[Mb-civic] Bush's changing tune - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Bush's changing tune

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  September 17, 2005

PRESIDENT BUSH said these things about Hurricane Katrina in his speech 
to the nation Thursday:

''Millions of lives were changed in a day by a cruel and wasteful storm."

''Federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing 
public infrastructure in the disaster zone."

''As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent 
poverty in this region as well. And that poverty has roots in a history 
of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity 
of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

In a vacuum, Bush came across as sincere. For a second time, he said he 
took personal responsibility for the federal government's slow response 
to Katrina. ''I, as president, am responsible for the problem and for 
the solution." This was seemingly a big turnabout for a president who 
has portrayed himself as righteously infallible. In the midst of his 
lowest approval ratings ever, Bush has been forced off Mt. Olympus.

It will be miraculous for him to become the solution after four and a 
half years of throwing down thunderbolts at the poor, who are 
disproportionately African-American and Latino. This is after joining 
the side of white students to kill affirmative action at the University 
of Michigan in the 2003 Supreme Court case. This is after his Justice 
Department deleted half of a 168-page report that detailed the lack of 
promotion and disparate pay for African-American and female attorneys.

This is after a first term in which his Health and Human Services 
Department issued a report that originally was to highlight racial 
disparities in healthcare, except that the department deleted racial 
''inequalities" and ''disparities" from its key findings.

The altered report went so far as to downplay the dramatic disparities 
in healthcare with ''Americans have exceptional quality of healthcare; 
but some socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, and geographical differences 
exist." The original report was published after an outcry.

This is from the same president who now tells us, ''Let us rise above 
the legacy of inequality."

Let him be the first to rise, by ending his cruel and wasteful assault 
on the poor. The last four and half years of his trickle-down theories 
have failed. His tax cuts and tax incentives have only enriched the 
rich. The poor have become poorer. The poverty rate has risen by from a 
27-year low of 11.3 percent to 12.7 percent according to the US Census. 
For the first time on record, household incomes failed to rise for five 
consecutive years. Even Phillip Swagel, a scholar at the conservative 
American Enterprise Institute was quoted in The New York Times as 
saying, ''The gains have gone to owners of capital and not to workers."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/17/bushs_changing_tune/
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