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September 28, 2005
WB: Moore’s Law
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There is more: Lobbies Line Up For Relief Riches
With Congress dangling as much as $200 billion in hurricane-related aid, lobbyists for oil companies, airlines, manufacturers and others are clamoring to get their share.
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For example, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) is moving legislation this week, much of it recommended by lobbyists, that would waive regulations to help oil companies build new refineries.
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The oil lobbyists, like so many others, are using the storms as an excuse to win long-sought legislation, even when their plans relate only tangentially to the hurricanes.
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Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines Corp. are trying to include relief from their pension obligations in hurricane legislation this year.
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The Air Transport Association, the airlines’ trade group, .. wants Congress to waive for a year the 4.3 cent-per-gallon tax on jet fuel, a plan that would cost $600 million.
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Insurers have been using Katrina as an argument for approving their long-held top priority, an extension of the Terrorism Reinsurance Act (TRIA)..
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Farmers, even those outside the disaster zone, are begging for hurricane cash.
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The nation’s for-profit hospitals are trying to persuade Congress to carve an exception into a decades-old law specifying that only nonprofit institutions qualify for grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rebuild critical facilities after a natural calamity.
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The Travel Business Roundtable, a coalition of chief executives of hotel, restaurant and other travel-related companies, is campaigning for a host of grant, tax-cut and loan relief proposals ..
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In an e-mail to her clients in the mortgage business two weeks ago, [lobbyist] Canfield noted that with so much money flowing, “Why not have some of those funds be used to actually help the mortgage industry and its consumers?”
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A highway-building trade association is asking lawmakers not to reduce gasoline taxes as a way to help consumers. The reason: Lower gas tax revenues might squeeze the federal trust funds that are used to build roads and bridges.
Is there anybody not taking part in the looting?
ARMY NATIONAL GUARD SWEEPS
Receive 3 FREE iTunes music downloads when you sign up for the national guard? WTF?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 28 2005 18:16 utc | 3
Still, Boh’s contract is tiny compared to the billions that will flow to the giants of the industry: Halliburton, Bechtel and Flour.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army have budgeted at least 62.5 billion dollars in emergency aid for Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi — not including rebuilding the levees — creating a boom for construction companies.
“They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door,” James Albertine, a Washington lobbyist and past president of the American League of Lobbyists, told the New York Times.
“I’m sure every lobbyist’s phone in Washington is ringing off the hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money — and it’s only a down payment.”
“You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering — disaster profiteering,” said Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a non-profit government spending watchdog group.
She notes that Joseph Allbaugh, Pres. George W. Bush’s former campaign manager and a former head of FEMA, is now a lobbyist and consultant to both the Shaw Group and Halliburton. (Melissa Norcross, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said Allbaugh has not, since he was hired, “consulted on any specific contracts that the company is considering pursuing, nor has he been tasked by the company with any lobbying responsibilities.”)
Many, including Sen. Richard Durbin, “are worried because we hear about no-bid contracts in the Katrina areas going to the same companies that they went to in Iraq without the kind of accountability that we have to demand,” the Illinois Democrat told a public radio network in the U.S.
In Iraq, limited accountability, corruption, massive cost overruns and devastating failures fed the chaotic mess that has followed the 2003 fall of Baghdad. Nonetheless, the largest Katrina contracts have been won by many of the same politically connected companies that oversaw that failed reconstruction.
And it is perhaps no coincidence, since many of the same people in the Army Corps of Engineers are awarding them — and in much the same manner: as open-ended, no-bid or hastily bid contracts with guaranteed profit margins.
Corps commander Lt. Gen. Carl Strock and Brig. Gen. Robert Crear spent a good chunk of 2003 working on Project Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO), Halliburton’s now-infamous no-bid contract.
Strock was one of the five people who voted at a Sep. 1, 2003 secret meeting in Baghdad to pay Halliburton 500 million dollars out of Iraq’s own funds for the RIO project. No Iraqis were present for the vote despite the fact that the money came from their own coffers.
As the chair of the Feb. 26, 2003 Pentagon meeting at which this contract was drawn up, Strock had attracted some notoriety. Less than three weeks after it was signed, he and Crear posed with Halliburton crews for photo-ops at the Al Zubair oil fields in southern Iraq.
When whistleblower Bunnatine Greenhouse revealed the details behind the no-bid contracts that Halliburton had won in Iraq, Strock arranged to have her demoted, despite a string of excellent performance reviews in her 23 years of service.
Link in Homepage
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Sep 28 2005 18:17 utc | 4
opps, my last link should have been on b’s
Aaarrggghhh !!! post. sorry.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 28 2005 18:21 utc | 5
So it’s come to this has it.
First it was War, then it was Terror, and now, right on schedule, it’s the breached birth of the hideously disfigured ‘Disaster Profiteer’.
A thousand apologies….
Didn’t mean to do the whore-o-rama above, meant to link this.
Here’s the relevant ‘Terror Profiteering’ bit:
“A month ago, Fortress America Acquisition (FAACU.OB:OTCBB – news – research – Cramer’s Take), a so-called blank-check company dreamed up by (former congressman Tom) McMillen, raised $42 million in an initial public offering. The Bethesda, Md., start-up, whose only products are the resumes of its politically connected board, hopes to use those funds to buy a company that “contracts directly with the government on homeland security projects.
After the IPO, McMillen, Fortress America’s chairman, owns 6.6% of its stock. In the offering, Fortress America priced its shares at $6. Buyers into the IPO also got warrants to buy two additional shares.
The money raised in the IPO is being held in an interest-bearing bank account until Fortress America finds a company in the homeland defense space as a merger partner. But even as that search goes on, McMillen stands to score again with another homeland defense firm he helped found.
Last Friday, Global Secure, a company McMillen resigned from earlier this year, filed a registration statement for a $100 million IPO underwritten by Jefferies (JEF:NYSE – news – research – Cramer’s Take) and Morgan Keegan. McMillen, the former chief executive officer of Global Secure, owns 12% of the Washington, D.C., company’s stock.
….snip….
…Like Fortress America, Global Secure is banking on political connections to resonate with investors. Global Secure recently named L. Paul Bremer III, President Bush’s former Iraq envoy, to its advisory board. Other advisory board members include Mark Holman, a former deputy assistant on homeland security to President Bush; Richard Armey, a Texas Republican who served as House Majority Leader; and Howard Safir, the former New York City police commissioner.
Safir is chairman of another company trying to cash in on the homeland defense business, GVI Security Solutions (GVIS.OB:OTCBB – news – research – Cramer’s Take).
Some of the political notables aligned with Fortress America include former Sen. Don Nickles (R., Okla.), who was once chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Asa Hutchinson, former undersecretary for the federal Department of Homeland Security.”
ARMY NATIONAL GUARD SWEEPS
Receive 3 FREE iTunes music downloads when you sign up for the national guard? WTF?
———
Pssst. Hey Kids. Forget about those
lonely nights standing guard duty
in the green zone. I’ll tell you how
to get em for free!
Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 28 2005 20:12 utc | 9
Milo Minderbinder is looking on and smiling as his children uphold the family tradition.
Posted by: 4-fingers | Sep 28 2005 20:28 utc | 10
During the networking session Clint Black, still in Washington since the march, played. All the crows come home.
Posted by: christofay | Sep 28 2005 21:08 utc | 12
Oh Ferdzy: Thou hast been touched by his noodly appendage… ARGH!
Posted by: Diogenes | Sep 28 2005 21:28 utc | 13
I support the alliance of Apple and the National Guard, provided the 3 song downloads are the following:
John Lennon – I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier
Phil Ochs – One More Parade
The Perceptionists – Memorial Day
Posted by: Rowan | Sep 29 2005 0:32 utc | 15
Re: the I-Tunes inducement……
We up here in Canuckistan have had a bout of that ourselves….involves Corporateers from the local PhoneCo using IPods Of Evil to encourage union members to cross the line and become scabs during a lockout.
Kind of makes you wonder just what kind of Robert Johnson-ish type of deal ol’ Mr. Jobs made to get those little players onto the top-o-the heap anyway.
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This time, the following is a purposeful blogwhoring on the subject for anyone interested.
I’ve always felt that there’s a little bit of
omen in everything in life, especially in big-
ticket items like 9/11 attacks and double-bang
hurricanes in the Gulf oil patch.
Everyone talked about the market crashing after
the twin towers came down, but then everyone
shut up after Bush blew a super-typhoon of our
children’s deficit inheritance into Iraq, and
the market started back up again. We’re whores.
The news items were always there, even if they
didn’t grab the front pages: the economy, such
as it is, grew 10%, while the wages of 80% of
Americans fell by 1% in the same period, and
by -30% adjusted for devaluation and inflation.
But it was always the other guy, the guy on the
dark side of the economy who’s dragging US down.
Even as the national savings average sank below
the zero-zero surface, we were happily flipping
our real estate for the same house you’d have
paid $100,000 less a year ago, but it’s a game,
right? Flip into flip, blow and go. Nevermind
the surging property taxes, never mind the ARM’s
leaping in expense, just flip and blow.
Then Katrina came, and Rita, just to remind US
Katrina wasn’t only a fluke. The world can go
to hell in a hand-basket overnight. Good old
Michael Brown was there too, and Chertoff, to
remind US FEMA wasn’t just a fluke, the entire
system of American government is bankrupt.
Financially, and what’s worse, corrupted.
Corrupt, and what’s worse, run by lawyers.
Saint Bernard Parish *is* the United States!
We are all, on par, sinking below the surface,
begging for help. The Fed? They’re nowhere
to be found, except maybe flying over US from
30,000 feet, shaking their heads, or speaking
at some chi-chi NY restaurant, of ‘conundrums’,
and ‘froth’, and ‘irrational exuberance’.
As though the $2,500,000,000,000 these vampires
suck out of US every year is insignificant, not
the real issue. We should be strong, persevering,
carrying the vampiroyals happily on our flayed
backs, starving our children, feeding them on
TV and Ritalin, spending off their inheritance.
The faces of every single soul you saw on TV
crying out from the 9th Ward on their rooftops,
is *your* face. You just don’t know it yet. You
are walking blind into a hurricane. A sandstorm
of poverty, slavery and despair, both for US,
because we did nothing about it, and for the
rest of the world, because we let it happen.
The vampiroyals don’t care. They’ll pull in
their claws, and lick them, waiting for the
markets to change, investing in India, or
China, or Saudi, they don’t care. Hot money
knows no borders. It’s not their concern.
George Bush and his OMB ilk will bleed US of
another $2T or $3T, or whatever they can
steal, until foreign bondholders scream, and
our temple pillars crash down. Greed zombies
don’t care. It’s a Night of the Living Dead.
That’s all.
A little mote in God’s eye. A tear.
A splash of salt, become a whirlwind.
Every moment springs forth from a sigh.
Posted by: tante aime | Sep 29 2005 4:10 utc | 17