The Pattern Continues - Politics and Cronyism

While it took Bush five days to respond to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it took him less than 24 hours to nominate John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Two days after he finally gives the go ahead for active engagement of the federal government in the disaster, the New Orleans levees are turned over to contractors, and Halliburton gets a no-bid contract to repair the military facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina. With the movement of showy federal assistance into New Orleans, the spin machine went into action to place the blame for lack of response on the local government.

Thousands of people aren't important enough to move the Bush administration off the dime until negative press threatens their agenda. Yet once they have the opportunity to advance their agenda of cronyism and profit, they can move with amazing speed. This is beyond disgraceful.

As I said before, and President of Jefferson Parish Broussard, stated eloquently and bluntly, this is murder through bureaucracy. Those people who have died while waiting and waiting for food and water are deaths at the hands of this administration.

What are their priorities? Is the nomination of a Supreme Court Chief Justice more important than the lives of 500,000 people? Apparently. Those who had any doubts about whether Roberts is a "moderate" candidate or not should have no further questions in that regard. The administration would not miss the opportunity to further the long term control of the Supreme Court by putting forward a "moderate."

Meanwhile, FEMA is making people fill out forms to get basic assistance - even critical supplies of food and water. But in Iraq, the military travels around with satchels of money to had out at their discretion - totally untraceable monies. Here in a state of disaster, the government is tracking every case of water, while in Iraq billions of dollars have just "disappeared."

Halliburton gets its no-bid contracts - in Iraq, and now in the United States, while the Department of Labor sets up a (yet to be implemented) program to hire "local people" to clean up their communities. Will there be other gifts of no- bid contracts for rebuilding the Gulf areas demolished by Katrina?

Then we have the man who was going to return accountability and integrity to government, once again blaming everyone else but his administration for the deadly lack of disaster response.

It is clear that this administration can act quickly indeed when they feel that their interests are at stake. Too bad they can't act so quickly and decisively when our lives are at stake.