For those familiar with the utterly corrupt nature of "disaster capitalism" the "appalling lack of progress in the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast" does not come as any more of a surprise than the appalling lack of progress in the rebuilding of Iraq, especially since much was carried out by the same companies.

As the high winds departed, KBR rushed in, securing a $12 million, no-bid contract to repair the naval station in Gulfport, Mississippi, which, in what Jeremy Scahill described as a "sick irony," just happened to be the location that the long-vacationing Dick Cheney, the former Haliburton CEO turned vice president chose to kick off his tour of the devastation.

KBR, Scahill noted, traveled "throughout the region assessing damage to…the pumps in New Orleans and the infrastructure of the city….They [set up the] same kinds of camps that we [saw] in Guantanamo and Iraq…to service the rebuilding of the Gulf…"

According to Pratap Chatterjee, Halliburton secured no-bid contracts in the Gulf region through the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, Carl Strock, who was the same man who provided the no-bid Halliburton Iraq contracts, and then demoted Bunny Greenhouse for blowing the whistle.

Naomi Klein contended that, by the time Katrina struck, "reconstruction" had become a standing, multi-billion dollar industry. Halliburton, Bechtel and Flour all secured pre-signed, no-bid contracts.

Klein reported on a September 15, 2005 meeting in which members of the radical-right, which included a Republican study group and the Heritage Foundation, mapped out a strategy for turning the Katrina disaster into an opportunity to "experiment" in the application of neo-liberal policies. This included a suspension of the Davis-Beacon prevailing wage laws, the conversion of the Gulf region into a "flat-tax free enterprise zone," an opening up of the Artic Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, coupled with subsidies for the oil industry, all of which, according to Klein. entailed a massive transfer of public wealth to private hands paid for by radical cuts in such things as the Medicare prescription drug benefit, thereby re-victimizing the very people the relief funds were intended for.

One of the first things the radical privatizers inside the Bush/Cheney cabal did was to fire all of New Orleans' public school teachers and to then redirect public aid monies into for-profit, private charter schools.

Although, per Bill Quigley, a law professor at New Orleans’s Loyola University, "public housing in New Orleans" entailed "some of the most structurally sound property…in the entire city," in June 2006 Scott Keller, Deputy Chief of Staff for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced that more than 5,000 public housing units for the poor were to be demolished.

Per Quigley, this was part of "a national policy to destroy public housing and replace it with this euphemism of 'mixed-income housing,' which…means they take conventional public housing, destroy it and then allow about 10% of the people who used to live there to come back, but it is a great bonanza for developers, for real estate people, for banks…."

Quigley lamented that New Orleans had “become a laboratory” for privatization; that none of the public institutions that were destroyed by Katrina were rebuilt. He warned that while it may not come as fast elsewhere, those who are advancing it intend to impose privatization on the rest of the country.

Quigley's allegations were confirmed when Greg Palast visited New Orleans nearly a year after the disaster.

Displaced residents were not only prevented from returning to devastated areas but from returning to a perfectly good public housing, “gorgeous, two-and three story townhouses,” untouched by the floodwaters—housing that had been had been boarded up with metal plates.

Patricia Thomas, an African American resident whom Palast assisted in breaking into her own home, complained, bitterly, “Katrina didn’t do this. Man did this. Katrina didn’t come in my house and put these gates up on my windows….Katrina didn’t have me walking out here looking for somewhere I could stay….This was man-made.”

Comedian Marc Maron summed up the disastrous aftermath of Katrina as "Strip mining the poor people of New Orleans to get at the valuable real estate underneath."

That was back in 2006. He couldn't have been more prescient.

DES~! I LOVE Marc Maron! Used to hang with (read: worship) him at the Improv years ago in NYC, when he was a YOUNG, cynical, prescient comic.

Always so smart.

He plays UCB all the time, you know. Has his own podcast: 'WTF'. I'll give you a shout next time I'm going down to catch his act (read: stalk him with my decades long professional crush.)

What have we learned? Look at the Gulf now. There is no longer any pretense that our government works to protect us.

Everyone from the Coast Guard, the EPA, NOAA and the administration of the US federal government take their orders from BP. We are nakedly a corporatocracy and everyone just yawns. Move along, nothing to see here, eat your fresh Gulf shrimp, no oil here anymore...

It wasn't just the alternative press that reported the open desire of Republicans to cleanse New Orleans of its black and poor people. I clearly remember a Wall Street Journal article that laid it out for everyone to see. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it (isn't that always the way?), but I did find a WSJ Washington Wire report reprinted by Raw Story (Congressman Hurricane finally cleaned out public housing in New Orleans) that gives the flavor of what was being said at the time.

Why is everyone so shy about what they know really happened this time five years ago in New Orleans? Days after Katrina, FEMA was cutting the communication lines in Jefferson Parish. That is why communications were fragmented after the storm. It was FEMA either sabotaging land lines or other Federal agencies jamming radio communications.

Who said FEMA was cutting the communication lines after Katrina? Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press, that's who.

Also, Katrina had passed New Orleans when the levees mysteriously collapsed. Residents said the air was calm, and they though they had made it, when suddenly they heard explosions, THEN the water started to enter the city.

You might also be interested to know that Katrina hit New Orleans with Category 1-2 winds, NOT Category 3 or 4 winds. And the Category 2 gusts that hit New Orleans were on the LOWER end of Category 2 winds. There is no way that the levees breached several hours after Katrina hit New Orleans with Category 1-2 winds.

FEMA lied about the bridges being down after Katrina hit. As we all know now, they weren't! Many of us know this because the NOPD were shooting anyone in the back who were trying to escape via those bridges. The most famous incident being the Danziger Bridge Massacre.

Did you watch the Frontline episode on the NOPD shootings after Katrina hit? Well, as usual the media asks ZERO questions. We now know that the police lied about responding to gun fire at the Danziger Bridge. Now, it doesn't take a high IQ to know that the next question that should follow is: Then if you weren't responding to gun fire on the Danziger Bridge, who told you to shot civilians in the back who were crossing the bridge? But Frontline (or even Brad Blog) restrain themselves from asking such obvious questions.

You see, the reason the NOPD were shooting people on the bridges was because the FEMA buses hadn't arrived yet. Those FEMA buses would take desperate residents of New Orleans not to safe areas within Louisiana, but to Utah, Texas, Virginia, Colorado. Anywhere but Louisiana, where the odds of getting back to New Orleans would be assured, assuming one wanted to return.

Those poor black and white folk were placed on cattle buses, while the media watched and knew what was happening, leaving abandoned properties that had been for decades coveted by real estate developers.

"The Big Uneasy"–In New Doc, Harry Shearer Makes the Case that Katrina Was an Unnatural Disaster

My New Orleans. Though I've lived and work now for many years, New Orleans is my home. Some of my family is still reeling from the storm. Much of the city is still a wasteland, peppered here and there by homes. Drive thru the outlying areas, away from the Quarter and it's a little bit lonesome. It's difficult to live there. But do I wanna go back? Oh yeah. shw