Cashing in on public misery

Leslie Cardé

is writer, director and producer of the documentary "America Betrayed"

Three years after the levee failures in New Orleans, five years after we entered into a war in Iraq, and seven years post- 9/11, there are some disturbing parallels to be drawn between the government's post-disaster responses. With a new regime slated to descend upon Washington in the next few months, will the growing rise of disaster capitalism, in which private enterprise benefits from public disasters, continue to spread its ugly tentacles? Or can we expect a sea change in policy? Will the backroom insider dealing abate, or will it be business as usual?

At first glance, there may seem to be little in the way of common denominators between the aforementioned catastrophes that caused so much structural damage here and abroad. But, scratch the surface, and the post-disaster profiteering becomes readily apparent.

In the wake of the drowning of New Orleans, at the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. government handed out no-bid contracts for everything from reconstruction of levees to post-Katrina security largely to its corporate friends.

While many in the Corps have been busy patting themselves on the back for the reengineered levees that survived Hurricane Gustav, to date, only one-eighth of the failing floodwalls have been rebuilt. Chalk up the survival of New Orleans this time around more to good fortune than to a timely and well-engineered flood-protection plan in place.

In point of fact, that city's reconstruction of levees and pumps, to date, has been riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, and the buck stops with the feds, and their wingmen . . . the Army Corps. The shameless manner in which lucrative contracts are handed out has benefited only a privileged few, and in many cases those special-interest groups have been the culprits in substandard manufacturing. Unpainted outflow pipes were delivered to the city, and they quickly rusted. Blue-roof tarps, put in place to keep rainwater out of people's homes temporarily, became one big boondoggle, perpetrated by corporate America, as contractor after contractor subbed the jobs out, collecting monies over and over again from FEMA. And who's minding the store when it comes to oversight on the spending of reconstruction dollars?

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have charged that $2 billion of funds given to contractors post-Katrina is missing. And while both candidates feel that the neglect of New Orleans at the federal level has been "shameful," there has been no disagreement that many Bush insiders have profited from that city's unraveling.

But this, sadly, is nothing new. The same companies leading the charge of disaster-capitalism post-Katrina, were very familiar with the scenario - they were already rebuilding the infrastructure in Iraq.

And while the crumbling infrastructure in America has been given no higher marks than a "D" by our own American Society of Civil Engineers, the American taxpayers' hard-earned dollars are being spent overseas to prop up the underpinnings of a place in the Middle East that many wish we would just leave.

Corporate America has cashed in to the tune of tens of billions of dollars with no-bid contracts, post-Katrina, post-9/11, and with the rebuilding of Iraq. And, it seems, the only real losers here are the American people. Missing cleanup cash in New Orleans pales in comparison with the $8 billion the Government Accounting Office has deemed missing in Iraq.

With a pervasive climate of fear, post-9/11, the real beneficiary of the principles behind our administration's "keeping us safe" policy has been the military-industrial complex. It's no secret that profits at oil and gas companies and weapons manufacturers soared, post-9/11. Whatever the rationale behind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, there were some very clear winners in the equation. Conspiracy? Not necessarily. But, there's certainly no incentive to cut off the incredibly abundant money stream for those whose pockets are being lined in a climate of conflict.

As we edge closer to closure on an administration that has capitalized on disasters for its own gains, and clearly perpetuated a sense of desperation to further its own ends, have we, the people, learned anything? Have the tales of corruption, incompetence and cronyism served to enrage the American public sufficiently that it will demand "change," the reform mantra propelling both political parties at the moment? Let us hope. As philosopher George Santayana once said, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" - or more to the point, are just plain doomed.