Yet Another Way Bush Benefits from Katrina

TPM:

FEMA Director Michael Brown got his job as a political patronage position, with no relevant experience and the last item on his resume getting fired from a job as a manager of horse shows. Last year he was caught giving out FEMA money as political pork with an eye to the 2004 elections. But that shouldn't surprise since people who get hired as part of patronage operations do their jobs as part of the patronage operation. That's the idea.

Now, look at this article from Tuesday's Times about the boom town atmosphere in Houston as people and business from New Orleans flood into the city ...

Oil services companies based here are racing to carry out repairs to damaged offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico; the promise of plenty of work to do sent shares in two large companies, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, soaring to 52-week highs last week. The Port of Houston is preparing for an increase in traffic as shippers divert cargoes away from the damaged ports of Pascagoula, Miss., and New Orleans.

Some of this is just the grim irony of politics and geography. Houston is a nearby port town deep into the oil business. It's also the capital of Bushland.

But see where we're going here. We have a thoroughly politicized FEMA, encased within an administration that ran the Iraqi reconstruction in such a way that they managed to give graft and cronyism a bad name. $10.5 billion is just a small down payment on the money that's going to go into draining and rebuilding New Orleans, constructing a much more durable and comprehensive system of pumps and levees around the city, patching up the coastlines of Mississippi and Alabama. And did we mention the important Senate race next year in Florida? And then there's the Port of New Orleans. And the oil facilities in the Gulf.

How conveeenient that Katrina wiped out the oil refineries around NOLA (there will be no one to work at the plants for months), and that Houston Texas is the closest place to which the oil can be shipped for processing.

Then there is the Halliburton business that benefits from Katrina AND the political patronage aspects of FEMA.

All this stuff is enough to make you dizzy and sick.