The Real Costs of the Culture of Greed

The essense of the problem in New Orleans is a symptom of a change in government policy. The poor response to New Orleans is not about incompetence, its about ideology.
Los Angeles Times

WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States. Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.


Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss. Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub flooded New Orleans "Lake George."


None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life. Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government policies that aid only poor brown and black people — even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared. MORE

Brad DeLong has an outstanding post about the miserable results from the deliberate assignment of inadequate leadership. The most important job in emergency management nationwide, a job taken very seriously at the county and city level from coast to coast, was give to a man with no experience. Yet he's charged with decisions that will decide who will live and die on the devastated Gulf Coast.
The disenfranchised who are now being shipped all over the country for housing have a common message.
Some of the Dispossessed Say They Won't Return - Los Angeles Times

Displaced residents of this city — especially the poorest blacks, who were hardest hit by the storm — are pondering whether they will try to return to a town the tour guides often missed, one that has suffered decades of crime, corruption and grinding poverty.


"Katrina had a tremendous impact on the black people who lived here," said Lance Hill, director of a diversity training program at Tulane University. "This city was tough on a lot of them even before the hurricane. A lot of them were already unemployed or had minimum-wage jobs. Many of them were renters. They don't have anything to come back to. A lot of them are just not going to come back."


Before the storm, most Americans knew New Orleans as a blend of old Southern elegance and Bourbon Street decadence. The aftermath, however, has highlighted a primarily black city in which one-third of the African American population — more than 100,000 people — lives below the poverty line. Many of those hardest hit by the storm are not sure whether they want to go back.
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So it seems the elite of New Orleans is about to reap the benefits of the new policy. The poor in New Orleans have been relocated, many don't want to come back. Many will be unable to find the means to come back.