BILLIONS FOR BROWNIES

In case you missed it, this is an important story in Rolling Stone about Bush's mishandling of the Department of Homeland Security. Well, perhaps mishandling is the wrong word, since the whole disastrous saga seems to be deliberate in origin and intent.

So, too, is the fact -- now plain for all to see -- that the Department of Homeland Security, the arm of the federal government responsible for ensuring our safety in times of national emergency, has become little more than an arm of big business, a radical experiment in President Bush's brand of market-based government.
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"DHS is emulating the worst contracting patterns developed at the Department of Defense," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent group that monitors federal contracts. "They use the same politically connected contractors, even if they have a record of misconduct on government jobs without performing the work they're getting paid to do."
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Such shameless cronyism underscores not just the inadequacy of Bush's disaster preparedness but the hollowness of his entire philosophy of government. Katrina revealed the underlying reality of the GOP agenda: that the federal government, after decades of reinventing and outsourcing and marketizing, is structured primarily to serve the needs of big business.

Tags: Bush, FEMA, Department of Homeland Security, corporate cronyism