The BushPresident Bush’s “plan” to create opportunity zones, from which he sees a “bright dawn emerging over the Gulf Coast and the great city of New Orleans,” is a travesty of leadership. He claims for his administration the power to decide – in complete ignorance of relevant engineering, oceanographic, meteorological and sociological facts – that the Gulf Coast should be rebuilt with billions of federal dollars. He ignores two preliminary steps necessary to adopting effective policy:
1) Developing new patterns of political participation that will empower the poor victims to control the corrupt and patronage-driven local and national government agencies that set them up for disaster.
2) A national debate on whether and how the nation’s money should be spent to minimize the pain of recovery and the potential for similar future disasters.
Baldwin Ranson, Longmont
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Finally, President Bush has said something we all can agree with: We must restore the lives of the people on the Gulf Coast, no matter what it costs, and in order to do that we will need to cut unnecessary programs out of the federal budget. I’m sure he means, of course, we should cut the billions being spent on the futile, disastrous war in Iraq; the fat-cat subsidies given to all corporations, particularly Big Oil; and the tax cuts that have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of our citizens.
Carole Bayer, Boulder
