[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
