National NOW Times >> Summer/Fall 2005 >> Article

Katrina: "Compassionate Conservative" at Work

By Kim Gandy, NOW President

Is this what it takes to wake us up? Bodies floating down the street of my beautiful New Orleans? We're in trouble indeed if this was the only way to shake some people into beginning to recognize the criminal incompetence of the Bush administration. Apparently thousands of dead U.S. soldiers (and untold Iraqi casualties) were not enough; it took thousands more deaths here at home to jolt this country out of a rose-colored reverie.

The winds began to shift after that squeaker of an election last year, but the high-riding cowboy didn't notice until the gale became hurricane-force. He's been playing fast and loose with the facts, confident that the press would remain cowed. Hey George, you know what happens when you play the odds? You have to pay up when you lose.

Bush is definitely not a "The Buck Stops Here" president — for a whole week after Katrina, he was the "What Buck?" president. Thousands of likely deaths and a media hurricane later, he changed his tune — and now he sees the buck stopping everywhere except his own desk. Instead of reading "My Pet Goat" for seven minutes, Bush went on with business as usual — for three whole days.

The bitter truth is that our president, the only official elected to represent the whole country, represents an increasingly narrow slice of it. Who has gained most from his presidency? Certainly not the poor New Orleanians, mostly African-American, left to fend for themselves when they couldn't drive away from disaster (it turns out our social safety net has some holes — if you're smaller than an SUV, you slip through). Not those who supported Bush after 9/11 because they were concerned about safety, since Bush's arrogance, war-making, and isolationism has made us less, not more, secure. Not even the right-wing religious extremists, to whom he panders with quietly-extreme Supreme Court nominees and legislation limiting our rights.

No, the people Bush has protected most are those who are most like him: rich, privileged, conservative big-business types, the ones who stand to profit from tragedies like the war in Iraq and the rebuilding of New Orleans. His allegiance to his true constituency explains what would otherwise seem like skewed priorities — well over $100 billion to wage an unnecessary war in Iraq (and convince us that it was for our own good) but only $10 million to shore up the crumbling levees (only a fraction of the $60 million requested).

And now he's protecting those same people again, by appointing John Roberts to be Chief Justice and keeping Roberts' papers secret — for it's this cadre of millionaires who will benefit most from Roberts' confirmation. Indeed, Roberts is the perfect Bush puppet; his earnest charm has blinded the media and public to his extremism. Roberts is no moderate, mark my words; I think he honestly believes that the wage gap, job discrimination and sexual harassment are myths — so those protections will be the first to go.

This hurricane has brought more to the surface than the bodies of those who couldn't escape on their own. Let's think about what the events in Louisiana and Mississippi surface about our government. We know that Bush's budget drastically cut levee repair funds every year, and he put a guy in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) whose most recent job had been running the Arabian Horse Association (from which he was reportedly fired). Bush cut FEMA's funding every year, after demoting it from a cabinet-level position, and his Department of Homeland Security stripped FEMA of its planning responsibilities and began efforts toward privatization (think Social Security).

And now we learn that Halliburton's subsidiary KBG has $17 million in contracts to repair two Naval stations in Mississippi and that the company has numerous smaller contracts across the area, like evaluating the pumps in New Orleans. The country is near bankruptcy. With Katrina, the deficit is estimated at $500 billion. What about reversing the tax cuts to the rich? It's time for sacrifice — not just the sacrifice of the victims of the hurricane, or the war in Iraq — but of the rich, too.

This storm was a knife that slashed our country, revealing the terrible truth of racism and poverty lurking just below the surface. It's always been there, but now the brutal exposure has hit our collective soul. Glued to our television sets, it's been hard for us to look, but harder to look away.

If we can't take care of our poor, our sick, our old, what kind of a "superpower" is the United States? If a few, mostly white, at the top are getting a tax cut by shredding the safety net for millions, mostly people of color, at the bottom; if billions for Halliburton and Bechtel come at the expense of security for all of us; if the wealth of the few depends on the poverty of the many — and if the vast majority of those in poverty are women and children — how can we call this a "great" country?

Look around: This is happening at some level in every city, in every state. You don't have to have grown up in Louisiana and lived in New Orleans like me, to see the truth: We are all New Orleanians to this administration — it's just a matter of time.