PROSPERITY:
Economic Policy | September 25, 2005
GOP
JACKALS
DESCEND
ON
THE
SOUTH
By
Douglas Drenkow, "Progressive
Thinking" As
Posted in "GordonTalk",
"Comments
From Left Field",
&
"OpEdNews"
and Linked by "BuzzFlash"
"Vulnerability".
To civilized people that term conjures up feelings of nurturing
and compassion. Selflessness and devotion. The good in the
Samaritan who stopped to help the man left for dead by the
bandits. But
apparently to the GOP, at least to its leaders, the term
"vulnerability" is a Pavlovian signal to drool at the
prospect of
a weakness to be exploited. Like jackals descending upon a wounded
wildebeest, the Right is poised to ravage the Gulf Coast, as
savagely as did the merciless Katrina, before they attack the economy as a whole. Rapacious
greed knows no conscience. Just
consider the "help" that the GOP is offering the
reconstruction efforts. The
Administration has suspended the Davis-Bacon rule, thus allowing
federal contractors to pay workers less than the
prevailing wage, while not requiring the savings to be passed on to
the taxpayers -- not
satisfied just with profits from no-bid
contracts, the Halliburtons of this country stand to make
untold billions on years of reconstruction...not even counting
the huge tax breaks they will receive, as will their
multi-million-dollar executives, from the tax cuts Bush refuses
to rescind, and as will the dynasties of their
heirs, from the estate tax the Congress intends to eliminate. The
Administration has suspended affirmative action requirements for
first-time federal
contractors in the reconstruction zone -- regulations that help minorities,
women, veterans, and the disabled -- despite the President's
prime-time assurance that he would do everything in his power to remedy racism
and discrimination, past, present, and future, as even he admitted
exacerbated the disaster. The
Administration has suspended the requirement that employers hire
only documented workers. The
American victims displaced from their jobs and their homes by
Katrina are now being displaced from the reconstruction efforts by
big businesses' hiring
undocumented workers laboring for little and living in trailers
without running water and with no real power...and not just
electrical hook-ups, my friends. I
swear if they thought they could get away with it, the
Administration would repeal the 13th Amendment and bring back
slavery -- the ultimate "ownership society". The
Administration is suspending rules right and left to protect the
environment -- the very environment whose rape left the city of
New Orleans so vulnerable to destruction, the wetlands that act as
barrier to storm surge but a shadow of their former, natural self. The
Administration is funneling public school money into private
school vouchers ( as they've been trying to do for years), while hiding behind
children and parents displaced and traumatized by the storm. And
others on the Right are snarling for even more vicious attacks on
our systems of social justice, the very conscience of our nation. The
Cato Institute is clamoring again for privatizing Social Security, because
"asset accumulation plays a vital role in escaping
poverty." As if "every man for himself" had not been
discredited by the deaths of the masses stranded in the
sewage. Newt
Gingrich calls for more cuts in federal taxes -- driving us deeper
in debt, as to banks overseas, and requiring more cuts in
programs helping the poor -- as well as for wholesale cuts in "red tape"
for big business -- read, fewer protections for workers, consumers,
and the environment. The
Wall Street Journal calls not only for big tax cuts for big
business but also for a flat tax on personal income -- much
more of a benefit for those at the top than for those at the
bottom. "Why
not allow the Gulf [Coast] to operate as a laboratory for a flat
tax," asks the WSJ. Why?! Because
those at the top have much more than they need, while those at the
bottom can barely survive! Republican
Senators
James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, and David Vitter, of Louisiana, are
pushing to allow the Administration to suspend any environmental
law for up to a year and a half; and Inhofe goes further, wanting
to prohibit any citizens from filing any lawsuits against federal
contractors who despoil the environment -- as if it is worthless,
as if we are not living within the environment, as if we
were gods. And
never to be outdone, the Heritage Foundation not only calls for
eliminating all capital gains taxes in the region -- as if the
prospect of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts,
and who knows how much more money from the private sector, weren't incentive enough to
draw business to the largest construction project in the history of
the nation -- they also want the infrastructure -- the very roads,
rail lines, and other lifelines of civilization -- turned over to
private companies "under contract" with the government,
the same government that the Right wants to never interfere with
business. The
jackals feast on the guts of the beast. And we are promised by the
rabid
Right that this is only a preview of what is in store for the rest
of the country. So
what if anything do we on the Left offer as alternatives? Contrary to
all-too-
fashionable criticism, we
progressives
do indeed have ideas -- very compassionate, very practical solutions -- which
put the needs of the many ahead of the profiteering of the few. Senator Ted Kennedy is creating a blueprint for a Gulf
Coast Redevelopment Authority, modeled after FDR's Tennessee
Valley Authority, which successfully revived that
then-flood-plagued region. Senator
John Edwards is pushing for another
New Deal-inspired program, a new Works Progress Administration,
called the New America Initiative,
which would take displaced Americans and put them back to work
rebuilding their own communities -- a far cry from the
Administration's reliance on workers from outside of the
country. The
Campaign for America's Future -- in addition to pushing for repeal
of the bankruptcy bill, to help ruined families -- is calling for
re-creating yet another New Deal success, a new Civilian
Conservation Corps, to put displaced workers back to work
restoring -- not exploiting -- the environment, such as the
wetlands that serve as natural protections against
hurricanes. Sometimes
those in the Middle ask if there is any difference between those on the
Right
and those on the Left. While
everyday people, on the Left and the Right, have contributed record
amounts to help the victims in the South, this catastrophe has brought the
positions of the leaders on the Right and the Left into much
sharper focus. They
are as different as greed and compassion.
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