Business As Usual
CBS reports: Feds Raid Office of Mississippi Governor’s Kin
The FBI has raided the office of a company owned by the wife of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s nephew. Rosemary Barbour’s firm Alcatec LLC has a large contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to maintain thousands of travel trailers housing residents displaced by hurricane Katrina. There is no evidence that Governor Barbour is involved with the company.
Rosemary Barbour is married to Charles Barbour, the nephew of the Governor and himself a county supervisor. A spokesman at the FBI field office in Jackson Mississippi would not comment on the ongoing investigation but said agents had conducted a “court approved” search of a business late Thursday.
Though local Gulf Coast media has reported that Alcatec received more than $28 million in contracts from FEMA to maintain the trailers, CBS News has discovered this contract which shows that Alcatec was awarded a five year contract that amounted to $299,376,647 in January 2006.
Y’all are probably think that this company got the contract because of family ties and political pull, but they might be the best travel trailers inspectors around. Well, okay, so the inspections and maintenance are actually done by other people, sub-contractors, but Alcatec had to line up the those people and pay them. Well, okay, so they weren’t, apparently, paying the sub-contractors enough to meet the terms of the contract, but they need the profit motive to take the contract.
Y’all are certainly a suspicious lot.
4 comments
Well, there’s an old tradition of Barbours doing blood-letting. What’s that? Barbers? Oh. Well, that’s completely different. <emily_litella_voice> Never mind! </emily_litella_voice>
The MSM keeps talking about how well the Mississippi recovery is going, when it isn’t. The little towns don’t look any better than the 9th Ward, but no one bothers to look.
I wish we could get walking tour videos of the Mississippi communities, with locals adding their verbal input. An analysis of the folks who’ve gotten rich in the process would also be very instructive.
Waveland is a wilderness, and when you go to the small rural communities north of the beaches, nothing has been done. It’s all been to get the casinos back-up and running, because they are the budget of Mississippi.
The people are even more powerless, than those in New Orleans, and less notice is taken.