The Incompetence, the Corruption, the Cronyism: Sept. 22nd, 2005 edition*

The Incompetence:

Ice for the Big Easy goes a long way
Trucks haul excess to Gloucester storage (Boston Globe)

GLOUCESTER -- First, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent them to the Gulf Coast, a rumbling, rolling convoy of tractor-trailers hauling 170 million pounds of ice bound for victims of Hurricane Katrina, whose food and medicine supplies were rapidly spoiling in the relentless sun.

No sooner had they arrived, when FEMA handed down another order: Never mind. It turns out that most of the victims had already been brought to shelters in Texas and other states with working refrigerators and freezers.

Now, 114 of the big rigs have ended up here, 1,000 miles north of the hurricane zone, on the briny, ocean-cooled shores of Cape Ann in Gloucester.

The Corruption:

Frist Stock Sale Raises Questions on Timing (Washington Post)

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has maintained for years that his stock holdings in the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain posed no conflict of interest for a policymaker deeply involved in health care matters. He even received two rulings in the 1990s from the Senate ethics committee that blessed the holding of the stock in blind trusts.

So when Frist decided in June to dump all the stock, and later cited as the reason his desire to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, eyebrows went up among ethics experts and congressional watchdogs. Why did he do it at that time?

Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold [by Frist], its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.

The Cronyism:

W Marks the Spot
Bait and Switch in the Bitterroot (From counterpunch.com, via cursor.org)

Like Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the Forest Service under George W. Bush runs on pr, corporate cronyism, an obsession with secrecy and the rapid-fire deployment of fabricated justifications for cutting down old-growth forests.

*The title of this post comes from skippy: framed