Joe Allbaugh is back, and his stench is almost as powerful as the sludge that's being pumped into Lake Pontchartrain. The former FEMA chief and Bush crony who appointed Michael Brown to take over the agency and thus dooming the Gulf Coast to suffer through the most bungled disaster recovery effort in history, has gone on to bigger and more profitable ventures. Through his relationship with the president, he's helped to secure multi-million dollar contracts for his clients at Halliburton and the Shaw Group.
But the motives that bind the administration, the profiteers, Allbaugh and the rest of the Bush cronies are almost too frightening and suspicious to consider.
Let's start by connecting the dots. It's easy. Bush and Joe Allbaugh are longtime friends. Allbaugh is a former Bush campaign manager and his former chief of staff in Austin. Bush appointed Allbaugh to run FEMA. Joe Allbaugh left FEMA and appointed a good friend and patently unqualified successor, Michael Brown, to take over. Joe Allbaugh went on to become a lobbyist for the Shaw Group and Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root. Brown bungled the Katrina effort so badly that it’s become a national disgrace. And the White House stammered its way through its response for weeks. And now, Allbaugh's Shaw and KBR are two of the primary government contractors hired to rebuild the Gulf Coast.
It's worth mentioning, too, another of Bush's cronies who's carpet bagging on the heels of Katrina. Bechtel has been given the first of perhaps many contracts in the reconstruction effort and, not surprisingly, one of Bechtel's former CEOs and one of its current CEOs are both Bush appointees to government power positions.
The elephant in the room is rearing up on its hind legs -- smashing the walls and ceilings and collapsing the room around us. And the debris could be crushing us in the process. Why prevent a disaster when there's significant profits to be made by ignoring it?
This notion can partly be derived from that infamous equation used by automotive manufacturers: if the cost of a recall is greater than the cost of an insurance settlement, then there's no recall and the deadly chips are allowed to fall where they may. Profit outweighs safety. Period. And human lives are lost. The same motives can be superimposed onto Big Pharma. Why should pharmaceutical companies find cures, when there's more money to be made from the symptoms associated with keeping people sick? After all, wouldn't a cure for cancer negate the business model for a company which, say, manufactures chemotherapy drugs?
We all know that the motivating factor for any business is profit. Or maybe we missed the big announcement that corporations with direct effect on human lives are now -- voila! -- suddenly more concerned with humanitarian goals than with keeping their employees and shareholders in the black. (And it's no coincidence that the Bush administration is known as the CEO administration, partly because of how it’s managed, and partly because, we can only assume, they give billions in business to a lot of CEOs.)
In this case, if a company like Allbaugh's clients Halliburton and Shaw can earn billions of dollars from a disaster (free money from you and I) then why would their buddies in the White House want to bend over backwards to prevent such catastrophes?
They don't. And that could be why, four years after 9/11, the readiness and response on the part of Bush's federal government was deplorable. Could it be that profit outweighed safety? Other than gross incompetence and criminal negligence, what else could it be? It'd be naive not to at least explore this as an answer.
The Shaw Group, for example, just announced two contracts worth $200 million -- half from FEMA and half from the Army Corp of Engineers. Halliburton's KBR is initially receiving over $29 million to rebuild military bases in and around the region. Added up, Allbaugh's friendship with Bush is worth nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to his corporate clients in the Gulf alone. And that's just for starters. In Iraq, Halliburton has earned $9 billion in government contracts. Audits have shown that nearly $1.5 billion of that paycheck is unaccounted for.
They could hire local contractors, but we haven't heard anything about any large contracts going to the New Orleans-based roster of independent firms. It's not like they're difficult to track down. A simple Google search yielded hundreds of independent contractors in the New Orleans area alone: construction contractors, medical contractors, and demolition contractors to name a few of the essentials.
For those of us who can see and understand what might be going on, it's an horrific prospect: corporations and politicians somehow allowing human harm in order to reap a financial windfall. However, for those of us who can't see it, I can only suggest a challenge: try to think like a corporation.
CEOs and executives think only in terms of profit and nothing else, both as a means of preserving their company and, hence, their livelihood. In many ways, that's great. It's the American way. It's their job. However, "it's their job" (Bush loves to tell us about "his job") is both the upside, in a personal well-being sense, and the catastrophic downside in a global sense.
It's a Big Tobacco CEO's job to sell cigarettes -- no smokers, no cigarette sales. It's a Big Pharma CEO's job to sell drugs -- no sick people, no drug sales. It's a Fast Food CEO's job to keep us loaded up with transfatty acids, triglycerides, and high fructose corn syrup. It's a Corporate Ag CEO's job to load up our beef with steroids and antibiotics in order to sell a better cut of meat while polluting our bodies with toxins. And it's an Automotive CEO's job to weigh out which decision (recall or lawsuit) will offer the best savings. The best savings! Why aren't we drinking clean water, breathing clean air, driving safer and more economical vehicles, and eating food free of mercury and growth hormones? If it meant a better bottom line, we would be.
So it's no stretch to hypothesize that perhaps a so-called CEO administration, with powerful friends in the private sector, might not deliver on their promise to keep us safe from a disaster (or to be wholly incompetent in the relief effort) in order to manufacture more profit-making scenarios for themselves and their cronies.