...when he was in the Florida State legislature, then as Bush's appointed Director of HUD and more recently as U.S. Senator from Florida. Martinez does shit for anyone but his buddies. Just one example following Katrina:
<snip>
Disaster profiteering: the flood of crony contracting following hurricane Katrina.(THE DISASTER AFTER THE DISASTER)AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA CAME ASHORE, President Bush promised relief for those in the Gulf region affected by the storm. But the relief he has been most generous in delivering has been to contractors.
That at least is the view of a growing number of government watchdogs and congressional critics, who say a series of exemptions to competitive bidding and other procurement requirements adopted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army Corps of Engineers has effectively turned the Gulf region reconstruction and cleanup contracts into a feeding frenzy for "disaster profiteers"--a network of crony contractors for whom the $200 billion cleanup and reconstruction promises to be a significant windfall.
They say FEMA's no-bid and limited-bid contracts are of such magnitude that they will give prime contractors an advantage that will last far beyond the initial emergency phase, and put local contractors at a distinct disadvantage.
By the end of September, there were ominous signs that the same pattern of "fundamentally flawed contracting strategies" described by congressional investigators as the cause of the epidemic of waste and corruption witnessed in Iraq was beginning to repeat itself in Louisiana and Mississippi. Many of the same companies involved in Iraq--Fluor, Bechtel, CH2M Hill and Halliburton--are now poised to clean up at home.
And some in Congress seem only too willing to provide them a helping hand. In late September, for example, Senator Mel Martinez, R-Florida, reserved a room on Capitol Hill for a "Katrina Reconstruction Summit" co-sponsored by Halliburton. CONTRACTING OUT CONTRACTING OUT
"You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering--disaster profiteering," says Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, which is monitoring the contracts.
But the contractors say the critics are off base. Randal Perkins, the founder of Florida-based Ashbritt, which has received one of the largest cleanup contracts for debris removal in Mississippi, says no one from his company attended Martinez's summit. While he and his wife have donated $10,000 to Martinez's Senate campaign fund since 2000, he says anyone who knows how the disaster contracting game works knows that the contracts are secured long before the storms hit shore and have nothing to do with lobbying on the Hill or campaign contributions. "We have more pre-positioned contracts than any other company in the country because we are the best in the business," Perkins says. "I'd ask the people who are complaining--where they were five years ago when these contracts were bid nationally?"
<MORE>
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-14946659_ITM 
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