Again, like Iraq, Bush & Co, are not revealing where how and when tax dollars are going to be spent and through which pipelines. Likewise, it is unclear how the feds are going to pay for the reconstruction.
If we are not vigilant, if our representatives are not vigilant, the pilfering of funds to pad the pockets of certain people will continue at enormous cost to all, without benefitting the victims.
By putting Chertoff, Rove and Allen in charge of this reconstruction here is a glimpse of one such possibility.
Bush Says Spending Cuts Will Be Needed
Tax Increase Not Part Of His Gulf Relief Plan
By Michael A. Fletcher and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 17, 2005; Page A01
snip
Bush has refused to put a price tag on the reconstruction plan, which he outlined in a prime-time speech Thursday night, although members of Congress and others have predicted that it could cost as much as $200 billion. The plan was assembled by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Claude Allen, Bush's top domestic policy adviser.
snip
An administration official said the White House and Congress will look for specific spending cuts, starting with about $20 billion in savings identified in the president's 2006 budget. Still more could come from changes to entitlement programs to slow their growth. Those proposals have already been examined by Congress and rejected.
Also, some of those cuts would hit precisely the programs the lawmakers want to expand. Among the programs slated by Bush for cuts were Medicaid, which he now wants to extend to evacuees, and the Army Corps of Engineers, which is faced with the huge burden of repairing levees and dredging waterways wrecked in the storm.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/16/AR2005091601488.html?Premium for Basic Medicare Increasing 13% Next Year
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: September 17, 2005
WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - The Bush administration announced on Friday that the basic Medicare premium would shoot up next year 13 percent, to $88.50 a month, mainly because of the increased use of doctors' services.
Many beneficiaries will pay an additional premium for the new prescription drug benefit, expected to average $32 a month. So the combined premiums for doctors' services, outpatient hospital care and prescription drugs will average slightly more than $120 a month.
Medicare provides coverage for 42 million people who are 65 and older or disabled. In most cases, Medicare premiums are deducted from monthly Social Security checks. The average monthly Social Security benefit for retired workers is $955 this year. The amount for 2006 will be announced next month and will probably approach $1,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/national/17medicare.html?Let's also look at Claude Allen one of the "planners and overseers" for reconstruction
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/08/news-ireland2.phpThe Bush Theocracy
Righteous homophobe Claude Allen brings his agenda to the White House
by Doug Ireland
President Bush’s appointment of his new chief domestic-policy adviser, Claude Allen — a notorious homophobe, a ferocious enemy of abortion and an opponent of safe-sex education who for years has been one of the AIDS community’s principal enemies — is a huge victory for the social reactionaries of the Christian right.
snip
When a federal judge found that a federally funded Louisiana abstinence program "illegally handed out Bibles, staged anti-abortion prayer rallies outside women’s clinics and had students perform Bible-based skits," Allen refused to have the program audited, while continuing his repeated audit persecutions of effective AIDS-fighting groups teaching condom use.
snip
Notorious for his anti-abortion stance, at HHS Allen helped use its regulatory powers to turn Title 10 of the Public Services Act — which Bush père had championed — away from family planning and the promotion of condom use and into an abstinence-only program. In his Virginia years, Allen’s Christian-right extremism led him to endanger the health of children. Then Allen worked to defeat legislation that provided health insurance for children of the working poor, largely because the program covered abortion services for rape and incest victims under the age of 18. "When the law was ultimately enacted, Allen was faulted for not enrolling children quickly enough, and admitted that ‘abortion was the sticking point’ delaying the enrollment of children," as People for the American Way (and civil rights groups like the NAACP) pointed out last fall when they successfully opposed Bush’s nomination of Allen for a federal judgeship. "In this episode, Allen proved himself to be so adamantly opposed to reproductive rights that he found it preferable for poor children to go without health coverage than to risk an underage sexual-abuse victim having access to state-funded abortion services."
snip
The appointment of Allen as domestic-policy czar is further evidence of the aggressive new push for the Christian right’s social agenda in Bush’s second term. In the first term, $1.7 billion was handed out in patronage disguised as "faith-based initiatives." Now, the Washington Post reported on January 4, the White House is launching a major new offensive (with Allen, in his new post, in charge) to persuade states to use an additional $50 billion in federal moneys to subsidize "faith-based" programs — money that has been shorn of church-state separation restrictions by a Bush executive order, without the approval of Congress. This amounts to a religious tax on the American people. Half a dozen Democratic governors have already joined in capitulating to the religious right’s agenda by appointing coordinators of "faith-based" services. At the same time, The New York Times reported on January 9 that the White House has prepared new legislation putting stringent caps on a whole host of federal benefit programs — from Medicare to prescription drug benefits — meaning that many poor Americans will be forced to rely on the states for help. And, when the new "faith-based" offensive succeeds, in many states they’ll only be able to get that help from religious-sponsored institutions funded by the states with federal moneys.
Welcome to the American theocracy — of which Claude Allen is the newest public face.
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