Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages.

Required reading from the New York Times editorial page.

2 replies on “A Big Storm Requires Big Government”

  1. This mentality – that the private sector operates better than government in disaster relief – is entirely concocted by the Koch brothers. Not surprisingly the NYTimes didn’t include this element to their story.

    See this study:
    http://www.danieljosephsmith.com/uploads/P…

    It was written by Boettke & Smith, who are employees of the Mercatus Center, which is one of the Koch Foundation’s research groups.

    Spend a moment researching the sources for their controversial claims, and you’ll notice – surprise, surprise – that the authors of their academic citations are groups also funded by the Koch Foundation. It’s the same with virtually every academic research paper on disaster relief.

    This is just one way that the Koch brothers have used their massive financial influence to manufacture an entirely new academic field. The Koch brothers are using their foundation to pay for research studies that invent bullshit for people like Romney to spew as if it’s unimpeachable. Sadly, there’s not much contradictory research out there…

    The reality is that FEMA entirely fucks things up themselves, and there’s a half truth in the Koch’s lies. I’ve spent the last two months doing a research project on FEMA spending as it relates to the Homeland Security Fusion Centers, and it’s a complete jumblefuck of wasteful spending by FEMA, on the order of +/- $1 billion dollars squandered just on Fusion Centers. A lot more money was spent for the Gulf Oil Spill (lol…remember that incident? Hilarious!) that money disappeared or was cut up to big organizations that never did shit for the cleanup. Romeny/Koch/et al just want this money for themselves: they want to suck the teat of Uncle Sam to line their pocketbooks, because deep down inside they’re just fighting for a piece of this Corporate-Socialist Pie, “Don’t give it to the States, give it directly to us!” So the other half of this reality is that even if it goes to the Private Sector, it’s not going to help the everyday working people.

    So, what the solution to disaster relief? I think it lies somewhere in the first half of the second amendment. We need people in our community who are members of the community that are prepared and capable to deal with disaster relief.

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