[Mb-civic] Bob Herbert

[Mike Blaxill]

Bush's Pledge? The Joke's on the Poor
    By Bob Herbert
    The New York Times

    Thursday 13 October 2005

    A Page 1 article in The Times on Tuesday
carried the following headline: "Liberal Hopes
Ebb in Post-Storm Poverty Debate."

    I might have started laughing if the subject
weren't so serious. Who in their right mind -
liberal, moderate, Rotarian, contrarian - could
have possibly thought that George W. Bush and his
GOP Wild Bunch (Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay
et al.) had suddenly seen the light ("Eureka!
We've been wrong!") and become serious about
engaging the problem of poverty in America?

    The article noted that some liberal activists
had hoped that the extraordinary suffering caused
by Hurricane Katrina might lead to a genuine
effort by the administration and Congress to
address such important poverty-related matters as
health care, housing, employment and race.

    After all, the president himself had gone on
national television from the French Quarter of
the stricken city of New Orleans and promised
"bold action."

    "As all of us saw on television," said Mr.
Bush, "there is also some deep, persistent
poverty in this region as well. That poverty has
roots in a history of racial discrimination,
which cut off generations from the opportunity of
America. We have a duty to confront this poverty
with bold action. So let us restore all that we
have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise
above the legacy of inequality."

    I assumed that most people watching the
president realized that he was deeply embedded in
a Karl Rove moment. The speech was a carefully
scripted, meticulously staged performance
designed primarily to halt the widespread
criticism of Mr. Bush's failure to respond more
quickly to the tragedy.

    As the president spoke, it never occurred to
me that anyone would buy into the notion that Mr.
Bush and his supporters would actually do
something about poverty and racism. Someone who
believed that could probably be persuaded to make
a bid on eBay to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

    Mr. Bush is the standard-bearer par
excellence of his party's efforts to redistribute
the bounty of the US from the bottom up, not the
other way around. This is no longer a matter of
dispute. Mr. Bush may not be the greatest
commander in chief. And he may not be adept at
sidestepping the land mines of language. ("I
promise you I will listen to what has been said
here, even though I wasn't here.") But if there's
one thing the president has been good at, it has
been funneling money to the rich. The suffering
wrought by Katrina hasn't changed that at all.

    One of the first things the president did in
the aftermath of Katrina was to poke his finger
in the eyes of struggling workers by suspending
the requirements of the Davis-Bacon Act in the
storm-ravaged areas. Passed during the Great
Depression, the law requires contractors on
federally funded construction projects to pay at
least the prevailing wage in the region.

    This is one more way of taking money from the
working poor and handing it to the wealthy. A
construction laborer in New Orleans who would
ordinarily be paid about $9 an hour, the
prevailing wage in the city, can now be paid
less. So much for the president's commitment to
fighting poverty.

    Poverty has steadily increased under
President Bush, even as breathtaking riches
(think tax cuts, cronyism, war profiteering, you
name it) have been heaped upon those who were
already wealthy. Class divisions are hardening,
and economic inequality continues to increase
dramatically.

    Mr. Bush's political posturing (his speeches,
his endless trips to the Gulf Coast) is not meant
to serve as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden.
It is a message to middle-class voters, who have
become increasingly disturbed by the president's
policies and were appalled by the fact that he
seemed unmoved by the terrible suffering that
followed Hurricane Katrina.

    The man who campaigned as a compassionate
conservative and then turned the federal
government into a compassion-free zone is all but
handing out press releases that say, "I care."

    He cares all right. About his poll ratings.
In the end, much of the money to help
lower-income victims of the recent storms will
most likely be siphoned from existing, badly
needed and already underfunded programs to help
the poor and near-poor.

    A real effort to fight poverty and combat
discrimination? From this regime? You must be
joking.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101305Q.shtml