Hot Potato Mash

Bush Drowned New Orleans, Not Katrina

How President Bush's Policies Leveled New Orleans

The Great Iraq Swindle

Please do yourself a favor and read this Rolling Stone article:

How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate,” they write, adding that “the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles” and that “during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt.” The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

When Congress gets wind of the fias co, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.

You blink. Fuck if you know. “I have some conjecture, but that's all it would be” is your deadpan answer.

The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.

Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your company's compensation. Touchy subject -- you've got a “cost-plus” contract, which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make -- and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you've got to cut him off. “So you won't voluntarily look at this,” Van Hollen is mumbling, “and say, given what has happened in this project . . . ”

“No, sir, I will not,” you snap.

“. . . 'We will return the profits.' . . .”

“No, sir, I will not,” you repeat.

Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home, take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the little woman. . . . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president's administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now assessed at $929,974, and you're sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.

“Yeah, I don't know what I expected him to say,” Van Hollen says now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back. “It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the taxpayer, for everything.”

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

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When The Saints

Two years after Katrina...

WhenTheSaints.Org

Where's The Money?

Before Katrina, music had pulsed through the veins of New Orleans. It spilled out of every club, seeped into every street, and nourished every tight community.

“Los Hombres Calientes, Vol. 2” (Jason Marsalis, Bill Summers, Irvin Mayfield)

Sadly, many musicians, like many residents have yet to return to the Crescent City:

Officially, New Orleans' population is half its pre-Katrina level.

According to the Renew Our Music Fund - one of a number of charities helping musicians get back on their feet - of the 5,000 full-time, professional musicians who lived in the city before Katrina, about 3,000 are still displaced.

“Vu-Du Menz” (Corey Harris & Henry Butler)

What's the hold up?

But thousands of people are still waiting for cash from the Road Home Programme before they can start to rebuild.

It is coming through, although painfully slowly for many and not without a little controversy. The question on most people's lips is: “Where is the money?” Many are angry. and fear it will never come through for them.

More at the BBC

“Alligator Lips & Dirty Rice” (Jon Cleary)

Meanwhile, we spend more than $9 billion a month in Iraq.

20 months after Katrina

The Lower 9th Ward Again

Last week I posted the above montage of the Lower 9th Ward in Nawlins' that I shot while visiting the city last month.  The reason for the repost was to include the impassioned email that my friend, Joshua Stern, who was with me in NoLa and has a way with words, forwarded along to some of his friends:

“Here is the result of Alan’s incessant recording of our trip to Jazzfest last month.  I’m impressed by Alan’s skill as a Blogger as well as the message of his story.  We should all do, or say, or feel something about this American tragedy, which after two years and counting continues today. The devastation is shocking and the lack of response unconscionable.  I’ve seen nothing worse in all my travels to the 3rd world.

I know this sort of political passion is uncharacteristic of me, so enough said – just check out the link. J”

Incessant! Well, the mainstream media isn't exactly clamoring to bring the 9th Ward to the masses.

Technorati Tags: katrina

Nawlins 20 Months After Katrina

I posted this at Brad Blog yesterday...

What follows is a short compilation of video footage I took when visiting New Orleans earlier this month. While some parts of the city have made significant progress, the poorer and lower situated areas like the Lower 9th Ward remain devastated. Yet, the most difficult part for me was not viewing the destruction but witnessing the lack of activity, building, people, hope. All were conspicuously absent. Hence the final clip taken from the Convention Center just after Katrina of the stranded masses chanting for help. Although 20 months have passed since those desperate cries, it seems we are still waiting for someone to hear them.

The music is  "Monday Night In New Orleans" by Kermit Ruffins (and The Barbeque Swingers) who, for my money, is the best living musician in the city.

"Putumayo Presents: Kermit Ruffins" (Various Artists)