[NYTr] Disaster Pimp/War Profiteer Joins Team Giuliani

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Media Transparency - Nov 19, 2007
http://www.mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=219

Rudy Giuliani adds war/disaster profiteer Joe Allbaugh to campaign staff
The former head of FEMA who gave America "Brownie" and helped disembody
the agency will be senior advisor on homeland security issues

by Bill Berkowitz

On October 30, Joseph Allbaugh was named Senior Advisor to Rudy
Giuliani's presidential campaign. According to a Giuliani campaign
press release, Allbaugh "will advise the campaign on general strategy
and homeland security."

"Rudy Giuliani is the only candidate who will keep America on offense
in the Terrorists' War on Us," the press release quoted Allbaugh as
saying. "The leadership he showed after 9/11 was an inspiration not
only to New Yorkers but to the country. He knows what it takes to keep
America safe, and as President, he will ensure that our country never
goes back on defense in this war."

Giuliani said that the two of them had "worked closely together in the
aftermath of 9/11 to ensure that everything possible was being done to
help victims and their families. He has significant experience in
emergency management and I will look to him for sound advice and
expertise."

The Politico reported that "The endorsement is valuable ... because it
gives the former New York mayor additional entrée to the Bush-Cheney
organization. Allbaugh was one-third of the 'Iron Triangle' of
Allbaugh, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, the powers-that-be in the
president's original Austin-based presidential campaign."

Both Giuliani and Allbaugh are disaster profiteers.

"Giuliani himself has parlayed his own fame in connection with 9/11
into lucrative consulting deals with his own private security firm,"
Sheldon Rampton, Research director with the Center for Media and
Democracy told Media Transparency in an e-mail exchange.

In addition, media reports have pegged his earnings from speeches about
the threat of terrorism at more than $10 million.

In May of this year the Washington Post reported that over a five year
period starting in early 2002 Giuliani Partners (website) "earned more
than $100 million, according to a knowledgeable source, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity because the firm's financial information is
private. And that success helped transform ... [him] from a moderately
well-off public servant into a globe-trotting consultant whose net
worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars."

The Washington Post pointed out that Giuliani chose as his partners
longtime associates, including a former police commissioner later
convicted of corruption, a former FBI executive who admitted taking
artifacts from Ground Zero and a former Roman Catholic priest accused
of covering up sexual abuse in the church."

"Given that Giuliani's private company has a history of hiring people
with questionable character and serving shady clients, it's not
surprising that he would hire a profiteer like Allbaugh to advise him
on homeland security," Rampton noted.

"Allbaugh has shown proficiency at private deal-making, but there's no
evidence that he knows how to serve the public good. There's certainly
no evidence that his time at FEMA prepared the agency to respond
effectively to subsequent disasters like Hurricane Katrina, although
Allbaugh and his clients evidently made quite a bit of money from it."

Over the past few years, Allbaugh's enterprises have raked in money
from both the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.

The last we heard about Allbaugh he was heading down to the
post-Hurricane Katrina Gulf Coast. However, he wasn't going to help the
victims of the hurricane - he was there to drum up business for his
corporate clients.

Allbaugh, George W. Bush's longtime Texas pal and the campaign manager
of his 2000 presidential campaign, is probably best known for being the
man who gave the American people "Brownie" -- Michael Brown, the former
head of the International Arabian Horse Association (IAHA) -- a
breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado -- who Allbaugh
brought into Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and who later
succeeded him as head of the agency. Brown's disastrous tenure at FEMA
is only one of the FEMA-wrecking projects on Allbaugh's resume.

After his appointment as FEMA chief, Allbaugh, who had no previous
experience in emergency management, took a Rumsfeldian approach to the
agency, setting about to make it leaner and meaner, all the while
putting privatization front and center.

In September 2004, Jon Elliston reported in the Independent Weekly that
Allbaugh had ominously testified before Congress in May 2001 that "Many
are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into
both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective
state and local risk management. Expectations of when the federal
government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have
ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."

According to Elliston's report titled "A Disaster Waiting to Happen,"
"As a result [of Allbaugh's efforts], says a disaster program
administrator who insists on anonymity, 'We have to compete for our
jobs--we have to prove that we can do it cheaper than a contractor.'
And when it comes to handling disasters, the FEMA employee stresses,
cheaper is not necessarily better, and the new outsourcing requirements
sometimes slow the agency's operations."

William Waugh, a disaster expert at Georgia State University who has
written training programs for FEMA, told Elliston that the "consultant
culture" was not a positive development. "It's part of a widespread
problem of government contracting out capabilities," Waugh said.
"Pretty soon governments can't do things because they've given up those
capabilities to the private sector. And private corporations don't
necessarily maintain those capabilities."

By the time Allbaugh handed in his resignation in December 2002, FEMA
was well on its way to becoming part of the newly created gargantuan
Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Elliston reported that "Analysts
in and out of government warned against subsuming the emergency
agency's vital functions in a new super-department. 'There are concerns
of FEMA losing its identity as an agency that is quick to respond to
all hazards and disasters,' the agency's inspector general noted in a
memo to Allbaugh. Congress' Government Accountability Office judged the
merger to be a 'high-risk' endeavor for FEMA, and the Brookings
Institution, a leading Washington centrist think-tank, cautioned in a
report that such a move could hobble the agency's natural disaster
programs. 'While a merged FEMA might become highly adept at preparing
for and responding to terrorism, it would likely become less effective
in performing its current mission in case of natural disasters as time,
effort and attention are inevitably diverted to other tasks within the
larger organization.'"

Albaugh's college friend Michael Brown, who served as FEMA's general
counsel, was named head of the agency which had become part of the
DHS's Emergency and Response Directorate. "When the reorganization took
effect on March 1, 2003," Elliston reported, "Brown assured skeptics
that under the new arrangement, the country would be served by 'FEMA on
steroids' -- a faster, more effective disaster agency."

A 2004 article in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency
Management pointed out that "Allbaugh brought about several internal,
though questionably effective, reorganizations of FEMA. The
Bush-Allbaugh FEMA diminished the Clinton administration's
organizational emphasis on disaster mitigation."

Elliston noted that after Allbaugh left the agency in March 2003, he
was expected to again play a major role in the Bush-Cheney re-election
campaign in 2004. Instead "he set about creating a string of lobbying
firms, including New Bridge Strategies [where he became Chairman and
Director], which helps U.S. companies win reconstruction contracts in
Iraq. [In the summer of 2004] he started [Blackwell Fairbanks, LLC],
another consulting company with Andrew Lundquist, the former director
of Vice President Dick Cheney's secretive energy policy task force. The
firm's first client was Lockheed Martin, one of the country's largest
defense contractors."

Early on, the website of New Bridge Strategies maintained that "The
opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented
nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills
and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the
ground in Iraq."

Two plus years later, in early September 2005, shortly after Hurricane
Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, Joe Allbaugh's boots
hit the ground in Louisiana; this time as a private citizen. No longer
representing the government, Allbaugh was there for one thing and one
thing only: to drum up business for corporate clients of The Allbaugh
Company, LLC (website) -- a firm he co-founded with his wife, Diane --
which advises companies how to get in on lucrative disaster relief
projects.

Based in Washington, D.C. with offices in Austin, Texas and Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma, The Allbaugh Company's website points out that it "is
uniquely able to create new opportunities and expand competitive
advantage."

In a report dated September 1, 2005 and titled "Joe Allbaugh, Disaster
Pimp," Slate's Timothy Noah pointed out that Allbaugh is "a lobbyist
and a consultant who's been cashing in on his close ties to President
Bush since 2003."

"Now." Noah wrote, "Allbaugh is the man to see if you want a contract
in Iraq, or a piece of the action on homeland security, or, apparently,
a shot at rebuilding New Orleans. 'I don't buy the 'revolving door'
argument," Allbaugh told the National Journal [in 2004.] 'This is
America. We all have a right to make a living.'"

"If Joe Allbaugh's advice is the basis for Giulani's approach to
national security, I think we can expect that a Giuliani presidency
would see further erosion of the government's ability to actually
respond to disasters, coupled with more profiteering and ineffectual
posturing when disasters happen," the Center for Media and Democracy's
Sheldon Rampton pointed out.