President Bush said these things about Hurricane Katrina in his speech to the nation Thursday:

“Millions of lives were changed in a day by a cruel and wasteful storm.”

“Federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone.”

“As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. And 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.”

In a vacuum, Bush came across as sincere. For a second time, he said he took personal responsibility for the federal government’s slow response to Katrina. “I, as president, am responsible for the problem and for the solution.” This was seemingly a big turnabout for a president who has portrayed himself as righteously infallible. In the midst of his lowest approval ratings ever, Bush has been forced off Mt. Olympus.

It will be miraculous for him to become the solution after four and a half years of throwing down thunderbolts at the poor, who are disproportionately African-American and Latino. This is after joining the side of white students to kill affirmative action at the University of Michigan in the 2003 Supreme Court case. This is after his Justice Department deleted half of a 168-page report that detailed the lack of promotion and disparate pay for African-American and female attorneys.

This is after a first term in which his Health and Human Services Department issued a report that originally was to highlight racial disparities in healthcare, except that the department deleted racial “inequalities” and “disparities” from its key findings.

The altered report went so far as to downplay the dramatic disparities in healthcare with “Americans have exceptional quality of healthcare; but some socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, and geographical differences exist.” The original report was published after an outcry.

This is from the same president who now tells us, “Let us rise above the legacy of inequality.”

Let him be the first to rise, by ending his cruel and wasteful assault on the poor. The last four and half years of his trickle-down theories have failed. His tax cuts and tax incentives have only enriched the rich. The poor have become poorer. The poverty rate has risen by from a 27-year low of 11.3 percent to 12.7 percent according to the US Census. For the first time on record, household incomes failed to rise for five consecutive years. Even Phillip Swagel, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “The gains have gone to owners of capital and not to workers.”

Bush now says he wants to rebuild New Orleans with federal dollars. But for four and a half years, he has embarrassed even fellow Republicans by his annual proposals to slash Community Development Block grants. He talks now of federal accounts of up to $5,000 for job training, education and child care expenses for evacuees. Yet before Katrina, he has proposed to slash job training programs, adult literacy programs and let his own No Child Left Behind program go underfunded by billions of dollars a year. Nearly every state in the nation is either suing the government or complaining about having to follow unfunded mandates.

Bush says he will now create a Gulf Opportunity Zone to stimulate business, “including minority-owned enterprises.” But he also suspended the Davis-Bacon act for Katrina rebuilding, meaning that contractors need not pay the prevailing wage for laborers. Bush says he wants to “help lower-income citizens in the hurricane region build new and better lives.” But between relaxing wage rules for the CEOs and heading a Republican Party that has for eight years blocked a rise in the $5.15 federal minimum wage, Bush’s plan to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will squeeze yet more pulp out of the poor.

Bush proclaimed that we are about to witness “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.” For that to happen, he will have to become everything he has not been for his first four and a half years. That is only possible if he does things like drop his tax cut program or end the needless war in Iraq.

Bush says Katrina was cruel and wasteful. He was right in a way he did not intend. Katrina laid bare the cruel waste of so much of his presidency.

Derrick Z. Jackson’s e-mail address is
jackson@globe.com.

 

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