Bushcorps Disaster Profiteering

excerpts with emphasis added from: "Katrina contracting: Bringing Iraq back home" in salon

By Tim Grieve
The White House would like us all to think of Hurricane Katrina as another 9/11 -- a time for Americans to come together and rally around our beleaguered commander in chief -- but it seems to be treating the disaster more like another Iraq. There's the cavalier attitude, the disconnect between the words in Washington and the reality on the ground, the rejection of the warnings of experts, and, of course, Halliburton.

And now, as the Wall Street Journal reports today, the Bush administration is "importing" into the Katrina recovery efforts "many of the contracting practices blamed for spending abuses in Iraq." The Journal says that the first large Katrina-recovery contracts have been awarded without competitive bidding and using "so-called cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend." The problem with such contracts? They encourage waste because they provide no incentive for the contractors to control costs, the Journal says.

If it all sounds familiar, that's because it is. "You can easily compare FEMA's internal resources to what you saw in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: a small, underfunded organization taking on a Herculean task under tremendous time pressure," Steven Schooner, a contracting expert at George Washington University, tells the Journal. "That is almost by definition a recipe for disaster."

The Journal says that "politically connected companies" like Fluor Corp. and Bechtel will profit from the arrangement. Halliburton will get its share of the Katrina money, too: As we've noted previously, its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, is already at work at naval facilities in Mississippi.

excerpt with emphasis from American Progress:

The White House mindset, according to Time magazine: "Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later. 'Nothing can salve the wounds like money,'" one official said. It's the same mindset that has governed the reconstruction efforts in Iraq, which have lined the pockets of politically connected corporate interests while leaving Iraqis with an infrastructure less capable than it was under Saddam Hussein. "This is very painful," says Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government spending watchdog group. "You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering -- disaster profiteering."