The past week has featured some outstanding work by
Digby, who chronicles the events of Katrina, day-by-day, bringing back all the horror, helplessness, impotent rage and sheer insanity of those days.
One of the things that I remember particularly in the aftermath of the calamity was being encouraged at least by all of the discussion in the public sphere about the issues that it brought into such stark relief, but particularly poverty and racism. Finally, I thought, we'll have some impetus to not only highlight these issues, but maybe an opportunity to address them, at least in the hurricane-stricken Gulf states, and the areas that felt the most impact in absorbing displaced Gulf residents. We could finally start talking about the plight of the 37 million people in America who live below the poverty line.
How naive could I have been? At least I wasn't alone in that. In a column in this week's Newsweek, Jonathon Alter admits to the same misconception, and the great hope he had that somehow the Bush presidency could be remade:
"It takes a hurricane," I wrote. "It takes the sight of the United States with a big black eye--visible around the world--to help the rest of us begin to see again." I ended on a hopeful note: "What kind of president does George W. Bush want to be? ... If he seizes the moment, he could undertake a midcourse correction that might materially change the lives of millions. Katrina gives Bush an only-Nixon-could-go-to-China opportunity, if he wants it."
...
The week after the article appeared, Bush went to Jackson Square in New Orleans and made televised promises not only for Katrina relief but to address some of the underlying struggles of the poor. He proposed "worker recovery accounts" to help evacuees find work by paying for job training, school and child care; an Urban Homesteading Act that would make empty lots and loans available to the poor to start over, and a Gulf Enterprise Zone to spur business investment in poor areas. Small ideas, perhaps, but good ones.
What's happened to the "worker recovery accounts," the Urban Homesteading Act, the Gulf Enterprise Zone? Not much. The first two ideas never got off the ground. As for the Enterprise Zone?
The administration's two-step process for post-Katrina renewal was in effect to (1) hand out $9 billion in almost entirely unregulated contracts to insider corporations, many of which sub-contracted and did little to employ locals, and (2) create the infamous corporate tax-break "Go Zones," which Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch reporter Sean Reilly exposed in our report One Year after Katrina:
A key feature of the legislation allows Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana to issue up to almost $15 billion of tax-free "GO Zone" bonds on behalf of companies seeking to build or renovate. So far, however, many of the firms seeking to take advantage of the cheap loans are pursuing ventures at best loosely connected to the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
It makes perfect sense that this administration and the Congress that is enabling it would do little more than find a way to make a few quick bucks for their buddies, whether it helped actual Katrina victims or not, whether it rebuilt entire region devestated by Katrina or not. As John Kerry says in the Alter column:
"This is the greatest lost opportunity I've ever seen in public life," Sen. John Kerry told me last week. "The Jackson Square speech ought to stand as one of the all-time monuments to hollow rhetoric and broken promises." Kerry depicted the response during the last year as a slow-motion Superdome II, where the federal government once more walked right past people in distress.
Distress doesn't seem to register with Bush, or with the Republicans at all. They send the country reeling from one disaster to the next, sending the sons, daughters, husbands and wives of other people, of poor people, off to fight their disastrous war. They agree to the first minimum wage increase in nine years, but only if the wealthiest of the wealthy in this country got their estate tax cut, a cut that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Hundreds of billions of dollars that could have rebuilt New Orleans and Biloxi, provided job training, built affordable housing, reunited Gulf Coast families and put thousands of people back to work.
But that's not where the priorities of the Rubber Stamp Republican Congress, and more particularly the Bush administration, lie. To quote Alter again:
After all the heat he took last year, how could Bush have blown the aftermath of Katrina? It's not as if he lacks confidence in the power of his office. He believes he can fix Iraq and transform the Middle East. He aspires to spread democracy to the far corners of the globe. But the fate of an American city and millions of his impoverished countrymen are apparently beyond his control, or perhaps just his interest.
It's time for change.