The Other Shoe Drops

Faced with increasing criticism from conservative allies, Bushcorps began talking about federal spending cuts to “offset” the massive commitment to rebuilding in the Katrina zone.The LA Times reports:

Bush did not specify the kind or extent of budget cuts he wanted Congress to consider, saying the White House budget office would "work with Congress to figure out where we need to offset, when we need to offset," he said.But administration officials said a good place to start would be reducing discretionary and entitlement spending proposed in the president's budget for the 2006 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

"Entitlements" in this lingo doesn't mean the big breaks given to corporate special interests or the massive tax cuts that the rich feel they are entitled to; it means programs badly needed by precisely the same kinds of people that Bush promised to help in New Orleans---the poor (who have steadily and alarmingly grown in number in the Bushcorps era) and minorities.

This budget-cutting pledge is not long after the White House helped push through an energy bill and an transportation bill loaded with pork for GOP congressional districts but mainly for Bushcorps corporate buddies.So what will the price of Bush’s program for New Orleans, which is loaded with giveaways to these same corporate interests, and very cheap on help to ordinary people?Just another excuse for cutting what’s left of healthcare, education, consumer protection, environmental protections and mitigations, and possibly above all, the agencies like public health on all levels that are likely to be on the front lines of the next big crisis, again without the resources and direction they need.

Just how badly Bushcorps crippled federal emergency preparedness and resources is revealed today in a story by Adam Entous in Reuters, which reveals that Bush " sought to cut a key program to help local governments raise their preparedness, and state officials warned of a "total lack of focus" on natural disasters by his homeland-security chief, documents show. "The disclosures add to questions over the administration's emergency-response planning, Homeland Security' Secretary Michael Chertoff's priorities and the way the White House budgets for disaster preparedness after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Organizations representing emergency-response and security officials at state and local agencies had complained of funding shortages and what they saw as an excessive shift by the Homeland Security Department away from preparing for natural disasters, as it focused increasingly on terrorism.

In July, the National Emergency Management Association wrote lawmakers expressing "grave" concern that still-pending changes proposed by Chertoff would undercut the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "Our primary concern relates to the total lack of focus on natural-hazards preparedness," David Liebersbach, the association's president, said in the July 27 letter to Sens. Susan Collins, a Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat, the leaders of a key Senate committee overseeing the agency.

He said Chertoff's emphasis on terrorism "indicates that FEMA's long-standing mission of preparedness for all types of disasters has been forgotten at DHS."

Does this sound familiar? Before 9/11 the Bush White House steadfastly ignored the information and advice of various agencies to pay attention to the threat of terrorism. Then, after terrorism became a political bludgeon, there was nothing else but efforts to use the terrorist threat to advance political and crony corporate ambitions. As Paul Krugman points out, Bushcorps got away with all this because they paid no political price. But this time they may not escape responsibility.

Information continues to emerge about the almost unbelievable bureaucratic incompetence of the FEMA hacks that Bushcorps hired, who not only failed to mount rescue operations but actively hindered them. The latest examples are in a Tierney column in the New York Times. (Read 'em while you can, before the Times columnists withdraw behind the veil of pay-for-view.)