I guess we should all be happy that Michael D. Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, resigned. It is a step in the right direction, but I believe that Brown did the job to the best of his abilities. Unfortunately, the best of his abilities was in running horse shows instead of managing emergencies. He was not qualified to do this job.
Who is to blame? The people who hired him. They knew that he lacked the qualifications.
George Bush appointed Brown as FEMA director as a political favor. At the time, Bush probably thought the chances of a major disaster occurring were remote. So, he put one of his political cronies in charge of a very important agency.
Trent Lott accused Brown of padding his resume. But, even if Brown did pad his resume, in the business world the resume only gets you an interview and not the job. At the interview, they should have discovered that he wasn’t qualified for the job. Bush didn’t care. This was his friend and he was going to get the job.
It should be obvious by now that Bush does not care about the average person. If you are not a multimillionaire you might as well not exist. He is only in office to help the rich. The people who voted for him should have realized this when he attacked the 40-hour workweek. He wanted to get a bill passed where a worker would get time-and-a-half after working 80 hours every two weeks instead of after working 40 hours a week. That should have indicated to the American people that he just doesn’t care about average people, no matter what color they are. He has created a political climate in which the giant corporations do not have to worry about how much they can exploit workers. They won’t get any resistance from the federal government.
George Bush refused assistance from the Cuban government, which was willing to send over 1,500 medical professionals who were experienced in this kind of disaster. Bush would rather lose human lives than make Fidel Castro look good. Unfortunately, fitting right in with Bush’s philosophy, one of the few entities to look good is anti-worker Wal-Mart, which donated over $20 million dollars to the hurricane relief effort, sending the message that privately run businesses are more efficient than federal agencies.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said on ABC’s “This Week” that the people in charge were ignorant of inner-city life. Of course they were. This right-wing Republican capitalist administration does not even want to know that inner-city life exists.
To acknowledge the fact that there is an inner city is to acknowledge that capitalism is not the perfect economic system that they claim it is. It is to acknowledge that the American dream to become wealthy and successful is not attainable by everyone as they claim it is. The inner city is capitalism’s failure. It is admitting that many have to suffer in order for a few to get rich. One of the things that Hurricane Katrina did accomplish was to show the rest of the world that there are big class differences in the United States. It showed that people who are on the low end of the class scale aren’t worth very much in our society.
So Michael D. Brown resigned as director of FEMA. It doesn’t make much difference to me. George Bush and the other people who run this country are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina, and they still have their jobs.
Doug Freedman is a PWW reader in the Chicago area.
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