911review/iraq

From the page: "Big, Easy Iraqi-Style Contracts Flood New Orleans
by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
September 20th, 2005

cartoon by Khalil Bendib

The day Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, Robert Boh watched the dramatic pictures of the unfolding disaster on television at his in-law's house in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where his family had taken shelter. As president of the biggest construction company in New Orleans, he was confident that the hundreds of miles of levees that he and his rivals have built over the decades would hold. "It never occurred to me," he said, that the 17th street canal would gave way. "I was shocked."

The next day the phones started ringing off the hook. One of the calls was offering work to repair the levees and drain the city from the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency run by the US military. Unable to access his New Orleans offices, which had six feet of water on the first floor, Boh drove down to work in nearby Baton Rouge, to help save the city where his grandfather had founded a construction business 96 years before.

Military Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters dropped sandbags into the breached levees in New Orleans, as Boh Brothers crews worked around the clock for a week. The work was a financial boost for the civil engineering company that had been $2 million in debt just over a year prior, because the Army Corps of Engineers had no money to pay them for installing floodgates for New Orleans†Harvey Canal.

Before Katrina struck, Boh was starting to question if he really wanted to apply for more work from the Corps, which oversees the levees. "In 2004 and 2005, funding for our work has been cut," he told CorpWatch. Indeed, earlier this year, New Orleans district projected that it would get just $82 million in flood and hurricane protection projects, a 44.2 percent drop from the $147 million spent in 2001.

Today state and federal money and contracts are flowing into the stricken area and Boh Brothers is one of the key local beneficiaries. Right after completing the emergency repairs, Boh was sub-contracted to help pump water from the flooded city by the Shaw Group, a politically well-connected contractor that had worked on reconstruction in Iraq. Then the state of Louisiana awarded the company a new $30.9 million contract to fix the hurricane-damaged twin-span bridge that carries Interstate 10 traffic over Lake Pontchartrain.

Bohâ€s contract is tiny compared to the billions that will flow to the giants of the industry: Halliburton , Bechtel and Flour. "The construction industry has stood up and is saying we are standing ready for your call," Lieutenant General Carl Strock told a September 2 Defense Department briefing. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army have budgeted at least $62.5 billion 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," said 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 nonprofit government spending watchdog group. She notes that Joe Allbaugh, President 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 Senator 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 National Public Radio, a public radio network in the US. " "