Quagmire was 0ften the term used by opponents to describe the American involvement in Vietnam; but no, this is not going to be another cliched comparison with Iraq. Rather, this is about New Orleans and the money pit that is now opening up.
President Bush has announced that we will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the Gulf coast, (New Orleans), at a time when we are already running hundreds of billlions of dollars in the red financing his War on Iraq. We must be very careful before we send politicians down there with barrels full of cash to make certain that this is not simply flushing money down the toilet or enriching a few at the expense of the many.
New Orleans is notorious as one of the most corrupt cities in the nation. The New Orleans police department has long been known to be rife with corruption. And, the incompetence of Mayor Ray Nagin is beyond dispute. Good Heavens! Last summer, Nagin announced to the city’s poor that if they were ever faced with evacuation, they were on their own as the city would not be able to evacuate them. Then, when the real thing hit, he sent bus drivers home the day of the hurricane to save money and told off-duty police not to show up until the day AFTER the hurricane! This is the kind of municipal administration to which we want to hand over billions of dollars?
Louisiana has a long and sordid history of corrupt politics. This is the state that continued to re-elect Edwin Edwards when he was under indictment, the man who said he would never lose an election unless he was found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. He was eventually convicted of corruption, but it took years to do so.
However, let’s not focus our fears of corruption and incompetence just on New Orleans and Louisiana. Friends of the Bush Administration are already lining up at the trough. Joe Allbaugh ran George W’s 2000 election campaign, for which experience it was deamed he was qualified to run FEMA. After leaving FEMA and suggesting a political crony from Oklahoma to be his successor, (the infamous and incompetent Mike Brown), he became a lobbyist and, guess what? After the first major disaster, two companies he represents, Shaw Group and Halliburton, (yes, the same Halliburton Dick Cheney ran and which received billions in no-bid contracts in Iraq), have received no-bid contracts for initial relief work. People connected to both companies were also significant contributors to the Bush campaigns.
The record defecits we are now running, after years of surpluses under President Clinton, are primarily being financed by Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Communist China. We are spending tens of billions of dollars in interest on those loans. Do the American people want to give away billions of dollars to China every year?
The rebuilding of the Gulf Coast is going to be a financial quagmire and if someone isn’t careful, it’s mostly going to be wasted.
