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.)

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet: Bush's Speech

The cronyism and revolving door corruption that led to the federal failure in the Katrina zone is just the small beginning. That failure led to massive suffering and devastation, but also a major opportunity for Bushcorps and buddies to cash in and try to turn the Katrina zone into a pork barrel for their pals and eventually a monument to privatized greed.

They will combat racism and poverty all right---by doing their best to make certain that nobody who isn't rich and hopefully white can live there.

But don't listen to our raving---listen to Krugman and Ivins.

Not the New Deal
by Paul Krugman
The New York Times (excerpts)

Now it begins: America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And the omens aren't good.

It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.

It's possible to spend large sums honestly, as Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated in the 1930's. F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.

How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful "division of progress investigation" to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed.

This commitment to honest government wasn't a sign of Roosevelt's personal virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.'s mission in office was to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission's credibility, he needed to keep his administration's record clean.

But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R. President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.

Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith).

He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.

Molly Ivins:

Some of you may have heard me observe a time or two -- going back to when George W. was still governor of Texas -- that the trouble with the guy is that while he is good at politics, he stinks at governance. It bores him, he's not interested, he thinks government is bad to begin with and everything would be done better if it were contracted out to corporations. We can now safely assert that W. has stacked much of the federal government with people like himself.

And what you get when you put people in charge of government who don't believe in government and who are not interested in running it well is ... what happened after Hurricane Katrina.

Many a time in the past six years I have bit my tongue so I wouldn't annoy people with the always obnoxious observation, "I told you so." But, dammit it all to hell, I did tell you, and I've been telling you since 1994, and I am so sick of this man and everything he represents -- all the sleazy, smug, self-righteous graft and corruption and "Christian" moralizing and cynicism and tax cuts for all his smug, rich buddies.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.