Bush’s vision for New Orleans: a profiteer’s paradise

[Karmadillo]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/body-s16.shtml

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These flourishes were for mass consumption—and deception. The substance of the speech was a series of signals to Wall Street and corporate America that not even the destruction of a major city will alter the very policies that produced the debacle. The centerpiece of the so-called recovery plan announced by Bush was the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone, encompassing parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

“Within this zone,” Bush said, “we should provide immediate incentives for job-creating investment, tax relief for small businesses, incentives to businesses to create jobs, and loans and loan guarantees for small businesses, including minority-owned enterprises, to get them up and running again.”

In other words, the new city that rises out of the flood waters of New Orleans will be a showplace for the unfettered exploitation of workers, who will be stripped of protections such as the Davis Bacon Act, which requires federally subsidized construction projects to pay prevailing wage rates, while companies that secure government contracts will get huge windfalls in the form of tax cuts and other handouts.

“It is entrepreneurship that creates jobs and opportunity,” Bush continued, “it is entrepreneurship that helps break the cycle of poverty, and we will take the side of entrepreneurs as they lead the economic revival of the Gulf region.”

With these euphemisms Bush reaffirmed the program of deregulation, privatization and the gutting of all government controls over corporate profit-making that has played a central role over nearly three decades, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, in starving the country’s infrastructure and making virtually inevitable the type of disaster that engulfed the Gulf Coast.

On this basis, trillions of dollars have been transferred, through tax cuts and the destruction of social programs, from the working class and poor to the wealthy, creating unprecedented social inequality and turning the country into a plutocracy. Bush’s prescription for addressing the Katrina disaster was a bigger dose of the same medicine that produced the catastrophe in the first place.

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[acmavm]

1. And the grand illusion that once was bush** seems to be becoming

patently obvious to most people. Sometimes you screw up sooooooo bad that nothing you try to do will ever make it right.

[mopaul]

2. new orleans is now a giant trough for the pigs at halliburton

billions in profits will be made and none of it will go to helping the poor.