Cinema Fridays: Disaster Profiteering

America Betrayed, directed by Leslie Cardé, currently in limited U.S. theatrical release

Academy Award winning actor Richard Dreyfuss narrates America Betrayed, the feature documentary written, directed, and produced by filmmaker Leslie Cardé. This film places the spotlight front and center on the specific ways in which the U.S. government contributes to, and profits from disasters both here and abroad. From 9/11, to the war in Iraq, to the levee failures in Hurricane Katrina, America Betrayed follows the money, and the path leads straight back to the hallowed halls of Congress the profits straight into the pockets of those with ties to the government.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer review:

Three years after the levee failures in New Orleans, five years after we entered into a war in Iraq, and seven years post- 9/11, there are some disturbing parallels to be drawn between the government's post-disaster responses. With a new regime slated to descend upon Washington in the next few months, will the growing rise of disaster capitalism, in which private enterprise benefits from public disasters, continue to spread its ugly tentacles? Or can we expect a sea change in policy? Will the backroom insider dealing abate, or will it be business as usual?

At first glance, there may seem to be little in the way of common denominators between the aforementioned catastrophes that caused so much structural damage here and abroad. But, scratch the surface, and the post-disaster profiteering becomes readily apparent.

In the wake of the drowning of New Orleans, at the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. government handed out no-bid contracts for everything from reconstruction of levees to post-Katrina security largely to its corporate friends. While many in the Corps have been busy patting themselves on the back for the reengineered levees that survived Hurricane Gustav, to date, only one-eighth of the failing floodwalls have been rebuilt. Chalk up the survival of New Orleans this time around more to good fortune than to a timely and well-engineered flood-protection plan in place.

In point of fact, that city's reconstruction of levees and pumps, to date, has been riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, and the buck stops with the feds, and their wingmen . . . the Army Corps. The shameless manner in which lucrative contracts are handed out has benefited only a privileged few, and in many cases those special-interest groups have been the culprits in substandard manufacturing. Unpainted outflow pipes were delivered to the city, and they quickly rusted. Blue-roof tarps, put in place to keep rainwater out of people's homes temporarily, became one big boondoggle, perpetrated by corporate America, as contractor after contractor subbed the jobs out, collecting monies over and over again from FEMA. And who's minding the store when it comes to oversight on the spending of reconstruction dollars?

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have charged that $2 billion of funds given to contractors post-Katrina is missing. And while both candidates feel that the neglect of New Orleans at the federal level has been "shameful," there has been no disagreement that many Bush insiders have profited from that city's unraveling.
But this, sadly, is nothing new. The same companies leading the charge of disaster-capitalism post-Katrina, were very familiar with the scenario - they were already rebuilding the infrastructure in Iraq.

Corporate America has cashed in to the tune of tens of billions of dollars with no-bid contracts, post-Katrina, post-9/11, and with the rebuilding of Iraq. And, it seems, the only real losers here are the American people. Missing cleanup cash in New Orleans pales in comparison with the $8 billion the Government Accounting Office has deemed missing in Iraq.

For more information visit the website here. To contact writer and director Leslie Cardé, email americabetrayed@gmail.com.