A Deadly Form of Cronyism

Bush, Brown, Chertoff

Talking Points Memo, including links to other sources and even more info, exposes FEMA Director Michael Brown's total lack of relevant experience. No wonder we're in trouble. Excerpt:

Michael Brown is a lawyer and GOP party activist. Before he came to FEMA in 2001, he had a full-time job overseeing horse-shows as the commissioner of the . He started with them in 1991. But he was eventually fired because of what the Herald describes as "after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures." (The Kos diary has some more details.).

But the stars were shining on Brown because President Bush had just been elected. And he appointed his chief political fixer Joe Allbaugh to replace James Lee Witt as head of FEMA.

That was a good break for the recently-canned Brown, because, as we learn from the Herald, he and Allbaugh were college roomates. He hired Brown as his General Counsel at FEMA in February. And then, by the end of the year, he promoted him to Deputy Director.

Then, little more than a year later, Allbaugh left FEMA to set up New Bridge Strategies, a consultancy to cash in on the Iraqi contracts bonanza. On Allbaugh's departure from FEMA, Brown became Director, in charge of federal domestic emergency management in the United States.

Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, doesn't have any background in dealing with natural disasters or terrorist attacks either. He's an ex-federal prosecutor and was a special counsel during the Whitewater investigation fiasco.

And you didn't think we'd avoid the Halliburton taint, did you? Must be where Cheney has been hiding this past week, paving the way to stream more billions into the arms of his cronies, who are doing such a fantastic job in Iraq:

Yesterday the Houston Chronicle reported that Halliburton has been hired by the Navy to repair its damaged facilities in Mississippi and perform initial damage assessments of facilities in New Orleans.

. . . in the coming days and weeks we will move into a recovery phase in which, no doubt, tens of billions of dollars will be spent cleaning up and rebuilding not just New Orleans but big sections of the Gulf Coast.

Does anyone believe that the Bush administration can handle that money and that task without widespread waste, fraud and cronyism?

What I'll be waiting to see is if any Dems have the nerve to criticize these kinds of serious and damaging ethics and effectiveness breaches, which worsen the death, destruction and chaos instead of mitigating it. Or if they'll allow and perhaps even participate in another drain of billions into the hands of Bush cronies. Enough is enough, don't you think? Lives in the balance...