"The Light Shines in Darkness" Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

[dutchdemocrat]

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And so here we go: George W. Bush's plan to reconstruct the Gulf Coast is the biggest crony cash-cow in American history (aside from the pork-orgy he's throwing for his pals in Iraq). Bush is using his emergency powers to strip American citizens of their legal protections against exploitation, handing out no-bid contracts to his pals and paymasters and allowing them to pay coolie wages to build their new commercial empires on the bones and blood of the hurricane's victims.

All of this is aimed at "changing the demographics" of the region, especially New Orleans, as the city's wealthy white elite have openly admitted to the Wall Street Journal. They want to scatter the poor – especially the black poor – to the four winds, and rebuild New Orleans as a playground for the rich, a malevolent corporate fantasyland patroled by heat-packing private goons.

While Bush is handing fat federal deals to his biggest contributors, to his former aides – and, as always, to the ubiquitous Halliburton – he has suspended regulations that would have paid the countless thousands of displaced natives a living wage to rebuild their communities and their region. Instead, as investigator Jeremy Scahill reports, the Bushist elite are bringing in migrant laborers – legal and illegal – to work, unprotected and ill-paid, under the watchful eye of hired guns from the Blackwater mercenary agency, many of them fresh from the privatized killing fields of Iraq and now under direct federal contract, with shoot-to-kill powers, in the streets of New Orleans.

Bush now has a honey-pot of some $200 billion to dole out to his cronies and his caporegimes. Despite the crocodile, or rather, alligator tears he's shed for the poor flood victims -- some of whom were reportedly eaten by the gators that poured into the city through the breached levees that he underfunded – Bush showed his true contempt for the "reconstruction" effort by putting his porcine political fixer, Karl Rove, in charge of it. A more brazen act of sneering cynicism can hardly be imagined. Rove has zero experience in organizing government relief efforts; but he is the master of the age when it comes to servicing cronies – and knee-capping opponents – for his witless boss in the White House.

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Full article at link

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=161&Itemid=1