declarations) to identify areas damaged by natural events beyond those areas’ ability to cope, whether due to hurricane, tornado, oil spill, whatever, then a responsible House leadership should follow through with an emergency appropriations bill to fund those declarations. The Republican leadership in the House decided to ignore them, just for politics. Result: fisheries damaged last year are still, today, unable to proceed with necessary repairs and real people have lost their jobs and their businesses. On December 20, 2012, a letter was sent to the Chairman and the Ranking Member on both the House Appropriations Committee and the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Committee on Appropriations requesting that these declarations be funded in any supplemental bill for Sandy. It was signed by 20 Members of Congress.
This should explain why the reference to fisheries in the Senate passed amendment was not restricted to just Sandy.
On this same theme, throughout Obama’s first term, Republican leaders declared that their first order of business, the most important thing on their agenda, was to deprive Obama of a second term. Not do the job they were elected to, not serve the American people, not even serve their own constituents but to embarrass and obstruct the President in order to deny him a second term. Loyal, conservative, responsible Republicans scoffed at this notion as absurd. Yet here is a good example of precisely that sort of thinking. The right thing to do would have been to fund those declarations. The House refused, not because there was any doubt that those declarations were valid and needed funding or the victims were part of the undeserving 47% of do-nothing welfare addicts, but because of petty politics and parsimonious ideology.
And how did the Republican leadership characterize these monies? As necessary funding for federal disaster areas? No, as vote-buying gimmicks. The House failed to do its job and when the Senate stepped in to do what the House SHOULD have done in September, suddenly the Senate Democrats were buying votes.
In a court of law, a witness is sworn to tell the WHOLE truth. Lawyers know better than any other segment of the populace that “a half truth is a whole lie.” Guess what. 170 of the 435 House Reps are lawyers, 37.2%. 60 of the 100 Senators are lawyers. These people KNOW the damage that can be done with lies of omission yet look at some criticisms of the Senate amendment:
“$150 million… to dole out to fisheries in Alaska,” failing to mention that the monies were for fisheries damaged by Sandy AND for Alaskan and other locations that had been declared federal disaster areas.
“$1 million for the Legal Services Corporation” sounds like money for a private law firm, no strings. In fact, “LSC operates as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that promotes equal access to justice and provides grants for high-quality civil legal assistance to low-income Americans.” Among its objectives, “LSC has built a national network of experience and expertise—including legal services providers and national organizations such as the American Red Cross and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—to help programs better serve victims when disasters strike.”
“$15 million for construction at NASA facilities, including restoration of sand berms.” This item fails to add “for repair at National Aeronautics and Space Administration facilities damaged by Hurricane Sandy.” It leaves the reader, who is focusing on the damage in NJ & NY, thinking, “Why should NASA need any money?” Overlooked by many is that Sandy DID inflict damage in Florida and other states not in the Northeast.
Thank you for your apology, but I share a lot of the blame. My first couple of posts were rushed, and lacked proper links and citations. It was lazy blogging at its best. Of course, there are no hard feelings.
Diane, I would agree with much of what you said. The house republicans completely dropped the ball by not providing emergency funding for these areas immediately. As I stated in an earlier post, they actually had to add “pork” to the bill to buy some votes from southern republicans. It’s a real shame that these republicans would need incentive to help those affected by the hurricane. They would have been able to pass a “cleaner” bill if they did it right from the start.
I don’t consider myself a republican, more of a moderate independent, so trust me, I have no desire to defend their actions (or lack there of). I always think of pork as anything not directly related to the bill. I believe this bill to be too broad. The ”SUMMARY: FISCAL YEAR 2013 DISASTER ASSISTANCE SUPPLEMENTAL,” could mean basically anything. That is true enough. However, it’s been framed as “Sandy Relief”, and by whom, I’m not sure. Did Republicans call it that to make it seem as though too much pork was in the bill? Or did Democrats first frame it that way to make it look worse from a public perception perspective towards the republicans that voted against it? It definitely looks worse that they voted down a “Sandy Relief” bill than it does a ”SUMMARY: FISCAL YEAR 2013 DISASTER ASSISTANCE SUPPLEMENTAL.” I’d be interested to know who first framed it as Sandy Relief.
Whatever it’s called, I don’t think the $13 billion for “disaster mitigation” fits entirely. The majority of the bill is directed toward relief for hurricane damage, and I think the mitigation projects are a separate issue and should be voted separately.
I found the same as you about the way conservatives have worded their argument. Surely, assistance in Manhattan is not pork. Yet they make it seem that way with the way they worded it (NJ/Staten Island). Political spin at its best. Honestly, politicians on both sides leave me disgusted at times. They all seem to do it. I just wish politicians would operate more honestly and transparently. I personally think the bill could be a little cleaner. I’m sure Republicans are making it seem like there is more pork than there really is. I also feel the Democrats have inflated some of the amounts (while there could be some wind damage at NASA for example, is it worse than any wind gusts they get every year? Is it routine maintenance, or due to an unusual disaster?) I’m sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Though, we’ll probably never know it.
Thank you for engaging in such a respectful discussion with me on this. I feel I’ve learned a lot from this experience.