Katrina Lessons – One Year Later: Talk About Katrina Poverty Was Just That, Talk
One year after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the talk about a war on poverty turned out to be just that, talk. There’s no reason to think that will change, says the author
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
August 8, 2006 - For a few weeks last September, the
unthinkable happened, America’s poor
suddenly became the rage. The shocking
and tormenting sight of thousands of
impoverished blacks fleeing in headlong
panic for their lives from Hurricane
Katrina’s floodwaters jolted the nation
and the world.
President Bush, reeling from the
battering he took in the media for his
initial comatose response to the Katrina
victims, scrambled fast and talked tough
about assailing poverty. In a televised
speech in New Orleans’ famed Jackson
Square, Bush told the nation “As all of
us saw on television, there is also some
deep, persistent poverty in this region,
as well.”
The rhetoric about aiding the poor
quickly flew hot and heavy.
Congressional leaders vowed to budget
millions more for the poor. Business
leaders vowed to pump more dollars into
job and skills training programs.
Private charities vowed to launch new
fundraising drives. Even many
hard-bitten, laissez faire conservatives
who reflexively oppose massive
government spending programs on the poor
screamed at Bush to do something about
poverty.
In a post- Katrina assessment of public
opinion on poverty, more Americans
agreed that the government should do
more to end poverty. Civil rights
leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus,
and anti-poverty groups even dreamed
that Katrina guilt would force Americans
to engage in the much needed, and much
avoided soul-searching dialogue on
poverty.
That was a year ago. The national roar
about attacking poverty has fizzled to a
whimper. Yet, the poor are still as
numerous, needy, and thanks to Katrina,
even more dispersed nationally. Census
figures released weeks before Katrina
struck revealed that the number of poor
had relentlessly climbed during Bush’s
White House years. Nearly forty million
Americans, 12 million of whom were
children, were poor. Census figures in
the year after Katrina will likely show
little change in the poverty numbers.
Thousands of New Orleans and the Gulf
Coast poor are still jobless, and live
in FEMA-constructed trailers, and
subsist on private donations.
Since his Jackson Square speech Bush has
mentioned poverty only six times. He
made no mention of it in his State of
the Union Speech in January and did not
utter a word about poverty in his speech
to the NAACP convention in July. Not one
of his anti-poverty proposals which
included bigger tax breaks and grants
for minority and small business, a
ramp-up in job training, and child care
subsidies, boosts in transportation
funding and an urban homesteading
program went anywhere. They fell victim
to budget slashes, Congressional
inaction or opposition, and public
indifference. A minimum wage hike, and
increase in funding for public housing,
and an expansion of job-training
programs, and the earned income tax
credit, that would help the wage earning
poor, died quick deaths in Congress.
Democrats piled blame for the wash down
in the post Katrina roar on poverty on
Bush and the Republicans. But the
Democrats did their part to dampen the
talk. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry,
Democratic National Committee Chairman
Howard Dean, and former Democratic Vice
Presidential candidate John Edwards
flailed away at Bush for his Katrina
ineptitude, spoke in vague terms about
Two Americas, and made a fleeting plea
for a Marshall-type plan to fight
poverty, a plan doomed from the moment
the call was made. While Edwards
barnstorms the country crusading for
more government initiatives to aid the
poor, he holds no official position in
the Democratic Party, and is largely a
lone voice crying in the wilderness on
poverty.
Democratic House and Senate leaders have
given no sign that they are willing to
fight for the billions that it would
take mount a comprehensive program to
combat poverty. The Congressional Black
Caucus is the sole group among Democrats
that still show some zeal for waging a
fight on poverty. But the Caucus is
nearly totally isolated and marginalized
in Congress and has been stymied in its
efforts to get any effective legislation
passed.
The talk about a fresh assault on
poverty was dead in the water from the
start. While Katrina momentarily
increased empathy for the poor, it
didn’t fundamentally change public
attitudes toward them. A fervent belief
in the Protestant ethic of hard work,
personal responsibility, and
self-initiative are deeply ingrained in
American attitudes. Success and merit
are intimately connected, and one can’t
be attained without the other. Poverty
is regarded as a perplexing, intractable
and insoluble malady that government
programs can’t or even shouldn’t cure.
In a wide-ranging study on American
attitudes and beliefs about the poor
published in the Journal of Social
Issues in 2001, a team of psychologists
found that attitudes toward the poor
were significantly more negative than
attitudes toward the middle class.
Respondents were most likely to blame
poor people themselves for their
poverty.
The poor are too diffuse and amorphous,
have only a scattering ofanti-poverty
focused activist groups, and no full
time congressional lobbyists. They can’t
dump money into Democrat and Republican
campaign coffers, and many are
non-voters. That makes them even more
politically expendable. One year after
Katrina’s shock, the talk about a war on
poverty turned out to be just that,
talk. There’s no reason to think that
will change.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of the forthcoming The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a look at Bush and The GOP’s court of black voters