It's Time
for a New "New Deal"
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=20690
Posted 09/08/2005
New Orleans is destroyed,
the Gulf Coast's infrastructure is in tatters and tens of thousands
of citizens are without jobs as gas prices nationwide rise to record
levels. Television sets brought the destruction into all of our
homes. But this White House seemed unable to grasp the misery
unfolding before its own eyes.
Instead, President Bush
treated the disaster as if he were a loutish frat boy when he joked
to Americans that he had had good times partying in New Orleans as a
young man and hoped in the near future to be able to sit on Senator
Trent Lott's rebuilt porch in Mississippi.
But to really understand
what went wrong with the Administration's shameful response, we need
to look beyond Bush's blame-the-other, pass-the-buck and
who-gives-a-____ attitude.
The Administration's
ineptitude, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it,
was "a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of
using government to serve the public good."
The government's failure was
the result not of "simple incompetence" in the Administration but
"of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to
systematically vilify the role of government in American life,"
LA Times columnist Robert Scheer argued. And as the Financial
Times observed, "For the past quarter-century in Washington...US
politics has been dominated by the conviction that what was wrong
with America would be solved by getting government off the people's
backs"--an attitude that contributed to the criminal inaction on the
part of the federal government.
Indeed, you could see what
the dog-eat-dog, antigovernment philosophy of the far right has
reaped in the bloated bodies and raw sewage in New Orleans's flooded
streets.
That philosophy has attained
new power under President Bush. While the Louisiana Army Corps of
Engineers proposed $18 billion in projects that would have shored up
the protective levees, improved flood control and perhaps prevented
last week's breaches in the levees' walls, none of these projects
were funded. Instead, the White House cut the Corps' budget and
actually proposed a further 20 percent cut in 2006.
Which raises the question:
What steps should we take to repair the breach that has become so
apparent in our social fabric?
Here's one answer: Let's
seize this moment by launching a twenty-first-century New Deal--with
programs modeled after the Works Progress Administration, updated
for these times. Why?
A modernized version of the
WPA would help our nation to rebuild New Orleans and Mississippi's
Gulf Coast, and repair the racial and class divides that we saw in
such dramatic relief these past few days. It would rebuild and
improve our nation's public infrastructure and (hopefully) alter the
terms of our political discourse in the years ahead.
After all, Roosevelt's New
Deal was so much more than simply a vehicle for providing economic
relief to citizens in need. It gave Americans a sense of solidarity,
a new social contract, as well as the chance to go to work. It also
helped bring the country's infrastructure into the twentieth
century.
Take a moment to consider
these statistics: The WPA, according to historian William
Leuchtenburg, "built or improved more than 2,500 hospitals, 5,900
school buildings, 1,000 airport landing fields, and nearly 13,000
playgrounds."
When the hurricane happened
the poverty rate in New Orleans stood at 28 percent--more than
double the national average. Fully half the children of Louisiana
now live in poverty, the second-highest child poverty rate in the
country (its neighbor, Mississippi, is number one). And as if to
underscore the poverty of our politics, the same week the hurricane
devastated the poorest regions the Census Bureau released a report
that found the number of Americans living in poverty has climbed
again--for the fourth straight year under President Bush.
African-Americans, who are
two-thirds of the city's population, suffered the most in the
hurricane's wake. As Professor Mark Naison wrote in a letter
circulating on the web, this event is nothing short of "a
humanitarian challenge of unprecedented proportions."
It showed "how deeply
divided our nation is and how far our social fabric has been
strained" by the Iraq war and by "policies which have widened the
gap between rich and poor."
A post-New Orleans WPA could
help to spark a new and desperately needed moral struggle for
economic rights. It could provide jobs to Louisiana and
Mississippi's poor and promote the goals of equality, justice and
economic opportunity across American society.
(Bush's approach, in
contrast, favors cronyism. Last week, Halliburton's stock hit a
fifty-two-week high, presumably because Dick Cheney's former
colleagues may reap the benefits of this tragedy securing government
contracts to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Bush's approach has been a
complete failure for the poor, elderly and largely African-American
population of New Orleans.)
A WPA-style program could
also begin to address the related crisis of the inner cities--a
crisis that, as the Center for American Progress points out, this
Administration has contributed to--as it has "repeatedly slashed job
training [to the tune of more than $500 million] and vocational
education programs."
The Milton Eisenhower
Foundation has argued that the federal government should fund 1.25
million public-sector inner-city jobs. (Its website lays out a
series of "what work" programs.)
We need a
twenty-first-century WPA to restore the infrastructure not only in
Louisiana and Mississippi, but in every state in America. As
Representative Dennis Kucinich said this past week, the task ahead
that is required to rebuild New Orleans includes a need for "new
levees, new roads, bridges, libraries, schools, colleges and
universities and...all public institutions, including hospitals."
The government's highest priority should be on affordable housing
and public infrastructure, not on casinos and luxury hotels, which
skew development and contribute to environmental degradation.
We're "the only major
industrial society that is not...renewing and expanding its public
infrastructure," the Eisenhower Foundation reported. Instead of pork
barrel spending on absurd bridges like "Don Young's Way" in Alaska,
let's have the federal government spend our money wisely to
modernize our hospitals, highways, universities and other
institutions.
Senator Kennedy said in a
Senate floor speech this week that "we can't just fix the hole in
the roof. We need to rebuild the whole foundation." He proposed
establishing "a New Orleans and Gulf Coast Redevelopment Authority
modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority in its heyday." His
good idea is to "plan, help fund and coordinate for the
reconstruction of that damaged region."
Finally, we must seek to
upend twenty-five years of right-wing political dogma that is
responsible for what went wrong in responding to this disaster.
We need a new politics of
shared sacrifice and a renewed commitment to a politics of shared
prosperity--with a federal government playing a vital role in
creating a fairer, more just, full-employment economy. These
proposals are common sense ideas; how could they be considered
heretical in the hurricane's wake?
This is a moment ripe
to reshape Americans' view of government. A twenty-first-century
version of the WPA would halt the dismantling and begin the
rebuilding of our nation's communities, of lives enmeshed in deep
poverty and squalor, and provide some hope that the horrific
abandonment by government of thousands of citizens will be an
aberration, not a nightmarish portent of what lies ahead.
Blog
reproduced from:
www.thenation.com
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