I just returned from a trip to Phoenix, during which I took a drive through the city's South Mountain Park, a swath of the Sonoran Desert that is the largest municipal park in the country and the starkly beautiful home to more species than anywhere else in North America.
At the summit, called Dobbin's Point, and elsewhere in the park, stand stone outposts and visitor facilities constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1937 and 1942, when the unemployed were paid $30 a week to blast the route of the steep winding road up, and were grateful to get the work. Still solid, a lasting testament more than 60 years on to what government money can do.
Curious about just how much money $200 billion is, I checked and found the entire US defense budget for 2005 is $407 billion. What the Katrina reconstruction budget amounts to is about half of that --only slightly less than the defense budgets of Russia, China, the UK, and Japan COMBINED.
I try to picture those kinds of sums in the hands of a top government official, a strategist who has only one job, consolidating the Republican Right Wing's power over the nation. A person who cares nothing about public policy except insofar as it advances that agenda, and whose track record shows him to be ruthlessly efficient at eliminating enemies real or imagined.
Here is how I imagine it will proceed. The displaced, the unemployed, the ruined---all the people in the Gulf who have been decimated by Hurricane Katrina--will see almost none of this money.
This government official already knows who the contractors will be, the calls are being placed now, and whether you want to say it's through diversion, or bribes, or payoffs, or favors, some portion of that $200 billion is going to end up winning state and national elections for the Republicans.
Be wildly conservative and say that percentage is 1% -- that's 55 TIMES as much money as the Democratic National Committee raised in 2004, its most successful fund-raising year ever.
All the elections in this country are like horse races--they're exciting, and weighing the odds and trying to outguess others on who the winners will be is fascinating. But races where one set of horses is sleek and pumped up with steroids, running against horses who've had a leg or two lopped off, are foregone conclusions.
When Congress passes its next Patriot Act installment to include martial law, as Bush has requested, our horses may be dead at the starting gate. I hope we'll see more of the incredible analytic powers on display at dailykos shifted to soberly facing this and strategizing ways to fight back.