“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” — Grover Nordquist (president of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably Washington’s leading right-wing strategist.)

Take a good look at Lake Pontchartrain today and just think of it as “Grover Nordquist’s bathtub.”

No doubt the arch Social Darwinist of the conservative movement is lying low in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — bad PR and all that for the movement for him to crow. Hell, people suffering and dying always plays bad in the press.

But this should be the time for economic conservatives of Nordquist’s stripe to be popping the corks off a bottle of Dom Perignon and celebrating, for after all, the plan has worked out splendidly, has it not?

For the last 25 years since Ronald Reagan said “so help me God,” Nordquist’s shock troops, aided and abetted by Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, Karl Rove and countless others (take a bow “gentlemen”) have worked long and hard to gut government service programs like a fish.

Mike Harris was a piker next to this gang, although I doubt that makes decent-minded Ontarians feel any better about how their province was left in his wake.

In the human wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, lie the fruits of our own conservatives’ “common sense revolution” — the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and countless others, starved of budgets, starved of staff and run by incompetent hacks (like horse whisperer and the sacrificial lamb Michael Brown of FEMA), were unable to save “the least among us” when the chips were down.

The wealthy made money off the city of New Orleans and its tourists, but there was always one little problem — the city was made up mainly of poor black people. Enter Katrina as the conservative deus ex machine of their dreams.

Now the poor of New Orleans have been scattered to the four winds and the city can rise again — not as the den of iniquity whose destruction, à la Sodom and Gomorrah, has been celebrated by the “Christian” Right, but as a lean, mean and clean engine of tourist and trade commerce. From the ruins, a French Quarter Disneyland (like the Times Square Disneyland) will rise.

And it will be built and exploited by “the right people” who always make money in America.

President George W. Bush gave “the right people” a great big wet kiss and applied a great big boot in the ass of the prostrate Gulf region poor last week by suspending the prevailing wage regulations under the Davis-Bacon act.

Bush, acting as the new American Caesar used an executive order (how to make law without that pesky legislating branch) to allow contractors to pay workers on Federally funded projects whatever the hell they feel they can get away with. After all, the “market forces” we worship in the U.S. say that if desperate people can be made to work for paltry wages, then somewhere Adam Smith is smiling and all is right with the world.

(Keep in mind what the President thinks he can do as long as he declares a “national emergency” for future reference. Sic transit gloria democracy).

What this means is that the billions the Federal government will allocate to rebuild New Orleans will be more effectively funneled into the pockets of contractors and not into the pockets of workers who desperately need them more than ever.

Yes, pity the poor businessman faced with having to pay the princely prevailing wage in the lower Louisiana area of $9 an hour.

Though the mountains may fall and the hills turn to dust, the cruel invisible hand of the free market will be used as a mailed fist to the working poor of America. Needless to say the so-called “opposition party” in the U.S. will roll over like puppies after having rolled over for so much before.

If the people of New Orleans, who are now being forced from their homes at gunpoint, believe that they are the victims of a kindler gentler genocide, who can really blame them?

The Bush administration, making damn sure it reasserts control over the media, has forbidden the press from taking pictures of the dead in New Orleans. As Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times reported, that order has been enforced with guns being pointed at journalists as NBC’s Brian Williams recently told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Regardless of the fact that countless dead bodies have already been photographed lying unattended in the streets of New Orleans, Caesar Georgius’ decree will try to prevent any more such images from impugning that the Federal government has any blood on its hands.

While the president makes jokes about sitting on Senator Trent Lott’s new porch (and no doubt being served mint juleps by a $5 an hour black porter in a tux and tails) and armed goons threaten journalists with machine guns one central fact remains:

This disaster and its aftermath was the intended consequence of countless policies implemented by a ruling American élite that looks out solely for itself and its allies and couldn’t give a tinker’s damn for the suffering of the less fortunate.

Never before has the blatant contempt of the ruling American élite for the poor been on such display before the public. But I fear the great American middle class has the images of poor blacks looting televisions burned in their minds.

They don’t believe the government would ever treat middle class whites this way. They had better guess again.

After all, if you’re depending on “entitlements” like disaster relief, fair wage laws, Medicare/caid and Social Security, there’s always plenty of room for you in Grover Nordquist’s bathtub.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...