VMC SURVEY BOARD

[ksuave]

I generally feel that this board works better when people express their own opinions rather than just paste in articles or urls, but these exerpts from an article I read succinctly state my own personal opinions about the political implications of Katrina. I don't know where the article originally appeared; someone sent it to me.


. . .Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists
have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government
performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans'
flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov.
Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of
feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of
both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.

Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of
protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even
after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub
flooded New Orleans "Lake George."

None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a
campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify
the role of government in American life.

Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that
their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government
policies that aid only poor brown and black people -- even as corporate
profits and CEO salaries soared.

For decades we have seen social services that benefit everyone -- education,
community policing, public health, environmental protections and
infrastructure repair, emergency services -- in steady, steep decline in the
face of tax cuts and rising military spending. But it is a false savings; it
will certainly cost exponentially more to save New Orleans than it would
have to protect it in the first place.

And, although the wealthy can soften the blow of this national decline by
sending their kids to private school, building walls around their
communities and checking into distant hotels in the face of approaching
calamities, others, like the 150,000 people living below the poverty line in
the Katrina damage area -- one-third of whom are elderly -- are left exposed.

Watching on television the stark vulnerability of a permanent underclass of
African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos is terrifying. It should be
remembered, however, that even when hurricanes are not threatening their
lives and sanity, they live in rotting housing complexes, attend
embarrassingly ill-equipped public schools and, lacking adequate police
protection, are frequently terrorized by unemployed, uneducated young men.

In fact, rather than an anomaly, the public suffering of these desperate
Americans is a symbol for a nation that is becoming progressively poorer
under the leadership of the party of Big Business. As Katrina was making its
devastating landfall, the U.S.
Census Bureau released new figures that show that since 1999, the income of
the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7% in inflation-adjusted
dollars. Last year alone, 1.1 million -- mostly whites -- were added to the
36 million already on the poverty rolls.

. . .

Fact is, most of them, and especially the president, just don't care about
the people who can't afford to attend politicalfundraisers or pay for
high-priced lobbyists. No, these folks are supposed to be cruising on the
rising tide of a booming, unregulated economy that "floats all boats."

They were left floating all right. Dead and face down in the floodwaters of
New Orleans.


Copyright 2005 Robert M. Scheer