Bank on Bush to handle the cleanup badly
Andew Greeley
First published: Friday, September 9, 2005
The terrible, tragic mess in New Orleans reflects and adds to the
economic and social mess in the whole country.
The foolish, endless war in Iraq has pushed the national debt beyond all
reasonable limit. The tax benefits for Mr. Bush's friends -- "the haves
and the have mores" as he called them in an unwise slip of the tongue --
have aggravated the deficit problems for which the grandchildren and the
great grandchildren will have to pay. Much of the debt is owned by the
Chinese who also have taken over the clothing market.
Median family income and real wages fell again this year, according to
The Wall Street Journal, and the proportion of the country who live in
poverty and the proportion of those without any health insurance have
risen again.
The cost of gasoline climbs almost every day because the obscenely
profitable oil companies have not plowed any money into building new
refineries for the last 15 years.
Many industries -- airlines and automotive, especially -- are trying to
make money by outsourcing jobs to other countries and curtailing the
salaries and benefits of their workers. The most notable of the offending
industries -- Big Oil and Big Pharma -- are piling up profits squeezed
from life blood of the working and middle class.
No one cares about poverty any more, so long as it is limited to the poor
(like the people who couldn't escape from New Orleans because they
couldn't afford an auto).
Now the country faces the task of rebuilding a major city and its port,
oil refineries and the rest of its crucial industries, and its flood
control system, and of providing new homes for the homeless of the city,
which is practically everyone.
One has to ask where the money will come from. The Bush administration
will characteristically talk big but do the job on the cheap, just as it
has done the Iraq war with its inadequate body armor, unprotected
vehicles, amphibious landing craft used as tanks, and not enough troops.
New Orleans has become our second contemporary big muddy and it will be
mishandled as badly as the first. Karl Rove will doubtless spin it all
into a big victory for the President.
The strains and the tensions that the New Orleans crisis will cause in
the American economy are a punishment for the pride and greed of this
country. The punishment is not imposed by the Almighty (who has better
things to do than to spin out a vast storm to wipe out sin in the Big
Easy) but will be the result of the present cult of greed and pride.
Ronald Reagan re-introduced this cult into our society and George W. Bush
has refined it to its logical conclusion. Greed is good. Pride in America
is good and anything goes.
Similarly the Big Easy, one of the most interesting of American cities,
if not high on the salubrious list, was punished for the greed and pride
which permitted it (and the Congress of the United States) to gamble that
its outmoded and inferior system of dikes -- far below the standards of
the embankments the Corps of Engineers have built along the rest of the
Mississippi River -- would protect it. Like the rest of the country, New
Orleans was not worried about the decline of infrastructure. But its
unique infrastructure was a matter of life and death.
The country's habit of responding to infrastructure problems with too
little and too late (Iraq writ large) will produce more disasters.
Airports that are too crowded and inadequate air traffic control, poor
public education, unconcern for the poor, spiraling medical costs -- all
are infrastructure problems that will come back to haunt us.
We are as a culture too proud and too greedy to worry about such matters,
just as we didn't care a few years ago about the incompetence of the FBI
and the CIA -- and the FBI's inability to hire enough translators of
Arabic or devise a working computer system.
The United States is the only superpower left; we can do anything we
want; we don't have to care about what other countries think or worry
about levees and pumps, new runways, more refineries, global warming,
near misses at airports, better education, or competition from China and
Asia.
God Bless America!
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=396974
&category=OPINION&newsdate=9/9/2005
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