By Roldo Bartimole
The New Orleans disaster really started when Ronald Reagan took a bludgeon to PATCO in 1981. It marked the Republican Party’s successful assault on Labor and the ascendance of the take-no-prisoners-capitalism that has endangered American democracy ever since. After Labor came the government itself.
The trend has been down on almost every human front since the smiling, genial Reagan suckered the nation for his long-time corporate sponsors.
President Reagan fired all the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) and Labor did not shut down the entire nation with a nationwide strike. It should have. The strangling of PATCO was the death knell for American Labor and, therefore, of all ordinary American citizens.
The link to Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is simple: By destroying government responsibility and what little countervailing power it represented, American crony capitalism was on its way to total victory.
They made people believe their own government was a foreign entity, not to be trusted. Of course, by lowering the effectiveness of government they insured self-prophesy.
Now, President George Bush wants to blame the “bureaucracy,” i. e. government, for the tragic debacle in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and particularly New Orleans. Thereby, escaping blame for not only his incompetence but also his and his administration’s total failure to protect Americans four years after 9/11, supposedly our wakeup call.
What has he done in four years that the nation could not respond adequately? Didn’t he say in his debate with John Kerry that the American people needed him for his ability to meet the challenge of a terrorist attack?
Bush’s unscripted remarks were telling insights of the man. He joked good times he had in New Orleans when he was still a drunk. He congratulated his appalling FEMA director Michael Brown, (as befuddled as the President) and made “cute” remarks about sitting with Sen. Trent Lott when the Mississippi Senator rebuilds his house. All are telling remarks of a man out of touch with reality. Did he not know that people were suffering and dying at that very moment because his administration bungled another job? George, despite his hugs for a few victims, was showing he was his mama’s boy. Mama Bush reacted by saying of the tragically uprooted, mostly black and poor people, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this is working very well for them.” In other words, they’re eating cake now.
We should look at the New Orleans disaster as a call to reexamine our behavior as citizens for the past 25 years, too.
We should look at ourselves and our selfishness, carelessness and brutality. We seem to accept ourselves as victims when all too often we are the perpetrators, from Iraq to the neglect of poverty in America. We blame others all the time.
As I write today (Sept. 6), Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column informs us that the infant mortality rate in Washington D. C. is more than twice the rate as in Beijing. He cities other facts that indicate we simply don’t care about many of our own children. Disgraceful.
The Republicans and their legions of right-wing cohorts have been indoctrinating us for many years now that government is broken and undependable. At the same time, Republicans have been eagerly subverting government. (President Clinton was a willing political triangulator who served as a bridge – rather than a break - between Reagan-Bush and the second Bush presidency. He failed to challenge the subversion of government because he was too busy ruining his presidency for blowjobs. No wonder George Bush wants him on his rescue teams now. The guy just needs to be loved. By anybody, apparently.)
Republicans are out to destroy government and it’s a disaster for the American people, if they’d only wake up to see what is happening to them. (The national news media temporarily woke up with honest and passionate coverage shocked by the degradation of the people of New Orleans and high-level indifference they saw first hand. Now expect them to go back to obsequiousness to the Bushies, afraid to call Bush what he is – an incompetent, unfeeling loser. Only on the Jon Stewart mock news do you get a real feel for just how absurd this President is.)
The right-wing dominated Republican Party wants to cut the guts out of government. The dust jacket on Kevin Phillips’ telling but laborious book on the Bushes (American Dynasty) says it more succinctly than the book, “…Phillips demonstrates how the Bush family exemplified many of the growing trends in American political life – policy favoritism to the top 1 percent, paper entrepreneurship, and crony capitalism a la Enron.”
However, Grover Norquist, the guru of the hard right, today best illustrates the thrust of Republicanism. He holds weekly meetings in Washington for his shadow government as labeled the “hub of conservative politically organizing.” Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both send representatives to attend Norquist’s weekly meetings, as do Republican Congressional leaders, to get the right-wing message.
Norquist has bluntly set their goal: “To cut government in half in 25 years to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”
Well, they did not use a bathtub, but rather the city of New Orleans.
I don’t usually comment at all on national issues because I’m a local guy who likes to know and feel what I write about. However, it’s hard to sit by while the likes of George Bush pursues policies so damaging to the U. S. and the world.
The weakness of leadership for those who oppose Bush & Company is also disturbing and depressing.
The Republican policy has been to divide and conquer, choosing instead of governing to create issues to split people unnecessarily – using race, fake science, sexual orientation, abortion and “values” as wedge issues, – in appealing to the base instincts of our people. Meanwhile, they shift income from the poor to the most wealthy by tax cuts and the desire to eliminate the estate tax, a $1.5 billion a day gift to the top 1 percent of Americans.
The Bush presidency has screwed up the unnecessary Iraq war, the environment, the military, and the nation’s infrastructure and most important, these deadly blows have reduced the confidence of the American people in themselves. Along the way, Bush has given the finger to allies and shamed America throughout the world.
To me this all adds up to criminal behavior by the Bush administration and it needs to be called to account now.
Best end with the man the Right loves to hate – Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He had it about right with his New Orleans statement. In addition, I will bet he wrote it himself and did not depend on hired hands.
“The President said an hour ago that the Gulf Coast looks like it has been obliterated by a weapon. It has. Indifference is a weapon of mass destruction.
“Our indifferent government is in a crisis of legitimacy. If it continues to ignore its basic responsibilities for the health and welfare of the American people, will there ever been enough money to clean up after their indifference?
If there is not a crisis of confidence in the U. S., government under Bush there ought to be.
Shorts
Finally, after 15 years, the Plain Dealer gave us some information about the cost of Gateway via the sin tax and county payment on bonds (though not the total cost since absent were other payments by the county and city and diverted city admission taxes.)
Joan Mazzolini’s accounting was thoroughly done; however, it was badly displayed, thus probably missed by many. In the July period ending the 15 years, however, there was zero accounting for sin taxes on cigarette, beer, wine & alcohol. In August, those figures came in at more than $6 million, raising the sin tax for Gateway to $240-million. Moreover, as Mazzolini wrote, we have 10 more years to help pay for the Browns Stadium and who knows what awaits taxpayers at the end of that period.
There Is A Mayoral Election This Year After All
Do you get the feeling that the Rev. Otis Moss sandbagged Mayor Jane Campbell? Either that or she’s stupid and I don’t think so.
Campbell asserted that Rev. Moss, a leading African-American clergyman, was one of her advisors. He says he talks to lots of people.
However, he did back her four years ago and I would think that he’d let her know that the deal was off.
He did let her know with his letter to the PD that makes me think Rev. Moss played a little trick.
Campbell, however, still has the ever-greedy George Forbes. Forbes is the mayor’s friend. Campbell opened the bond business to the former Council President. His old friend, former Mayor Michael White, had shut him out of city business for 10 years. People figure Forbes positioned at least a couple of black candidates in the mayor’s race. Forbes has a history of undercutting younger black politicians and rather pursuing his moneymaking and power seeking. He’s still at the game of self-interest more than 15 years after he left City Hall.
The mayoral campaign may be heating up but it seems only to get lukewarm.
No one seems able to come out of the pile as White did in a much stronger field of candidates in 1989.
Neither Campbell nor Council President Frank Jackson impress with the people they’ve hired either in the administration or at Council, though there is less hiring and responsibility for Jackson as Council President. His staffing was hardly impressive.
Campbell fell down badly at the start of her administration. She seemed to prefer loyalty to competence in most cases.
What does that say about James Draper, chosen by Campbell her original Safety Director? Not much, I guess.
Draper seems to be the oddest candidate – an African-American supported by the police and firefighters. That set has not exactly been part of the civil rights movement in the last 100 years or so.
It looks as if it will be Campbell-Jackson with a crowd behind picking up a small vote each. Always dangerous to make such conclusions but that’s how I see it now.
'From Cool Cleveland'' columnist Roldo Bartimole RoldoAtAdelphia.net (:divend:)