From this Frontline article:
While the citizens suffered in the Superdome, the federal government began to plan for the rebuilding of the city. Lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, a former FEMA employee and Bush's campaign manager in 2000, represents two of the main firms that will benefit from the contracts to rebuild the city: the Shaw Group and Halliburton. On September 7, Allbaugh visited the Gulf Coast, where he told reporters, "I don't do government contracts. I'm just trying to lend my shoulder to the wheel trying to coordinate some private-sector support that the government always asks for."
Nevertheless, Halliburton, Vice-President Cheney's former firm and major beneficiary in Iraq, has been tapped to clean up the Navy bases along the Gulf coast (at a cost of $29.8 million). Shaw earned a $100 million from the Corps of Engineers to rebuild homes (Bechtel, another major player, has been called in to build homes). These are all no-bid contracts.
Meanwhile, in Dallas, 40 members of the New Orleans elite (all established, moneyed, white families) met to discuss the fate of their city. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically," said James Reiss to The Wall Street Journal's Christopher Cooper (September 8). "I'm not speaking for myself here," he continued. "The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out." Incidentally, when Reiss fled the city before the storm, he flew in an Israeli security firm by helicopter to protect his Audubon Park mansion.
The government and these established families have tried to remove the black poor from the city for several decades. The hurricane's destructive force has done their job for them. Now they will try to keep the poor blacks out. The federal government has already shipped people across the country. Inside the Houston astrodome, military recruiters went among the refugees. On September 7, the military conducted a Job Fair inside the astrodome "as a blatant effort to exploit the despair of masses of Americans evacuated from the Gulf coast", in the words of a community organiser.
