Blog Left: Critical Interventions Warblog (war blog, Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Bush, Gulf War II, left)

Salon.com News | The Hammer falls

the whole corrupt apparatus that funded Bush-Cheney-GOP Gang is going down. Here's a good account from Salon:
"The Hammer falls
It isn't just Tom DeLay. The vast corrupt money machine that funded the Republican Revolution is exploding before our eyes.

Rep. Tom Delay, R-Texas, talks to reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday after resigning as House majority leader.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michael Scherer

Sept. 29, 2005 | At its height, the first great political machine of the 21st century worked like this: In Congress, Texas Rep. Tom DeLay controlled the votes like a modern-day Boss Tweed. He called himself "the Hammer." His domain included a vast network of former aides and foot soldiers he installed in key positions at law firms and trade groups, a network that came to be called the "K Street Project." He gathered tithes in the form of campaign cash, hard and soft, and spread it out among the loyal. He legislated for favored donors. He punished those who disobeyed, and bought off those who could be paid.

Conservative activists, who had grown up in the heady days of Reagan's America, patrolled the badlands of American politics for new opportunities. None did it better than Jack Abramoff, a former president of the College Republicans, who had a taste for expensive suits. Abramoff opened a restaurant, Signatures, where the powerful came to be seen and, in many cases, treated to free meals from a menu that included $74 steaks. He pulled in tens of millions of dollars from Indian tribes and the Northern Marianas Islands to help fund other operations -- skyboxes at the MCI Center where DeLay could hold his fundraisers and all-expense trips to Scotland where DeLay and friends could play golf.

Others were drawn into the web as well. Abramoff kicked down money to his old college buddy Grover Norquist, an anti-tax crusader whose role was to keep the right-wing ideologues in line. He hired Ralph Reed, a former advisor to the Christian Coalition, who helped keep the religious right on good terms with the Republican leadership. He hired Michael Scanlon, a former aide to DeLay, as his assistant. He leaned on former lobbying colleagues, like David Safavian, who was working in the Bush administration and could do favors for his clients. Susan Ralston, Abramoff's former gatekeeper and executive assistant, went to work for Karl Rove in the White House.

For a while, the whole operation seemed unstoppable. DeLay, Abramoff, Norquist, Reed and Rove vanquished their Democratic opponents, winning election after election. The loyalty that ensued allowed for a historic cohesion in Congress. Tax breaks passed like clockwork, as did subsidies for favored industries and cuts to long-standing Democratic initiatives. The Democratic Party, which had ruled Capitol Hill for half a century, imploded in confusion.

But the machine may now be coming to an end. The prosecutors have arrived, and they are handing out indictments at a blistering rate. "It's a house of cards," says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Jack Abramoff has been the ace of spades, but Tom DeLay has been linked arm in arm with him." Now the house is on the brink of collapse, he added. "Everything that surrounded the K Street Project and what flowed from it ... all of that is under intense pressure."

On Wednesday, DeLay was indicted with two aides by a Texas grand jury, accused of flouting campaign finance laws by illegally sending corporate funds to GOP candidates in the state. Two months ago, Abramoff was arrested and charged with fraud in connection with a casino deal in Florida. On Tuesday, two employees of a company owned by Abramoff were charged with murdering the casino's former owner. Last week, the feds arrested David Safavian, who has been working in the White House, on charges of lying to investigators about a trip to Scotland with DeLay and Abramoff. Scanlon, the former DeLay aide who worked with Abramoff, is said to be cooperating with investigators, who are likely to file even more charges.

For those who have followed the machine from its inception, these developments are striking. "It represents the beginning of the end of an era," said Vic Fazio, a Democratic lobbyist at the law firm Akin, Gump and a former California congressman. "A powerful group of people who had consolidated their power in the mid- to late 1990s is now vulnerable to legal attack."

Even some conservatives have begun to distance themselves. "The Tom DeLay machine that he built, there were corruptive elements to it," said Stephen Moore, a longtime conservative activist who sat at the head table at a recent dinner celebrating DeLay's career. Moore, who founded the Free Enterprise Fund, still describes himself as a "Tom DeLay fan," who considers the congressman a "conservative hero." But he has misgivings as well. "All of these guys getting rich off this process rubs some conservatives the wrong way," Moore said. "It's going to be difficult for Tom to recover from this no matter what happens."

Though DeLay may not recover, his machine has not yet collapsed entirely. Late Wednesday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert appointed Rep. Roy Blunt, the Republican whip from Missouri and a disciple of DeLay, as the new majority leader. Republicans, meanwhile, began working to portray the torrent of indictments as politically motivated charges against one individual. "Tom DeLay is a tremendous public servant," said Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, in a statement. "It is our sincere hope that justice will remain blind to politics." DeLay also lashed out, as is his fashion, saying he was a victim of "one of the most baseless indictments in American history."

Perhaps the best news for Republicans is the relative disorganization of the Democratic Party, which remains weakened after the 2004 elections and lacks a unified message. Democratic politicians, like Rep. William Jefferson, of Louisiana, and Rep. Maxine Waters, of California, also face their own ethical scandals. As one congressional Republican, Arizona's Rep. Jeff Flake, boasted in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, "endemic Democratic ineptitude makes Republicans more attractive when graded on a curve."

But even if the collapse of Abramoff and the weakening of DeLay does not end the Republican reign, it will at least expose its workings. For years now, Republicans across Washington have been scratching each other's backs as they march in lockstep with a unified message. With each release of a subpoenaed e-mail, and every new indictment, more information about the workings of the machine -- and the money that was its lifeblood -- comes to light.

In recent weeks, for instance, Timothy Flanigan, a former attorney in the Bush White House, has been answering questions from Congress about his relationship to Abramoff. Flanigan, who has been nominated as deputy attorney general, went to work for the Bermuda-based corporation Tyco after he left the White House. Once there, he hired Abramoff as a lobbyist to reach out to Karl Rove on a tax issue. According to a report in the Washington Post, Abramoff boasted to Flanigan that "he had contact with Mr. Karl Rove" and that Rove could help fight a legislative proposal that would penalize U.S. companies that had moved offshore. Flanigan oversaw a $2 million payment to Abramoff for a related letter-writing campaign that never materialized. Flanigan says the money was diverted into other "entities controlled by Mr. Abramoff."

The charges surrounding DeLay also concern the misuse of money. The former majority leader is charged with raising $190,000 in 2002 from several major corporations, including Sears Roebuck, the Williams Companies and Bacardi USA. The indictment alleges that DeLay conspired to funnel that money through the Republican National Committee into seven Texas state campaign accounts, where he was helping Republican candidates as part of his effort to redraw Texas voting districts. If the charge is proven, DeLay and his associates would have violated a Texas campaign finance law that prohibits corporate donations to local races.

The ability of DeLay and Abramoff to collect and distribute enormous sums of money was always a key to their success. They used the money to buy friends and crush enemies. They used the money to fund the Republican revolution. As Abramoff told the New York Times in March, "Eventually, money wins in politics."

Those words form a perfect epitaph for a political machine gone awry"
Salon.com News | The Hammer falls

Posted by:
Douglas
at 9/29/2005 07:02:15 AM | Permalink

Katrina, Take 2

here's last version of my katrina analysis and crises of bush administration
Hurricane Spectacles and the Crisis of the Bush Presidency

Douglas Kellner

On the weekend of August 27-28, Hurricane Katrina hurtled toward the Louisiana coast. With winds up to 175 miles per hour it was deemed a Hurricane 5, the most dangerous on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The media had been warning that a big hurricane was going to strike the Gulf coast and was heading straight for New Orleans for days prior to its eventual landing on Monday, August 29. Reports had focused on the potentially catastrophic threats to New Orleans, noting how much of the city was perilously below sea-level and how flooding threatened its precarious levee and canal system that protected the city from potential catastrophe. There were copious media speculations that this could be “the big one,” prophesized for years and documented in government and media reports, warning that New Orleans could be devastated by a major hurricane. Accordingly, the mayor of New Orleans and state officials had ordered the city evacuated, while the Governor of Louisiana declared a “state of emergency,” putting the federal government in charge.
Despite all the warnings, there appeared to be utterly inadequate preparation in the days preceding the well-forecast hurricane and for days after it was apparent that this was indeed a major catastrophe. Although the New Orleans mayor ordered evacuation just before the storm was to hit, tens of thousands, mostly poor and black people, remained behind because they had no transportation or funds to leave the city. Tens of thousands of the remaining citizens were herded into the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center to ride out the storm, without proper food and water, sanitary facilities, police protection, or other basic necessities. Although the crowds survived the storm, which did not strike New Orleans directly, Hurricane Katrina wreaked tremendous damage and by Monday the 17th Street Canal levee was breached, others cracked, and 80-90% of the city lay under water.[i]
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath exhibited one of the most astonishing media spectacles in US history. Houses and towns along the Gulf coast in Louisiana and Mississippi were destroyed and flood surges wreaked havoc miles inland. New Orleans was buried in water and for several days, the crowds in the Superdome and Convention Center were not given food, water, or evacuation and there were reports of fighting, rape, robbery, and death. Indeed, no federal or state troops were sent to the city in the early days of the disaster, and thousands were trapped in their homes as the flood waters rose and there were widespread images of looting and crime.
Just as President Bush remained transfixed reading “My Pet Goat” to a Florida audience of schoolchildren after 9/11, a spectacle preserved on the Internet and memorialized by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, so too was the president invisible in the aftermath of Katrina (as he had been after the Asian Tsunami). Bush remained on a five-week vacation during the first days of the disaster punctuated by a visit to a private event in Arizona where he bragged about how well things were going in Iraq, comparing the war there that he initiated to World War II, inferring that he was FDR. The next day Bush was shown clowning at a fundraiser in San Diego, smiling and strumming a guitar, and again bragging about Iraq and touting his failed domestic policies, leading one commentator to exclaim:
The last few weeks have been irrefutable proof that America is being wrecked and mismanaged by the most incompetent, dangerous and out of touch boobs ever to obtain power. Any American with even a tiny amount of conscience who watched those images from New Orleans shook their heads with disbelief and shame that something like this should happen within our own borders in these modern times. As pictures of floating corpses glared at us through our TV sets, we were treated to photo-ops of our supposed leader golfing, blithering about Social Security, eating cake and strumming a guitar. Meanwhile, our Secretary of State shopped for shoes and took in a show while the Vice President shopped for a house in a ritzy Maryland neighborhood. [ii]
During Bush’s first visit to the disaster area, he made inappropriate jokes about how he knew New Orleans during his party days all too well and joked that he hoped to visit Republican Senator Trent Lott’s new house upon hearing that his beachfront estate was destroyed. In a fateful comment, Bush told his hapless FEMA director Michael Brown on camera: “You are doing a heck of a job, Brownie.” Bush’s first visit to the area kept him away from New Orleans and isolated from angry people who would confront him. His visit to the heavily damaged city of Biloxi, Mississippi was preceded by a team that cleared rubble and corpses from the route that the president would take, leaving the rest of the city in ruin. The same day, in an interview with Diane Sawyer, Bush remarked “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees” at a time when the media had circulated copious reports of previous warnings by scientists, journalists, and government officials concerning dangers of the levees breaching and catastrophic flooding in the city of New Orleans, much of which was dangerously below sea level.
Bush’s response to the catastrophe revealed all the weaknesses of the Bush presidency: immature frat-boy, good-old boy behavior and banter; political cronyism; a bubble of isolation by sycophantic advisors; an arrogant out-of-touchness with the realities of the sufferings his policies had unleashed; a general incompetence; and belief that image-making can compensate for the lack of public policy.
But the media spectacle of the hurricane, which dominated the US cable news channels and was heavily covered on the US network news, showed images of unbelievable suffering and destruction, depicting thousands of people without food and water, and images of unimaginable loss and death in a city that had descended into anarchy and looked like a Third World disaster area with no relief in sight. Images of the poor, sick, and largely black population left behind provides rare media images of what Michael Harrington described as “the other America,” and the media engaged in rare serious discussions of race and class as they tried to describe and make sense of the disaster. As John Powers put it: “Suddenly, the Others were right in front of our noses, and the major media — predominantly white and pretty well-off — were talking about race and class. Newspapers ran front-page articles noting that nearly six million people have fallen into poverty since President Bush took office — a nifty 20 percent increase to accompany the greatest tax cuts in world history. Feisty columnists rightly fulminated that, even as tens of thousands suffered in hellish conditions, the buses first rescued people inside the Hyatt Hotel. Of course, such bigotry was already inscribed in the very layout of New Orleans. One reason the Superdome became a de facto island is that, like the city’s prosperous business district, it was carefully constructed so it would be easy to protect from the disenfranchised (30 percent of New Orleans lives below the poverty line).”[iii]
Usually the media exaggerate the danger of hurricanes, put their talking heads on the scene, and then exploit human suffering by showing images of destruction and death. While there was an exploitative dimension to the Katrina coverage, it was clear that this was a major story and disaster and media figures and crews did risk their lives to cover the story. Moreover, many reporters and talking heads were genuinely indignant when federal relief failed to come day after day, and for the first time in recent memory seriously criticized the Bush administration and Bush himself, while sharply questioning officials of the administration when they tried to minimize the damage or deflect blame. As Mick Farren put it:
In the disaster that was New Orleans, TV news and Harry Connick were the first responders. It may well have been a news generation’s finest hour. Reporters who had been spun or embedded for most of their careers faced towering disaster and intimacy with death, and told the tale with a horrified honesty. When anchors like Brian Williams and Anderson Cooper waded in the water, dirty and soaked in sweat, it transcended showboating. It was the story getting out. Okay, so Geraldo Rivera made an asshole of himself, but I will never forget the eloquent shell shock of NBC cameraman Tony Zumbado after he discovered the horror at the Convention Center.
That CNN could function where FEMA feared to tread undercut most federal excuses and potential perjuries. Journalists who could see the bodies refused to accept “factuality” from Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, or even George Bush. Ted Koppel and Paula Zahn all but screamed “bullshit!” at them on camera.[iv]
The rightwing Republican attack machine first blamed the New Orleans poor for not leaving and then descending into barbarism, but it came out quickly that there were tens of thousands who were so poor they had no transportation, money, or anyplace to go, and many had to care for sick and infirm friends, relatives, or beloved pets. Moreover, the poor were abandoned for days without any food, water, or public assistance. The rightwing attack machine then targeted local officials for the crisis, but intense media focus soon attached major blame for the criminally inadequate public response on Bush administration FEMA Director Michael Brown. It was revealed that Brown, who had no real experience with disaster management, had received his job because he was college roommate of Joe Allbaugh, the first FEMA director and one of the major Texas architects of Bush’s election successes, known as the “enforcer” because of his fierce loyalty to Bush and tough Texas behavior and demeanor.[v]
Stories circulated about how Allbaugh gutted FEMA of disaster response professionals and packed it with political appointees, such as previous Bush team PR and media people. Allbaugh was part of Bush’s anti-government conservative coalition which cut back funding for FEMA, as the administration would later cut back plans to prepare disaster relief for New Orleans and cut federal funds to boost up its levee system. Allbaugh was FEMA director when 9/11 hit and quickly resigned, going into the public sector to advise corporations on how to deal with terrorism and then set up a business helping corporations get contracts in Iraq and security to protect their employees.
Meanwhile, Internet sources and Time magazine revealed that Brown had fudged his vita, claiming in testimony to Congress that he had been a manager of local emergency services when he had only had a low-level position.[vi] He had claimed he was a professor at a college where he was a student and generally had padded his c.v. Stories also circulated that in his previous job he had helped run Arabian horse shows, but had been dismissed for incompetence. After these reports, it was a matter of time until Bush first sent him back to Washington, relieving him of his duties, and allowing him to resign a couple of days later.
The media then had a field day scapegoating the hapless Brown who admittedly was a poster boy for Bush administration incompetent political appointees. But the top echelons of FEMA were full of Bush appointees who had fumbled and stumbled during the first crucial days of disaster relief and who were unqualified to deal with the tremendous challenges confronting the country. Moreover, Brown was blamed for a statement that he did not know there were tens of thousands of refugees stranded in the New Orleans Convention Center without food, water, or protection after pictures of their plight had circulated through the media. In fact, Michael Chertoff, head of the cabinet level Department of Homeland Security, had made the statement and the federal non-response could easily be blamed on his ineptness and failure to coordinate disaster response efforts.[vii]
Media images of the refugees left on their own in New Orleans and the surrounding area were largely poor and black, leading to charges that the Bush administration were blind to the suffering of the poor and people of color.[viii] While there was a fierce debate as to whether the federal response would or would not have been more vigorous if the victims were largely white or middle class people, readers of Yahoo news recognized that racism was blatantly obvious in captions to two pictures circulating, one of whites wading through water and described as “carrying food,” while another picture showing blacks with armloads of food described as “looters.” During NBC's Concert for Hurricane Relief Rapper Kanye West declared “George Bush doesn't care about black people,” and asserted that America is set up "to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible." West sharply criticized Bush’s domestic priorities and Iraq policy before NBC was able to cut away to a smiling Chris Tucker.[ix]
Bush’s presidential ratings continued to plunge as day after day there were pictures of incredible suffering, devastation, and death, and discussions of the utterly inadequate federal, local, and state response. While the U.S. corporate media had failed to critically discuss the failings of George W. Bush in either the 2000 or 2004 elections and had white-washed his failed presidency, for the first time one saw sustained criticism of the Bush administration on the U.S. cable TV news networks. The network correspondents on the ground were appalled by the magnitude of the devastation and paucity of the federal response and presented images of the horrific spectacle day after day, including voices from the area critical of the Bush administration. Even media correspondents who had been completely supportive of Bush’s policies began to express doubts and intense public interest in the tragedy ensured maximum coverage and continued critical discussion.
The Bush administration went on an offensive, sending Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and other high officials to the disaster area, but the stark spectacle of suffering undercut whatever rhetoric the Bush team produced. It was widely reported that Condoleezza Rice was on a shopping spree in New York buying $5000 plus pairs of shoes when the spectacle unfolded on TV and her first press conference during the disaster showed her giddy and bubbly, impervious to the suffering; to improve her image, she was sent to her home-state Alabama where photographers dutifully snapped her helping organize relief packages for flood victims.
While the Bush administration tried to emphasize positive features of the relief effort the images of continued devastation and the slow initial response undercut efforts to convey an image that the Bushites were in charge and dealing with the problem. Although the Bush team tried to scapegoat the poor, local officials, environmental groups, and even God,[x] it was clear that only the federal government had the resources to deal with the immensity of the tragedy and that the Bush administration had largely failed.
Bush’s claim that he would himself lead an investigation into what went wrong with the federal response to Katrina was met by ridicule,[xi] and although the Democrats attempted to mandate an independent government commission to investigate the failure, Republicans resisted and formed a committee of its own to investigate that Democrats refused to participate in.
After praising CNN and cable coverage of Hurricane Katrina, Nikki Finke describes how the US corporate media returned to their conservative agenda some weeks into the tragedy:
At first, only CNN appeared not to have thoroughly read the proverbial memo. It was the only network, on air and on its Web site, to compare and contrast the wildly contradictory statements by federal, state and local officials, sometimes within hours, but often within minutes of each other. It was CNN that posted the first full transcript of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s profanity- and passion-filled September 2 interview on local radio. It was also CNN that first exposed the gruesome nature of the conditions at the Superdome, at the convention center and in the hospital corridors. Its broadcasters were the first to keep a heart-wrenching online blog during Katrina. Even as late as September 6, political correspondent Ed Henry was the first to counter the claims by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay that local officials and not the feds were to blame, by reporting that congressional Republicans, in a secret confab, were giving the Bush administration a big fat F.Then the fix was in.On September 8, CNN anchorette Kyra Phillips was chewing into House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for “continuing to criticize the administration, and criticize the director of FEMA... I think it’s unfair that FEMA is just singled out. There are so many people responsible for what has happened in the state of Louisiana.”Instead of smiling through clenched teeth, the San Francisco Democrat bit back: “I’m sorry that you think it’s unfair. But I don’t . . . If you want to make a case for the White House, you should go on their payroll.”By September 12, even the White House admitted that FEMA had been its own disaster area by pushing out its Arabian-horseman-turned-jackass head, Michael Brown. (Bush finally admitted on Tuesday that the buck was going to stop with him whether he liked it or not. “To the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” he said.) That same day, CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, announced the hiring of DeLay’s chief of staff as a top Washington lobbyist. This news, and its timing, prompted Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy to tell the L.A. Weekly: “Time Warner aligning itself with the right-wing DeLay machine should send shudders [down] CNN and HBO. Clearly, TW wants DeLay insurance so it won’t have to face cable-ownership safeguards, à la carte rules and broadband non-discrimination policies.”For the first 120 hours after Hurricane Katrina, TV journalists were let off their leashes by their mogul owners, the result of a rare conjoining of flawless timing (summer’s biggest vacation week) and foulest tragedy (America’s worst natural disaster). All of a sudden, broadcasters narrated disturbing images of the poor, the minority, the aged, the sick and the dead, and discussed complex issues like poverty, race, class, infirmity and ecology that never make it on the air in this swift-boat/anti-gay-marriage/Michael Jackson media-sideshow era. So began a perfect storm of controversy.Contrary to the scripture so often quoted in these areas of Louisiana and Mississippi, the TV newscasters knew the truth, but the truth did not set them free. Because once the crisis point had passed, most TV journalists went back to business-as-usual, their choke chains yanked by no-longer-inattentive parent-company bosses who, fearful of fallout from fingering Dubya for the FEMA fuckups, decided yet again to sacrifice community need for corporate greed. Too quickly, Katrina’s wake was spun into a web of deceit by the Bush administration, then disseminated by the Big Media boys’ club. (Karl Rove spent the post-hurricane weekend conjuring up ways to shift blame.)[xii]
Karl Rove was reportedly put in charge of both the White House PR effort and reconstruction efforts and suddenly Bush was sent down to the disaster area every few days to make an appearance, hugging black people and showing that he cared and was in charge. Of course, these media visits were pseudo-events constructed to make Bush look presidential. NBC anchor Brian Williams's reported on his blog how he and the residents of New Orleans were plunged in darkness during one presidential visit, when suddenly all the electricity came on and everyone cheered and rejoiced. After Bush’s motorcade passed through to celebratory applause, electricity was suddenly cut, not to be restored, causing groans and dismissals of the president who found the political will to have electricity for his safe passage and stagecraft, but not for those still stuck in the city. Another visit showed Bush in Mississippi with shirt-sleeves rolled up, speaking to a man who seemed dazed and lost, wanting to know where he could find a Red Cross station which he had been searching for for days. A decisive Bush pointed down the road, declaring "there's one right down there," appearing to be on top of the situation. However, it was later reported that the man never made it to that station because it was just a theater prop and that "Red Cross stations" were popping up all over the South during Bush's visits, only to disappear the moment the camera left. His “visits” also diverted military and relief efforts to set creation instead of emergency assistance.
Three weeks after Katrina, Bush imagineers concocted a staged spectacle to attempt to make Bush look like a decisive leader. In an evening prime-time address to the nation, Bush was shown striding across the fabled Jackson Square in New Orleans with blue-background lighting and the famed St. Louis Cathedral in the background. The White House had brought generators to produce electricity for the shoot in the blacked out city, and had put up background patches of military camouflage netting to hide the president from the ghostly deserted streets of the French Quarter. But the long shot of Bush walking up to the podium made him look more like a small figure in an Antonioni movie, dwarfed by the environment and most deemed the speech as failed stagecraft. As Maureen Dowd put it:
All Andrew Jackson's horses and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.
In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?[xiii]
This was typical Bush administration image making: stagecraft over substance, and carefully planned spectacle to attempt to produce an image of Bush as a decisive leader. But the previous three weeks had shown that Bush was not a leader at all, but a front man for a regime based on cronyism, providing spoils from the treasury and government patronage jobs to their supporters and loyalists. Michael Brown of FEMA had been unveiled as totally unqualified for the job and had received it only because he was the roommate of Joe Allbaugh, who himself had dismantled FEMA and filled it with incompetent political appointees. As Douglas J. Amy put it:
Brown is just one example of an ongoing pattern of inappropriate and disturbing appointments by President Bush - appointments that threaten to undermine the basic functioning of many key government agencies.This administration's guiding political philosophy is that government is a bad thing and should be cut back to a minimum. It has a particular contempt for the federal bureaucracy, which it sees as the embodiment of "liberal big government." So it is hardly surprising that the administration has not made a great effort to ensure that the best-qualified people are running these agencies.But the situation is actually much worse than this. It is not simply that Bush put incompetent political hacks like Brown in place. He has also been appointing officials who are actually hostile to the agencies that they run. Many of them have political values and views diametrically opposed to the very missions of these agencies. For example, many of Bush's appointees to agencies charged with protecting the environment have been opposed to environmental regulations in particular, and government regulation in general. And many have come from businesses or conservative organizations that have fought against efforts at environmental protection.[xiv]
Not only did the FEMA fiasco reveal how Bush had put political hacks and rightwing ideologues throughout government, but it revealed his personal failings and those of his administration’s policies and ideology as well. As Frank Rich put it:
The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.
In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.
Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.[xv]
Bush’s speech revealed one of the most ambitious reconstruction efforts in US history, a two billion plus dollar effort that would provide bonazanas for the corporations and special interests that the Bush administration serve and that provide their financial support. It is an index of the administrations hubris and lack of shame that they instantly started pushing privatization a la Iraq to deal with Katrina debacle and put arch-rogue Karl Rove in charge of both the PR and the diving up the spoils for reconstruction, already going out to the usual suspects.[xvi] Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s former campaign enforcer and first FEMA chief who packed the agency with political hacks, was already getting contracts for his clients, while no-bid contracts were handed out to Halliburton’s subsidy Kellogg, Brown & Root. As Weldon Berger put it, “Rove’s overt involvement… marks the death of any hope that the recovery operation will become something other than a cesspool of cronyism and political pandering. The action manuals will be vote counts, the 2006 electoral map and Republican Party campaign contribution lists. The result will be a hedonistic political and fiscal binge Bremer could only have dreamed of” (op. cit.).
Berger recalls that under Paul Bremer’s command in Iraq, at least $16 billion of Iraqi oil money was misplaced, there were numerous no-bid contracts to Bush cronies and scandalous over-billing and corruption, and little accountability to the privatization binges and contracts to the politically connected. In his Jackson Square speech, Bush stressed that he would emphasize “entrepreneurship” and market-solutions to the Gulf Coast catastrophe, a code for supporting corporate allies and cutting-back on regulation and oversight of reconstruction. Already the Bush administration began pushing tax cuts for wealthy investors in the area, eliminating minimum wage requirements and environmental regulation, opening the way for pushing through yet another rightwing agenda, as they did after 9/11, and providing copious awards for political supporters and allies.
Yet the spectacle of the devastation and the inadequate response of the Bush administration may block or undercut Bush’s attempts to exploit the tragedy for his own political ends. The media continue to focus intensely on the destruction and hoped-for recovery, more and more people and journalists on the front-line are becoming increasingly skeptical of Bush, and his ratings have continued to go south after his Jackson Plaza speech and sketched ambitious plan for reconstruction.
Bush continued to insist that taxes would not be raised to pay for the reconstruction and weeks after the event he still would not concede his planned next round of tax cuts for the superrich, his expensive plans to privatize Social Security, or his deceptive Medicare plans that would provide a bonanza to drug companies. Hurricane Katrina, however, would focus attention on his policies and the outrageous level of federal debt they would incur, while benefiting largely special corporate interests and the rich.
Some speculated that the Katrina catastrophe and the failed Bush administration response signaled the death knell of the pro-market laissez-faire politics that had dominated the US for the past years. It was clear that global warming had contributed to the intensity of the hurricanes and other extreme weather that had been plaguing the world for the past several years. While there was a fierce debate whether global warming or cyclical hurricane patters were the major cause of the extreme weather, it is likely that both are to blame. The Bush administration’s dismissal of the science of global warming and blocking efforts to deal with the problem now appear criminally negligent. In addition, the deregulation that characterized neoliberal politics had been responsible for destruction of the wetlands, which traditionally helped buffet hurricanes and extreme weather, as well as uncontrolled coastal development along the Gulf Coast which contributed to the immensity of the destruction.
Yet the Bush administration response, allegedly led by Karl Rove, trumpeted out the same old neoliberal policies and made it highly likely that there would be major corruption and political cronyism in Gulf redevelopment. Yet the intensity of Hurricane Katrina, followed by the potentially devastating Hurricane Rita and future possible destruction of the Gulf, has led many to speculate that something like a new Marshall Plan, focusing on rebuilding the Gulf Coast guided by environmental restoration and a flood control system like Holland’s, as well as providing housing and jobs for the poor, would be needed to deal with the immensity of the tragedy.
As Hurricane Rita gathered intensity in the Gulf,
speculation emerged that George W. Bush was the worse president in modern history, or perhaps the worst ever, and that there needed to be a serious discussion about impeachment.[xvii] There were also reports that Bush had started drinking again,[xviii] and during September 22 when Rita was scheduled for landfall David Gregory of NBC queried Bush whether his planned trip to San Antonio to observe disaster response efforts in Texas would be “disruptive for first responders.” Bush turned away in anger, revealing what appeared to be a wired telecommunication device on the back of his jacket,[xix] and then suddenly turned around and told reporters that “there is no risk of me getting in the way, I promise you.” But then suddenly Bush’s trip to San Antonio was cancelled and he went instead to Colorado to monitor reports, and when it appeared that the effects of Hurricane Rita were not as dire for Texas as feared, he flew to Austin and San Antonio for photo events.
Reporting on Bush’s day, the September 24 NBC News noted that political commentators believed that going to so many places and making so many pronouncements could lead to Bush being seen as a “political opportunist,” and indeed there was an air of desperation to the president’s frenetic activity in response to Hurricane Rita after his much criticized feeble response to Katrina. For those who cared to see, Bush’s behavior indeed revealed him to be concerned with image rather than substance and unable to provide effective leadership and communication.
It remains to be seen how the politics of hurricane spectacles will be played out and whether Bush will weather the storms of criticism unleashed, what the role of the media will be, and how the public will respond to the disasters and Bush’s response. George W. Bush’s entire life has been grounded in monumental failures and perhaps the Iraq and the hurricane spectacles will be his Waterloo and infamous legacies in a life-time of crony capitalism, corruption, lies and deceit.[xx]
Notes
[i] For an excellent overview of the storm and the government failed response, see Walter M. Brasch, “SPECIAL REPORT: ‘Unacceptable’: The federal response to Katrina,” September 12, 2005 at www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22719.
[ii] W. David Jenkins III: 'Georgie, you're doing a heck of a job,” September 17, 2005 at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22787.
[iii] John Powers, “Week of the Living Death,” LA Weekly, September 9-15, 2005 at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/42/on-powers.php.
[iv] Mick Farren, “Post-Storm Watch,” Citybeat, September 22-28, 2005 at http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2645&IssueNum=120.

[v] Mark Benjamin, “The crony who prospered. Joe Allbaugh was George W. Bush's good ol' boy in Texas. He hired his good friend Mike Brown to run FEMA. Now Brownie's gone and Allbaugh is living large.” Salon, September 16, 2005 at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/16/allbaugh/index.html. Allbaugh was known as Bush’s enforcer during his stint as Texas governor, allegedly being in charge of sanitizing the records of Bush’s National Guard service that suggested he had gone AWOL and not completely his military service; see Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy. Boulder, Col.: Paradigm Press, 2005.
[vi] Mark Benjamin, “Brownout!” Salon, September 11, 2005 at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/10/brown/index.html.
[vii] See Jonathan S. Landay, Alison Young and Shannon McCaffrey, “Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows,” Knight-Ridder News Service, September 13, 2005. The report indicates that Chertoff, not FEMA Director Michael Brown, was in charge of disaster response and delayed federal action. Chertoff was a lawyer and Republican partisan who participated in the Whitewater crusade against Bill Clinton and had no experience in either national security or disaster response when Bush made him head of the Department of Homeland Security.
[viii] On the issue of race and the history of New Orleans, see Mike Davis, “The Struggle Over the Future of New Orleans,” Socialist Worker, September 21, 2005 collected online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=8784.
[ix] NBC circulated a disclaimer after the show saying that West did not speak for the network and departed from his prepared speech, and also cut the clip from a West coast broadcast three hours later, but the video circulated over the Internet and was immediately incorporated into rap songs and anti-Bush websites; see the video clip at http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/hurricanekatrina/v/kanyewestbush.htm (accessed September 23, 2005) and see Chris Lee, “Playback Time. Two rappers use Kanye West’s anti-Bush quote to launch a mashed-up Web smash,” Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2005: E1.
[x] At a National Prayer Service in the Washington Cathedral, aimed to replicate a spectacle held right after the September 11 terror attacks, Bush presented the Katrina tragedy as an act of God. See Amy Sullivan, “Bush scapegoats God; After weeks of blaming others for the disastrous response to Katrina, Bush used the pulpit at the National Prayer Service to blame the biggest scapegoat of all: God.” Salon, September 17, 2005 at www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/09/17/god/print.
[xi] Bush appointed Francis Fargos Townsend to head a federal investigation who it turned out was the wife of his Andover and Yale roommate and a rightwing ideologue; see the discussion in “Fact Check” at www.cjrdaily.org on September 20, 2005.
[xii] Nikki Finke, “They Shoot News Anchors, Don’t They?,” LA Weekly, September 16-22, 2005 at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/43/deadline-finke.php. See also Finke’s earlier version of this column at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/42/deadline-finke.php.
[xiii] Maureen Dowd, “Disney on Parade,” New York Times, September 17, 2005.
[xiv] Douglas J. Amy: “Bush's strategy to hobble government,” September 18, 2005 at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22798&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.

[xv] Frank Rich, “Message: I Care About the Black Folks,” New York Times, September 18, 2005 at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/opinion/18rich.html?incamp=article_popular&pagewanted=print.
[xvi] Weldon Berger: 'Bush: 'We'll do for the Gulf Coast what we did for Iraq,'' September 18, 2005 at www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22797.
[xvii] Beth Quinn: “George is worst natural disaster to hit country,” September 19 at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22810; Donald Kaul, “Bush faring well in Incompetence Derby,” September 19 at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22808; and Robert Parry: 'What to do about the Bush problem,” September 23 at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22869&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.
[xviii] Jennifer Luce and Don Gentile, “Bush’s Booze Crisis,” National Enquirer, September 24, 2005 at http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/63426.
[xix] On reports and images that showed Bush wearing what appeared to be a communication wire during the 2004 presidential debates and on other occasions, see Douglas Kellner, “Media Spectacle and the Wired Bush Controversy,” Flow, Vol. 1, Nr. 3, at http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=473.
[xx] On Bush’s life-as-failure, see Mike Whitney, “No exit: Descending into hell with George W. Bush,” September 22, 2005 at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22857&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.

Posted by:
Douglas
at 9/26/2005 10:10:00 AM | Permalink