During Katrina, a storm that drowned the entire city of
New Orleans and nearly all of its citizens who were left behind, Condoleezza Rice was busy
buying shoes and attending the theater in New York City.
Today she pledges $770 million
to help Lebanon's "fragile democracy" while many of NOLA's displaced
have yet to get out of the FEMA prison-like camps they have been put
into.
Imagine how this must look. The President makes no reference to NOLA, the victims, or what progress has been made with our money, in his SOTU all the while singing praise of a shiny-happy economy. Now the very next day the token African American official in his administration pledge funds to help finance a foreign nation's political system, but has yet to pledge anything, time, money, even interest in her fellow American citizens, African American citizens.
NOLA, citizens, on the other hand are hidden from view and polite conversation in camps that resemble prisons more than they do anything called "help"- denied housing if they should talk to the press and patrolled by guards as though they were criminals (because them black folk need guarding, is that it?). Why and how is this being allowed? Or is this, like the Iraq war, simply a loophole that this administration has exploited in order
to satisfy their corporate clients over the critical need of American
citizens?
Consider that $100 billion dollars
was handed out in no-bid contracts to Halliburton, Bechtel, and other
such luminaries to rebuild NOLA. Now consider that by investing a fraction of that
money into NOLA and hiring the displaced residents instead of
corporate parasites, the administration could have not only spent less of the federal budget on reconstruction,
but actually solved the crisis, and even won praise from the public.
What possible reason could there be for this administration not to have done the less costly and the more PR friendly thing? It is more than obvious by now, sadly obvious.
Is
there an actual word for such criminal behavior? I am sick of hearing
about "government waste" when it is quite obvious that what we are
seeing is government fraud. Congress? Oh, wait, Joe
Lieberman sits at the head of the profitable DHS contracts table, err,
committee and he closed the book on investigating Katrina corruption. And why would Joe do a thing like that?
I think I have finally figured out why Cheney, Rove, and Bush have made such a
point of repeating Joe Lieberman's name over and over, to the point of
absurdity and why Joey boy has been more than eager to serve his handlers: The Rove election gin plans on running this opportunist as a Veep candidate with one of their 2008
props: either the Manchurian Candidate John McCaine or with Chevron Rice -
completing the circle of "where is our money?"
But by all means, go right along Chevron Rice and build your little democracy while the people of NOLA watch, as we watch, as the world watches.