Welcome to Bushamerica

Things don't look good for the FEMA Katrina survivors - at least not the poor ones. You remember when the hurricanes in Florida destroyed a few communities about a year ago. The misuse of government relief funds made a brief splash in the news when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of dollars were passed out to well-off folks who hadn't even suffered any damage in the storms.

What you didn't hear about were all the working poor who were wiped out and relocated to a "FEMA trailer camp" a few miles out of Punta Gorda, one of the harder hit towns. Well they're still there and the town doesn't seem to be interested in taking them back. The WaPo reports,

"You almost hate to say this because of the difficulties so many people have had, but Charley tore down some buildings that needed to come down and cleared areas for much higher kinds of uses," said City Manager Howard Kunik.

An old, damaged Holiday Inn on the town's waterfront, for instance, has been demolished and will be replaced with an $80 million condominium-hotel complex, and other upscale projects are moving forward....

... the city made clear that it plans to tear down a public housing complex on the waterfront to make way for much higher-income people.

"That land was just too valuable to have poor people on it," said community leader Isaac Thomas. He said that the local government is trying to help him and other black leaders save some of the modest but historic homes in the African-American East End, but that "it's a really uphill fight."

Meanwhile, the FEMA camp is due to be shut down in February and thousands of its residents still have nowhere to go. I wonder where they think they're going to get the service workers to staff all these new fancy up-scale properties if they force the poor out the area.

And we're going to let these politicians administer another $200 billion of our tax dollars to "rebuild NOLA?"