When Jerry Bremer arrived in Baghdad to take over as Iraq proconsul, he immediately set about rewriting the country’s civil code — in violation of international law — for the benefit of US corporations, and dispensing pallet loads, literally, of cash looted from Iraqi’s oil revenues. Now that president Bush has designated political assassin and ongoing national security threat Karl Rove as the new Gulf Coast proconsul, Bremer will soon look like a classic piker.
Even before word of Rove’s new role oozed onto the pages of the New York Times, signs abounded that Bush had dropped the flag on another years-long season of corruption, greed, casual malice and graft, this time at home.
And not just any signs: flashing neon ones, such as no-bid reconstruction contracts going to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, and to clients of former Bush campaign manager and Michael Brown’s FEMA predecessor, Joe Allbaugh. Such as the president’s possibly illegal suspension of the law requiring federal contractors to pay employees the local prevailing wage. Such as Dick Cheney’s decision to divert power company crews from providing electricity for hospitals to providing electricity for pipeline operators. Such as the administration’s decision to bump federal credit card spending limits from $2,500 up to $250,000.
Such as the sometimes ghoulish Congressional attempts to transform the entire Gulf Coast into a giant laboratory for the social Darwinist agenda radical Republicans have mostly failed to inflict on the nation at large.
As Rove prepares to channel a deluge of federal money into the hands of the administration’s cronies and political allies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, no longer guided by what in retrospect looks like an ultra-competent Michael Brown, continues to flail aimlessly, depriving hundreds of thousands of Katrina survivors the assistance they desperately need.
FEMA-contracted trucks filled with relief supplies are wandering the coast for all the world like diesel-powered ghost fleets while FEMA community relations personnel breeze through communities with no power and no phone service, distributing fliers advertising toll-free emergency numbers to the people trapped there and then moving on.
Rove’s overt involvement — and no matter who is in charge, he is in charge — marks the death of any hope that the recovery operation will become something other than a cesspool of cronyism and political pandering. The action manuals will be vote counts, the 2006 electoral map and Republican party campaign contribution lists. The result will be a hedonistic political and fiscal binge Bremer could only have dreamed of.
Bremer, you may recall, misplaced some $16 billion of Iraqi oil money; the exact amount will never be known because of his lack of interest in contract details and outcomes, and because for much of his tenure the Iraqi oil exports financing his adventures were unmetered and therefore unaccountable. But while Rove will be constrained from simply handing out pallet-loads of cash, as Bremer did, and he has no oil revenues to steal, the entire US Treasury is his.
It’s often remarked upon as an oddity that Bush has never vetoed a bill and has rarely even threatened to do so; since the turn of the last century only Warren Harding, with six vetoes, comes close to Bush’s legislative insouciance. Bush joins a handful of presidents who never met a bill they didn’t like, the most recent being James Garfield, whose tally reflects not a collegial relationship with Congress — they didn’t get along — but that he was shot six months after taking office in 1881.
But it isn’t an accident or an oddity or a quirk of presidential character. The Bush administration have made an agreement with the Republican Congress, whether tacit or overt, to cover just such situations as this and the war in Iraq: We won’t get in your way if you don’t get in ours. For Congress, that means aggressively abrogating their oversight duties and surrendering Congressional powers to the executive; for the administration, it means giving up the veto.
Either part of the bargain is a sacrifice only for someone interested in governing. For those who treat public service as nothing more nor less than an unlimited letter of marque issued against the American people, it’s no sacrifice at all.
So Congress has already placed more than $60 billion in Rove’s hands; by the end of this year the total will likely top $100 billion. Sometime next year it will match and surpass the cost of the war in Iraq. Every penny of it that isn’t simply lost will go where the administration most needs it to go, and every lunatic notion that survives Congress will meet administration approval.
And if in the process the Gulf Coast becomes a radical Republican protectorate operating under different tax, environmental and civil codes than the rest of the country, so much the better. Maybe Baghdad will finally get a US sister city.
I like my town with a little drop of poison
Nobody knows they’re lining up to go insane
I’m all alone, I smoke my friends down to the filter
But I feel much cleaner after it rains
— Tom Waits, “Little Drop of Poison”
When is the announcement coming down that targeting Rove … such a trivial matter … is no longer just given we have so much more to worry about?
What weekend newscyle is best?
One of the articles btw noted federal credit cards were used for breast implants. We need to see the photos, but darn if releasing photos is contrary to administration policy.
what the ___ does ‘insouciance’ mean?
at least Rove & cronies are putting money into the US economy, which is more than I can say for the average head-up-the-a** American. more than twenty five percent of the equity extracted from mortage refinancing is going into the stock market, and with big biz still refusing to borrow or invest, it means that money is going straight out as either CEO compensation or shareholder dividences… meanwhile, to make the situation even more funny, the Dow stands where it did in 98′ and home mortage debt has nearly tripled.
this simple statistic suggests Americans have the leaders they deserve, doing the ‘hard yards’ they’re too greedy and ignorant to carry out.
so are you suggesting what Rove is doing is unfair? unconstitutional? not good biz? at least that’s dollars main-lined straight into the economy; more than I can say for the typical American’s investment choice.
If you think that the administration will conduct themselves honestly and honorably, then you won’t have any disagreement with what they’re doing. As for the economics, handing hundreds of billions of dollars to corrupt people simply isn’t the best way to shore up the economy in the short term, and running up the deficit and the national debt to yet greater heights is inimical in the long term.
Repealing the tax cuts for the top 1% of taxpayers would go a long way toward covering the costs of the recononstruction and would ease the deficit pressure, but that won’t happen.
I’ll give you one example of how the administration are already ensuring that the money won’t go where it would do the most good. By suspending the requirement that federal contractors pay prevailing wages, the administration have initiated a process in which wages will be driven down because the competition for jobs will be fierce. But the feds are paying the contractors, not the workers, so any savings will go into the coffers of the contractors.
That money will be used not to create more jobs, but to retire debt, cover acquisitions or increase dividends and executive pay, depending on the company’s situation, none of which do much good for the economy. If the employees were getting that money, it’d get spent, which would be good for the economy, not to mention the workers.
Suspending the law is probably illegal, but it’ll take a while for that to percolate through the courts.
So yeah, it isn’t good biz, as you say. Corruption rarely is. I don’t know about constitutionality, but that’s setting the bar pretty low, isn’t it? Something can be constitutional and still constitute bad policy. And of course criminality isn’t constitutional.
A lot of homeowners and investors will be very unhappy in the relatively near future, I think, but their financial miscues are dwarfed compared to what the administration have done and are doing. Most homeowners aren’t turning to the Chinese to float their debt, or at least not directly, and they have at least some prospect of paying off their mortgages, which can’t be said of the one the administration has taken out on the country.
Steve your assertion that money invested in the stock markets would or should normally go on investment in the company or does go to CEOs and dividends is an investment fallacy.
Although true for the initial issue of stocks it is no longer true from that point onward. All that happens from then on is a peice of paper changes hands the company no longer benefits from the trading of the shares they only recieved money from the initial sale of stock so the majority of the money spent by Americans on shares cannot be diverted to dividends it could benefit CEOs if they happened to hold large amounts of shares and the stock rose substantially but generally what you suggest is a fallacy.
The idea that money invested in stocks is money to be invested into that company and therefore the economy is a nice idea but in reality if the stock has already been issued then your money is just going to the person who sold you the stock nowhere else.