9-09-05, 7:56 am

All of you out there weeping and wailing about the suffering of those displaced and made homeless by Hurricane Katrina can cut out your histrionics. As it turns out, Hurricane Katrina, far from being a massive natural disaster with horrific consequences, has actually been a boon to the poor and destitute of Louisiana and Mississippi. That's right, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, some of the poorest of Americans are now better off.

Who knew?

Well, Barbara Bush apparently knew. While touring hurricane relief centers in Houston on September 5, the former First Lady paused to dispel the myth that Hurricane Katrina was disastrous to its alleged victims. Remarking on American Public Media's 'Marketplace' radio program, Babs explained, 'And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this - this (slight chuckle) is working very well for them.'

And there it is, the truth of that oxymoron, 'compassionate conservatism.' Barbara Bush, in no more than an off-the-cuff remark, concisely summed up the real attitude of conservatives regarding the poor in America. It's an attitude of patronizing contempt.

Consider the import of Babs' assessment of the 'underprivileged anyway' who managed to survive Hurricane Katrina. According to Babs, the poor and underprivileged had nothing to lose anyway, so they didn't really suffer any harm from Hurricane Katrina. The poor and underprivileged are of so little significance, have so little value, that their suffering elicited a chuckle from Mamma Bush and the declaration that sleeping on cots in an arena with several hundred strangers, without even the semblance of privacy, 'is working very well for them.' Never mind that those who were the object of Babs' condescension may have lost loved ones, friends, and pets. Never mind that their psychological trauma is just as real and as painful as the 'privileged' who survived Katrina. Never mind that those who 'were underprivileged anyway' have been equally displaced from their homes. Never mind that they now find themselves without their former senses of self and community, having been relocated to foreign communities with nothing to call their own except that with which they managed to escape. They were underprivileged, so who cares?

The comments of Mamma Bush expose the truth of her son's administration and the frightening direction in which this country is headed. Conservatives, at least those is positions of power, aren't compassionate. They can claim to be all they want and can even come up with trite catchphrases like 'compassionate conservatism.' When it comes right down to it, however, the self-anointed compassionate conservatives won't be satisfied until the last vestiges of governmental support and assistance to America's poor are eliminated.

Regardless of Katrina's exposure of the false promise of the American dream, President Bush and his Republican cohorts remain dead-set on permanently repealing the estate tax, and making further cuts to the already heavily trimmed capital gains and estate taxes. In other words, Bush and his fellow men of compassion want to permanently cut taxes on the rich to the tune of $70 billion. At the same time, they're determined to make $35 billion in spending cuts from entitlement programs, including slashing $10 billion from Medicaid and Medicare. (Apparently, affordable health care is an entitlement to which the poor are no longer entitled.)

To conservatives, compassion means enriching the rich while impoverishing the poor.

This is not a new phenomenon. Since Bush took office, the median household income for working-age households has fallen $2,572, or 4.8 percent. Between 2003 and 2004 alone, it fell 1.2 percent. By contrast, the real average income of the top five percent of American households (a.k.a., the rich) rose by 1.7 percent in the same period. Similarly, since Bush took office, 5.4 million Americans, including 1.4 million children, have been added to the nation's poverty rolls, totaling 37 million impoverished Americans in 2004. America's population of working poor (those who work but still live in poverty) increased by 563,000 in 2004 alone. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by 6 million since 2000, leaving nearly 16 percent of all Americans uninsured.

Come to think of it, maybe Babs was on to something. Those 'underprivileged anyway' survivors of Katrina currently living in shelters like those in Houston and just might be better off. They're fed, clothed, and provided medical care. They're provided with social services. They're the beneficiaries of billions of dollars in federal aid. In short, they're cared for.

That's a hell of a lot better than the treatment they've received from Bush and his cadre of compassionate conservatives.

What a frightening thought.



--Ken Sanders is a writer in Tucson whose publishing credits include Op Ed News, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, Democratic Underground, Dissident Voice, and Political Affairs Magazine, among others. Read his work at