Katrina was a mere bump in the roadway for the Bush Gang of robber barons as they continue with the greatest heist of the century - turning social programs for the needy into profits for the billionaires.
The 2005 fiscal year for the government closed at the end of September. Neither chamber of Congress was able to agree on a new funding bill, instead relying on a measure known as a "continuing resolution," holding federal spending to 2005 levels and restricting the implementation of programs that would mandate a spending increase.
Alreeady this year, Congress had approved cutting billions in spending on government health care and other social programs, as well as billions in tax breaks favoring the rich, but were stymied on an agreement over the 2006 fiscal year when Katrina really upset their applecart and showed the dearth of the national safety net.Even so, House Republican leaders raised the stakes this week, pledging to lift the target of entitlement cuts from $35 billion to $50 billion, impose across-the-board spending cuts and rescind spending already approved. That's fifteen more billions cut from programs for the poor, such as food stamps, Medicaid and student loans.
The rational for this is "paying for Katrina" yet even the mainstream media seem blithely unaware of the contradiction of cutting poverty programs to pay for a disaster which was made immesuarably worse by the effects of poverty.
Meanwhile, Defense and Homeland Security will step up with every other Department and face a supposed 2% cut across the board. Two per cent! At a time when between them the Depertments of Defense and Homeland Security have a budget equivalent to the entire rest of the world's arms spending (DHS alone spends more each year than China does on its military). And that's just if the supposed cut ever actually comes to pass - the profits plugged back into the robber baron's pockets by the arms companies make that extremely unlikely. National interest, as usual, will be invoked as the reason to give Defense and DHS a "get out of jail free" card, mark my words.
Meanwhile, the New Standard reports on the findings of the Coalition on Human Needs – an alliance of 750 labor, civil liberties, religious and other groups - that Republicans still plan to push through $100 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, including an extension of capital-gains and dividend tax breaks.
And that, my friends, is where the "savings" chopped from the poor will go. Not to pay for Katrina's damage but instead to line the pockets of the robber barons and their richest supporters. Katrina will just be left to swell the deficit for those who come after - Republican or Democrat it matters not to Bush and his cronies. They none of them expect to ever be able to work in government again and are hell bent on taking the lions share of the government's money - taxpayers' money - into retired exile with them on the beach closest to their offshore banks.
Update Charles Todd over at Freiheit und Wissen copies a report from the LA Times that some post-Katrina construction workers are only being paid a measly $4 an hour after Georgie-boy cleared the way for more profit-taking by suspending prevailing wage laws and asks:
Somehow we have trained these corporations to believe that national disasters are a time for them to profit. But this gets things all wrong. A system that privileges the profit of a construction company over the basic welfare of those who will live in the area after it is rebuilt is a system that has been turned upside down. Indeed, what good will it be to rebuild that community if you underpay the very people who are supposed to live that community?
Charles, that only makes sense if you expect the robber barons and their cronies to care. See what I mean now?
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