Disputed lessons of Katrina

Some liberal writers are cautious about emphasizing the possible racial aspects of the New Orleans disaster.

It seems clear to me that the Katrina disaster and the federal abandonment of New Orleans has highlighted both race and class differences in a way not unlike the Mississippi Flood of 1927 did.  As I've said before, if people can't bring themselves to criticize racism or look at how race shaped the response to Katrina until they hear a tape of Bush and "Brownie" saying "let's let all those black people drown, starve or die of thirst," then they've put themselves in the role of the Southern "moderates" of the segregation years.  As one of Herman Melville's characters said of "moderates" on the slavery issue, such moderates are useless for good but indispensable for evil.

Having said that, though, it doesn't mean we have to turn off our brains, either.  I think Molly Ivins has it right with her perception: George Bush investigates! WorkingforChange.com 09/08/05

According to The New York Times, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, White House communications director, began a campaign this weekend to blame local and state officials. The "woefully inadequate response," said "sources close to the White House," was the fault of "bureaucratic obstacles from state and local officials."

The bottom line is they're playing the race card. As many of you have noted, it IS a racial issue that poor people suffer most in any natural or economic disaster. Because Katrina hit the Deep South, a great many of the poor people affected are black, especially in New Orleans -- both hit hardest and majority black to begin with.

I'm not sure what to say about a cable news station that plays a "loop" of black looters over and over -- about 20 seconds of actual footage, replayed for four minutes, while the voiceover dwells on the looting problem. Obviously, there are some looters in New Orleans and elsewhere, and equally obviously, there are lots of people who were without food or water for days.

She refers to the famous radio interview during the crisis week following the hurricane when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin used some cuss words:

The mayor  was in tears. I heard two nice, white American "ladies" deploring this interview. "Well! He should remember there might be children listening!" Children still without food and water. What happens to people when they talk about race? Of course, most of us don't actually talk about race any more, we refer to it only indirectly, we talk "those people."

Watch carefully, listen carefully -- minority groups have always been blamed after natural disasters, since the days when the Hungarians were supposed to have cut the fingers off bodies to get the gold rings in the wake of the Johnstown Flood. Dirty Bohunks.

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby has been dubious all along about the way many commentators and public figures have emphasized the racial angle.  He's hit on the issue in several of his posts, including this one: The Joy of Race/The Joy of Class! 09/20/05

Gene Lyons (An equal-opportunity disaster Daily Dunklin Democrat 09/21/05) is impatient with the quibbling over the word "refugee."  He writes, "A refugee is somebody who takes refuge, period.  Americans of every race and ethnicity are refugees from Hurricane Katrina."

But he realizes that the results and reactions have a racial element to them:

Democrats have tried for generations to craft a populist message that cuts across racial lines, and have 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 an historic opportunity to restate their case.

Here's one example: One of President 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 will 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 losteverything. 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 means bigger profits for Halliburton, and the rest, period. Hence much of the cash will be siphoned out of the region that needs it so desperately.

Jules Witcover thinks that John Kerry could have come across more forcefully on the New Reconstruction scandal in the making: Democratic Overkill on Katrina Tribune Media Services 09/21/05.  But he also gives Kerry credit for calling Bush on the New Reconstruction scam:

The senator, who clearly has not ruled out a second try for the presidency in 2008, said the Bush recovery plan would turn the Gulf Coast "into a vast laboratory for right-wing ideological experiments."

Bush in that speech [of 09/15/05 in New Orleans] did indeed invoke several proposals that fit neatly into his basic objective of converting what Newt Gingrich likes to call "the welfare state" into what Bush repeatedly describes as "the ownership society" of individual initiative and self-reliance.

He talked of creating a Gulf Opportunity Zone where small businesses would get tax breaks enabling them to make fresh starts, of providing federal land grants to hurricane victims with which they could build new homes of their own, and school vouchers for evacuated children.

It would be a big mistake for liberals not to confront the racial issues in the Katrina disaster, because, as Molly Ivins indicated, the Republicans are not reluctant to draw their own racial conclusions from the experience.