Well.  BushCo’s Katrina-response time is improving.

Ah, you ask.  Did he rush to exempt the Gulf Coast evacuees from the provisions of the looming Bankrupty Bill?  Or take some other action designed to help relieve their financial worries?

Nope.  Bush has rushed to suspend the prevailing wage requirements of the Davis Bacon Act for NOLA reconstruction contracts.

(crossposted with revisions from a comment in a fine diary by seesdifferent at DKos)
Davis Bacon requires the government to pay the “prevailing wage” for federal service contracts in a given area, thus ensuring that bidders do not import cheap labor and keeping the focus on a prospective contractor’s ability to perform efficiently and with qualilty.

BushCo will spin this decision as follows:  to save money.  To drive down the cost of reconstruction.

And since any such federal contracts will be cost-plus, it would actually result in reduced profits for Halliburton or whoever (other things being equal) since the cost of labor under the contracts would be less.

Their real motives, of course, are twofold:  to indulge their beloved hobbies of union-busting and screwing the working class.

The proper frame for response is  “fairness to the already-devastated residents of NOLA”, who already earn less than the national average.

What I would love to see is for locals to gather the requisite expertise to form a consortium to bid on these contracts – and keep the profits in the area.

Fat chance.  Halliburton and other predators upon human misery will swarm over these contracts like maggots on a drowned corpse.

Incidentally, FEMA dumbfuck-in-chief Brown’s college buddy, former Bush campaign honcho and  FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, is a lobbyist for Halliburton.

You should visit the excellent Hallilburton Watch site, btw, just to check out the sickening charts on the home page – worth a diary by itself.  Do the heartbreaking math:  Halliburton is guaranteed a minimum of 2% profit, with a ceiling of somewhere in the 8%-10% range depending on evaluations of their performance.  If I didn’t slip any decimal points, and assuming about 4% profit on revenue of about $11 billion, then (thru March) I calculate their profit on about 1600 dead soldiers at roughly a quarter million $ each.

Talk about blood money.  Fucking vultures.  They ought to be tithing a hefty percentage back to the families.

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