Fwd: [Green_All_Views] PALAST: On Entergy (and a few other things...)

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Jun 8, 2006 8:16 AM

Fwd: [Green_All_Views] PALAST: On

Entergy (and a few other things...)

 

 

 

Worth reading --- Les

 

--- Don DeBar <dondebar wrote:

 

Don DeBar <dondebar Don DeBar

<dondebar Thu, 8 Jun 2006 00:14:14

-0700 (PDT) [Green_All_Views] PALAST: On

Entergy (and a few other things...)

 

1927 Again

 

Excerpted from Armed Madhouse

 

By Greg Palast.

 

06/07/06 " Information Clearing House " -- The National

Public Radio news anchor was so excited I thought

she'd pee herself: The President of the United States

had flown his plane down to 1,700 feet to get a better

look at the flood damage! Later, I saw the photo of

him looking out of the window of Air Force One. The

President looked very serious and concerned. That was

on Wednesday, August 31, 2005, two days after the

levees broke and Lake Ponchartrain swallowed New

Orleans.

 

The President had waited the extra days to stop first

at the Pueblo El Mirage Golf Course in Arizona. I'm

sure the people of New Orleans would have liked to

show their appreciation for the official Presidential

photo-strafing, but their surface-to-air missiles were

wet. I don't want to give the impression the President

did nothing. He swiftly ordered the federal government

to dispatch to New Orleans 18 water purification

units, 50 tons of food, two mobile hospitals, expert

search teams, and 20 lighting units with generators.

However, that was President Chávez, whose equipment

was refused entry to the disaster zone by the U.S.

State Department.

 

President Bush also flew in generators and lights.

They were used for a photo op in the French Quarter,

then removed when the President concluded his

television pitch. The corpses floating through the

Ninth Ward attracted vultures. There was ChoicePoint,

our friends from Chapter 1: The Fear. They picked up a

contract to identify the bodies using their War on

Terror DNA database. In the face of tragedy, America's

business community pulled together, lobbying hard to

remove the " Davis-Bacon " regulation that guarantees

emergency workers receive a minimum prevailing wage.

 

The Rev. Pat Robertson got a piece of the action. The

Federal Emergency Management Agency's Web site

encouraged those wanting to help victims to donate to

the charities he controls. Within the week, the Navy

penned a half-billion-dollar contract for

reconstruction work with Halliburton. More would come.

Our President, as he does in any emergency situation,

announced additional tax cuts. He ordered immediate

write-offs for new equipment used in rebuilding. That

will likely provide a relief for Halliburton, but the

deductions were useless to small New Orleans

businesses which had no income to write off. The oil

majors, the trillion-dollar babies, won a $700 million

tax break. Don't think of hurricanes as horrors, but

as opportunities. For the schoolchildren among the

refugees, instead of schools, our President promised

school " vouchers " on a grand scale. And there was a

bonus. Louisiana had been a " purple " state- neither a

solid Republican Red nor Democratic Blue. It was up

for grabs politically. With a Democratic Senator and a

new Democratic Governor, Louisiana was ready to lead

the South out of the GOP. Louisiana's big blue

Democratic splotch was enclosed within the city below

sea level.

 

On August 29, this major electoral problem for the

Republican party was solved. I'm not saying our rulers

deliberately let New Orleans drown. But before they

would save it, the lifeguards boarding Air Force One

had to play a few more holes.

 

In 1986, I was hired by the City of New Orleans to

check out suspicious doings by a corporation called

" Entergy. " I flew in to meet City Councilman Brod

Bagert, who is also New Orleans's top trial lawyer and

its most accomplished poet. Over beignets and chicory

coffee at the river, he said, " You want to know what

this city's about, Mr. Palast? I'll show you. "

 

He drove me to a concrete bunker, banged on the metal

door, and greeted a guy named Fishhead, who brought me

into the belly of a horrendously loud, gargantuan and

astonishing apparatus. " This here, Mr. Palast, is a

pump. Forget Bourbon Street. This is all you have to

know about New Orleans: We are under water. Below sea

level, sir, and the only thing that keeps the river

from pouring in over our heads are these pumps. You

got that, son? " Outside flowed the Mississippi.

America's toilet. The poisoned expectorations of a

hundred cities dumped into it or leached from suburban

lawns and from factories when no one is looking, come

out here in the tap water. A couple years ago, we

buried our friend Gary Groesch, aged 50, of some

mystery disease. " The City That Care Forgot " is their

motto. The City That Everyone Forgot, a Bantustan

where the Forgotten can be ignored except for the

jazzy minstrel shows for tourists.

 

I called Bagert four months after the flood. Nearly

half the city is still in the dark. The electric

company, New Orleans Public Service, " NOPSI, " is owned

by a holding company, Entergy, the company Bagert,

Groesch and I investigated in 1986. Here's what we

found. In 1986, the New Orleans company was going

broke because of the eye- popping cost of buying

wholesale power-four times normal-from a company

called Middle South Energy, charges they were passing

right on to their captive customers in the city.

Middle South is 100% owned and controlled by, you've

guessed it, Entergy. But these were the days of

government regulation, and government ordered an end

to the shell game. Then came deregulation and the

siphoning restarted with a vengeance. Busy shuffling

loot from pocket to pocket, Entergy had neither the

concern nor funds to harden their system against a

hurricane. But from the looks of it, and my own review

of their accounts, their plan in case of the

long-expected flood came down to " turn off the lights

and declare their subsidiary bankrupt, " which they did

three weeks after the hurricane. Negligent damage

liabilities and rebuilding obligations were thrown

into the Dumpster of the bankruptcy courts, and the

holding company walked away. But don't worry, Entergy

the holding company is doing quite well, posting a big

 

24% leap in earnings for the third quarter, a profit

it attributes to " weather. " So who's to blame for

losing New Orleans?

 

That's easy. It was Franklin Roosevelt. New Orleans

was the victim of the New Deal, according to New York

Times columnist John Tierney, in " Losing that New Deal

Religion. " The free market flat-worlder's argument

goes like this: The idea that government's job is to

protect you is gone with the wind, drowned in the

Mississippi. Government's the problem, and the

solution is... Wal-Mart. Turn FEMA into WEMA, the

" Wal-Mart Emergency Management Agency. " That's a

quote. Let the market do it, let the market save us.

Louisiana's Republican Senator David Vitter was so

excited by the idea of selling off the government,

" privatizing, " that he introduced a bill at high tide

to do just that, " privatize " emergency planning. But

Senator Vitter, didn't Joe Allbaugh tell you? New

Orleans hurricane planning was privatized.

 

You should remember Allbaugh from Chapter 4: The Con.

It was Allbaugh, as Governor George Bush's Chief of

Staff who, in 1997, handled the Governor's personal

emergency: His office allegedly called the Texas Air

Guard to let them know that Karen Hughes would be

dropping by to " make sure there's nothing in there

[bush's war file] that'll embarrass the Governor. "

Under Bill Clinton, the Emergency Management Agency

was run by emergency managers. That was the dull way

to do it.

 

In 2001, Bush made Joe Allbaugh FEMA's chief and the

two of them converted the agency into something more

exciting, a front-line command center in the War on

Terror, dissolving the agency into the Department of

Homeland Security. And that's when the unexciting

emergency planning work was put up for sale.

(Allbaugh quit in 2003 and turned the Wal-Marted FEMA

over to his old college roommate, Michael Brown, an

executive with the Arabian Horse Association.) It

wasn't in the Times, but a year before the hurricane,

the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA signed a

half-million-dollar contract with a private operator

to write up " a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan

for the City of New Orleans, " says the press release.

Their plan was innovative. We know it was innovative

because the work was handed to a company called

" Innovative Emergency Management. " Innovative

Emergency Management, said a company release, had

" teamed " with expert James Lee Witt, the renowned

Clinton FEMA chief, which was good news for New

Orleans. The bad news was, it wasn't true. Witt,

despite IEM's press release, said he was not part of

the Innovative " team. "

 

No matter. Innovative Emergency Management's founder,

president and CEO, Madhu Beriwal, I believe, owns an

umbrella and she's an exceptionally experienced donor

to the Republican party. She has more campaign

committee citations, including donations to Senator

Vitter, than evacuation plans to her name. Maybe she

has extraordinary credentials for saving a city from

flood, but when we called seeking her experience and

credentials, we got nothing.

 

IEM's press release, besides the fib about Witt, made

this utterly truthful point: Given this area's

vulnerability and elevation...a plan that facilitates

a rapid and effective hurricane response is critical.

Amen to that.

 

So I called IEM in Baton Rouge to see their critical

and innovative plan that was supposed to be complete

well before Katrina's landfall. The Wal-Mart of

disaster prep couldn't get me a copy. In fact, they

couldn't say if they had it. Nor if the City of New

Orleans had it. Or if Senator Vitter or anyone had it

or if it existed.

 

Could they tell me the name of someone at FEMA who had

the evacuation plan? They hesitated, so I prompted,

" Well, who do you call if there's an emergency? " The

question stumped them. And it stumped FEMA, which

wouldn't provide me a copy. The problem, I was

informed, was that they couldn't confirm it existed.

 

There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican

president going for the photo op as the Mississippi

rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and President

Calvin Coolidge sent Commerce Secretary Herbert

Hoover, " a little fat man with a notebook in his

hand, " who mugged for the cameras and promised to

build the city a wall of protection. They had their

photos taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay

or, rather, the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of

his day.

 

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was

awaiting burial. As depression approached, the

coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for, of all

things, balancing the budget.

 

Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician,

the state's electricity regulator, stood up on the

back of a flatbed truck rigged with loudspeakers, and

said, roughly, " Listen up! They're lying! The

President's lying! The rich fat jackals that are

drowning you will do it again and again and again.

They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they

take away your schools and your hope, and when you

complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants.

Then they drown your kids. I say, Kick'm in the ass

and take your share of the wealth you created. " Huey

Long was our Hugo Chávez, and he laid out a plan: a

progressive income tax, real money for education,

public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, Social

Security old age pensions, veterans' benefits,

regulation of the big utility holding companies, an

end to what he called, " rich men's wars, " and an end

to the financial royalism of the One Percent.

 

He even had the audacity to suggest that the poor's

votes should count, calling for the end to the poll

tax four decades before Martin Luther King succeeded

in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical

anthem: " Everyman a King. "

 

The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928,

Huey " Kingfish " Long was elected Governor of

Louisiana. At the time, Louisiana schools were free,

but not the textbooks. The elite liked it that way,

but Long didn't. To pay for the books, the Kingfish

levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies

refused to pay for the textbooks. Governor Long then

ordered the National Guard to seize the oil fields in

the Delta.

 

It was Huey Long who established the principle that a

government of the people must protect the people,

school them, build the infrastructure, regulate

industry and share the nation's wealth-and that meant

facing down " the concentrations of monopoly power " of

the corporate aristocracy- " the thieves of Wall

Street, " as he called them.

 

In other words, Huey Long founded the modern

Democratic Party. FDR and the party establishment,

scared witless of Long's ineluctable march to the

White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted,

called it the New Deal and later the New Frontier and

the Great Society. America and the party prospered.

What happened to the Kingfish? As with Chávez, the oil

industry and local oligarchs had few options for

responding to Governor Long's populist appeal and the

success of his egalitarian economic program. On

September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a U.S. Senator,

was shot dead. He was 42. And now is the moment, as it

was in '27. Greg Palast is author of " Armed

Madhouse " Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats,

Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind

Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the

Class War

 

 

DDeBar

87 Ferris Place Ossining, NY 10562

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