After the Deluge: How do Blacks get to the Table?

http://www.blackcommentator.com/153/153_picard_katrina.html

I am a native of New Orleans. Like so many in that city, I grew up in
poverty with my family shuttling between several of the downtown housing
projects (St. Bernard, Lafitte, Desire and Iberville). In 1965 when
Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans we were living in the Ninth Ward which,
almost singularly, experienced flooding in the 4 to 8 foot range - a
situation that was devastating but a lot less severe than the floods of
Katrina where 80 percent of the city was affected and where water rose to as
high as 20 feet. In the aftermath of Betsy we went for days without
electricity and we "liberated" sustenance from the neighborhood grocery
stores - all, for the most part, unrecorded by the television cameras.
People suffered staggering losses - their lives, their homes, their
possessions, their jobs. There was no evacuation to speak of and there was
no recovery plan even remotely comparable to what is being contemplated now.
For the most part people licked their wounds and went back to eking out a
living as they had done before. New Orleans dried out and carried on.

In subsequent decades, political empowerment, its concomitant cronyism, a
limited corporate presence and the several higher education establishments
provided a middle class option for a few. Other incumbent and would be
members of the black middle class, myself included, escaped New Orleans,
recognizing that opportunities for African Americans were largely confined
to low wage, low benefit, low security jobs in the hospitality, leisure and
gaming industries. Employment in the tourism sector provided a living at or
slightly above the poverty line. A vast segment of the African America
population - the unemployed, the underemployed, the disposed - suffered
grinding poverty that spawned, variously, hopelessness, resignation and
criminality.

New Orleans is now in its third generation of black political power but no
serious student of New Orleans pretends that political empowerment is
coterminous with economic power. The white economic elite, accompanied by an
undercurrent of pervasive and, in some cases, mob inspired corruption,
continued and continues to control the city's economic fortunes. Those who
were in poverty continued to fester in poverty. Indeed their numbers grew.
The impoverished became an increasing percentage of the city's population as
whites and middle class African Americans abandoned the inner city with its
failing schools, escalating crime and diminished opportunity. It was the
city's poor, for the most part, who were the people we saw at the Superdome,
Convention Center, on and under the bridges and overpasses, devastated and
abandoned. And now that the rescue and recovery effort is ending, they again
face the prospect of being left out as the redevelopment process unfolds.

In the days since Katrina the Congressional Black Caucus, traditional civil
rights leaders, local black political elites, professional political
scientists, pundits and Joe citizen have been asking, even demanding, that
African Americans be included in the recovery process. They want to be at
the table when decisions are taken and they have been insisting that the
resulting programs address the fundamental interests of, not just the middle
class, but of working class and dispossessed African Americans in New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. My question is, in the prevailing
political climate, how do we get to the table? Has Katrina brought about
that sort of change? What has happened in national politics that would lead
us to conclude that we have the means to affect this process any more
meaningfully than we have affected public policy in the past two decades?

My questions point to my concerns. Katrina has exposed a lot of issues
(poverty, underdevelopment in the Gulf Coast region, the extent that certain
agencies have been gutted and financially starved) and it has shown the Bush
Administration to have feet of clay, but it should not distort our political
perspectives. Once we get beyond the emotional reaction to Katrina's
devastation, our assessment of what is possible must take into account where
the nation is politically. To assume that this most unfortunate event has
fundamentally altered the prevailing political dynamic in the United States
is wishful thinking. No one left office as a consequence of Katrina. The
fundamental philosophy directing national policy has not changed. There has
been no shift in the national political power equation. The zebra has not
changed its stripes. The neo-conservative era is far from over.

Hard line conservatives control all the levers of government: the
Administration, Congress, the Courts, and - as they penetrate to its middle
ranks - the Bureaucracy. Their grip on state houses and politics is
tightening not decreasing. Is it reasonable to expect that George Bush, ***
Chaney, Carl Rove, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, Rick Santorum, Joe
Lieberman - the legions of conservative lobbyists, pressure groups and power
brokers - and their cronies in the Administration and Congress, in governor'
s offices and state assemblies, Republican and Democrat alike, have
abandoned or redirected the steaming neo-conservative agenda because of
Katrina? I think not.

These people and their citizen supporters see the Bush Administration as
nothing less than the culmination of a process that started with Richard
Nixon, benefited from the friendly policy support of Jimmy Carter, was
accelerated by Ronald Reagan, and coddled by Clinton era policies. The hard
line conservatives successfully implemented a forced march to power that
spans three decades. Bush may fall out of public favor and his
administration will end, but that will not change the character of Congress
or the Court System, with its lifetime appointees, and it will not change
the minds of the people who helped consolidate the conservative juggernaut.
We practice self delusion by not understanding this.

I am not convinced when Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne argues that
the Bush Era has ended (Washington Post "End of the Bush Era," September 13,
2005). If we equate the Bush Era with high numbers in public opinion polls
then his administration may well limp to the finish line. His image and
legacy may suffer. Poll numbers are one thing, but we have yet to see the
failure of his legislative agenda. Beyond that, it is important to
understand that the Bush Era and the era of hard line conservatism are not
one and the same. More interests are invested in the conservative agenda
than just Bush and the immediate representatives of his Administration. For
the hard line conservatives this is no time to waver. They fully intend to
rule for generations and plan to leave an indelible stamp on American
politics and society.

Even if Bush were inclined to pursue a fair, honest and transparent
recovery, which I know will not be the case, we should not expect that he
could impose his wishes on Congress - many of whom are further to the right
than his administration - or even on his hard line cronies in the Executive
Office. Dionne's call for leaders of both parties to declare their
independence of the Bush Administration may sound forward looking. But what
he fails to acknowledge is that many of those would be independent
Republicans (and Democrats) have a much more conservative policy agenda than
Bush.

We need look no further than the rapid resort to no bid contracts going to
well placed corporations like Fluor, Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root
(Halliburton) - in other words, the usual suspects who are the prime private
sector beneficiaries of the war in Iraq. Bush moved quickly to waive
prevailing wage requirements for contractors working on hurricane relief
projects. That was reassuring to the conservatives in Congress who had been
fighting to strike that provision altogether. They now have a beachhead.
Beyond that, it is not likely that many in the displaced population will
benefit from construction and other jobs due to limited skills and low labor
force participation rates before Katrina. Even with the lower wages others
likely will get those jobs.

The Education Secretary's crisis related spending proposal is being met with
mixed emotions because astute observers see it as a carefully crafted effort
to introduce through the back door, and in spite of public wariness, a
national voucher system by providing tuition support for students who attend
private schools in the Gulf region. Hard line conservatives have asked to
put off implementing the prescription drug benefit for one year. Many of
them opposed the plan from its inception and would like to proceed from
delayed implementation to derail the plan altogether. Conservative
Republicans are already preparing to make sure that the next emergency
spending request does not fly through Congress like the earlier $62 billion
request. Some members such as Arizona Representative Jeff Flake (R) have
characterized anticipated Katrina relief spending as an irresponsible new
entitlement program.

His high sounding pronouncements aside, Bush has made a determined effort to
assure conservatives that he has not abandoned his commitment to "limited
government" and "fiscal prudence." His call for the national equivalent of a
Gulf Coast "Marshall Plan" is accompanied by an equally forceful declaration
that it will be pursued without increasing taxes and will be accompanied by
offsets from existing spending programs. In the effort to identify budget
offsets for the new Marshall Plan, Bush has asked Congress to revisit his
budget submission from earlier this year. That budget contained deep cuts in
social programs. Do we need to guess who would have borne the brunt of those
cuts? Congress, concerned more about Pork Barrel spending than the well
being of the citizenry, failed to cut the budget as deeply as Bush proposed
but still managed to include $35 billion in spending cuts in programs for
low- and moderate-income families, and $70 billion in new tax breaks, mostly
for the rich. Now, in the face of Bush's Katrina recovery commitment, the
programs that survived are likely to be revisited. It would be a travesty
if, after the initial tragedy, we are confronted with an even more draconian
consequence where Congress robs the poor to give to the rich while making
symbolic overtures to the Katrina's real victims.

In the face of these likely developments what leverage do African Americans
have? Should we expect that Katrina has given us an opening to appeal to the
compassion of Bush and Company? To think so is laughable. For that crowd
compassion is little more than a symbol laden political slogan. It reflects
no related programmatic commitments. Their compassion takes the form of
cutting taxes for the rich, eliminating the Estate Tax, limiting the public'
s ability to sue corporations, killing the bankruptcy option for the average
Joe and loading the Energy and Transportation bills with more pork than
Hormel and the Jimmy Dean sausage factory can handle together.

Can we expect continued media scrutiny such as we saw during the height of
the Katrina Crisis? Maybe some, but not much that will be of consequence.
The corporate media, which has been emboldened to some extent during this
crisis, is still subservient to and intimidated by the hard line
conservatives. The momentary flash of courage that we witnessed over the
past several weeks does not mean that the cowardly lion has now found a
heart.

What about access? This administration has treated the CBC and the
traditional civil rights leadership like red headed step children. They have
no access to speak of. It is true that Bush reached out to many African
Americans in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane and in the face of a
spreading public relations disaster. But we should not confuse his PR
overtures for a genuine effort to be inclusive. When the Bush Administration
does reach out it is likely to be to their hand picked, and carefully
cultivated alternative African American leadership stratum - their
Republican Party operatives, think tank researchers, media spokespersons and
pundits, and mega church executives wrapped in their faith based, gospel of
prosperity. Even then, much of that effort is likely to take the form of PR
since the real horse trading is taking place in Congress and within the
Executive Office. We should not blind ourselves with delusions about the
amount of leverage we have as a result of this tragedy. No one of
consequence who really wants to advance the interests of African Americans
is likely to be invited to Bush's Gulf Coast recovery and reconstruction
table.

Paul Krugman (NYT 9/5/05 "Killed By Contempt") was prescient in identifying
the issue in play as the hard line conservative premise that government is
the problem and that it has no definite and non-negotiable responsibilities
to the citizenry. The hard line conservatives have been moving full speed
ahead in their program to "starve the beast" through tax cuts and giveaways
for corporate America and the wealthy, by knifing social programs and
shredding the social safety net, through deregulation and privatization, and
by shifting federal spending in the direction of corporate entitlements,
pork barrel earmarks and crass, unapologetic crony capitalism. For them
government has a responsibility to promote and support the private sector in
myriad ways, but essentially the citizenry is on its own in much the same
way that the victims of Katrina were on their own in those early days after
the flood. Krugman was premature in his expectation that the Katrina Crisis
would produce an epiphany that would lead the public to reject hard line
conservative notions about government: that big government is bad government
and the best government; that the best government is less government, and
their program to make those self-fulfilling prophecies. The polity has not
reached that point.

Instead of hoping for Bush to be born again to the notion of government of,
by and for the people, we should begin serious discussion of the daunting
political project that awaits people of all classes and ethnic groups who
want to tackle head on the problems, including poverty, that confront this
country. That task is to reassert the idea that government should serve the
people and defeat the conservative philosophy that even many Democrats -
some of them African Americans - have embraced. An alternative consensus has
to become politically predominant which says that the government has a
responsibility to build and maintain the physical infrastructure
(transportation, sewer and water, energy security and conservation, flood
control; environmental protection); and that every American citizen has a
right to a decent education and job training, quality health care, income
security and impartial justice. It is not enough to just focus on the
presidency. The new project for the 21st Century is no less than the need to
change, wholesale, congressional district by congressional district,
political jurisdiction by jurisdiction, the ruling political class in the
country and the ideology that informs policy making. If Katrina is to
produce anything of consequence it should be to set this process in motion.
We need a new way of thinking about and national consensus on the
responsibilities of government. Let us go to the table to thrash out the
answers to that question.

Earl Picard is a Political Scientist who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He can
be reached at earlpicard@xxxxxxxxxxxx


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