Hightower Lowdown

THE WAILING IN OUR COUNTRY ABOUT the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages...Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the U.S. itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness--around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery, and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate. [ read more ]

By the fifth day—with New Orleans under 20 feet of toxic water, with federal help still nowhere to be seen, and with 100,000 or so poor people trapped in unbelievable misery and danger—some of the locals still were able to muster enough of the Big Easy's irreverent humor to crown their drowning city with an apt new name: "Lake George." What happened in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi was not merely the abject failure of the Bushite presidency (both in preparedness and response), but also a deep moral failure, reflecting the bankruptcy of their extremist ruling ideology. They have a blind hatred of the idea that government exists to serve the common good, instead insisting that people should be on their own.

In New Orleans, they were. To help pay for tax cuts for the rich, Bush had cut the money to shore up the levees...so people drowned. If you ever wondered what George W's "ownership society" would look like, there it was. Step right up if you want to own a casket. What Bush & Company don't get is that the great majority of us Americans simply do not share such a callous ideology, and we are totally embarrassed that federal officials failed to be there for the people of the Gulf Coast from day one. Whatever else people think about government, ordinary folks (including the conservativeminded who are not partisan ideologues) expect government to respond hard and fast in times of real need — and the aftermath of Katrina has to be the absolute definition of real need.

Yet Washington dawdled for days (George went on a meandering political trip out west, Cheney was out on Maryland's Eastern Shore buying a $2.4 million vacation home, Condi Rice took off for some shoe shopping in New York City, and Bush's homeland emergency team was locked inside the Beltway doing a terrific impersonation of the Three Stooges). Americans were appalled, for the Bushites' indifference and ineptitude reflected on our sense of ourselves and our nation. "Is this America?" That was the question I heard being almost shouted out everywhere I went, asked in a combination of disbelief and outrage. We are a can-do, roll-up-our-sleeves people (as demonstrated amply by the gusher of grassroots charity and volunteerism that immediately followed the storm), and it was deeply offensive to our core values of fairness and justice that the Bushites were such clueless slugs.
The third disaster

Katrina should be known as K3, for it brought three disasters. The first two—the storm itself and Bush's non-response—have been widely covered. But there's a third disaster that's still unfolding: the reconstruction of New Orleans and other ravaged areas. Rushing to make up for their tardiness and incompetence, the White House and Congress are airdropping massive sackloads of taxpayer cash on their political problem. The first delivery was $62 billion (with $50 billion going through those comical bunglers at FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and the best guesses are that the final toll will top $200 billion. Two important questions about this bundle are not being addressed by the politicos in charge: One, where's it coming from? Two, who's getting it?

Funding the relief and reconstruction. George is up to his usual fiscal hocus-pocus, delivering federal largesse without being honest or accepting political accountability for it. Just as with his $210 billion tab (so far) for his Iraq attack, he is refusing to assess us taxpayers for the bill for his Katrina project. Instead, he's putting every dime of it on the federal credit card, passing the actual payout to our grandchildren, who'll have their taxes hiked to pay off the ever-ballooning debt. Of course, Bush will be long gone by then, so he and his GOP congress will pay no political price.

As usual, some of the right-wing congress critters are calling for more cuts in Head Start, job training, college grants, and other "social programs" to finance both the war and Katrina. But these cuts would hurt the very families fighting the war and the ones devastated by the storm. A better way has been suggested in numerous letters to the editor I've seen in papers all across the country: Cut corporate welfare and pork-barrel spending!

Take the recently passed highway bill, bloated by $24 billion in boondoggle projects stuffed into it by lawmakers wanting political credit for bringing home the bacon. There are a record 6,371 of these projects in the bill—nearly all of which could easily be sacrificed to free up funds for the urgent needs on the Gulf Coast. For example: [ read more ]