Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour of interviews about US foreign policy, the environment and more, I’m Dori Smith

Peace and justice activist Roger Benham of Connecticut joins us by phone from Algiers Louisiana. He is there to provide emergency medical care for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and he says he would like to see some of the aid money for storm victims go to grass roots efforts that have proven how effective they can be during the past few weeks. Roger Benham has also done volunteer emergency medical work in the occupied territories, Palestine, and is a community radio producer and environmentalist. He has recently visited Tennessee mining country to work with Mountain Justice Summer a group protesting the mining practice of blasting off tops of mountains.

Smith: Roger Benham welcome to Talk Nation Radio.

ROGER BENHAM: Thank you.

Smith: When did you arrive in New Orleans?

ROGER BENHAM: I got down here to New Orleans on Friday the 9th of September. I came down here with three other people. Two other action medics, one of them was an
EMT and one other person from an anarchist’s collective in D.C. called, “Mayday D.C.”

We came down here at the request of Malik Rahim who is a social activist here in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. And the first thing he wanted us to do was to set up the health center to provide some medical relief for the community. We were basically the first medical relief that they had seen. The day we arrived the Army went around with one ambulance with a couple of paramedics on it knocking on doors and trying to get to people, and then they left. Other than that we were the first medical relief into this community.

I also came down with a bunch of basic hygiene supplies. Diapers and feminine hygiene products and things like that, and the United Church of Christ had already been here distributing some of those supplies. But other than that there was no government relief effort. There was just the Military here on the streets.

Smith: And Roger what is it like down there right now as far as how many people are there, what kind of a scene are you witnessing?

ROGER BENHAM: Where I am now is the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, and it’s part of the city of New Orleans but its on the west bank of the Mississippi, which is actually because of the way the river curves south of the city. And this area never flooded. It just sustained heavy hurricane damage. It didn’t flood. The levies didn’t break on this side of the river like they did on the other side. I have been to the other side, in fact, I was just there today I just got back an hour ago. It was my third trip to go to the other side.

What’s going on now here in Algiers is that a lot of people are coming back, they started coming back just in the last day or two. Some people are just coming back to assess the state of their property and to get some things and then to leave and maybe come back later. And a few people are moving back in.

The Military presence here has really reduced and the New Orleans police department just in the last day or two has started to patrol at night to enforce the curfew that use to be enforced by the Military. So some people are rebuilding their houses and doing repair work. It’s a lot calmer than it was when we first got here. When we first got here it was still basically a war zone. There would be twenty helicopters in the sky at once but they started hooking up electricity to houses where people live on the night we got down here so we actually had no nights without electricity.

It took them a while to get the whole neighborhood up and running but ours, the mosque where we are staying where we established the first aid station slash clinic was one of the first places to get rewired because it sits closer to the city line. So things are much calmer here than they were. They were very bad just before we arrived and the day we arrived was kind of at the tail end of that.

Smith: Roger you said you were helping a population of area residents. Are these people with a particular reason for having stayed where you are or are they people that have come home? How is it that there is a group of people for you to be using your medical skills to try to help?

ROGER BENHAM: Most of the people that we have been seeing are people who couldn’t leave for some reason or another. And the major reason that they couldn’t leave was because they didn’t have cars or they were just too old or were too sick to leave. This is a primarily African American neighborhood. There is a small population of white bohemians and artists more towards the river area called the Point.

So the majority of people that we have seen just couldn’t leave because they didn’t have the resources or they were too sick. So we have been seeing a lot of people since we first got down here with chronic health problems that predated the hurricane. We did treat a few people with hurricane related injuries like infected cuts that hadn’t been treated yet. But the vast majority of people we have been seeing are elderly people or not so elderly people with problems like high blood pressure, diabetes, congestive heart failure; people who haven’t had any access to their prescription medications since the storm.

A big problem that we saw when we first got down here was veterans. As I said this is a predominantly African American neighborhood. There is a large population of older men who are veterans who would be getting their prescription medication through the veteran’s administration in the mail and when the hurricane came that stopped and it still hasn’t started again.

One of the big challenges we faced when we first got down here was trying to hook them up with their prescription medications, trying to find MDs who would come in here just for a day or so and write prescriptions. Then we tried to coordinate just going to one of the few pharmacies that was open, not in this area, but many miles away and getting a bunch of medication and delivering to these people.

We saw people, for example, who had been off their high blood pressure medications for two weeks, and we were seeing blood pressures like 220 over 110 which is life threatening, which is a stroke waiting to happen. And there was no recourse. We kept on asking the Military, look these veterans are depending on the V.A. isn’t there anything you can do?

When we first got here they had no orders to help civilians, and they would say, “our hands are tied we can’t do anything.” So these people were basically abandoned. All the Military was willing to do was evacuate people. They said, “People like that should be evacuated.” And we kept asking the Military what that meant and if they could just evacuate just to take them to a pharmacy to take them to get their prescriptions. When we first got here they told us, “no if someone evacuates they will be taken to New Orleans airport and they will be allowed to go to any major U.S. city if they have relatives there and if they do not have relatives in a major city then they will not be able to chose where they will go they will just go through the evacuation process.”

Smith: What kinds of things are you hearing from the people that you are giving medical care to? Are they satisfied now with the situation they are in or what are their complaints about what is happening? Do they have supplies? I mean, they are getting some care from you but do they have the kinds of supplies coming in that they would like to see?

ROGER BENHAM: The supply situation has improved a lot in the last few days. There is a very large local church presence and they have been distributing supplies out of a parish hall just about two miles away. So people who have cars and can go there can get supplies and I mentioned the United Church of Christ relief operations earlier, that’s only about a block and a half from us, that’s been handing out supplies ever since we first got here.

But the problems here pre-date Katrina. I mean a lot of the people we are seeing were getting their primary health care from Charity Hospital Emergency Room. Charity Hospital is across the river in the city of New Orleans and I’ve just heard today that their emergency room opened back up. But that’s a long haul to go across the bridge. These are problems that pre-dated Katrina and we are not just dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina here; we are dealing with the aftermath of hurricane racism and hurricane capitalism, and those storms have been battering these communities since 1719, when they were founded.

Smith: We’re talking with Roger Benham. He’s an emergency medical worker from Connecticut in the French Quarter of New Orleans and there to see what he can do to help some of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Shall we say people right now who are still in their homes largely? Are they staying in a specific location or are most of these people who have stayed home?

ROGER BENHAM: Sorry, I’m not in the French Quarter, I’m in Algiers, the neighborhood of Algiers, it’s actually across the river from the French Quarter, although I was in the French Quarter today and we can talk about conditions there in a little bit if you want. But yes, these are people who stayed in their homes that we have been seeing, who just rode out the hurricane and then were left in the aftermath with no government services at all except for very crude militarized law enforcement.

As I said I was in the French Quarter today, and pretty much the French Quarter seems to just be occupied by the few die-hards there who outlasted the storm and stayed put. There are a lot of street characters; the kind of people who anyone who has been to New Orleans knows frequents the French Quarter, and a lot of relief workers and a lot of fire fighters and military from all over the country.

We were just at this bar, Johnny Whites, which never closed. It stayed open throughout the storm and actually someone had a makeshift clinic in there during the hurricane and did kind of basic triage and actually sutured on a person’s ear, an old army medic. And that’s just swarmed with the hangers on of disaster. Relief workers and people like that.

But outside the French Quarter on that side of the river there are people who are like people in the neighborhood here in Algiers. We actually went out and inoculated some people today that we found in the central city neighborhood of New Orleans which is just on the other side of the bridge from here. There were about ten people we found there who were just, didn’t have the resources to leave, and they were unwilling to go to the Convention Center or the Superdome because they thought that it would turn into a disaster if they went to those places. And they just stayed in their homes and just rode it out throughout all the violence and the subsequent chaos and we were just driving around and trying to find people on the street and as I say we were inoculating them against tetanus and depending on what their risk behaviors were against Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B as well.

Smith: Now there have been some reports out of New Orleans that physicians are concerned about the possibility of diseases developing. Dr. Peter Deblieux, an ER physician at New Orleans Charity Hospital has expressed the concern on CNN that people might be getting ill again from going back into New Orleans. Maybe because of the standing water, because of what was left behind, chemicals whatever. Are you talking with other people who are aware of any problems in that area?

ROGER BENHAM: We have been trying desperately to get people on top of this situation with developing diseases. So far the only thing that that we’ve been able to confirm down here is a slight up tick in the incidence of Vibrio infections. I guess there have been twelve recently reported cases of Vibrio in hurricane affected areas. But the vast majority, it seems to us down here on the ground, that the vast majority of just talked about diseases is really overblown. There are a lot of rumors flying around. For example, one of the independent journalists working down here had these bumps on his arm the other day and he showed them to us and he said he had run into some soldiers and the soldiers saw the bumps and they said, “Oh you have knobs, New Orleans bumps, and yeah you get those over across the river.” And this journalist had been across the river quite a bit.

Well our doctor here looked at these bumps and he has quite a bit of clinical experience. He worked at San Francisco General Hospital, and he determined that they were flea bites. There are quite a few stray dogs running around here. They were abandoned. So things like that can kind of get blown out of proportion; and this is not to minimize the dangers to anybody who had an open cut or anything coming in contact with the flood waters, but a lot of this talk about disease strikes me as having a racist subtext. You know, New Orleans is about 67% black and when the flood came CNN sent Jeff Koinage, who is their African reporter, and the way that the Military talked about pacifying New Orleans. There was some report about; “We are going to make this place look like Somalia” –I think there was a little bit of a racist subtext going on with these rumors and they now have to be kept in perspective. From my understanding that there have been no cases of Cholera, there have been no cases of Malaria, there has been a few cases of the West Nile, but you know where we live in Connecticut we have West Nile.

I think it all needs to be kept in perspective with disease issues, and we need to be informed about a real racist subtext going on there like, Louisiana’s the third world, the people down here are different from the rest of Americans. It is frankly rather, some of it is rather offensive. But I do not want to minimize the dangers of the chemical contamination that’s going on down here because this has been an environmental disaster. In many ways this is the American Chernoble. Simply because of the amount of oil and the petrochemical plants that were flooded and then the flood waters were contaminated with those chemicals. So there is an issue of contamination going on down here. But that’s the kind of thing that will show up not right away in new diseases, that will show up down the line in higher instances of cancer and various mutagenic diseases, but you’ve got to remember that this area of the country, Louisiana, has always had one of the country’s highest cancer rates because of the number of petrochemical plants and because of the amount of pollution that comes down the Mississippi.

The Mississippi drains the entire central portion of the country so all the agricultural run off and all the industrial run off comes out here. So this area has been impacted heavily by chemical spills before and now it’s just ten times worse and we are going to be seeing the results of that in years to come.

Smith: The environmental consequences of hurricane Katrina have been discussed to a certain extent in two ways. One, the toxicity of water that wound up getting pumped back into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, and two, the factors having to do with degradation of the coast line; –These relating directly to the consequences of the storm, and then too the story of global warming has started to be mentioned here and there in the press. Certainly not to the degree that someone like Steve Conner has written about it in today’s Counter Currents and his headline is “Global Warming, Past the Point of No Return.” This was featured in the Independent September 17, 2005.

His topic is “a record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer which is convincing some scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. –Scientists fearing that the Arctic has entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice which has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.”

–I know you are environmentally aware Roger Benham. Put this into some context in terms of how your overall view of our planet has been impacted by the crisis that you have gone down there to see first hand.

ROGER BENHAM: Well I think that anyone with their eyes open realizes that global overheating is going on. That’s what I call it now. Global warming does not do justice to what is really happening, and global warming sounds kind of nice, like “it will warm up.” But what is going on is global overheating, the issues that you just mentioned, the melting of the sea ice, while they are not directly related to what happened down here this is kind of a preview of things to come.

We have had category 4 hurricanes hit the U.S. before, before they were measured there was a hurricane, I think it was in 1900 that hit Galveston Texas and killed between eight thousand and ten thousand people and wiped the city out. But what’s significant about this disaster I think is that it shows just how vulnerable modern infrastructure is; oil refineries, petrochemical plants, modern American cities, the health system, the courts, how vulnerable it is to rising sea levels and to increased incidences of hurricanes.

Anyone who has studied hurricanes and what they are about, hurricanes are part of the planet’s thermoregulation process. They form near the equator and they move away from the equator. In the northern hemisphere they move to the north and in the southern hemisphere they move to the south. (–Cell phone blank space error–) warmed sea water, so it makes sense that if sea water is warming you are going to get more hurricanes. And you are going to see more destruction as well because another issue that has happened here is that the wet lands of Louisiana have been systematically destroyed over the last hundred years. The whole ecological history of the southern Mississippi here is one of just betting that a disaster won’t happen.

Where I’m standing here in Algiers like I said earlier the levee here never broke but when you stand on the levee you see that the Mississippi is higher than the neighborhood. So if the levee had broken here the neighborhood would have been flooded. Well the reason the Mississippi is higher is because it’s inside a levee system. The Mississippi use to naturally flood and it use to cover this area with sediment seasonally. By building levees all that sediment is dropped in the river channel and that has gradually raised the level of the river.

The other issue here is subsidence. As more and more infrastructure has been built the level of the ground in some places has actually gone down as the water table has gone down and that’s not a situation unique to New Orleans. That is happening in many places around the world and human populations are concentrated in these areas that are most vulnerable to rising sea levels and increased storms.

If you look at population density maps all over the world people live in the vulnerable areas along the coast much more than they do inland; Our biggest cities, New York City, Boston, Miami, are very close to the ocean, and in other areas of the world too like in Bangladesh, on the Nile Delta, the Netherlands, the city of London, you have these large concentrations of humanity at these areas that are very vulnerable to rising sea levels. And at the same time we’ve been doing things like destroying the wetlands here in Southern Louisiana, destroying Mangrove forests throughout the tropics, and these kinds of systems act as breakwaters against storm surges from hurricanes and they act as sponges and regulatory mechanisms against rising sea levels.

So it stands to reason that if you are going to be raising the overall temperature of the planet by liberating all of those carbons getting locked away in fossil fuels for millions of years you are going to liberate that into the atmosphere. In 200 years you are going to raise the temperature of the planet, you are going to have more increased storms, and at the same time you will have more and more people living very close to vulnerable areas.

So I think what we’ve seen here in New Orleans, and I don’t mean to neglect that there’s devastation and destruction that has also happened in other areas, rural areas of Louisiana and along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, but what we are seeing here is a preview of what we are I fear going to be seeing a lot more of as the 21st Century continues.

Smith: Let’s spend the rest of our time then on what kinds of things people can do to help. I know locally students at ESCU have been organizing concerts and this type of thing is going on across the country. How would you like to see the charitable aid that has been collected and the funds and so on, how would you like to see that money spent as you look around these neighborhoods to see what they need?

ROGER BENHAM: I would like to see the money spent according to the wishes of the people that live in these neighborhoods. And this project that I’m involved with, Common Ground down here in Algiers and now also in the 9th ward of New Orleans, I think is a good example of that. (See also the the site and on September 20, 2005, the volunteer health care efforts of Common Ground in Algiers were featured on CNN.)

What basically happened here was that people in the neighborhood saw a need and they put a call out for activists to come down here and do everything from providing medical support to clearing the streets. -We’ve cleared storm gutters here, we’ve started working on repairing people’s houses, we’ve cleared debris out of the streets; I would like to see the money go to projects like that.

There have been various conflicted agendas going on down here between various government agencies and private agencies like the Red Cross and there seems to have been a sense before this disaster that the government and these bigger institutions were the ones that we would turn to in a disaster. But what I’ve seen down here shows, I don’t think that’s the answer, I don’t think that’s how we are going to be able to deal with the increasing environmental degradation and disasters that are going to come.

Right after the storm there were many instances of private individuals simply grabbing boats here in New Orleans and going out and rescuing people from roof tops. There were instances of people self organizing to get out of the city. Everything from getting abandoned cars and hot wiring them, loading them up with refugees, driving them out. -Under hails of gunfire I might add from agencies like the Gretna Police just to the south of here. I don’t know if you are familiar with the incident that happened where 200 people tried to march out on the bridge that I’m looking at now and they were turned back into New Orleans by a line of Gretna Sheriffs deputies firing live ammunition over their heads. Things like that.

At the same time you had people who wanted to help coming from all over the country, medical professionals, and they were sitting in Baton Rouge waiting for something to do, waiting for orders from FEMA. They were sitting there while people in these communities were dying. Everyone was sitting around waiting to be told what to do by the officials in charge, and the officials in charge didn’t know what they were doing, they still don’t know what they are doing.

I ran into a man who worked for the sewage and levee district down here in New Orleans and he had a whole FEMA team with him, a crack dewatering team that had been activated by FEMA and their whole job was to come down here with all this equipment and pump out flooded areas. Well he ran into another member of his team at an army encampment down here and asked him what he was doing and the man said, “We are doing nothing. We’re delayed on a naval ship in the Mississippi and we’ve done nothing since we got down here. And this fellow from the sewage and levee district said “well I’ll work for you, let’s go out,” and they have been going for the last couple of days dewatering all of these areas under nobody’s authority.

The man from Louisiana said, “I have no authority to do this, no one is telling me anything, we just decided we are going to go out and do it.” And they have been clearing all of these areas of floodwaters without any government instructions whatsoever. And that’s what we are involved with down here. We just put together this medical clinic with fully accredited doctors and nurses who are able to practice here under the state of emergency. We’ve just been going out into the community. We have made contact with a lot of people by bicycle patrols, with EMTs on bicycles, people that the Army wasn’t reaching.

We talked to people in this community, asked where their elders were, where their shut INS were. We got access to a lot of people’s houses that the Army didn’t have access to because they came in with a bunch of men with guns knocking on doors loudly, and that’s not the way to get action from people who have been traumatized by the storm and all of the gunplay that was happening.

So I would like people to think about their money perhaps going to more grassroots organizations and more grass roots efforts, because the state and the institutions just let us down in this disaster quite criminally and in an atrocious manner and I don’t think that more government, or institutionalized bureaucracy and red tape is the answer. I think empowering local communities, the communities directly affected, and giving them what they want on the ground and just letting people do what I’ve seen people be very good at here; take care of each other; and when they are given resources do incredible things.

By the way the organizations which just have started since the hurricane has a web site if anyone is interested it’s Common Ground Relief if anyone wants to check that out. That might give people some ideas of where they could send resources or volunteer their time. These communities are looking for people with skills, carpentry skills, and plumbing skills, environmental testing skills, to come down here and spend some time in Southern Louisiana or to spend some time in Mississippi. And we’ve been sending people to Mississippi to help folks over there too.

It’s really incredible what’s happening down here and I’ve never seen anything like it in all my experience as an activist. It may be the beginning of something new or we may go back to business as usual but I really think that this is going to change a lot of people’s lives.

Smith: As you know Roger, the U.S. Government, Homeland Security, FEMA, are sending a lot of contractors down and the contracts are being written faster than anyone can track them to companies like Halliburton, Kellogg Brown Root, we’ve seen most of
the names from the war zone in Iraq; Bechtel; so this is now the obvious intent at least is to set up a lot of the known companies to start rebuilding.

FEMA has outsourced the Katrina body count to a firm that was implicated in body dumping scandals, a really dark crime. This is a company named Kenyon, a subsidiary of Service Corporation International, SCI. It’s a scandal ridden Texas based company operated by a friend of the Bush family and SCI have illegally discarded and desecrated corpses according to Miriam Raftery writing for The Raw Story.

Any ideas about the body counts or what kinds of things we may hear about in the coming weeks and months as to the death toll, injuries, and this grim story of loss of life and how that is being handled?

ROGER BENHAM: Yeah. Well there was a body lying out in this neighborhood a few blocks from where I am standing and it was laying out there until Amy Goodman of Democracy Now came down, and Malik Rahim a local activist, showed her the body and she talked about it on her show. The next day they picked that body up. The body was very badly decomposed. It was probably someone who was, I didn’t get a very good look at it because someone had covered it partially with a piece of a metal roof, but it was very badly decomposed and the man had probably been shot in some of the violence that had happened. But there is no way that we are going to get any accountability from capitalist corporations. They screwed up the reconstruction of Iraq, and now they are doing it here again, and we can’t let them bring Iraq back home.

Basically, what they have done to New Orleans is what they did to Fallujah. Completely emptied the city out, and then what we have to resist now is to resist them trying to rebuild New Orleans as some kind of “New Orleans-world”. We have to resist their attempts to gentrify it and their attempts to get rich off it. And when I hear these stories: Down here on the ground I just saw some Blackwater Merc..(Cell phone gap) there on the other side and they are trying out all (cell phone gap) here that they first experimented with in Iraq. That’s a very old story about you try things in the colonies first and then they come back home, that happened with everything from finger printing to machine guns to aerial bombing. –A lot of the things that they have done here, a lot of the techniques they have used here in this militarized response, this very late response that was entirely militarized, are things that we saw in Iraq. And we can’t let them do to New Orleans what they have done to places like Fallujah, in Iraq.

There’s no public accountability and I can’t think how the American people are letting the U.S. Government get away with it again. What the Bush Administration did in this situation, in the first through neglect was criminal, and in my mind was nothing short of manslaughter, and now what they are doing in their response is even more criminal because they are actually getting rich off of the suffering of the poor black population of New Orleans. And every American should be extremely upset about this because if it happens in New Orleans, they will try it first with the poor Black populations in a city like New Orleans but they are going to come to every American and try to do this too if we let it happen. We can’t let it happen. We’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to support grass roots community efforts for communities, resist letting capitalist corporations come here making money off of it.

George Bush suspended the minimum wage in the hurricane zone. He suspended the minimum wage because he said that would make the federal response more efficient. That’s ridiculous. The idea that you would pay people from here less and you are going to bring in Blackwater Security Guards and paying them, I don’t know how much they get paid but in Iraq they were getting paid $100,000 a year, and at the same time you are going to inflict more impoverishment on these communities; Where if you invested those resources at the local level these communities could actually be better off than they were before, with more democratic participation from the people who live here, with more input into their lives? So that’s just completely the wrong approach and we have to stop it.

Smith: With that final word Roger Benham’s cell phone cut out, as he remained in Algiers, Louisiana, to help provide medical assistance. Roger Benham is an emergency medical care volunteer from Connecticut. He decided to go to Louisiana after a call for volunteers from Malik Rahim, a community organizer from New Orleans. Malik Rahim was recently featured in a Democracy Now interview. He and others witnessed the militarization of New Orleans as state and federal officials called for forced evacuation.

You’re listening to Talk Nation Radio, produced in the studios of WHUS Storrs, FM 91.7 in Connecticut. We will use the final moments of today’s program for storm related headlines:

-Five people who were shot dead by police as they walked across Danziger Bridge in New Orleans September 4th were contractors working for the defense dept. according to the Associated Press.

-The death toll continues to change as hundreds are known killed but thousands still appear to be missing. Over 2000 children are still according to CNN, which broadcasts photos of kids and information. www.missingkids.com or www.nola.com for more.

-Miriam Raftery reported in The Raw Story that the Katrina Body Count was outsourced to the company involved in Funeralgate. Morgue duties will be provided in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by Kenyon, a subsidiary of SCI, the company involved in a scandal involving Bush family friend and campaign contributor, Robert Waltrip. SCI dug up bodies and put them in mass graves to make room for more burials. Millions of dollars in fines were paid but the officials involved avoided criminal prosecution. One committed suicide. –SCI was hired for Katrina through FEMA, Homeland Security, and the governor of Louisiana.

–With billions in contracts to be had a FEMA official expressed concern that they are going down the path of “no federal accountability for huge sums of money,” according to a September 18 story in the LA Times.

–Halliburton and subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, as well as Bechtel have received top contracts without bids. Journalist Dahr Jamail has reported on this program that Bechtel was paid to clean up water that was contaminated during the invasion and war but has not done the work. Look for Dahr Jamail to speak in Connecticut in October.

–The US State Department has accused Halliburton of poor performance in carrying out a 1.2 billion dollar contract in Iraq, and Representative Henry Waxman, of California, found Halliburton’s overcharges exceeded 47% of the total task order according to IPS and William Fisher, “Double Trouble.”

–The Project on Government Oversight and USA Today has reported on two more troubled companies receiving major Katrina contracts: A division of the California Company Fluor, received $100 million dollar contract to provide housing. Fluor agreed to pay $3.2 million over 1997 allegations of padding repair bills to clean up Navy bases in South Carolina after Hurricane Hugo. It agreed to pay 8.1 million in 2001 to settle allegations it billed the US government for work done for other clients.

In addition to Halliburton, Kellogg Brown and Root, Bechtel, and Flour, another embattled company, the Shaw Group, of Louisiana, has received a $200 million dollar Katrina contract in spite of an SEC investigation, and will also be working for the Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Navy and other agencies, according to USA Today. Try the Project on Government Oversight Website at POGO.org for more.

For Talk Nation Radio, I’m Dori Smith, Talk Nation Radio is produced at the studios of WHUS Storrs, Radio for the People at the University of Connecticut. to listen live wed. at 5 pm and visit the Talk Nation blog for transcripts and discussion.