KRUGMAN ON KATRINA

The New York Times' resident Princeton economist takes a look at a couple of Katrina related issues, courtesy of the Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page.

Not the New Deal

But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R.

President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.

And to date the Bush administration, which has no stake in showing that good government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.

That's why Mr. Bush's promise last night that he will have "a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" rings hollow. Whoever these inspectors general are, they'll be mindful of the fate of Bunnatine Greenhouse, a highly regarded auditor at the Army Corps of Engineers who suddenly got poor performance reviews after she raised questions about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq. She was demoted late last month.

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So, the reason we have such a crappy Federal Government is that it is run by people who don't believe in the Federal Government as an entity. It's quite amazing, actually, how the government-is-the-problem meme, which was so effective in catapulting the Republicans into their position of absolute power, has become so utterly dominant that it threatens literally to destroy the nation. I think this idea has essentially run its course: if we go any further in an anti-government direction, there won't be a government. Now if only our leaders could figure out how stupid they are, as if that's going to happen.

I wonder what kind of country this would be if conservatives had simply chosen to fight waste and fraud, instead of government itself: hell, if that were so, I might have some rightward tendencies myself.

Tragedy in Black and White

By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.

The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations.

But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.

Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.

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I continue to be amazed how so many white Americans, including countless liberals, are able to look at the African-American victims of Katrina all over television for weeks and still say "there was no racism." What would it take? Bush in a KKK robe and mask? I think it's safe to say that most whites tend to think of race in terms of individual attitudes and actions. Consequently, Bush's extraordinarily slow response in dealing with the disaster in New Orleans cannot, for most whites, be racism unless Bush is racist as an individual. Clearly, Bush is not in the Klan, but he does ride herd over numerous Federal institutions for which black Americans are simply not a priority. By the popularly believed racism-is-individual standard, that's not racism. But it's still whites with power screwing over blacks. In other words, it's what's known as institutional racism. Call it what you want: it still stinks.

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