Government For Sale

FEMA director Michael Brown, or Brownie, as President Bush calls him, claimed to Ted Koppel on Nightline that, despite reporters on the scene and hours of TV coverage, his office wasn’t factually aware of the thousands of people stranded in the New Orleans convention center until four days after hurricane Katrina had passed. Which indicated Brown was either lying or grossly incompetent or both. How long before he gets a promotion or a medal?

The failure of government embodied by FEMA likely caused many fatalities in the wake of the storm, and further illuminated what many have come to understand well in the last five years; that the Bush Administration is more interested in giving patronage jobs to loyalists and rewarding corporate sponsors than in staffing federal agencies with competent people. Before heading FEMA, Brown ran the International Arabian Horse Association, from which he was fired. If it weren’t so disgraceful it would be comical.

By now, anyone who doesn’t appreciate the Republican-led orgy of pork and cronyism on Capitol Hill is either dead or has “special needs.” We’ve seen no-bid contracts go to fraud perpetrators like Haliburton, promotions for wrong-headed staffers like torture-czar Alberto Gonzalez, top jobs in the EPA for oil industry lobbyists, homeland security disbursements to states based on population instead of risk (thus favoring red states), and budget bills stuffed with mega-million-dollar bridges to nowhere. What more proof do we need that our government is for sale?

While our so-called leaders talk about morals and values, they pillage our federal treasury by channeling funds to the businesses of their golf buddies back home and jobs to their former college roommates in Washington. Meanwhile, in the face of tragedy, we confront the cold fact that “the greatest country on earth” has large pockets of third-world poverty and federal agencies whose stated missions are beyond the abilities of the people who staff them.

The Republican party is run by and for affluent country-club types, yet they brilliantly convince the poor and working class to vote for them. But Katrina has exposed the rot at the core of our Republican-run government. Too bad the price of that exposure is so painfully, fatally high.