So Halliburton is leaving the neighborhood. If I were you, I’d start selling. It’s a sign that property values are heading down in looted and Katrina-tized America. With full protestations that it really isn’t going anywhere, Halliburton, with its $19 billion in Pentagon contracts, with its $2.7 billion in estimated Iraq overcharges, is moving its headquarters to Dubai, the Las Vegas of the Middle East where almost anyone is welcome to plot almost anything on the indoor ski slopes or private mini-islands. If I were the head of Halliburton, I’d be heading for Dubai, too, or at least for parts unknown while the Bush administration is still in office and I still had a roof over my head. Enron’s Ken Lay could have taken a tip or two from Halliburton Chief Executive David Lesar on the subject. Far too late now, of course. And I wonder whether Al Neffgen, the ex-Halliburton exec running the privatized company, IAP Worldwide Services, that was put in charge of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2006 as part of the privatization of the military, might be considering a holiday there as well. No mold, no rats (other than the human kind), just honest sun and sand, surf and turf, oil money and… well, everything that goes with it.
We always knew that there was a link between Iraq, hit by a purely human-made flood of catastrophe, and Katrina, which had a helping hand from nature. Halliburton had a hand in both, of course, picking up some of the earliest contracts for the “reconstruction” of each — the results of which are now obvious to all (even undoubtedly from Dubai). The inability of either the Bush administration or its chronically cost-overrun crony corporations to genuinely reconstruct anything is now common knowledge. But it’s worth remembering that, though the disaster of Iraq’s “reconstruction” preceded it, Hurricane Katrina was the Brownie-heck-of-a-job moment that revealed the reality of the Bush administration to most Americans.
The various privatization-style lootings and catastrophes since then have all been clearer for that. Katrina, in fact, has become a catch-word for them. So when the Bush administration’s treatment of the wounded — though reported well beforehand — suddenly became the headline du jour, it was also a Katrina-comparison scandal. (“Dems Call Walter Reed Scandal ‘Katrina of 2007″;”The Katrina of Veteran’s Care”; “Like Brownie in Katrina, Rummy did ‘a heckuva job.’ So has Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, Army surgeon general, who commanded Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004.”)
Recently, Rebecca Solnit eloquently reminded us, however, that Katrina isn’t simply some comparison point from the past, a piece of horrific history to keep in mind; it’s an on-going, never-ending demonstration that we have been changed from a can-do to a can’t-do society (except perhaps at the neighborhood level). Katrina, the hurricane, was then; Katrina, the New Orleans catastrophe, is right now and, given what we know about government today, that “right now” is likely to stretch into the interminable future.
