(Courtesy of Abby Normal who states: "This is what needs to be out in the media. New Orleans IS the Bush Assministration (that spelling was stolen from the blogosphere) fault. Tax cuts to the almighty rich, firing the experts who testified in congress..the list is endless and unforgivable. I hated these lying, manipulative bastards who prey on peoples fears and I especially hate the people who allow themselves to be manipulated by a press that is to corporate, ... and too complacent to do their jobs.")
Hurricanes Rain on Bush's Tax Cut Parade: How the Katrina catastrophe proves that conservatives' tax cut zealotry has left america vulnerable to disaster.
By David Sirota
In These Times
Excerpt:
Casual observers wouldn't expect Mike Parker to serve as a de facto spokesman for how the Republicans' tax-cuts-at-all-cost agenda has weakened America. As a conservative GOP Congressman from Mississippi in the '90s, Parker was an outspoken advocate for giving tax breaks to the wealthy.He served as one of Newt Gingrich's lead grassroots advocates for reducing the estate tax--a levy that falls almost exclusively on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of Americans. In his 1999 run as Republican nominee for Mississippi governor, Parker made tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign. His signature television advertisement featured him shooting pool, saying "When I say I'll fight to cut your taxes, well friend, that's something that you can bank on."
After narrowly losing that race, Parker was rewarded for his Republican service by President Bush, who appointed him to head the Army Corps of Engineers on June 7, 2001. That was the very same day Bush signed his massive $1.3 trillion income tax cut into law--a tax cut that severely depleted the government of revenues it needed to address critical priorities. As Parker soon learned, one of the priorities that would be sacrificed was flood and hurricane protection.
Overall, Bush's first budget introduced in February 2001 proposed more than half a billion dollars worth of cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers for the 2002 fiscal year. To be sure, these budget cuts were one in a number of cuts to public priorities like health care, human services, infrastructure and job training.
And it is true that the cuts to the corps came as the agency was being legitimately criticized: Some of its projects in recent years had run roughshod over environmental concerns, and others had been unnecessarily expensive products of congressional pork. However, instead of reforming the corps and getting it back on track, the White House used the criticism as a cover to gut the entire agency. The cuts were so deep, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) broke ranks with her party and penned a nationally-syndicated op-ed in April 2001 saying that "lives very likely will be lost."
Consider just a few of the specific examples: In the same budget that provided more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts, Bush proposed providing only half of what his own administration officials said was necessary to sustain the critical Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA)--a project started after a 1995 rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes and caused a half billion dollars in damage. This 2001 budget proposal came in the same year that, according to the Houston Chronicle, federal officials publicly ranked the potential damage to New Orleans by a major hurricane "among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."
Similarly, less than two weeks after Bush signed his tax cut on June 7, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that "despite warnings that it could slow emergency response to future flood and hurricane victims, House Republicans stripped $389 million in disaster relief money from the budget."
By the beginning of the 2002 congressional session, Parker had enough of sitting in silence while these tax and budget decisions were being made. In a meeting with White House budget director Mitch Daniels, Parker demanded the Bush administration restore the critical money for flood and hurricane protection.
"I took two pieces of steel into Mitch Daniels' office," Parker recalled. "They were exactly the same pieces of steel, except one had been under water in a Mississippi lock for 30 years, and the other was new. The first piece was completely corroded and falling apart because of a lack of funding. I said, 'Mitch, it doesn't matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates--either way it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame.' "
But as Parker noted, "It made no impact on [the White House] whatsoever." In February 2002, the president unveiled his new budget, this one with a $390 million cut to the Army Corps. The cuts came during the same year the richest 5 percent (those who make an average of $300,000 or more) were slated to receive $24 billion in new tax cuts.
The cuts were devastating. The administration provided just $5 million for maintaining and upgrading critical hurricane protection levees in New Orleans--one fifth of what government experts and Republican elected officials in Louisiana told the administration was needed. Likewise, the administration had been informed that SELA needed $80 million to keep its work moving at full speed, but the White House only proposed providing a quarter of that. These cuts came even though the potential cost of not improving infrastructure was known to be astronomical. A widely-circulated 1998 report on Louisiana's insurance risks said a serious storm could inflict $27 billion worth of damage just to homes and cars--and that didn't include industrial or commercial property. Local insurance executives estimated in 2002 that the total damage would be closer to $100 billion to $150 billion--estimates that now look frighteningly accurate.
When Parker headed to Capitol Hill for annual budget hearings in February 2002, he couldn't hide the truth. Under questioning, he admitted that "there will be a negative impact" if the President's budget cuts were allowed to go forward. The White House fired Parker within a matter of days.
Some Republicans came to Parker's defense after he was removed. Then-Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said, "Mike Parker told the truth that the Corps of Engineers budget, as proposed, is insufficient." Rep. David Vitter (R-La.) said the administration was "in denial" about the cuts. "There's no two ways about it that [the corps] are very underfunded," he said, noting that "southeast Louisiana flood control [is] our most obvious example."
Vitter was right--but he was also "in denial" about his own culpability: Just weeks before, he and his Republican colleagues voted for a brand new business tax cut package, costing the federal government $43 billion in revenues that could have gone to fill the budget gaps Parker identified. And those tax cuts were targeted specifically to the GOP's biggest financial backers. According to the Houston Chronicle, the White House-backed legislation was a windfall for Big Business, "reducing total corporate tax collections by 21 percent."
Inadvertently foreshadowing just how closely tied the tax cuts and budget infrastructure negligence really would be, Bush signed this new tax cut two days after firing Parker.
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