A day after having published a
shameful apology of Bush, the Financial Times publishes a series of scathing comments on the Bush presidency, one from their main US political correspondent, and the other from their other conservative editorialist, Christopher Caldwell (of the Weekly Standard).
Bush policies have crippled disaster response
With the New Deal in the 1930s, helping those who could not help themselves became a mission that spawned a vast expansion of government's role. After a generation of determined effort the conservative movement has succeeded in squelching that mission. In the aftermath of Katrina, its success appears to have come at high cost.
Christopher Caldwell: A society bursts its banks
But whereas September 11 reminded Americans of what they held in common, this crisis is doing something different. It is sowing unease among Americans about the kind of society they live in, as well as worries that foreigners are thinking along the same lines.
From the first article:
There are at least three reasons why the hurricane may mark a turning point in the US debate over the role of government.
First, the deep tax cuts enacted in 2001 - which President George W.?Bush now wants extended permanently - left no room for government initiatives that might have prevented the catastrophe and increased capacity to respond.
(...) [The article notes all the funding cuts by Bush for required work on the New Orleans levees]
Second, despite huge increases in spending to fight the war in Iraq, the hurricane revealed how thinly the US military has been stretched. [The article notes how the local National Guard was in Iraq ]
(...)
Most striking, however, has been how the storm has ruthlessly exposed the poverty that still afflicts a substantial minority of Americans, and has grown worse since Mr Bush pushed through tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the well-to-do. The US Census Bureau reported this week that another 1.1m Americans slipped below the poverty line last year. After falling for most of a decade, since 2000 the number of Americans in poverty has grown from 11.3 per cent to 12.7 per cent of the population - a higher percentage than in the 1970s despite 30 years of generally robust economic growth.
Its conclusion:
With the New Deal in the 1930s, helping those who could not help themselves became a mission that spawned a vast expansion of government's role. After a generation of determined effort the conservative movement has succeeded in squelching that mission. In the aftermath of Katrina, its success appears to have come at high cost.
And now on to Caldwell. I don't know enough about his work at the Weekly Standard, but for the FT he writes mostly thoughtful, if clearly conservative, pieces. In this one, after describing the economic catastrophe caused by the hurricane (the energy crisis, the destruction of trade on the Mississippi) he focuses on the perceptions of the crisis and he is not kind to Bush:
There are corpses floating down the streets of New Orleans, and warnings of cholera, typhoid fever and other diseases. One doctor told a reporter: "In a lot of ways, we're functioning as if we were in a developing country."
Five years after discovering they had suicide terrorism within their borders, Americans are now being introduced to the notion of having their own "refugees", too. Tens of thousands of them are being bussed to neighbouring states from the city's convention and sports centres, where they have been sleeping for days. The state of Texas has announced that it will accept 23,000 refugees in Houston's Astrodome. An unsettling - and internationally embarrassing - aspect of this mass movement is the discovery that almost all the unfortunates stranded in New Orleans are black. Most Americans consider defacto segregation a fading reality. They may be right. But the TV footage challenges that view, to put it mildly. Under the weight of homeless migrants from New Orleans, the previously sleepy state capital of Baton Rouge hasbecome the largest city in Louisiana, like some Middle Eastern border city that people pour into in search of asylum.
Ouch, that must hurt. Remember, this is a conservative writing! He then goes on to describe, in detail, the criticism thrown at the Bush administration for its inept handling of the disaster relief. He has not a single word to contest these words, only saying that these have been provided by the New York Times and "others". Not a stinging rebuttal at all, and actually a strong airing of these stinging words.
The political consequences for Mr Bush are more likely to resemble those visited on the Turkish government in 1999, accused of a slow response when a massive earthquake outside Istanbul killed 17,000 people, many of them living in rickety apartments. Thisis the way such disasters usually work. Rightly or wrongly, the government not only gets blamed for its incompetence in dealing with the disaster. It also becomes a symbol of years of bad decisions. Or, which is worse, a symbol of bad luck.
The last sentence is the only one that can be construed as a defense of Bush ("it's only bad luck"), but actually, it means that he considers that the Bush administration is toast ("rightly or wrongly" - he doesn't even take sides, just allowing for some doubt about it). The comparison with the Turkish earthquake is actually pretty devastating, because the government there lost all credibility with the public for two things:
- its inept handling of the aftermath
- all the stories that came out about how the construction codes had not been respected and how the politicians in power had profited from the construction work through corruption and largesse and let the country with vulnerable buildings (in areas known to be earthquake-prone).
But this is the meme:
"the conservative movement has succeeded in destroying the government and this is the result"
AND THE BUSINESS WORLD IS FINALLY NOTICING AND IS NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT.