Scam Inc: How Government Pays for Privatization and Other Matters

Probably the biggest scam this side of Wall Street banking is privatization.  Promoted in the Reagan years as giving the private sector the chance to cut costs and be efficient in what normally was done by the public sector, the result time after time has been that a few folks are getting rich by privatizing prisons, the military and now higher education--all primarily with tax money.  Notes an opinion piece on the New York Times site:

"The worst problems, though, occur at for-profit schools like those run by the Apollo Group (which owns the University of Phoenix), the Education Management Corporation or Corinthian Colleges. These schools cater to low-income students and veterans, but too often they turn hopes for a better life into the despair of financial ruin.

Nearly all of their students take out loans to attend, and the amounts are staggering. Among holders of bachelor’s degrees, 94 percent borrow. They take on median debt of $33,000 per student, compared with just $18,000 at the nonprofits and $22,000 at the publics. The for-profit graduates have trouble finding jobs that pay enough to afford their debts, and 23 percent of borrowers default within three years, compared with just 7 percent from nonprofits and 8 percent from publics."

 So how do they stay in business?  Like those big "security firms" and prisons, they are lapping it up at the government trough.

"Congress, by loosening regulations, permitted for-profit colleges to thrive on the government’s dime. These schools, which enroll nearly a tenth of college students, use nearly a quarter of federal student aid dollars allocated through Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, and they account for nearly half of all student loan defaults. A 1998 rule allows them to gain up to 90 percent of their revenues from Title IV alone — a figure that does not include their substantial use of military education money. Even during the 2008 financial downturn, the top publicly traded for-profits enjoyed growth. Their upper management and shareholders benefit at the expense of American taxpayers and students."

Other matters:

The Obama Derangement Syndrome Comes Home: This demonization of President Obama has its most obvious and unprecedented consequences in foreign affairs, as Josh Marshall noted.  But it has become the excuse for Republicans to avoid dealing with domestic issues like immigration reform, as Kevin Drum writes in Mother Jones.

However, there's some statistical evidence that while President Obama's reelection has made mad-dog GOPers even madder, it has (temporarily, I would guess) deflated officially designated hate groups.

Paul Ryan has been caught cooking the research to support his war on the war on poverty.

On the subject of poverty and the Rabid Right, is there an alternative brewing within US conservatism?  Or was listening to the Dalai Lama just a stunt?

Speaking of cooking the research, a catalog of Putin's lies about Ukraine.  Nevertheless, Josh Marshall warns that fears of at least some members of the new government aren't baseless: there is a strong fascist faction.  But Marshall's chief conclusion is that Putin is showing weakness, not strength.  As well as showing his true KGB colors.

Happy Ending, Maybe

Catherine Ferguson Academy was a unique school in the Detroit public school system.  It educated 250 high school girls at a time, pregnant or new mothers, offering daycare to more than 100 of their babies.  The girls helped run a small farm, in addition to academic studies that all together provided a plus 90% graduation rate, and a high percentage going on to higher education.

But when Michigan strengthened its laws giving power to single overseers, and the one in charge of Detroit public schools set his sights on Catherine Ferguson, controversy ensued.  Students getting set to begin a sit-down protest strike in the school were hauled out and arrested, while police sirens wailed to block out their cries.  All this got the attention of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC who did several segments on the school and its plight, including on Wednesday, which was the day that Catherine Ferguson was slated to close forever.

The city's newspapers belatedly but strongly decried the decision to close the school.  A protest rally was scheduled for noon Thursday, with Danny Glover among the speakers.  But then the apparent Hollywood ending--at the last minute the announcement came that Catherine Ferguson Academy had been saved--taken over as a charter school, with the promise of more resources.

It was a perfect ending---maybe too perfect.  The company that will run the school (and made a deal the same day for two other public schools that would close but send its students to their charter school) seems to have a record working with disadvantaged kids, and seems initially at least a much better choice than another company rumored to be in the running, which ran a school with a graduation rate closer to 10%.

But the whole thing was suspect from the beginning.  The decision to close Catherine Ferguson was ostensibly to save the city money, but most of its budget was paid for by federal and state grants.  There were other schools closed, but the money saved was far short of expectations. 

Two things are certain: a private company now has what once was a groundbreaking and highly successful public school, and just as pointedly, the teachers at Catherine Ferguson will no longer be union members.

So excuse me for being a little suspicious of all this, the timing in particular, and of what will happen over the next year or two at Catherine Ferguson, once the celebs have left and the cameras have moved on. 

I suspect that thought has also crossed the mind of the school's founding principal,  Asenath Andrews.  Amidst the joy and relief of the school not closing, she mentioned to Rachel Maddow on Thursday (transcript not yet posted) that she hoped she felt the same way the next day, or next year, when she might need to go on Rachel's program again.  Maddow also made a cheery but definite point of saying she will keep in touch, and will visit the school in the future.         

Centered on the Future

Because politics is instantly available spectacle, because the extreme Rabid Right has the power of media to influence the dialogue and agenda and decision-makers, and because of whatever else, nobody wants to be caught in the middle. When President Obama talks about listening to both sides, for combatants on the left and probably on the right, it's code for caving in. Governing from the middle is wishwashy and weak to both sides, it seems. But President Obama is staking out not the middle but the center. He's centered on winning the future with common cause and common truth.

He addressed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which covertly raised millions to support GOPers and their now uncontrollable and often embarrasing Tea Partiers. Much of what he said was in his State of the Union. But he talked in more detail about one of the great bugaboos: gobment regulation. Yes, it was Ronald Reagan who rode this to prominence, and set various forms of deregulation and privatization in motion, most of which we've paid for dearly. But President Obama didn't talk about that. He talked about lessons for the future.

Unnecessary government regulation is dangerous. Apart from unnecessarily slowing things down and making them more expensive to do, the power bureaucrats have can easily be misused. So there are and should be arguments over what regulations are necessary.

But the Rabid Right has pushed the button that says you get everything for free by having no government programs and no regulations. All (or nearly all, depending) regulations are wrong. This gets people elected, and it makes it easier for unscrupulous people to get very rich by ignoring everything but their own profits. But capitalism and democracy, capitalism and a healthy society, cannot coexist without regulations to make sure all businesses play by the same rules, and none gets a competitive advantage by, for example, skimping on health and safety. They cannot coexist without government investments in what no business or group of businesses can afford to do, which is create the infrastructure--the roads, water systems, air and rail systems, etc.--that the entire society depends on, including businesses but also individual citizens. The same goes for necessary functions like kinds of education and research that aren't always profitable enough for businesses to care about. But society needs them to exist and advance.

President Obama made the case on regulations in this way:

"Even as we eliminate burdensome regulations, America’s businesses have a responsibility as well to recognize that there are some basic safeguards, some basic standards that are necessary to protect the American people from harm or exploitation. Not every regulation is bad. Not every regulation is burdensome on business. A lot of the regulations that are out there are things that all of us welcome in our lives.

Few of us would want to live in a society without rules that keep our air and water clean; that give consumers the confidence to do everything from investing in financial markets to buying groceries. And the fact is, when standards like these have been proposed in the past, opponents have often warned that they would be an assault on business and free enterprise. We can look at the history in this country. Early drug companies argued the bill creating the FDA would “practically destroy the sale of … remedies in the United States.” That didn’t happen. Auto executives predicted that having to install seatbelts would bring the downfall of their industry. It didn’t happen. The President of the American Bar Association denounced child labor laws as “a communistic effort to nationalize children.” That’s a quote."

None of these things came to pass. In fact, companies adapt and standards often spark competition and innovation. "

President Obama got an example from his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu: refrigerators. Refrigerators were a key item in the consumer economy revolution of the 1950s. That's Betty Furness up there, one of the first to effectively use the medium of television to sing the praises of new refrigerators. But the latest innovations didn't happen because of Betty Furness.

"But he started talking about energy efficiency and about refrigerators, and he pointed out that the government set modest targets a couple decades ago to start increasing efficiency over time. They were well thought through; they weren’t radical. Companies competed to hit these markers. And they hit them every time, and then exceeded them. And as a result, a typical fridge now costs half as much and uses a quarter of the energy that it once did -- and you don’t have to defrost, chipping at that stuff -- (laughter) -- and then putting the warm water inside the freezer and all that stuff. It saves families and businesses billions of dollars.

So regulations didn’t destroy the industry; it enhanced it and it made our lives better -- if they’re smart, if they’re well designed. And that’s our goal, is to work with you to think through how do we design necessary regulations in a smart way and get rid of regulations that have outlived their usefulness, or don’t work. I also have to point out the perils of too much regulation are also matched by the dangers of too little."

This is not scoring political or ideological points. It's about what works, and being serious about what we need to be considering and debating and doing, if we're going to deal with the future, let alone win it.

We also may be unused to measuring the benefits of regulations in a broad enough way. Junayd Mahmood, a Center for American Progress energy intern, assembled these amazing facts:

"Studies demonstrate that the costs of environmental regulations are miniscule compared to the benefits to Americans. In a study assessing the net benefit of the Clean Air Act, the EPA determined that Americans gained $21.4 trillion in health and environmental benefits between 1970 and 1990. The Clean Air Act prevented 205,000 premature deaths and millions of cases of asthma, heart disease and child IQ loss. According to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, the Clean Air Act “returns $40 dollars in health and environmental benefits for every dollar of compliance costs.” Rather than tax future economic growth, benefits are expected to grow further. A 2010 EPA study predicts that the Clean Air Act will produce health, environmental and productivity benefits valued at $2 trillion in the year 2020."

There is not much conflict in these facts. They are a public good. But our political and media and ideological environment is so sensationalistic and toxic that we can't deal with this on those terms: of what helps this society work, every day and to meet the challenges of the future. The toxic blatherers in Washington and their media minions certainly don't want anyone to think about how the Obama federal government saved the U.S. auto industry, and thousands of jobs directly, and millions of jobs indirectly and in the future, and did so by getting the industry and labor centered on what they needed to do. Now GM has paid back almost all of its loans to the federal treasury, and is well on the road to prosperity.

It's worth noting, for the partisan politics and ideologically obsessed, that to the Chamber of Commerce President Obama defended regulations that protect workers and their ability to make a living, as well as his Recovery Act, his planned investments in education and energy innovation and infrastructure, and even his health insurance reforms, on this same basis:

"We simply could not continue to accept a status quo that’s made our entire economy less competitive, as we’ve paid more per person for health care than any other nation on Earth. Nobody is even close. And we couldn’t accept a broken system where insurance companies could drop people because they got sick, or families went into bankruptcy because of medical bills.

I know that folks here have concerns about this law. And I understand it. If you’re running a business right now and you’re seeing these escalating health care costs, your instinct is if I’ve got even more laws on top of me, that’s going to increase my costs even more. I understand that suspicion, that skepticism. But the non-partisan congressional watchdogs at the CBO estimate that health care tax credits will be worth nearly $40 billion for small businesses over the next decade -- $40 billion, directly to small businesses who are doing the right thing by their employees."

President Obama hasn't changed, even if perceptions of him are changing. But perhaps he's making it clearer: He is not middle of the road, nor is he ideological and clueless. He is centered on the future.

Our Common Wealth

From the first day I stepped into a library, as a gradeschooler entering a fairly modest brick building on South Main Street, to pretty much every time I walk through the stacks, following the coded numbers that will lead me to the magic of an unknown book in the (public) university library some three thousand miles from there, I've felt it all as a kind of miracle, outside the normal rule. How could I have such free access to all this wealth? I suppose I always knew they were going to take it away.

This wealth has been the birthright of Americans for generations now. The public library in particular was once a mark of the progress of our civilization as well as a shining product and exemplar of our democracy. I suppose part of what made it so unlikely to exist, even in my child's mind, was that it was supported by so many people who seldom if ever used it. But it was valued and supported. And they were right--for their children may have used it, or others who used it and the knowledge there would provide for the town in many different but ultimately substantial ways.

But municipalities of all sizes are cutting back on services, and libraries are often victims. So it happened that some hard-pressed towns heard the siren song of privatization--you know, since it works so well in health insurance--and the library was put in corporate hands. Then the next step--and a financially healthy town in California privatized, leading to some cries of outrage.

If I ever had any doubt about the effect of privatization on libraries, I only would need to listen to the CEO of the company taking over, which specializes in libraries, as quoted in the New York Times:

There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”


Yes, somehow they have. Somehow they are sacred organizations. That seems to make him pretty mad. He mocks the idea. He sounds like somebody out of Dickens--if I might make a literary allusion to a fellow who lives chiefly in libraries.

I don't know the specifics of this union situation in Santa Clarita, but this doesn't sound like the librarians I've known:“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

The Mayor says this is not true privatization, because the library stays open to the public. Privatization always seems sweet at first, however, until the real profit motive shows up--usually when a corporation gets control of enough of the "business," that is, the libraries. Then watch out.

The consequences of the corporate predation known in corporatespeak as privatization has more obviously cruel consequences than taking over libraries, as the recent situation I mentioned at the end of the earlier "Follow the Money" post--the family watching their house burn, with their pets dying inside, because they hadn't paid the $75 fee for fightfighters, who stood beside them and let it all burn. While perhaps not precisely a privatization example, it suggests where it is going.

But while the cruelty of closed or restricted or profit-oriented libraries may not be so obvious, the example of libraries makes one aspect of privatization crystal clear: it is a corporate threat to our common wealth, to profit a few.

There are other pressures on the library, like this machine I'm using at the moment. But that's more a result of human folly, a little more correctable and open to argument than the corporate grip. I suppose if the library goes, I won't actually be surprised. I'm too surprised it's still there every time I'm there. It's lived not only because people dreamed it and worked to build it and keep it going, but because people like Mr. Pezzanite were restrained by at least some strong belief in the library and what it stands for as, yes, a sacred--public--institution.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Barack Obama on Friday shocked some, and inspired the usual if still ugly and disappointing vituperation of the Rabid Right. It also surprised many, including the President, and so in the first blush some called it "ridiculous" and emphasized how early it was in his presidency. Many voices have since justified it, partly on the basis of the tradition of the Peace Prize (as Rachel Maddow so ably did in the clip embedded below) and on the change that President Obama brought in such a short time to the international dialogue and especially, America's role in the world. But I think everyone is still slightly missing the point.

Yes, it was a surprise--which the Nobel Committee obviously knew it would be. So why? Why did the Nobel Committee take this surprising step? Why did they choose to single out the American President after only nine months in office? Why did that recent survey suggest that America has become more admired internationally because of Barack Obama?

The answer that everyone is missing is urgency. The Nobel Committee didn't just hand out an award---it stood up and screamed, pay attention to this man! Many European leaders in politics, sciences, professions, etc. and many leaders around the world, all understand that the future survival of the planet hangs by a thin thread. That progress must be made quickly on controlling and ending nuclear weapons, negotiating agreements that are just to all sides in areas of the world where conflict could be imminent and would be catastrophic, and especially that the world's great nations must band together to lead a rapid response to the Climate Crisis before it is too late for the future of human civilization.

This award is the diplomatic, international community equivalent of standing on the table, jumping up and down and shouting: this is our last best hope! This is the fierce urgency of now!

They know what American leadership still can mean. They know what President Obama is up against in this country. Political leaders told him at the G20 in Pittsburgh that they couldn't understand the attacks on him as one kind of radical or another, when he would be comfortably centrist in any other western democracy. They don't understand that the wealthiest nation on earth is undermining its own economy while failing to meet its responsibilities, when it remains alone in not supporting universal health care. They are afraid of a nation with such a powerful military machine and yet so careless about violence that citizens wear guns to a political rally, and that children gun down other children in the streets, while apparent adults oppose the most rudimentary controls on deadly firearms. They saw the same gunslinger attitude rend the world for eight dangerous years.

The Prize is an official anguished cry on the Climate Crisis. They awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, and America still didn't get the point. In the UK, our closest cultural and political ally in Europe, conservatives compete with liberals and Labourites on devising and implementing the most effective and most urgent measures to address the Climate Crisis. Now China is beginning to move its massive state machinery to address it--and to corner the market on the renewable energy technology of the near future. Now India seems to see the light.

But they need and want America to be part of this, and they see President Obama as the key to American leadership and American cooperation, and the return to American responsibility in the world. They know these problems are urgent, most of them made far worse by American actions in the past eight years, and they are telling us how important it is that President Obama be successful.

They look at this country and our media-fueled self-renewing cyclones of distraction, our 24/7 locust plagues of pettiness, our twittering fits of trivial obsessions, our instant acting out and the dead slogans nailed to our identities and shouting matches, and they're crying out: we value this man, the world desperately needs him as your leader, we hear him, why can't you listen to what he's saying? Can't we please focus?

The Nobel Peace Prize was exactly as President Obama said: a call to action. And what we're missing is that it was a decorously desperate, very loud, very urgent call. Maybe we should listen.

Drawing the Tan Line Against Terrorism

Here's the latest on our government's war on terrorism from Reuters:

A Texas golf course, a Nevada tanning salon and an Illinois candy shop were among small businesses that may have improperly received U.S. subsidized loans intended for firms hurt by the September 11 attacks, an internal government watchdog has found.

Did terrorists secretly attack a tanning salon, and we weren't told about it? Is no one safe getting a few artificial rays? What is this country coming to when you can't tee up in peace? Attacking golf is attacking the heart attack of America!

Well, not that simple. It seems:

The tanning salon's lender blamed the September 11 attacks for hurting the Las Vegas casino industry which employed many of the salon's customers.

So do the watchdogs bark at the absurdity of compensating a tanning salon for 9-11? Not exactly. It's not the absurd and outrageous claim that bothers them. It's finding out that it wasn't even true.

However, the inspector general found the salon's business had grown by 52 percent in 2001 and 32 percent in 2002 and said there was no evidence the owner could not borrow outside of the program. The SBA guaranteed $437,000 in loans to the salon, which were used to expand.

As for the golf course:

The report's examples included the Texas golf course, whose owner was cited by a lender as saying "people were more interested in staying home and watching the attack on television than playing golf."

However, the course was owned by someone else when the attacks took place and the justification for the $480,000 in loan guarantees did not apply to the new owner, the report said.

This was all under a one-year, $4.5 billion program, the Supplemental Terrorist Activity Relief, or STAR, which provided loan guarantees to small businesses adversely affected by the September 11 attacks. Or who made such claims, however outrageous. For the agency's inspector general found that in 85 percent of the sample of loans it reviewed, a company's eligibility to receive the money through the program could not be verified.

The Small Business Administration still insists it acted properly, but added that it has told lenders it will not honor guarantees on defaulted loans that fail to document the September 11 link. Yeah, that would be too much.

Still, it's heartening to know that while sick people will be sacrificing their health for the cause as Medicaid and Medicare cuts go through, and students will sacrifice their education if they can't replace the federal loans that were cut, at least a Texas golf course is getting back the money lost when people selfishly watched their fellow Americans die and the Twin Towers come down, instead of doing their patriotic duty out on the fairway.

Captain Future's Log

New Orleans Christmas: Heroes and Villians

"Amid ruins, volunteers are emerging as heroes" is the headline of the story by Anne Rochell Konigsmark and Rick Hampson in USA TODAY. It begins:

In his 67 years, Howard Peterson had never seen a Mennonite. But 11 days before Christmas he stood in the ruins of his kitchen, watching a crew of them gut and clean his flood-ravaged house.

Peterson and his wife couldn't afford to pay a contractor several thousand dollars to gut the one-story house, which sat in water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina inundated the working-class Gentilly district. So Peterson, who looks too frail to do spring cleaning, began trying to clear out the house himself. Then the Mennonites came by and offered a hand.

"I can't thank them enough," he says. But he also wonders when the professionals - city, state and federal agencies - will do their part. "They should be trying to repair the city."

The story highlights a number of NGO's (non-governmental organizations, including those we know of as charities) that are doing vital work that the government is not. In one sense, it is a perfect holiday story, about the willingness to help and can-do spirit of the people, rather than the impersonal government.

The Gulf Coast in general and New Orleans in particular have at times felt abandoned by the American government. But they haven't been abandoned by Americans, who have volunteered by the thousands to clear out houses, collect trash, fight mold, cover roofs, feed the hungry, tend to the sick and help in any way they can.

Partly because politicians continue to dither, bicker and accuse, non-governmental organizations - "NGOs" ranging from large, non-profit agencies to church youth groups - are emerging as heroes of the recovery effort.

Habitat for Humanity, whose Operation Home Delivery has been building houses across the nation for shipment to the Gulf Coast, received an 85% "positive" rating for its post-hurricane work in a national Harris Poll released in November. FEMA, in contrast, got a 72% "negative" rating.

In New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward, FEMA is so unpopular that its workers have been heckled and threatened. Some stopped wearing anything that identifies their agency.

Why are these organizations succeeding where government agencies are failing? The article says this:

Past crises generally have established the limits of non-government action; private charity proved insufficient to cope with the Great Depression, for example. This crisis seems to have a different lesson: Volunteers, outsiders and amateurs can help fill a void created by what Amy Liu, an urban policy expert at the Brookings Institution, calls "a lack of leadership across all levels of government."

"There's a general sense that the charitable sector has the touch needed, a better feel for the communities affected," says Paul Light, a New York University government analyst.

The article cites these reasons:

• Government lost the public's confidence after the hurricane and will have a hard time regaining it. "That leaves the non-profits," says Tiziana Dearing of Harvard's Hauser Center for Non-profit Organizations.

• The disaster's scope stretches even well-functioning government agencies, inviting involvement by NGOs that normally focus on the neediest victims - the poor and elderly.

• Lacking government's power, money and size, non-profits often are more sensitive to people's needs. "We listen before we do anything," King says.

• NGOs are relatively nimble - an important asset if, as seems likely, the Gulf Coast will recover a block or a neighborhood at a time. "It's easier for light-footed individuals to move things forward than a government bureaucracy," says Greta Gladney, a community activist whose home in the Lower 9th Ward has been rehabbed by ACORN volunteers.

All of this is probably true. But the article and its analysis leave out other important points. Government agencies like FEMA have been effective in the past. Why aren't they now? A great deal of responsibility for that must be borne by the Bush administration, and earlier Republican administrations, that bled dry the funding for public services conducted by or organized by government---by directly cutting budgets of federal agencies and programs, and by indirectly bleeding state and local governments.

Why did they do this? The "philosophy" as stated was that government is inefficient, but private enterprise has the incentive of efficiency to keep costs down and get the job done, because their profits depend on it.

Certainly the bled dry government agencies have largely failed, especially FEMA and the monstrous money-eating disaster called Homeland Security, where the corporate model meant "branding" the agency was more important than actually addressing its mission and tasks, as a Washington Post series is revealing.

But the real story here is the failure of private contractors in New Orleans to do anything but pig out on fat no-bid government contracts, leaving the real work to non-profits.

It's the same lesson as Iraq, where much of what the military used to do is being ineptly and expensively done by private contractors, who operate above the law (sound familiar?) and at least some of whom are stealing American taxpayers blind.

It isn't government that has failed New Orleans. It's the Bush government, and its policy of rewarding its corporate pals. It's privatization and the corporate model to do the public's business that has failed.

A Private Little War


Sunday Telegraph

from 'Trophy' video exposes private security contractors shooting up Iraqi drivers
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent

A "trophy" video appearing to show security guards in Baghdad randomly shooting Iraqi civilians has sparked two investigations after it was posted on the internet, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The video has sparked concern that private security companies, which are not subject to any form of regulation either in Britain or in Iraq, could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Iraqis.

The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on "route Irish", a road that links the airport to Baghdad.

The road has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous in the world because of the number of suicide attacks and ambushes carried out by insurgents against coalition troops. In one four-month period earlier this year it was the scene of 150 attacks.

In one of the videoed attacks, a Mercedes is fired on at a distance of several hundred yards before it crashes in to a civilian taxi. In the last clip, a white civilian car is raked with machine gun fire as it approaches an unidentified security company vehicle. Bullets can be seen hitting the vehicle before it comes to a slow stop.

There are no clues as to the shooter but either a Scottish or Irish accent can be heard in at least one of the clips above Elvis Presley's Mystery Train, the music which accompanies the video.

Last night a spokesman for defence firm Aegis Defence Services - set up in 2002 by Lt Col Tim Spicer, a former Scots Guards officer - confirmed that the company was carrying out an internal investigation to see if any of their employees were involved.

The Foreign Office has also confirmed that it is investigating the contents of the video in conjunction with Aegis, one of the biggest security companies operating in Iraq. The company was recently awarded a £220 million security contract in Iraq by the United States government. Aegis conducts a number of security duties and helped with the collection of ballot papers in the country's recent referendum.


The video first appeared on the website www.aegisIraq.co.uk. The website states: "This site does not belong to Aegis Defence Ltd, it belongs to the men on the ground who are the heart and soul of the company." The clips have been removed.

Capt Adnan Tawfiq of the Iraqi Interior Ministry which deals with compensation issues, has told the Sunday Telegraph that he has received numerous claims from families who allege that their relatives have been shot by private security contractors travelling in road convoys.

He said: "When the security companies kill people they just drive away and nothing is done. Sometimes we ring the companies concerned and they deny everything. The families don't get any money or compensation. I would say we have had about 50-60 incidents of this kind."
A spokesman for Aegis Defence Services, said: "There is nothing to indicate that these film clips are in any way connected to Aegis."

Last night a spokesman for the Foreign Office said: "Aegis have assured us that there is nothing on the video to suggest that it has anything to do with their company. This is now a matter for the American authorities because Aegis is under contract to the United States."

A Private Little War II

Los Angeles Times

from "A Journey That Ended in Anguish "

By T. Christian Miller

One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations.

Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.

On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation.

In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops. Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.

In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions. Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.

The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.

A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."

Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded." However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing.

The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report."This is a mess … dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.

The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain."The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.

By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.

His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command. Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home.

His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death."I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."

On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.

At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls. Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset."He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted.

Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed."I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.

Then there was the note. Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.

Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land."I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored."Death before being dishonored any more."

A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."

Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.

Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.

"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."

Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.

She answered:"Iraq."

Captain Future's Log

Watching A Car Wreck Is Not An Agenda

Chris Bowers at My DD writes that no President has recovered from poll numbers like those Bush is getting (including two new ones over the weekend and Monday.) T. Goddard's Political Wire had an item about research from James Carville and Stan Greenberg which shows an opening for Democrats because of Bushcorps fall from grace.

An opening, yes, but who is going to go through it? And how? And even, why?

So far it seems Democrats have watched Bushcorps self-destruct. Tom Gilroy warns that Bushcorps isn't going to simply roll over and be dead. He reminds everyone that they are" a gang of fanatics who stole two elections in a row, invaded a country they knew couldn’t defend itself, and gave a male hustler White House security clearance." And they will continue their usually successful tactics of character assassination and Newspeak redefinition.

Sure enough, Bush is out on the hustings naming Democrats like Kerry and Harry Reid as traitors giving aid and comfort to the enemy with their criticisms of the king in wartime. It worked before. (See the New York Times editorial excerpted below for the truth.)

In the meantime, their demonic work goes on in Congress and through the Executive branch, with hoped-for help apparently coming from the courts, especially the Supreme Court in the future. As Gilroy writes, "As long as Democrats and their well-fed punditocracy measure Bush, et al with a yardstick of morality, popularity or ethics, they will never recapture the majority, and here’s why; Bush, et al aren’t driven by morality, popularity, or ethics. They’re driven by money."

But since you've read the Captain's log on privatization, you knew that.

Now that there's an opening, it becomes especially clear that the Democrats don't seem to have anybody ready to go through it, at least in terms of 2008 presidential candidates. Though John Kerry is more eloquent and forthright now, he is regarded as damaged goods, and the party would be nervous about returning to him, mostly because of a few evidences of bad judgment in who he depended on to run his campaign, and their advice (especially about his early concession.) Al Gore is liberated and becoming of all things a passionate orator, but has no organization or intention of running, and there seem to be too many hopefuls out there to allow him to play catch-up.

In the meantime, those named as hopefuls are a pretty undistinquished lot, mostly middle of the road milksops with all the eloquence, intellect and charisma of an electric shaver, or veterans of Washington politics who have run before and lost. Hillary Clinton has amassed the most money and has the best known name, but she's not getting much emotional commitment with her stand on the war.

In the meantime, John McCain is perfectly positioned to be a very strong Republican candidate. He's well known, well liked, and he's distancing himself from Bushcorps on key issues so he'll be one of the few clean Republicans when more of the whole sordid story is told. He's positioned to lead a reform movement within the Republican party and to bring independents to him. Right now the Democrats don't appear to have anyone with his stature who is as good a candidate. And as we all learned twice in this decade, no Democrat is going to win a close election. That's what the Supreme Court and computer voting machines are for.

So 2008 is not necessarily the Promised Land, though fortunately there's a lot of time yet. But Democrats shouldn't be waiting around, or jockeying for position in the presidential sweepstakes. Their job is to retake Congress next year, and that's what they need to be focusing on.

Democrats should be articulating a solid set of principles, positions and policies, right now.

Fortunately for them, Captain Future is on the job. The emphasis here is going to be on the future, and on what needs to be done. It'll mean resisting the temptation to highlight even the most stupendous of Bushcorps outrages, at least outside the context of what needs to be done. It will probably take more time as well.

But you haven't really been keeping up with everything written and reproduced on this site anyway, have you? Maybe less is more. We may see.

Captain Future's Log

Fox in the Henhouse, Wolf at the Door

Sure, we're all sick to death reciting the tragic actions, bold and destructive deceptions and mind-boggling mistakes of Bush Corps, and sick to death of hearing them. But we aren't being inundated only by Bush-bashing as politics or as Internet sport. There is real damage being done. One by one, our public institutions are being dismantled, corrupted and destroyed. Our ability to respond to the challenges of the future, which could become crucial at any moment, are being greviously wounded if not utterly demolished.

Think Katrina. Think FEMA. And if anyone believes that private corporations are up to the challenge, they've earned an all expenses paid vacation in Iraq, where the privatization of war and intelligence gathering has resulted in one disaster after another, even given that it was a fool's errand to begin with.

A lethal combination of ideological dogmatism, cronyism and corruption has led to psychotic priorities and actions. The evidence is hitting hard every single day.

The worst is that it affects institutions and offices that even ideological, politically and economically corrupt and crony-prone leaders of the past have been sane enough to leave alone. Like public health. Transportation. The Army.

Iraq is the playground for psychotic priorities based on ideological dogmatism and a truly frightening ignoring of facts that contradict those priorities and assumptions when they conflict with the ideology. The tragic harm has been done to the people of Iraq, to American soldiers (and those of other countries) and families, to American prestige, and by creating new reasons for terrorism and a huge training ground for terrorists---all of this damages our present and our future.

We also saw what the Iraq war has done to our National Guard and its ability to do its historic job that Americans depend on the Guard to do, when its personnel and equipment were in Iraq instead of Louisiana and Arkansas in the aftermath of Katrina. Now there are fears for what it is doing to the armed forces.

Bob Herbert wrote this in the NY Times: "The Army, for example, has been stretched so taut since the Sept. 11 attacks, especially by the fiasco in Iraq, that it's become like a rubber band that may snap at any moment. ..Last December, the top general in the Army Reserve warned that his organization was "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force" because of the Pentagon's "dysfunctional" policies and demands placed on the Reserve by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As one of my colleagues at The Times, David Unger of the editorial board, wrote, "The Army's commitments have dangerously and rapidly expanded, while recruitment has plunged."

What happens when psychotic priorities are wedded to this administration's penchant for cronyism? Again we saw that in Katrina, and now we're seeing it in the potentially greater challenge of avian flu. As Jeremy Scahill reports in The Nation and on Democracy Now!, Bushcorps has "systematically de-funded" public health programs, specifically those that would prepare the nation for an avian flu threat, and provided massive funding for research into technologies to "fight a possible anthrax or smallpox attack, which almost no one in the public health or national security community was saying was an imminent threat, except people close to Dick Cheney." Specifically, Scooter Libby.

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, also interviewed on the same DN program by Amy Goodman, we are completely unprepared for any sort of health emergency.

Why not? "... the influence of politics and ideology and strategies to promote a particular point of view, undermining something that should have been above and beyond any kind of political consideration...The problem there, of course, is that the whole health care system is so fragile and so eroded over this last couple of decades that we don't even have that capacity in place right now to make anybody feel very confident that we can handle the number of people who might be affected by a pandemic flu. "

One reason for this now is that these efforts are being run by a Bushcorp crony, Stewart Simonson, who has no credentials other than being an ideological Republican. 'I mean, every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions," Dr. Redlener said. " But normally, typically, those people get – you know, they become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce, where, in effect, it really doesn't matter who's in those positions. What's striking about this administration, since they got into power, is the placement of people into critical positions, where the national security or the public health is at stake."

Here as in all actions by Bushcorps the cronyism and neocon foreign policy is all in the service of the ideology that began reshaping America in the Reagan administration: the destruction of public institutions, to be replaced by "private" corporations, with the purpose of profit, not public service or the public good.

This is clear in Bush's new flu initiatives, and Republican backed legislation called Bioshield 2. It would, said Scahill, "remove all corporate accountability and liability for pharmaceutical companies that manufacturer vaccinations -- vaccines that hurt people or kill people, and secondly it creates a federal agency that would be the only agency exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. "

"This whole thing has gotten so bizarre and Byzantine, "added Dr. Redlener," and permeated with this sort of electrifying high intensity politics and economics that the real goal of all of this, which is to literally make us safer in the event of a pandemic or any kind of major disaster, that gets lost in the shuffle. You can't even sort it out now. So even issues like the Bioshield bills, which are terrible bills, basically, for a variety of reasons..."

One of which is that this proposal does nothing to ensure there are mechanisms to produce vaccines and anti-viral medications when they are needed. In other words, the entire public purpose.

Bushcorps relentless push for privatization made news this week as well when the administration fired the president of Amtrak because he wasn't going along with their plans to break up and privatize pieces of the national railroad transportation system.

According to the New York Times, the man they fired, David Gunn, " is known as a rail-turnaround artist. He was brought in to fix the New York City subway system in the 1980's, and provided leadership in the construction of the subway system in Washington. "Just two months ago he was praised by the chairman of the same governing board that fired him: "Mr. Gunn has done, as far as I am concerned, a splendid job." He said Mr. Gunn had "righted a ship that was listing and about to spill over."

But Gunn wouldn't agree to their plans. "They want at least one transportation mode that is totally free market," Mr. Gunn said. But highways, airports and ports are all federally subsidized, he said, decrying "all this angst over an operating deficit of 500 million bucks for the whole country, and the bulk of money going into capital or infrastructure."

What's this relentless privatization about? "...the largest transfer of public wealth to private pockets in the history of this country, says Si Kahn, co-author of The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, interviewed this week on Democracy Now! He continued:

"We're seeing this in Iraq, where the goal of this administration is to see how much of the money that should be going to all sorts of other issues and other causes can be put into private pockets. Think Halliburton. Think Lockheed Martin. This is what is going on, and it is the undermining of public space, of the public good, of public welfare, is a deliberate strategy to undermine the ground that belongs to all of us: the common wealth, the commons, those things that create public good, that create a humane society."

Added his co-author, Elizabeth Minnich: "The most important thing to emphasize over and over again is precisely that shift from the public, that which belongs to us, services, goods, values that we have held dear, that we have government established to protect and to provide for us, being opened up to for-profit exploitation, in which case two things key happen. One is, goods that are supposed to be for the people, that we set aside, that we established as rights for the people, which is democratic to the core, being taken over by for-profit corporations for private pockets, dispersed away from the people most directly affected. This is anti-democratic in the extreme. "

But it's been consistently sold as simply a more efficient way to provide services the public wants and needs, using the invisible hand of competition, the magic of the marketplace, instead of bureaucratic waste and abuse.

And it's all a lie. "The whole notion that gets repeated time and again is that the privatizing corporations can do a better job," Minnich said. "People ask us this every time: 'But aren't they more efficient?' No, they do not do a better job. "

"And efficiency," Kahn added, "in corporate terms, means efficiency in generating a profit. It means efficiency in returning the maximum amount of money to the corporate directors and executives and to the majority shareholders."

And the result is, as everyone who say The West Wing debate knows, that wasteful government delivers health care through Medicare with administration costs of under 2% of revenue, while private health care insurance corporations typically devote a third or more to administration, not to mention lobbying and advertising.

We have done worse than letting the fox guard the henhouse, these authors say, we've invited them inside. Is there any wonder that our health care system is shambles, our privatized prisons and schools are a scandal, our privatized war is beset with expensive failure and lack of accountability for hired killers and torturers? Or that public institutions bled dry by ideologues of privatization can't meet their challenges? How can we be surprised when there are no chickens left?

Critics may claim that alarmists have been crying wolf over failures caused by ideologues, corporate greed and privatization, but we made it through the 80s and we're still here.

Eight years of Clinton slowed it down. But in 2005, after just five years of G.W. Bush, they should be reminded that even in the cautionary tale about the boy who cried wolf prematurely, the story ends when his cries are ignored, but unfortunately for everyone, the wolf finally comes.

When You Care Enough to Send the Very Worst: Halliburton Steals From Everyone

from "U.S. Should Repay Millions to Iraq, a U.N. Audit Finds"

New York Times By JAMES GLANZ

An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.

The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly.

Some of the work involved postwar fuel imports carried out by K.B.R. that previous audits had criticized as grossly overpriced. But this is the first time that an international auditing group has suggested that the United States repay some of that money to Iraq. The group, known as the International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, compiled reports from an array of Pentagon, United States government and private auditors to carry out its analysis.

The monitoring board authority extends only to making recommendations on any reimbursement. It would be up to the United States government to decide whether to make the payments, and who should make them. But Louay Bahry, a former Iraqi academic who is now at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the board's findings would stoke suspicions on the street in Iraq, where there had always been fears that the United States invaded the country to control its oil resources.

"Something like this will be caught in the Iraqi press and be discussed by the Iraqi general public and will leave a very bad taste in the mouth of the Iraqis," Mr. Bahry said. "It will increase the hostility towards the United States."

The audits may also come at a bad time for the Bush administration, since Vice President Dick Cheney's former role as chief executive of Halliburton has led to charges, uniformly dismissed by Mr. Cheney and the company, that it received preferential treatment in receiving the contracts. The early Kellogg, Brown & Root contracts in Iraq were "sole sourced," or bid noncompetitively.

"The Bush administration repeatedly gave Halliburton special treatment and allowed the company to gouge both U.S. taxpayers and the Iraqi people," Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a statement on the new audits. "The international auditors have every right to expect a full refund of Halliburton's egregious overcharges."

Some of those contracts were paid for with American taxpayer money, but others were financed by Iraqi oil proceeds. Because the monitoring board was created to oversee those proceeds, its audits focus only on the work that was financed with Iraqi money.

Other entries suggest the existence of $600,000 in ghost payrolling in the Electricity Ministry and additional evidence of bribes.

The K.P.M.G. audits also show ample evidence of the chaos that permeated the early reconstruction effort in Iraq, with paperwork on hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts won by firms other than K.B.R. that were lost or never completed, making it difficult or impossible to tell if the work was carried out properly.

Captain Future's Log

How to pay for Katrina Reconstruction---
“It’s Your Choice!”

The Republican Way (via “Operation Offset” and the Heritage Foundation):

Eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS and NPR, and
Eliminate subsidized student loans for graduate students, and
Eliminate funding for the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and
Terminate Legal Services, and
Close schools for children of U.S. soldiers, and
Cut grants for local responders, and
Cut healthcare for National Guard, and
Freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, U.N. peacekeeping operations and many third-world development programs, and
Eliminate the EnergyStar program to encourage energy efficient appliances, and
Eliminate grants to states and to local communities for energy conservation, and
Reduce federal subsidies for Amtrak, and
Eliminate funding for new light-rail programs, and
Cancel hydrogen fuel initiative, and
MORE....

or the Democratic Way (as proposed by Bill Clinton, Center for American Progress, etc.)

Repeal the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy (and have lots to spare.)

Throwing Money Into Chaos
"The trouble at federal agencies extends beyond emergency response. Aid is abundant, but prompt and accurate delivery is a problem."

Los Angeles Times [excerpts, emphasis added}

By Nicole Gaouette, Alan Miller and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The federal government's efforts to help victims of Hurricane Katrina have been hobbled by inadequate planning and coordination, troubled computer systems and confusion over who will pay the costs.

Interviews with federal officials indicate that recovery difficulties have gone beyond the Federal Emergency Management Agency and span key agencies in Washington, where top officials are trying to respond to a huge reconstruction problem for which they had no policies or plans. Large contracts are pouring out of agencies, but the task ahead involves issues Washington hasn't thought seriously about since the 1960s.

FEMA has continued to stumble, leaving tractor-trailers packed with ice and water intended for evacuees sitting out of position for days or sending them to places that had no need. And the agency's rushed efforts to deliver evacuee housing points up a lack of foresight and planning that could have long-term ramifications.

Federal officials responsible for programs designed to help the poor are tangled in questions about rules that vary from state to state. Families that received welfare in Louisiana, for instance, may not be entitled to payments in Texas, where they have been resettled. And almost everywhere, funds for programs such as Head Start were stretched thin before Katrina hit.

Not the New Deal

By PAUL KRUGMAN
from the New York Times
[excerpts:]

Now it begins: America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And the omens aren't good.

It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.

It's possible to spend large sums honestly, as Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated in the 1930's. F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.

How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful "division of progress investigation" to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed.

This commitment to honest government wasn't a sign of Roosevelt's personal virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.'s mission in office was to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission's credibility, he needed to keep his administration's record clean.

But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R.

President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.

Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith).

He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.

Captain Future's Log

How Bushcorp is Already Cashing In on Katrina Tragedies

"All that's missing from the Katrina story is an expensive reconstruction effort, with lucrative deals for politically connected companies,” Paul Krugman writes, comparing the Bush administration's response to Katrina with its efforts in Iraq in today’s column excerpted here, “ But give it time - they're working on that, too.”

Indeed they are, and we can only begin to count the ways.

A storm is growing around Joseph Allbaugh, the Bush-appointed FEMA director before the current one, Michael Brown. Allbaugh is a former campaign manager for GW Bush. After leaving FEMA in the care of Brown, his college roommate, he went into the lobbying business with former national Republican honcho Haley Barbour, now governor of Mississippi. He got his wife a gig in the firm, as well as Neil Bush, the Bush brother the family tries not to talk about.

Allbaugh is putting his disaster experience (gained entirely as head of FEMA, since he had no previous qualifications) to good use. On Democracy Now! Amy Goodman quoted the Washington Post as noting that Allbaugh is helping Louisiana,to ‘coordinate the private sector response to the storm.’”

Judd Legum, research director for the Center for American Progress, added this:. "And what's interesting is that Allbaugh actually beat Michael Brown, the current director of FEMA down to Louisiana. He was there far in advance of when Michael Brown came down, in Louisiana, essentially securing private contracts for his clients. And he recently, although the contract was signed before he started representing Halliburton, secured the agreement of the government to tap into that contract to clean up naval bases in the Louisiana area. So, he's already paying dividends for Halliburton, certainly, and probably will for a lot of his other clients as this very large disaster relief effort continues. "

This may not be just an ironic indication of where the Bushcorps priorities are. It may be an indication of why FEMA's response was so apathetic, and why FEMA initially spurned help from so many sources, both within the US and from outside. The whole idea may have been to turn over disaster relief to Bushcorp's corporate partners, like Halliburton. Again, pretty much as they've done in Iraq.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Allbaugh’s presence has also drawn the attention of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. Citing Allbaugh’s connection to Halliburton, "the government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests," said Danielle Brian, the group's executive director.

There’s potential for a lot of cashing-in. Of the $51.8 billion just allocated for Katrina zone relief, the Republican controlled Congress put $50 billion in the hands of Allbaugh’s roommate, Mike Brown at FEMA.

If Bush-backing corporations cash in on this as they did on all those billions spent on Iraq and Homeland Security, they’re likely to make out even better. President Bush issued an executive order that permits federal contractors in the Katrina zone to pay below the prevailing wage. That means less money for workers, and more of that $50 billion for Bush’s greedy corporate pals. It is also likely to mean the kind of substandard work that has kept Iraq unreconstructed.

Two Democrats immediately protested. "The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities," Rep. George Miller of California Miller said.

"One of the things the American people are very concerned about is shabby work and that certainly is true about the families whose houses are going to be rebuilt and buildings that are going to be restored," said Senator Ted Kennedy.

But Joe Allbaugh, Halliburton and Dick Cheney (who still profits from his Halliburton stock) aren’t complaining. Mike Brown may be a little upset that he’s only getting to funnel the money, but there’s a payday ahead for him, too, no doubt. And with his executive track record so far, Neil’s brother is going to need some help finding another job.

To the Privatization Elite: Prove It, or Get Out of Town

They’ve gotten away with this for far too long, living off the fantasies of their snake oil slogans, as well as their lies. Now is the time to call them on it all. If privatization of everything—-from prisons and schools to energy and water, and from health care to Social Security---is so great, let’s see you prove it.

There are enough examples out there now, some running for decades. Show us the money you saved. Show us the efficiency of the private sector, the magic of the marketplace in providing better and more affordable health care, cheaper energy, better schools at lower costs. Spare us the platitudes. Prove it. Prove that privatization works.

The policy of privatization emerged as one of the major mantras and most destructive changes that began in the 1980s and still threatens America’s future today. Privatization is another way that America turned itself inside-out, reversing what had been public with what had been private.

MORE HERE