Left In Lowell

My husband caught this Digby post today. At first pass, I could only read the first few paragraphs before turning my head away in disgust. He quotes an article from the Wall Street Journal:

After Katrina, Republicans Back a Sea of Conservative Ideas

Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

Some new measures are already taking shape. In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction. Yesterday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would offer sweeping protection against lawsuits to any person or organization that helps Katrina victims without compensation.

“The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot,” says Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who leads the Republican Study Group, an influential caucus of conservative House members. “We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was.”

It’s not bad enough the so-called great free market has failed these people, time and time again…no, they want to impose it unfiltered and unregulated on these victims, and on our nation. And they are passing these laws and rules changes right under our progressive noses.

Well, when that house of card falls, it’ll be another great depression all over again - seeing as it was the failure of an unregulated cronyist free market which brought us the New Deal in the first place. Unfortunately, like the Great Depression, many, many people will be hurt by it. How many of these cycles of rich lording it over the desperate poor and erosion of the middle class will we have before we truly fix our system?

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R., Kan.) said that the plans under development “are all part of a philosophy of lowering costs for doing business.” He said southern Louisiana,Mississippi and Alabama offer a “microcosm” where new ideas can be applied to speed the rebuilding.

So, the already-poor states of the south will be another guinea pig, like Iraq, for these idiots. Just as we’re hoping Massachusetts will be a testing ground for universal health care and gay marriage. Guess which one will result in a better society? The economic gap between blue and red states is going to get wider, folks, and expect them to use that to call us even more “elite” and “latte-drinking” - mostly because we’ll be able to afford more lattes when red-staters won’t.

Republicans, meanwhile, say they will also press for a new round of energy concessions, including incentives to rebuild and expand offshore drilling and clear the way for new refineries that were dropped from a 500-page energy bill that passed last month.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton of Texas and Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe are working on bills that would encourage refineries to build new plants and expand existing ones by rolling back environmental rules and making it easier for refineries to navigate regulatory channels in Washington.

Yeah, never mind that the environmental regulations have little to do with the lack of new refineries - that would be the failure of the free market. After all, if you’re an oil company, all the money is in finding and selling oil - and the less refineries there are, the scarcer supplies are…and the more money you make on the oil market. There’s not much money to be made in refining, so no one wants to build new ones.

Digby chimes in with commentary:

Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” pushing the slogan of the very liberal Children’s Defense Fund as one of his signature issues (No Child Left Behind.) He’s always used liberal rhetoric and programmatic boilerplate to sell himself as a “new kinda Republican.” It’s just that being kinder and gentler has been out of fashion since he donned the codpiece after 9/11. There is nothing new in this. And it is in no sense some sort of capitulation. Republicans have been stealing liberal rhetoric for some time now, particularly when it comes to pretending to care about people they really don’t care about. Gingrich showed that hard edged conservative rhetoric is deeply unpopular. People want to hear their leaders pretend to care, even if they don’t. Karl Rove knows what works — and they know that the dipshit pundits love it when a Republican says it because anything counter-intuitive becomes “bold” and “politically courageous.”

Exactly. No kudos for the Corporate President, please. He might talk the talk, but we long ago learned the hard way…he will not walk the walk. We can’t stop, not even for an instant.