The GOP sees big opportunities in the devastation of Katrina, writes Edmund Andrews in today's New York Times:

Republican leaders in Congress and some White House officials see opportunities in Hurricane Katrina to advance longstanding conservative goals like giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation. ...

The Bush administration has already moved to relax a variety of regulations in areas damaged by the hurricane. Many of the changes are small, like letting people take bigger tax deductions for the miles they drive while doing charitable work. Another change, announced on Friday by Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, will give preference to investment groups from hurricane areas that are seeking tax credits for community development projects.

But other changes are more ideological and more controversial. On Thursday, Mr. Bush issued an order that exempts federal contractors working on disaster relief projects from a longstanding federal requirement that they pay workers "prevailing wages," which are usually pegged to union pay rates.

The exemption strikes at the heart of a requirement that labor unions and Democratic lawmakers have ferociously defended for years.

"There are a lot of opportunities to experiment," said Mr. Snow, who jointed Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez in a rapid trip to highlight the administration's hurricane-relief operations.

Experiment? Maybe Mr. Snow will want to bring back the Black Codes. Or how about sharecropping? We'll have to call it something else, of course. (Suggestions?) Then, of course, if we combine Bush's "immigration reform" (i.e., guest worker) program with slave wages, the Gulf Coast will turn into one big encomienda.

 

I like this one:

But beyond the immediate needs, Republican lawmakers and administration officials are contemplating tax cuts intended to draw companies and workers back to New Orleans, regulatory changes to speed the expansion of oil refineries and scores of smaller changes to improve the recovery.

You want to draw workers back to New Orleans? How about offering good wages and benefits? What do the Bushies have against people who work for a living?

 

Really, this Katrina thing promises to work out well for the Bush Team. Congress promises to shovel billions of dollars to federal agencies staffed with Bush cronies. And they can be counted on to pass most of these dollars along to other Bush cronies in the private sector, as reported today by Reuters:

Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W. Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc. <SGR.N> and the other is Halliburton Co. <HAL.N> subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

And now that these people have just about been relieved of the onerous burden of paying their employees, sit back and watch those profits roll in!

 

As Chris at AMERICAblog pointed out yesterday, strange things happened to most of the government money appropriated for rebuilding after September 11:

How about their favorite subject, 9/11? After that disaster, the GOP controlled government offered relief via bank loans to those impacted by 9/11. Those silly folks in NYC probably thought that meant them, but loans to NY only made up 11% of the five billion dished out. Instead the money was handed out by banks who just happen to be large campaign donors and who have their tasty chunk of pork coming with the bankruptcy bill next month, to people across the country including the 9/11-needy country radio station KBFS in Belle Fourche, South Dakota and Little Dogs Resort & Salon in Utah.

Expect most of the "Katrina relief" money to end up everywhere on the planet except Louisiana.

 

The GOP seems to be charging ahead on Bush's agenda as if he still had his post-9/11 approval numbers. In this must-read editorial in today's Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner writes,

We face two opposite prospects. The first is that Americans will finally grasp that what connects the catastrophes in New Orleans and Iraq is a witches' brew of self-delusion, deliberate deception, cronyism, and staggering incompetence on the part of the Bush administration. Republicans, meanwhile, will desert a president who is becoming a plain embarrassment even to his staunchest backers.

But there is a darker possibility. The Karl Rove team is gradually getting Republicans back ''on message." The message: There's no point in playing a ''blame game," as Scott McClellan said 15 times at Thursday's press briefing. The New Orleans disaster just proves the unreliability of government in general rather than this feckless president in particular. We should be looking forward to rebuilding -- with the private sector taking the lead.

If we aren't alert, Bush will not only wriggle out of political responsibility for diverting funds from New Orleans's flood defenses, eviscerating FEMA, and bungling the response, just as he evaded responsibility after Richard Clarke's testimony that the administration ignored warnings about Al Qaeda's plans for a 9/11 style-attack. Katrina could even be a political windfall, promoting the campaign to cripple government, permanently displacing some reliable Democratic voters from the swing state of Louisiana, causing the faithful to rally 'round their beleaguered president, and knocking even more unpleasant news off the front pages and network TV.

("Small government" coservatives, take note: the "private sector" won't really be taking the lead if Bush gets his way, because what passes for a "private sector" under Bushonomics amounts to Bush appointments and cronies. Sitting at the top of the power pyramid is a plutocratic elite answerable to neither the people nor the "invisible hand" of the marketplace.)

 

But Bush's approval numbers continue to slide; truly, it's not September 12 any more. Now is the time to fight.

 

I've heard news stories that some Katrina survivors are going to establish an encampment on the Washington mall and call it "Bushville." This could be as effective as Camp Casey if most of the people participating really are Katrina survivors. Stay tuned.

 

There's also the September 24 antiwar protest planned for Washington DC. I've decided to go, even though I have many of the same missgivings expressed by John Aravosis. Anyone want to join me? Any other suggestions?

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President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

In a notice to Congress, Bush said the hurricane had caused "a national emergency" that permits him to take such action under the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in ravaged areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Yeah, who in Louisiana needs money in circulation to rebuild their lives when it can all go into the pockets of Halliburton et al. and Joe Allbaugh?

Maybe they'll get Massah Joe and Massah Dick to oversee the plantation for Massah George, y'think?

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The bottom line is that despite the fact the president was strapped with two governors who bungled this crisis badly, in the end it is the president who sends in the National Guard and FEMA relief. The president's suggestion that the size of this storm caught all by surprise just doesn't get it. His administration was 48 hours late sending in the National Guard and poor Americans got raped and killed because of those mistakes.

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We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they're TV trucks around.

Things are so bad, Bush is now censoring all reporting from NOLA. The First Amendment sank with the city.

The top U.S. disaster official waited hours after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast before he proposed to his boss sending at least 1,000 Homeland Security workers into the region to support rescuers, internal documents show.

Part of the mission, according to the documents obtained by The Associated Press, was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.

Acknowledging that such a move would take two days, Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29....

...Brown's memo to Chertoff described Katrina as "this near catastrophic event" but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, "Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities."

But those federal problem-solvers are sure on the job now. For example, read "U.S. Agency Blocks Photos of New Orleans Dead" from Reuters.

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Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?" 

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

Sometimes snarking just isn't enough.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

And here is the fruit of their labor: The publicity photo.

 

A great many bloggers have already gotten to this story, which means I can coast a bit by quoting them. Michael Bérubé says of the photo,

And only the hypercynical among you would dare to suggest that this photo will do its job—that the Mark Steyns and the Hugh Hewitts and the Jonah Goldbergs will dash to their keyboards and begin gushing about their bold, steely leader rolling up his sleeves (note the sleeve!) and getting to work.

Billmon:

I guess this is what Bush was talking about yesterday when he called himself a "problem solver." But one of these days he and the Rovians really ought to take a stab at trying to solve other people's problems.

I'm just surprised they didn't shove some boots and a helmet on Shrub and stick him behind the wheel of a fire engine. Maybe with a big banner on the side: "Lets Roll!"

Using experienced firefighters as PR flacks while fires burn in New Orleans is not a screw up. It was FEMA's plan.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Federal officials are unapologetic. 

"I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country," said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

The firefighters - or at least the fire chiefs who assigned them to come to Atlanta - knew what the assignment would be, Hudak said.

"The initial call to action very specifically says we're looking for two-person fire teams to do community relations," she said. "So if there is a breakdown [in communication], it was likely in their own departments." ...

...Louis H. Botta, a coordinating officer for FEMA, said sending out firefighters on community relations makes sense. They already have had background checks and meet the qualifications to be sworn as a federal employee. They have medical training that will prove invaluable as they come across hurricane victims in the field.

Do read the entire Salt Lake Tribune article, by Lisa Rosetta. Read about the search-and-rescue, parametics, and haz-mat certified experts had to sit through a sexual-harassment class (your punch line here). Read about how the firefighters have been warned not to talk to the press. And read about how cities are picking up the tab to fill the firefighters' vacancies while they work 30 days for the federal government and are now not available to respond to disasters anywhere.

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For five years now, you could measure how seriously Bush took issues of great magnitude by how deeply Cheney was involved. It was Cheney who ran Bush's super-secretive energy task force. When Bush wanted a drummer to pound the false connection between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11 into the heads of middle America, Cheney responded on the speech circuit and Sunday talk shows, as he himself likes to say, ''big time."

Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make sure that Halliburton's lucrative contract to rebuild the city is watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described the shattered parish as "Baghdad under water," the vice president plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying minority rights.

Or, maybe he'll be helping former Bushie FEMA head Joe Allbaugh get his influence-peddling racket off the ground. Josh tells us,

This article from the September 1st edition of the Post noted that Allbaugh was already in Louisiana "helping coordinate the private-sector response to the storm." ...

... I'd been so focused on Allbaugh's Iraq operation, that I had lost track of what he was up to on the domestic rain-making activities.

First, there's Blackwell Fairbanks, the outfit he set up with Andrew Lundquist, the guy who ran Vice President Cheney's energy policy task force. And then of course there's Allbaugh's main shop, The Allbaugh Company, the one Haley Barbour[*] helped him set up along with New Bridge Strategies, the Iraq venture.

I figure he's in Louisiana wearing the Allbaugh Company hat, seeing as how a few months back he signed on as a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary KBR to "educate the congressional and executive branch on defense, disaster relief and homeland security issues."

[*]You'll remember that Haley Barbour is the governor of Mississippi at the moment.  

Regarding Halliburton, which just got a $500 million U.S. Navy contract for emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and marine facilities, the company  reported being paid $10.7 billion for Iraq-related contracts in 2003 and 2004. Pentagon auditors have questioned tens of millions of dollars of Halliburton charges, however.

From the Illinois Journal Standard:

Consider the plight of Bunnatine Greenhouse, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lead official for government contracts, whose demotion last week to a position with no influence was obscured by news of Hurricane Katrina. What did the otherwise highly respected civil servant do to earn such harsh discipline from the government she, by all accounts, served admirably throughout her career?

She issued pointed criticism about the awarding of $20 billion in no-bid contracts to Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services company headed by Vice President Dick Cheney prior to his being named to the Bush ticket. Cheney, according to some reports, may still own more than 400,000 shares of Halliburton stock.

And Halliburton and its subsidiaries now own more than half of Iraq reconstruction projects.

Meanwhile, the probe into how billions of Iraq contract money disappeared under Halliburton's watch seems to have stalled.

Mo Dowd reports that in the days just following Hurricane Katrina, Dick the Dick had been shopping "for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home." But now he's got a shot at owning a big chunk of the oil-rich Gulf Coast, and at bargain-basement prices!

Cross-posted to The American Street.

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Offers of foreign aid worth tens of millions of dollars -- including a Swedish water purification system, a German cellular telephone network and two Canadian rescue ships -- have been delayed for days awaiting review by backlogged federal agencies, according to European diplomats and information collected by the State Department.

Since Hurricane Katrina, more than 90 countries and international organizations offered to assist in recovery efforts for the flood-stricken region, but nearly all endeavors remained mired yesterday in bureaucratic entanglements, in most cases, at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Soon after the flooding, the government of Sweden offered a C-130 Hercules transport plane, loaded with water purification equipment, and a cellular network donated by Ericsson.

"As far as I know, it's still on the ground," said Claes Thorson, press counselor at the Swedish Embassy in Washington. He said that along with 20 other European Union nations that have pledged aid, "We are ready to send our things. We know they are needed, but what seems to be a problem is getting all these offers into the country."

So far, Thorson said, the State Department has denied Sweden's request for flight clearance. "We don't know exactly why, but we have a suspicion that the system is clogged on the receiving end," he said. "But we keep a request alive all the time, so we are not forgotten."

New Skies even arranged transport, securing a C-130 cargo plane from the Israeli air force, to pick up the equipment and technicians from Germany and bring them to Louisiana. "With one call, I got an airplane," Hemy said. And then, over four days, she and the owner of Unisat, Uri Bar-Zemer, called contacts at FEMA, the American Red Cross, the State Department, even members of Congress, trying to find someone to accept the gift.

Finally the State Department told them that to receive flight clearance, the gift must have a specific recipient. "I was ringing, ringing, ringing -- and nothing," Hemy said. Finally, yesterday, she got a call from the U.S. Air Force's Joint Task Force Katrina Communication Operations division, thanking the companies for the gift and inquiring about the system's technical specifications.

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