An equal-opportunity failure

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Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2005

You know things are upside-down when President Malaprop makes sense about race. A reporter asked George W. Bush about talk that "there was a racial component" to who got no immediate help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "My attitude is this," the president said. "The storm didn’t discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort. When those Coast Guard choppers, many of whom were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn’t check the color of a person’s skin. They wanted to save lives." Were the words scripted? Probably. To the limited extent he’s capable of empathy, however, Bush is no bigot. I’m less sure about Queen Mother Barbara Bush, whose stunningly callous remarks about how well things were working out for the thousands of "underprivileged" hurricane victims in the Houston Astrodome, delivered with a condescending chuckle, will not soon be forgotten. No homes, no jobs, no schools, family members missing and feared dead, and the president’s mother begrudges refugees a free meal and a folding cot in a baseball stadium? Incredible.

That said, Rev. Jesse Jackson made the most inane contribution. He chose the worst natural disaster in U.S. history to start a semantic debate about African Americans marooned by the storm. He decreed that "refugees" was a racist term because "it does not describe American citizens."

That’s ridiculous. A refugee is somebody who takes refuge, period. Americans of every race and ethnicity are taking shelter from Hurricane Katrina. To play the race card over something so trivial helps nobody. Indeed, Jackson’s efforts were so counterproductive, I’m surprised that Bush didn’t make him the new head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Sure there’s a racial component to who the poorest and most vulnerable victims of Katrina are; we’re talking about Mississippi and Louisiana, after all. With regard to race, people are feeling strong, often conflicting emotions, pity, fear and anger among them. We need serious dialogue, not publicity hounds hollering "racism" on national TV.

But if anything good can be salvaged from the wreckage, it will have to start with the recognition that we Americans are all in this together. We need a government that’s competent and works for us all. Right now, we don’t have one. And the main reason we don’t, to be perfectly blunt, is that working-class, Southern whites tend to vote against their own interests, partly for racial reasons.

Democrats have tried for generations to craft a populist message that cuts across racial lines and mostly not succeeded. But the Bush administration’s sheer incompetence in the face of a natural disaster that has rendered hundreds of thousands jobless, homeless and seemingly hopeless provides Democrats with a historic opportunity to restate their case.

Here’s one example: One of Bush’s first official actions after Katrina was to make an emergency declaration that the Davis-Bacon Act requiring federal contractors to pay the "prevailing local wage" to workers would not apply during the reconstruction effort. In the largely non-union Gulf Coast area, that wage is roughly $9 an hour—barely above the poverty level. Bush’s action will depress salaries throughout the region.

Think about it: Working people throughout the region have lost everything, and this president’s first thought, along with awarding billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to Halliburton, Bechtel and other big GOP contributors, is to cut their pay. Republicans have sought unsuccessfully to eliminate Davis-Bacon for years. According to The Washington Post, they consider it "a taxpayer subsidy to unions." But unions get nothing out of the law; only employees do. Cutting workers’ salaries won’t save the government money. It only means bigger profits for Halliburton and the rest, period. Much of the cash will be siphoned out of the region that needs it so desperately.

And why was FEMA so inept? Largely because of the Bush administration’s ideologically driven effort to "privatize" the agency, slash its budget and substitute political appointees for experienced professional staff. Months before 9/11, Joe Allbaugh, the Bush appointee who replaced President Bill Clinton’s FEMA director, James Lee Witt, told Congress that the agency had become "both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management." Then Allbaugh quit to become a lobbyist, turning the job over to his former college roommate, the recently resigned Michael Brown. The universally respected Witt delivered a prophetic warning during a 2004 Capitol Hill hearing. "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded," he said. "I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact, one state emergency manager told me, ‘ It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management. ’"

Like the storm, the Bush administration is an equal-opportunity disaster.

–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.