by Linda Beale
In the aftermath of the botched emergency response to Katrina, Republican legislators appear to have decided to use the concern about the conspicuous unmet needs of Katrina victims to spur forward their own agenda of radical economic and social policies in the storm zone and in the rest of the country. Under their "free market" banner, they intend to remove environmental protections and social protections so that corporations, the true sovereigns under the Republican regime, can have free reign to rebuild New Orleans in their own image. Casinos and refineries will be lining up for goodies. It's not so clear that this version of "help" will meet the real unmet needs of the Gulf region.
First on Bush's list was the suspension of rules that require federal contractors to pay prevailing wages. Long a goal of the anti-union, big-business machine, the suspension of prevailing wages permits businesses to reap a windfall out of the disaster that has befallen so many Americans. Instead of letting businesses violate wage requirements, those requirements should be enforced, so that people put out of work by the storm are not taken advantage of in the aftermath.
Not content with waiving prevailing wage requirements, Bush also waived affirmative action rules for employers--like Cheney's old company Halliburton--given no-bid contracts in the storm region. Although the face of the disaster was predominantly African American, Bush seems to think it is okay for these contractors to continue their practice of hiring from outside the black community. Federal dollars will benefit the businesses, but not the people at the heart of the disaster.
Republicans plan to use the disaster as a spur for even more of their planned abuses of taxpayer dollars. Instead of giving money to desperate public schools that need an influx of cash to pay teachers, restore buildings, and buy books, they will provide tuition vouchers that will add taxpayer dollars to the coffers of religious schools.
Instead of requiring the oil companies (that have made a killing out of high energy prices and long periods of tax-subsidized profits) to improve their facilities so that they are less hazardous in the event of a major storm, the Republicans plan a series of further tax breaks for them--creating tax-advantaged enterprise zones. These ultimately provide more tax subsidies for the wealthy, who reap the benefits through their ownership of most corporate stock. After witnessing the toxic stew created by pipelines that sit on the ocean floor and burst in cataclysmic storms, the Republicans plan to make it even easier for the oil companies to make money while destroying our environment. They plan to expedite approval processes so that companies can build refineries without the kind of careful evaluation that we know is necessary to avert environmental disasters. Going further, they will lift environmental restrictions on new refineries outright so that they can pollute our air and water even more.
Perhaps the most dastardly of the ideas, though, is the Republican proposal to exempt estates from the estate tax in connection with deaths in storm-affected states. Remember that only the top 2% of taxpayers in this country pay any estate tax at all. Most estates are already exempt, since $1.5 million is excluded from taxation in 2005 (with the exclusion amount increasing to $3.5 million by 2010, as the provision is currently written). None of the ordinary folk that suffered so much in the Katrina disaster are affected by the estate tax. So the Republicans are planning to exempt the truly wealthy from paying tax, while they promise to cut services--like medicare and social security and other benefits that are so needed by the poor--in order to pay for their version of Katrina aid, which seems to be to give out no-bid contracts to connected companies like Halliburton and Shaw. Instead, they should be using tax monies to aide the most needy, and letting the millionaires' estates pay their fair share of the burden.
Many of the ideas being proposed come from the right wing Heritage Foundation, where "free-market" ideas are being pushed to recreate New Orleans in the corporate ideal. See the Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005, at B1. One imagines the corporate tycoons reveling in their idea of taking over prime real estate and turning it into their version of heaven on earth--corporate enterprises without any governmental oversight for the protection of the people. As Rahm Emanuel noted, the right-wing Republicans are "going back to the playbook on issues like tort reform, school vouchers and freeing business from environmental rules to achieve ideological objectives they haven't been able to get in the normal legislative process." Id.
Isn't it just like Republicans to turn their incompetent bungling of a major rescue operation into an opportunity for more corporate largesse and more misrepresentation to the American people?
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