1% Solution?
_____________________________________________________________
Straight to the pockets of Bush’s 1%...are we really surprised? What’s remarkable is that we are, it seems, helpless to prevent these inequities, and it would seem, are quite content to go back to sleep as events transpire that change forever the concepts of democracy and freedom in this country. These brave journalists are ringing the bells of alarm as loudly as they can, and no one is heeding the warning.
___________________________________________________________________
October 13, 2005
Housing
$11 Million a Day Spent on Hotels for Storm Relief
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 - Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.
The number of people in hotels has grown by 60 percent in the past two weeks as some shelters closed, reaching nearly 600,000 as of Tuesday. Even so, relief officials say they cannot meet the deadline, as more than 22,000 people were still in shelters in 14 states on Wednesday.
The reliance on hotels has been necessary, housing advocates say, because the Federal Emergency and Management Agency has had problems installing mobile homes and travel trailers for evacuees and has been slow to place victims in apartments that real estate executives say are available throughout the southeast.
Hotel costs are expected to grow to as much as $425 million by Oct. 24, a large expense never anticipated by the FEMA, which is footing the bill. While the agency cannot say how that number will affect overall spending for storm relief, critics point out that hotel rooms, at an average cost of $59 a night, are significantly more expensive than apartments and are not suitable for months-long stays.
Officials in cities from Dallas to Atlanta, which are accommodating thousands of evacuees, give credit for getting 90 percent of the victims out of shelters. But they say they are frustrated by FEMA's record in helping place people in more adequate housing.
"Deplorable. Disappointing. Outrageous. That is how I feel about it," said the Atlanta mayor, Shirley Franklin, a Democrat, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "The federal response has just been unacceptable. It is like talking to a brick wall."
Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush administration's handling of the temporary housing response. "I am baffled," said Ronald D. Utt, a former senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research organization. "This is not incompetence. This is willful. That is the only way I can explain it."
Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said the federal government was moving as quickly as it could to find temporary housing. But the scale of the catastrophe has made it difficult, she said.
"Clearly we have never encountered the size and scope of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina," she said. "Housing half a million people is a challenge by any standard."
The American Red Cross started the hotel program days after Hurricane Katrina struck, when it became clear that the shelters it had opened were not adequate to deal with the 600,000 to 700,000 families displaced by the storm, a spokeswoman, Carrie Martin, said.
The hotel program was intended to last a couple of weeks but has twice been extended by FEMA. Now Red Cross officials are saying there is no end to the initiative, which pays for 192,424 rooms in 9,606 hotels across the United States, in a range of cities as diverse as Casper, Wyo., and Anchorage, Alaska.
Congress last month appropriated a $62.3 billion for the relief effort, most of it designated for FEMA. The agency had told Congress that it expected to spend more than $2 billion to buy up to 300,000 travel trailers and mobile homes to house displaced residents. The agency also planned to give out $23.2 billion in assistance to victims for emergency needs and for temporary housing and housing repairs.
But the temporary housing program has been troubled since the start, observers say. Instead of setting up as many as 30,000 trailers and mobile homes every two weeks, as of Tuesday, just 7,308 were occupied. Even counting berths on the four ships that FEMA has leased and rooms on military bases and elsewhere, the agency has provided only 10,940 occupied housing units for victims in the three Gulf states.
FEMA, reacting to criticism that it might create super-concentrated slums, has scaled back plans to build so-called FEMAvilles with up to 25,000 trailers.
Even a less ambitious plan - complexes with 200 or so units - has been slow to unfold. FEMA officials cite the reluctance by some rural parishes or landowners to welcome evacuees.
But landowners and some state officials in Louisiana blame bureaucratic fumbles by FEMA. Bill Bacqué, co-owner of a trailer park in Lafayette, La., said he offered property for 45 trailers within days of the storm. Negotiations with FEMA were still under way this week, he said. "Things do not move fast," Mr. Bacqué said.
Late last month, FEMA began handing out $2,358 for three months so that families in shelters or hotels could rent apartments.
To date, more than 415,000 households have been approved for that aid, totaling $979 million. But FEMA officials cannot say how many families have used the money for apartments, or simply spent it on expenses while also living in a government-financed hotel room.
David Degruy, his wife, Debra, and their six children, of New Orleans, have done just that while staying in two rooms paid for by FEMA at the Greenway Inn and Suites in Houston.
"We're trying to save the money so that when do get in a house we'll be able to buy things," Mr. Degruy said. "We eat out sometimes, we buy clothes, personal hygiene things."
Some officials criticize FEMA for a passive approach in dealing with cities and hurricane evacuees.
Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who sits on a House panel that helps oversee the housing effort, complained that it was unreasonable for the federal government to expect that a family led by jobless parents, with no car, little savings and little familiarity with a new city could independently find an apartment.
"The administration's policy is incoherent and socially seriously flawed," he said in an interview.
Real estate officials say that although there are few available apartments in Louisiana, there are many vacancies in apartment buildings across the South, including perhaps 300,000 in Texas alone.
"What are these guys doing?" Jim Arbury, an official with the National Multi Housing Council, a group of building owners and managers, said of FEMA. "All of this housing is available now."
Some housing experts say the Bush administration should follow the approach taken after the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, when displaced residents were given prepaid housing vouchers instead of having to negotiate and pay a lease on their own.
"We are wasting money hand over fist because we did not deploy the right policy tools," said Bruce Katz, a vice president at the Brookings Institution, a liberal research group in Washington. "We could have thousands, if not tens of thousands of families, in stable permanent housing right now. And we would not have to turn to these costly measures, like hotels, motels and cruise ships."
Ms. Andrews, the FEMA spokeswoman, defended the housing policy. "The program is designed to give those who it affects the most the control over their own lives," she said.
Some cities, including Houston and San Antonio, have taken an active role in helping families find housing by creating their own voucher program, identifying vacant units, paying for six-month leases and then turning over the unit to the evacuees. FEMA has promised to reimburse the cities for the housing costs.
"You can't just give people a check and say, 'Good luck, we will see you,' " said San Antonio's assistant city manager, Christopher J. Brady. "It would not be a sufficient solution."
FEMA officials said other cities can set up similar programs. But Mayor Franklin of Atlanta and Mayor Laura Miller of Dallas have said they cannot do so without being paid in advance by the federal government.
Expressing frustration that she could not offer more help to the 39,000 displaced people who have come to Georgia, Mayor Franklin said FEMA's expectations that her city could advance housing money were unrealistic.
"Our government is not large enough to do that," she said. "We can't absorb the costs."
Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Houston for this article, Lily Koppel from Baton Rouge, and Andy Lehren from New York.
· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
_________________________________________________________________
Benefits to the 1% instead of the poorest among us: again, no surprises here unless you count the total disbelief that this can be happening in the (formerly) greatest country in history at a time when all eyes are watching these events transpire, and the events are being remarked upon by credible journalists, and nothing, NOTHING, is changing the forward momentum of the crooks who rob the poor to pay the rich.
____________________________________________________________
October 13, 2005
Editorial
Budget Cowardice in the Capitol
Congressional Republicans are trying to invoke the cost of reconstruction from Hurricane Katrina to justify cutting even more deeply and cruelly into programs that help the poorest Americans. Prodded by self-proclaimed budget hawks, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, suddenly wants to up the ante in Congress's budget plan - to $50 billion from $35 billion - for five years of cuts in basic programs. Billions for food stamps, Medicaid and welfare reform would be lopped off.
Much of this is transparent posturing for next year's elections. The same lawmakers who cheered on President Bush's reckless tax cuts for the affluent, killing the surpluses and creating mammoth debt, are trying to transform themselves into responsible budgeteers.
The budget process was also a mess well before Katrina struck. But the cost of repairing the storm damage makes facing reality more urgent. For a starter, the next bout of upper-bracket tax-cut extensions should be indefinitely shelved. And Congress should return to the pay-as-you-go discipline that produced the surpluses of the 1990's. The cynical plan in the House would mandate offsets for spending programs only, not for tax cuts.
Once again, the nation must hope that Republican moderates and Democrats in the Senate take a stand, but not for another split-the-difference budget. There's plenty of egregious pork protected by Congress in highway and Pentagon spending bills, like the bridge to nowhere and the inoperable antimissile shield. Dozens of comparable revenue wasters have been identified.
The independent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points to the timely warning from Congress's Medicare advisory commission that billions will be wasted under the new drug subsidy program unless Congress fixes the windfall formulas for managed care companies.
Sadly, there is less political risk in exploiting Katrina to compound the suffering of the poor.
· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________________________
We “poor and near-poor” who have the most to lose have the insight into these machinations that rich folks would probably call “street sense”. We have the under-educations of experience unbiased by propaganda that enable us to see the wickedness and evil intents of the Bush Administration, but no power to effect change. We are dependent on the monied folks, the educated folks, the ‘movers and shakers’ to finally sway the most powerful among us to change the course of events. If you love America, and you love what she stands for, and you love your freedoms as American Citizens, then you must help the poor among us, else, when the poorest have been euthanized by whatever means, then the next level is closer to your level. There will always be a ‘bottom level’ of the pyramid to dissolve and destroy until only the 1% is left on planet Earth. Perhaps, if we are stupid enough to continue to allow this to happen, then we deserve the annihilation that will surely befall us.
___________________________________________________________
October 13, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bush's Pledge? The Joke's on the Poor
By BOB HERBERT
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 G.O.P. 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 U.S. 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.
· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
In spite of the general leanings of our lawmakers and journalists and public opinion, the criminals of the Bush administration who would deprive us of our rights as stated by the Constitution and The Bill of Rights continue to press to put American active duty military into our states. They are doing it in spite of our open eyes and will not rest until this country is in a state of tyranny controlled by whatever puppet masters are pulling Bush’s strings.
_________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
Pentagon Plans to Beef Up Domestic Rapid-Response Forces
By Ann Scott TysonWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, October 13, 2005; A04
The U.S. military is planning a more rapid, robust role for active-duty forces in responding to catastrophic disasters or terrorist attacks, a senior Pentagon official said yesterday, describing the demand for large-scale military resources in such cases as "inevitable."
Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, stressed, however, that the expanded active-duty military response would be limited to rare, mass calamities or attacks in which thousands of lives were at risk -- such as a category 4 hurricane, or a terrorist strike involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Federal troops might also play a role in enforcing a quarantine in the case of a pandemic outbreak of avian flu or other disease, McHale said, although initially that job would fall to National Guard forces under the command of state governors.
"We are looking at a wide range of contingencies potentially involving Title 10 forces [federal troops] if a pandemic outbreak of a biological threat were to occur," said McHale.
In contrast, the Pentagon does not intend to take the lead in responding to the dozens of "major disasters" such as floods declared every year, McHale said. And even in catastrophic events, the Pentagon's goal would be to provide a rapid, early response and then to quickly transfer responsibilities to civilian authorities, he said.
The planning for an expanded Pentagon role in domestic catastrophes comes amid escalating demands on U.S. forces, which today not only are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but are also carrying out disaster-relief missions in Pakistan, Guatemala, and domestically along the Gulf Coast.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, at a conference with Central American defense ministers in Florida, yesterday advocated closer military cooperation as a way to better address threats from terrorists and drug traffickers, as well as natural disasters.
The Pentagon is drafting recommendations for improving the military's response to devastating attacks or disasters as part of a government-wide review of "lessons learned" from Hurricane Katrina.
"It is almost inevitable that the Department of Defense will play a very substantial role in providing resources, equipment, command and control, and other capabilities in response to a catastrophic event," McHale said. Only the Pentagon can "marshal such resources and deploy them as quickly . . . during a time in which thousands of American lives may be at risk."
One major focus will involve identifying a larger active-duty force that will be organized and trained to respond immediately -- along with the National Guard -- to a domestic crisis, McHale said. Advance planning between the active-duty personnel and the Guard is vital -- in contrast to the cooperation that he said unfolded during Katrina "on the fly" -- albeit by "superb leaders."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
__________________________________________________________________
Straight to the pockets of Bush’s 1%...are we really surprised? What’s remarkable is that we are, it seems, helpless to prevent these inequities, and it would seem, are quite content to go back to sleep as events transpire that change forever the concepts of democracy and freedom in this country. These brave journalists are ringing the bells of alarm as loudly as they can, and no one is heeding the warning.
___________________________________________________________________
October 13, 2005
Housing
$11 Million a Day Spent on Hotels for Storm Relief
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 - Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.
The number of people in hotels has grown by 60 percent in the past two weeks as some shelters closed, reaching nearly 600,000 as of Tuesday. Even so, relief officials say they cannot meet the deadline, as more than 22,000 people were still in shelters in 14 states on Wednesday.
The reliance on hotels has been necessary, housing advocates say, because the Federal Emergency and Management Agency has had problems installing mobile homes and travel trailers for evacuees and has been slow to place victims in apartments that real estate executives say are available throughout the southeast.
Hotel costs are expected to grow to as much as $425 million by Oct. 24, a large expense never anticipated by the FEMA, which is footing the bill. While the agency cannot say how that number will affect overall spending for storm relief, critics point out that hotel rooms, at an average cost of $59 a night, are significantly more expensive than apartments and are not suitable for months-long stays.
Officials in cities from Dallas to Atlanta, which are accommodating thousands of evacuees, give credit for getting 90 percent of the victims out of shelters. But they say they are frustrated by FEMA's record in helping place people in more adequate housing.
"Deplorable. Disappointing. Outrageous. That is how I feel about it," said the Atlanta mayor, Shirley Franklin, a Democrat, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "The federal response has just been unacceptable. It is like talking to a brick wall."
Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush administration's handling of the temporary housing response. "I am baffled," said Ronald D. Utt, a former senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research organization. "This is not incompetence. This is willful. That is the only way I can explain it."
Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said the federal government was moving as quickly as it could to find temporary housing. But the scale of the catastrophe has made it difficult, she said.
"Clearly we have never encountered the size and scope of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina," she said. "Housing half a million people is a challenge by any standard."
The American Red Cross started the hotel program days after Hurricane Katrina struck, when it became clear that the shelters it had opened were not adequate to deal with the 600,000 to 700,000 families displaced by the storm, a spokeswoman, Carrie Martin, said.
The hotel program was intended to last a couple of weeks but has twice been extended by FEMA. Now Red Cross officials are saying there is no end to the initiative, which pays for 192,424 rooms in 9,606 hotels across the United States, in a range of cities as diverse as Casper, Wyo., and Anchorage, Alaska.
Congress last month appropriated a $62.3 billion for the relief effort, most of it designated for FEMA. The agency had told Congress that it expected to spend more than $2 billion to buy up to 300,000 travel trailers and mobile homes to house displaced residents. The agency also planned to give out $23.2 billion in assistance to victims for emergency needs and for temporary housing and housing repairs.
But the temporary housing program has been troubled since the start, observers say. Instead of setting up as many as 30,000 trailers and mobile homes every two weeks, as of Tuesday, just 7,308 were occupied. Even counting berths on the four ships that FEMA has leased and rooms on military bases and elsewhere, the agency has provided only 10,940 occupied housing units for victims in the three Gulf states.
FEMA, reacting to criticism that it might create super-concentrated slums, has scaled back plans to build so-called FEMAvilles with up to 25,000 trailers.
Even a less ambitious plan - complexes with 200 or so units - has been slow to unfold. FEMA officials cite the reluctance by some rural parishes or landowners to welcome evacuees.
But landowners and some state officials in Louisiana blame bureaucratic fumbles by FEMA. Bill Bacqué, co-owner of a trailer park in Lafayette, La., said he offered property for 45 trailers within days of the storm. Negotiations with FEMA were still under way this week, he said. "Things do not move fast," Mr. Bacqué said.
Late last month, FEMA began handing out $2,358 for three months so that families in shelters or hotels could rent apartments.
To date, more than 415,000 households have been approved for that aid, totaling $979 million. But FEMA officials cannot say how many families have used the money for apartments, or simply spent it on expenses while also living in a government-financed hotel room.
David Degruy, his wife, Debra, and their six children, of New Orleans, have done just that while staying in two rooms paid for by FEMA at the Greenway Inn and Suites in Houston.
"We're trying to save the money so that when do get in a house we'll be able to buy things," Mr. Degruy said. "We eat out sometimes, we buy clothes, personal hygiene things."
Some officials criticize FEMA for a passive approach in dealing with cities and hurricane evacuees.
Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who sits on a House panel that helps oversee the housing effort, complained that it was unreasonable for the federal government to expect that a family led by jobless parents, with no car, little savings and little familiarity with a new city could independently find an apartment.
"The administration's policy is incoherent and socially seriously flawed," he said in an interview.
Real estate officials say that although there are few available apartments in Louisiana, there are many vacancies in apartment buildings across the South, including perhaps 300,000 in Texas alone.
"What are these guys doing?" Jim Arbury, an official with the National Multi Housing Council, a group of building owners and managers, said of FEMA. "All of this housing is available now."
Some housing experts say the Bush administration should follow the approach taken after the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, when displaced residents were given prepaid housing vouchers instead of having to negotiate and pay a lease on their own.
"We are wasting money hand over fist because we did not deploy the right policy tools," said Bruce Katz, a vice president at the Brookings Institution, a liberal research group in Washington. "We could have thousands, if not tens of thousands of families, in stable permanent housing right now. And we would not have to turn to these costly measures, like hotels, motels and cruise ships."
Ms. Andrews, the FEMA spokeswoman, defended the housing policy. "The program is designed to give those who it affects the most the control over their own lives," she said.
Some cities, including Houston and San Antonio, have taken an active role in helping families find housing by creating their own voucher program, identifying vacant units, paying for six-month leases and then turning over the unit to the evacuees. FEMA has promised to reimburse the cities for the housing costs.
"You can't just give people a check and say, 'Good luck, we will see you,' " said San Antonio's assistant city manager, Christopher J. Brady. "It would not be a sufficient solution."
FEMA officials said other cities can set up similar programs. But Mayor Franklin of Atlanta and Mayor Laura Miller of Dallas have said they cannot do so without being paid in advance by the federal government.
Expressing frustration that she could not offer more help to the 39,000 displaced people who have come to Georgia, Mayor Franklin said FEMA's expectations that her city could advance housing money were unrealistic.
"Our government is not large enough to do that," she said. "We can't absorb the costs."
Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Houston for this article, Lily Koppel from Baton Rouge, and Andy Lehren from New York.
· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
_________________________________________________________________
Benefits to the 1% instead of the poorest among us: again, no surprises here unless you count the total disbelief that this can be happening in the (formerly) greatest country in history at a time when all eyes are watching these events transpire, and the events are being remarked upon by credible journalists, and nothing, NOTHING, is changing the forward momentum of the crooks who rob the poor to pay the rich.
____________________________________________________________
October 13, 2005
Editorial
Budget Cowardice in the Capitol
Congressional Republicans are trying to invoke the cost of reconstruction from Hurricane Katrina to justify cutting even more deeply and cruelly into programs that help the poorest Americans. Prodded by self-proclaimed budget hawks, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, suddenly wants to up the ante in Congress's budget plan - to $50 billion from $35 billion - for five years of cuts in basic programs. Billions for food stamps, Medicaid and welfare reform would be lopped off.
Much of this is transparent posturing for next year's elections. The same lawmakers who cheered on President Bush's reckless tax cuts for the affluent, killing the surpluses and creating mammoth debt, are trying to transform themselves into responsible budgeteers.
The budget process was also a mess well before Katrina struck. But the cost of repairing the storm damage makes facing reality more urgent. For a starter, the next bout of upper-bracket tax-cut extensions should be indefinitely shelved. And Congress should return to the pay-as-you-go discipline that produced the surpluses of the 1990's. The cynical plan in the House would mandate offsets for spending programs only, not for tax cuts.
Once again, the nation must hope that Republican moderates and Democrats in the Senate take a stand, but not for another split-the-difference budget. There's plenty of egregious pork protected by Congress in highway and Pentagon spending bills, like the bridge to nowhere and the inoperable antimissile shield. Dozens of comparable revenue wasters have been identified.
The independent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points to the timely warning from Congress's Medicare advisory commission that billions will be wasted under the new drug subsidy program unless Congress fixes the windfall formulas for managed care companies.
Sadly, there is less political risk in exploiting Katrina to compound the suffering of the poor.
· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________________________
We “poor and near-poor” who have the most to lose have the insight into these machinations that rich folks would probably call “street sense”. We have the under-educations of experience unbiased by propaganda that enable us to see the wickedness and evil intents of the Bush Administration, but no power to effect change. We are dependent on the monied folks, the educated folks, the ‘movers and shakers’ to finally sway the most powerful among us to change the course of events. If you love America, and you love what she stands for, and you love your freedoms as American Citizens, then you must help the poor among us, else, when the poorest have been euthanized by whatever means, then the next level is closer to your level. There will always be a ‘bottom level’ of the pyramid to dissolve and destroy until only the 1% is left on planet Earth. Perhaps, if we are stupid enough to continue to allow this to happen, then we deserve the annihilation that will surely befall us.
___________________________________________________________
October 13, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bush's Pledge? The Joke's on the Poor
By BOB HERBERT
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 G.O.P. 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 U.S. 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.
· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
In spite of the general leanings of our lawmakers and journalists and public opinion, the criminals of the Bush administration who would deprive us of our rights as stated by the Constitution and The Bill of Rights continue to press to put American active duty military into our states. They are doing it in spite of our open eyes and will not rest until this country is in a state of tyranny controlled by whatever puppet masters are pulling Bush’s strings.
_________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
Pentagon Plans to Beef Up Domestic Rapid-Response Forces
By Ann Scott TysonWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, October 13, 2005; A04
The U.S. military is planning a more rapid, robust role for active-duty forces in responding to catastrophic disasters or terrorist attacks, a senior Pentagon official said yesterday, describing the demand for large-scale military resources in such cases as "inevitable."
Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, stressed, however, that the expanded active-duty military response would be limited to rare, mass calamities or attacks in which thousands of lives were at risk -- such as a category 4 hurricane, or a terrorist strike involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Federal troops might also play a role in enforcing a quarantine in the case of a pandemic outbreak of avian flu or other disease, McHale said, although initially that job would fall to National Guard forces under the command of state governors.
"We are looking at a wide range of contingencies potentially involving Title 10 forces [federal troops] if a pandemic outbreak of a biological threat were to occur," said McHale.
In contrast, the Pentagon does not intend to take the lead in responding to the dozens of "major disasters" such as floods declared every year, McHale said. And even in catastrophic events, the Pentagon's goal would be to provide a rapid, early response and then to quickly transfer responsibilities to civilian authorities, he said.
The planning for an expanded Pentagon role in domestic catastrophes comes amid escalating demands on U.S. forces, which today not only are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but are also carrying out disaster-relief missions in Pakistan, Guatemala, and domestically along the Gulf Coast.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, at a conference with Central American defense ministers in Florida, yesterday advocated closer military cooperation as a way to better address threats from terrorists and drug traffickers, as well as natural disasters.
The Pentagon is drafting recommendations for improving the military's response to devastating attacks or disasters as part of a government-wide review of "lessons learned" from Hurricane Katrina.
"It is almost inevitable that the Department of Defense will play a very substantial role in providing resources, equipment, command and control, and other capabilities in response to a catastrophic event," McHale said. Only the Pentagon can "marshal such resources and deploy them as quickly . . . during a time in which thousands of American lives may be at risk."
One major focus will involve identifying a larger active-duty force that will be organized and trained to respond immediately -- along with the National Guard -- to a domestic crisis, McHale said. Advance planning between the active-duty personnel and the Guard is vital -- in contrast to the cooperation that he said unfolded during Katrina "on the fly" -- albeit by "superb leaders."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
__________________________________________________________________
posted by FancyRage at 9:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home