Gene Lyons

[mooseandsquirrel]

snip

But if anything good can be salvaged from the wreckage, it will have to start with the recognition that we Americans are all in this together. We need a government that’s competent and works for us all. Right now, we don’t have one. And the main reason we don’t, to be perfectly blunt, is that working-class, Southern whites tend to vote against their own interests, partly for racial reasons.

snipp

http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/gene.html

[Demoiselle]

1. I love this guy. Always smart always sensible.

[CatWoman]

2. a kick for Gene

and moose'n'squirrel

:kick:

[grasswire]

3. a national treasure...

....Gene Lyons was blackballed by the powers that be after breaking stories critical of Republicans. He's on his game.

[Martin Eden]

4. Great article! I especially liked the last 4 paragraphs:

Here’s one example: One of Bush’s first official actions after Katrina was to make an emergency declaration that the Davis-Bacon Act requiring federal contractors to pay the "prevailing local wage" to workers would not apply during the reconstruction effort. In the largely non-union Gulf Coast area, that wage is roughly $9 an hour—barely above the poverty level. Bush’s action will depress salaries throughout the region.

Think about it: Working people throughout the region have lost everything, and this president’s first thought, along with awarding billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to Halliburton, Bechtel and other big GOP contributors, is to cut their pay.

Republicans have sought unsuccessfully to eliminate Davis-Bacon for years. According to The Washington Post, they consider it "a taxpayer subsidy to unions." But unions get nothing out of the law; only employees do. Cutting workers’ salaries won’t save the government money. It only means bigger profits for Halliburton and the rest, period. Much of the cash will be siphoned out of the region that needs it so desperately.

And why was FEMA so inept? Largely because of the Bush administration’s ideologically driven effort to "privatize" the agency, slash its budget and substitute political appointees for experienced professional staff. Months before 9/11, Joe Allbaugh, the Bush appointee who replaced President Bill Clinton’s FEMA director, James Lee Witt, told Congress that the agency had become "both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management." Then Allbaugh quit to become a lobbyist, turning the job over to his former college roommate, the recently resigned Michael Brown. The universally respected Witt delivered a prophetic warning during a 2004 Capitol Hill hearing. "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded," he said. "I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact, one state emergency manager told me, ‘ It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management. ’" Like the storm, the Bush administration is an equal-opportunity disaster.