Always The People Left Behind

by Michael Winship

As the torpor of this long, hot and humid summer came to an end, television plagued by re-runs and movie theaters by remakes of TV re-runs, it seemed appropriate somehow that the Bush presidency more and more resembled a bad remake of the Nixon administration.

Instead of the Pentagon Papers, we had the apparent White House outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. It seems a shoddy attempt to discredit her husband Joe Wilson, who was debunking claims that Saddam tried to buy uranium for WMD's.

Instead of Nixon's alleged complicity in the overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende, we had Pat Robertson calling for the un-Christian-like snuffing of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

And, of course, instead of Vietnam, we have Iraq. Okay, Iraq is different from Vietnam. As Daniel Ellsberg of the aforementioned Pentagon Papers recently noted, Iraq has more of a dry heat.

But instead of Watergate, George W. Bush got water -- lots of it. Eighty percent of New Orleans flooded, in some neighborhoods to a depth of twenty feet. Not to mention the damage done to the rest of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. A death toll that doubtless will exceed the number of Americans killed on 9/11 or in Iraq, possibly combined and probably more.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina represents a catastrophic failure by government at every level -- local, state and federal. As the facts unfold, some Democratic officials will have to accept various degrees of culpability as much as Republicans.

But it's the feds taking most of the heat and for good reason. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), politicized and minimized as part of the Department of Homeland Security behemoth, was absurdly ill-informed and ill-prepared: slow off the mark but quick to complain it was unjustly being picked on.

As the humorist Mo Rocca noted over the weekend, we all have our fortes and weaknesses; this is not a White House that does "aftermaths" well. The failure to apprehend Osama, for one. The invasion of Iraq and subsequent mayhem brought about by bad planning and willful ignorance of advice and warnings, for another.

And now this. Like FEMA, the President seemed sluggish on the draw and initially oblivious not only to what was going on but how his words and actions would be interpreted. "Out of the rubbles [sic] of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house," Bush said jocularly during his first visit to the disaster site Friday. "There's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

To impoverished African Americans who had just lost their homes and belongings, this must have sounded like the same old, same old. With bodies floating in the streets and disease on the horizon, it's the rich white senator who gets his loss singled out by the president. Not only that, it's the senator who lost his majority leader job for saying that, in 1948, the nation would have been better off if segregationist Strom Thurmond had been elected president.

For the first days of the New Orleans Katrina story, the elephant in the room was the basic truth that almost all of those abandoned in the floodwaters were poor men, women and children of color.

They were too old, infirm or didn't have the wherewithal to evacuate the city. Living paycheck to paycheck, they had nothing saved for the ultimate rainy day. Or they stayed behind to protect what little they had or to help their families and neighbors. For too long, it was the only help on which they could rely.

Discrimination isn't always conscious, or maybe it's just absent-minded. "I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African Americans," Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told reporters on Sunday. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."

One could regard those remarks as loyal, disingenuous or clueless, but not shoeless, as we learned that Secretary Rice spent part of Hurricane Week in New York shopping at Ferragamo. She also attended the Monty Python musical "Spamalot," one of the opening numbers of which is titled "I Am Not Dead Yet."

More accurately, as Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks told the New York Times, "This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society -- in a literal way... It's not that it's at odds with the way I see American society. But it's at odds with the way I want to see American society."

Coincidentally, as the storm continued its way north last week, the Census Bureau issued its annual report on income and poverty. Last year, another 1.1 million Americans slipped below the poverty level. Earnings fell and for the first time ever, household incomes failed to rise for five straight years. The number of Americans without health insurance rose to 45.8 million.

This, despite what otherwise has been described as a robust economy. The Times quoted Phillip Swagel, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute: "It looks like the gains from the recovery haven't filtered down. The gains have gone to owners of capital and not to workers."

Here in Manhattan, although faraway from the immediate tempest, the income disparity between rich and poor is greater than in any other county in the United States. According to a Times analysis of 2000 census data, "The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make -- $365,826 compared with $7,047 -- which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia.

"... Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents."

Another study, released this weekend by the Fiscal Policy Institute in Albany (un-ironically headlined, "New Yorkers Treading Water in a Tenuous Recovery"), noted a "hollowing out" of middle income families -- the rich getting richer, the poor poorer.

Back in New Orleans, before the waters came, more than a quarter of the town's residents lived below the poverty line. Sixty-nine percent of the population was black. Thirty-five percent of those black households didn't have a car. All were at the mercy of the elements.

To its credit, in recent days, the White House has met with African American leaders to try to put things right. Yet here comes the Republican Congress, back from recess with what the Washington Post called "a dream agenda for small-government conservatives: permanent repeal of the estate tax, an extension of deep cuts to capital gains and dividend taxes, the first entitlement spending cuts in nearly a decade, and the advent of private investment accounts for Social Security."

In the aftermath of Katrina and its vast, looming economic impact, Congress must reconsider. As Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley asked, "How do you do tax cuts when your budget is straining to save lives?"

If there is any proverbial silver lining here, it may be Foley's realization, shared by some of his fellow party members. This, in addition to the wake-up call alerting us to our lack of preparedness for any massive calamity, natural or manmade.

The Katrina cataclysm also should make us aware that anyone's suffering is our own, and not just in times of national emergency. Ideally, it could open a nationwide dialogue on race and class, a discussion that since the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles largely has gone underground.

Otherwise, those dislocated, huddled masses down South might well come to believe the line in Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," his song about the not so long ago Mississippi flood that displaced 700,000 Americans: "They're tryin' to wash us away."

Or, even sadder and more frightening, the line from the slave era spiritual that warns, "No more water, the fire next time."

If so, as the makeshift grave of a flood victim named Vera reads, "God help us." All.