Friends In High Places

Kill people on the streets. The NOLA pumps memo, via fixthepumps via Humid City v2.3. Now, anyone with a speck of gray cellular matter in the uppermost area of their body knows that there is more Bu$hCo involved than the complete failure to help the people of the New Orleans. & yes, here it is - his fucking brother Jeb!

MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El* that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

MWI has run into trouble before. The U.S. Justice Department sued the company in 2002, accusing it of fraudulently helping Nigeria obtain $74 million in taxpayer-backed loans for overpriced and unnecessary water-pump equipment. The case has yet to be resolved.

Taxpayer-backed loans, sounds like Hank Martinsen & Gary LaPean of Ashland, WI.

More on the faulty pumps here & here.

Let it not be said that Hurricane Katrina's lessons didn't sink in. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers learned that it's good to look prepared, even if you aren't -- so it (apparently knowingly) installed 34 defective pumps in New Orleans before the 2006 hurricane season. The season was mild, so the Corps now has time to fix the gadgets' overheating engines, broken hoses, and blown gaskets for the 2007 season. (The pumps were made by a company run by a former business partner of Jeb Bush. We're just saying.) The Corps also learned that developing wetlands is bad, bad, bad. That's why it just issued controversial regulations allowing development on some flood plains to proceed without environmental reviews. Curiously, Corps officials say the rule -- which guides projects that fill less than half an acre of wetlands or less than 300 feet of a stream -- will deter building on bigger wetlands parcels by allowing it on small ones. It's a wonder their brains don't burst from all that logic.

Emphasis added. *Nice ring to the company name, eh? I bet the Bu$hCo handholding buddies in Saudi Arabia love it as well, probably helped with the name.