[From the diaries by susanhu. Great reporting. It’s a distillation of, well, sickening information.]
or
How I learned to stop worrying and love the profiteers.
You remember how well we did with bags of cash and shady deals during the early days of the Iraq construction?
Well, hold on to your wallet, because we are about to witness the same style of reconstruction in the wake of Katrina.
The Disaster Profiteers
First came the phone calls — 6,300 by last Wednesday to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers alone, from contractors offering “‘cure-all’ technologies and services” for the Gulf Coast reconstruction effort. Then came the cash: more than $500 million a day is being spent already, much of it on Iraq-style no-bid contracts, since normal federal contracting rules were “largely suspended” in the days following Katrina’s landfall. The White House mindset, according to Time magazine: “Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later. ‘Nothing can salve the wounds like money,'” one official said. It’s the same mindset that has governed the reconstruction efforts in Iraq, which have lined the pockets of politically connected corporate interests while leaving Iraqis with an infrastructure less capable than it was under Saddam Hussein. “This is very painful,” says Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government spending watchdog group. “You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering — disaster profiteering.”
How does that grab you?
MORE BELOW:
How about this: you know that 51.8 Billion that Congress just approved? Remember who gets to distribute that money? Yeah, that’s right, FEMA. You know, the agency that is rife with incompetence and political appointees. That’s comforting.
Bush took some time out from his posturing and posing on the Gulf Coast to sign a special order regarding reconstruction contractors:
Big contracts aren’t the only post-Katrina kickbacks being served up in Washington. For years congressional conservatives “doggedly tried — and repeatedly failed — to repeal a Depression-era law (the Davis-Bacon Act) that requires federal contractors to pay workers the prevailing wages in their communities.” Following Hurricane Katrina, it took President Bush all of eleven days to banish the requirement, “at least temporarily, with the stroke of his pen.” Congress also passed a major White House-backed change to federal contracting regulations. The new rules allow holders of government-issued credit cards “to spend up to $250,000 on Katrina-related contracts and purchases, without requiring them to seek competitive bids. … Before Thursday, only purchases of up to $2,500 in normal circumstances or $15,000 in emergencies were exempt.”
The fact that they are using Iraq as a model of reconstruction just floored me. That means that they think they had some measure of success. Well, Iraq is not reconstructed, it’s a bloody mess, but a lot of money changed hands and lined pockets and fortunes were made and THAT’s the part they consider worth repeating. The Bush Administration is about to plunder the treasury …again.
This level of incompetence and corruption has become the hallmark of an administration that has sold out to corporate cronyism and ‘privatization’. Will they get away with it again?
[all emphasis mine]
Much more to read and explore at the Progress Report
Just when I thought that maybe they really were on the defensive, these details start coming out. How in the world do they expect to get away with the kinds of shenanigans that went on in Iraq? Are they that stupid or are they that good?
Wouldn’t you think they would try to do this the right way, just because they’re under such scrutiny? This is insane. The poor evacuees and storm victims… they’re barely on the list.
They think they are doing it the right way. For them the right way is to loot the economy at every opportunity and give the loot to their supporters.
These ruthless irrational regime extremists have been scheming tirelessly for decades to starve out all social assistance programs and institute their misnnamed conservative ideology that basically says to the public; “You’re on your own”
And yes; they are insane, they are anti-democracy, and they are our worst enemy.
You’re right. They actually think they’re moving things along… shifting paradigms and redistributing the wealth. I often wonder if they don’t consider us in the middle class as just another resource.
These lunatics running the regime are making the same mistake that all advocates for empire have made; they’ve chosen to ignore the simple truth that government’s only reason for existence is to protect, sustain and improve the lives of (all)the people.
They invent all kinds of ways to parse this truth to bring legitimacy to their own selfish designs, but in the end, whenever government policies are rooted in a “zero sum game” calculus, that government fails.
And none of these megalomaniacal crackpots ever learn this lesson the easy way.
They see ALL of us — human, animal, plant, earth and everything else — as "just another resource".
They expect to get away with it because they control Congress and the media.
Simple really.
this is really without reason here on our own soil. Do you think they will find some way to control it with better oversite here instead of thousands of miles away?
Boy, you would think so, wouldn’t you? And yet… credit cards good for 250,000 a pop, no questions asked; sounds like it’s already turning into a giveaway free for all. It reminds me of a ‘push and shove’ sale at JCPenney’s 1 week before Christmas. Someone’s gonna get hurt.
The very idea of responsible oversight is an alien concept to the Bush regime.
They know they have to restore some version of the gulf region. The oil, the port itself, the fishing and all of that demands it.
But whatever they want to build will require lots of allies to push their mutated version of what they want the new New Orleans to be. They’ll have to buy lots of new friends in order to get away with completely disenfranchising the poor and in totally destroying any attempt to restore the true character and style of New Orleans to it former status.
So, the primary function of all this money being spread around is going to be to buy these allies; to put the money into the hands of those who will agree to support whatever the Bush regime wants in the region.
I seriously doubt there will be any real and affordable housing to the poor who want to return.
This is going to get ugly.
A central theme in the Volcker-report on the UN-administered oil-for-food programme was the lack of internal oversight.
Internal oversight, as we all know, only applies to others. This administration is free to lose $8,8 billion in Iraq – barely batting an eyelid. The most efficient system to pump funds into connected corporations has been established. Perfect for any disaster.
This is lunacy. No one in the administration can even give Bush bad news… who’s going to watch over his minions? Who would they report to? No one in the administration cares, as long as they get their cut. The corporations have become our government. The corporations are like squatters who’ve taken over the White House and they have the key to the executive washroom AND the treasury.
I almost expect these contractors to show up along the Gulf Coast carrying carpetbags instead of briefcases.
And this surprises any of us? Just another day in Bushland profiteering. How do I get one of those credit cards? And Fema stopped handing out $2000 debit cards to the victims? WTF!?
Here in Florida in the hurricane season of 2004, (before the election), FEMA gave out I forget how many tens of millions of dollars in Miami-Dade and several other counties; counties where there was virtually no effect from the hurricanes at all.
This was vote buying pure and simple, rewarding wingnut Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for her propaganda work in south Florida by pumping millions of dollars into her (undamaged) district. Meanwhile, over 8 months later, those areas hit hardest by those hurricanes still didn’t have all their roofs put back on.
Now they’ll be buying allies in the Katrina region by doling out funds to wingnut ideology supporters, but the basic scheme will be to continue looting the treasury.
Perhaps the media will pay attention this time around and maybe even revisit the Florida issues you’ve mentioned. Maybe the toothfairy will knock on my door and offer me a 3 room addition in exchange for my bridgework. It could happen.
.
Skull and Bones from Yale University, probably the most powerful secret society in America. Sutton explains the Hegelian-Masonic motto “order out of chaos”, an act of creating wars to create a need for peace.
Read my recent diary —
BUSH Think Creation :: “Order out of Chaos”
Links To Skull & Bones Society!
Son just like mom … disconnected.
All Ye Faithful
Is George Bush the Christians’ Christian?
George Bush a TOOL of VP Cheney | Karl Rove and Corporate Power?
▼ ▼ ▼
As far as Bush being a Holy Man, I don’t buy it. I once read that in his early days he discovered the power of faith… on voters. If he has religion it’s all tied up in his Narcissistic personality, and a little dry drunk syndrome thrown in like eye of newt.
As for Bush’s eager trashing of EPA rules and labor laws, we humans sometimes have difficulty comprehending such a greedy, sociopathic policy: business comes first. Business before folks quietly drowning in attics. Business before families, business before you, business before me. Our Government under Bush has become dysfunctional.
Vietnam, Iraq and now the US. I wouldnt credit King George with a direct line to God’s natural disaster planners, but the actions before during and after the storm sure fit the phrase.
And the big engineering companies have been (through their lobbying PAC groups) pushing for YEARS to end low-bid contracts from government, to go to what they call “QBS” or “Qualification-Based Selection” — that is, you select your engineering contractor based on who’s the best qualified, not on who set in the lowest bid. Now, I’ll agree that the lowest-bid contract isn’t always the best criteria for making a choice of who to hire for a job, but eliminating cost as a factor seems ludicrous to me as a consumer, and as a taxpayer.
In the wake of the Iraq war, they were all about getting those huge government contracts to rebuild Iraq — ignoring the fact that Iraq had something like 30,000 engineers, many of them educated in the US or Europe. Engineers who had already rebuilt many of those roads and bridges and other infrastructure projects once — and done so under sanctions, no less.
Now they’re all about rebuilding the Gulf states. They have poured millions of dollars into lobbying — the highway bill, for instance, was one of their special focus projects. And this time, there won’t be any “insurgents” shooting at them…. and probably no more accountability of how the monies get spent.
(Especially telling to me — after so many websites from every major newspaper to amazon.com, including many blogs and industry associations, put up donation links to send money to the Red Cross and other hurricane victim relief organizations, the big business interests who are going to benefit most from reconstruction have links up to organize cross-industry resources — equipment, jobs, personnel — to get those precious contracts. No relief links, just business interests here. Subconcious, perhaps — obviously, their members have lots of other avenues to donate to the relief effort if they wish. But it does reflect priorities….)
And yet people are outraged over some designer handbags purchased with those FEMA cash cards…. demanding accountability for amounts that are less than POCKET CHANGE compared to the real, untraceable cash that vanished in Iraq.
I’ve got an idea. I think all publically-funded rebuilding contracts should be handled with ATM cash cards — so we, the taxpapers, can see how every penny of those billions is spent. Then maybe the rest of the country can get a little fucking PERSPECTIVE here….
I just found this headline on Raw Story:
INVESTIGATION FINDS RED CROSS AGREEMENTS WITH HOMELAND SECURITY PREVENTED RELIEF; BOARD CHAIR BUSH APPOINTEE: DEVELOPING…
Everything Bush touches turns to crap. Nothing about the process going on now regarding Katrina is honest or fair. My hope is that this time there will be more media scrutiny, and public awareness.
Here’s another shocker (snark) Firms with Bush-Cheney Ties Clinching Katrina Deals