pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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OIL-GLAZED ALLIGATOR, CAJUN STYLE

253.

It amazes me that the same president who suspends federal wage laws for workers who are rebuilding the Gulf Coast has the fucking gall to authorize another massive supplemental spending bill that will give more no-bid contracts to his incompetent wealthy chums at Halliburton and Bechtel�donors who have done nothing but bungle Iraqi reconstruction on our tax dollars!

This makes me wonder how Al Gore, a democrat familiar with the Tennessee Valley Authority model, would have handled hurricane relief.

In the totality of the Gulf Coast destruction, the economy and the society have been collapsed. As New Dealers understood, you cannot fix one without fixing the other. And only the federal government has the resources and authority to lead such a complex undertaking.

A new New Deal, that's what he's talking about here.

Illinois Democrats Rahm Emmanuel and Barack Obama (please elect this man president) are pushing legislation to get tax refunds to hurricane victims faster but Republicans Jon Kyl (AZ) and Jeff Sessions (AL) are trying to find a dead person with enough money to pay estate taxes so they can push another repeal of what the GOPers insist on calling "the death tax." I guess it hasn't occurred to the Republicans that few southerners�few people outside their circles, in fact�are wealthy enough to pay that tax to begin with.

He got busy in the days following the disaster by advancing legislation that would keep the National Weather Service out of the business of predicting the next deadly storm.�Holland again

And conservative legislators are pushing an amendment to cut the non-defense budget by 2.5 percent even as Democrats propose "comprehensive, long-term aid to the stricken areas for housing, keeping kids in school and healthcare." (Holland)

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)�who would no doubt insist that global warming couldn't possibly have raised water temperatures and thus increased Katrina's strength or that all those disappeared barrier swamps could have protected New Orleans from such�has actually written a bill that allows the EPA to suspend environmental regulations during Gulf Coast reconstruction, giving the oil industry that made billions while causing us to pay for Gulf Coast reconstruction another big fat break.

I can just see it now: try our newest New Orleans cuisine: oil-glazed alligator.

bold Democrats are doing what they haven't dared to do for many years, even decades: They are invoking their New Deal legacy and applying its liberal operating assumptions to the present crisis.

Former Senator John Edwards proposes a vast new jobs program, patterned after the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in which the displaced and the poor are hired at living wages to clean up and rebuild their devastated communities. In the week after Katrina, Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Stephanie Tubbs Jones swiftly rounded up 88 House co-sponsors, including some from Mississippi and Louisiana, for a similar initiative.

As the dimensions of this challenge become clearer, reformers will discover other New Deal models they can emulate and adapt to present circumstances. For instance, in the 1930s Roosevelt's Reconstruction Finance Corporation was a central player in rebuilding the industrial economy, because it acted like a public-spirited investment banker empowered to channel startup capital to collapsed companies, provide temporary protection from creditors and impose equitable terms on how the private firms relate to social priorities. This time cities and schools need similar help.

Neither local school systems nor small-business employers can recover unless their communities have a large, reliable base of wage incomes�that is, government-financed jobs to sustain customers and taxpayers. You can't rebuild homes without tools and materials or temporary relief from mortgage defaults. You can't reopen schools if their tax base is gone. You can't prevent poor people from sliding back into desperate conditions unless government creates ladders of upward mobility. Recognizing such social-economic connections was the essence of New Deal innovation. Serious politicians need to jump-start their imaginations. This born-again New Deal spirit isn't backward-looking but instead can seize the opportunity to address grave issues�such as the myriad ecological dangers spawned by our hydrocarbon economy� that status-quo politics neglects, like the New Orleans levees.

The catastrophe, as many seem to grasp, is one of those big moments that jolt public consciousness and alter the course of national history. I would go further and describe it as an exclamation point that marks a dramatic breakdown for the reigning right-wing orthodoxy, the beginning of its retreat and eventual demise. This by no means insures the restoration of progressive alternatives, but events have at least reopened the argument conservatives thought they had won. A profound political question is suddenly on the table:

Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain over human lives and public values?

That's a question worth repeating.�Greider again

(Of course, the Newt is also urging the president to turn the Gulf Coast into a humongous tax-free zone for subsidized businesses and, like Sen. Inhofe, wants to relieve the oil industry, which is currently being sued for price gauging the citizenry, of those meddlesome environmental regulations that at least attempt to keep the citizenry and workers somewhat healthy and safe.

Holland responds best to this reality: "These acts are the very essence of poor governance: placing cronyism and ideology over the needs of devastated communities."

11:29 a.m. - 2005-09-21

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