No Second Chances: Bush's Business Bosses Work to Shut Down the Chance to Start Again
By Paul Loeb
Using rhetoric of compassion, a president who owes his career to unearned
breaks is defining his presidency as the regime of no second chances. Not
for individuals, nor for the planet, nor for anyone except the wealthy and
well-connected. Think back to his bankruptcy bill, pushed through, on the
eve of a recession, by credit card companies that gleefully send cards to
your dog, cat, and 12-year-old, but don't want you to be able to make a
fresh start if you lose your job or have a medical crisis. If you went
bankrupt under the old system, you paid some costs, but at least you could
get out from under. Now, thanks to these key Bush funders, if your luck runs
bad, you're indentured for life.
The bankruptcy bill set a pattern-one that threatens to persist unless the
Democrats act far more aggressively than they did before the Jeffords
switch. Those with power have long believed that whatever damage they do to
individual lives or communities, they themselves can skate through, exempt
from costs. But the Bush administration is giving the wealthy get more
chances and subsidies than ever, and creating ever-harsher policies for the
rest of us, left to scavenge in the ruins. If we mess up, we're left with
only empty phrases.
When Bush proposed cutting funding for abused children, after-school
programs, low-income childcare, health care, and housing, he did so with
kind and gentle words-in part to give an extra $53,000 per year to those one
in a hundred Americans whose annual incomes average a million. If you grow
up in poverty, however, you're now even more likely to stay there. Is the
pace or design of your workplace leaving you crippled? Wave good-bye to
ergonomics standards that took a decade to craft, but have now been gutted.
Hunger-relief lobbyists worked for years to get Congress to oppose user fees
in international aid programs, which prevented people without money from
getting health care or going to school unless they paid the institutions
that served them. Bush has now reversed the stand. The Clinton administration belatedly passed a rule making it more difficult for
corporations that consistently violated laws to bid for federal contracts.
That too is gone.
Bush is also denying a second chance for the earth--the chance to learn from
the blind paths of the past. Instead, he's sandbagged the Kyoto global
warming treaty, reversed his stand on limiting carbon dioxide emissions, cut
alternative energy research and international family planning funds,
proposed unlimited oil drilling, nominated a timber industry shill to head
the forest service, and resurrected the rancid corpse of the nuclear power
industry. Given the accelerating pace of global climate change, species
extinctions, and population pressures, he's risking the chance for recovery
of the planet.
All this comes from a president whose career has consisted of unearned
breaks and forgiven mistakes: launching a succession of failed oil
companies, losing millions of his father's friends' dollars, and walking
away with more money each time; partying through Andover and Yale, bypassing
a hundred thousand others to get into the Texas National Guard, and then
ducking out on a year of service once he entered; being bailed out by
connections every time. Now, Bush has revived a previously dormant law denying federal financial aid to college students with drug convictions. If
you grow up wealthy, you don't need the aid, so you can be as "young and
irresponsible" as you want and you'll be fine. But if you're broke and get
busted, that's it-even if you change your ways.
Of course GW would never have entered the White House were it not for the most profound elimination of second chances in our society-the banning of 1.4 million ex-felons from the voting rolls. In Florida alone, 650,000 people were banned from voting for this reason, including one in three
African-American men. Tens of thousands more were knocked out through letters purging them from the rolls for convictions that never applied under
Florida law-or never existed. Rules barring ex-felons proliferated a century
ago, spearheaded by former Confederate states restricting black voting and
establishing racial segregation. They've disenfranchised far more people in
the wake of bi-partisan mandatory sentencing laws and other measures that
have left us leading the world in the percentage of our citizens in jail.
No other advanced industrial democracy bars former prisoners for life: Many
actually encourage current inmates to vote. But our laws "elected" GW, even
before all the discarded ballots and cancelled recounts.
The ethic of no second chances threatens to dominate the next fifty years if
Bush appoints enough judges like those who installed him in office. Are you
a cancer patient on chemotherapy, who needs medical marijuana to keep down
your medication and food? The Supreme Court overrides the will of local
voters and calls that illegal. Are you an Alabama prison guard with asthma,
wanting to be protected against working in a smoke-filled environment that
destroys your chances of recovery, or a nursing home employee demoted for
taking time off for cancer treatments? Too bad, say the Justices: The
American with Disability Act doesn't apply to state employees. Are you a
Texas mother who neglects to fasten your children's seat belts? The police
can now handcuff and arrest you in front of them-you'll get no sympathy
here.
In the worldview of the Bush team, exemption is contingent on class. If you're rich and contribute to Republican coffers, you deserve every
forgiveness and reward. If you're not, but are struggling with the downside
of the American dream, you just don't have what it takes. We've not quite
revived workhouses and debtor's prisons, but they seem close on the horizon,
cloaked in words of compassion.
Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a
Cynical Time (St Martin's 1999). See www.soulofacitizen.org.
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