The Unraveling of the Bush Presidency by Howard Zinn

Author:Howard Zinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Protesters in holding a massive American flag during the immigration rally in downtown Dallas, 2006. CORBIS

Congress approved plans to build a 750-mile fence along the southern borders of California and Arizona, to keep out Mexicans who were trying to escape poverty in their home country. The irony seemed lost on the U.S. government—that it was working so strenuously to keep poor Mexican people from coming into territory that had been seized from Mexico in the war of 1846-48.

As legislation was being discussed in Congress to punish people who were in this country illegally, there were huge demonstrations around the country in the spring of 2005, especially in California and the Southwest, involving hundreds of thousands of people demanding equal rights for immigrants. Not only immigrants themselves, but Americans who supported them, joined these actions. A common slogan was: “No Human Being Is Illegal.”

In the midst of growing opposition to the policies of the Bush administration, at home and abroad, disaster struck in New Orleans, Louisiana, in August of 2005, in the form of a deadly hurricane which smashed the levees protecting the city from the Mississippi River, destroyed much of the city, brought death and injury to thousands, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. A Washington Post reporter wrote:

“People around the world cannot believe what they’re seeing. From Argentina to Zimbabwe, front-page photos of the dead and desperate in New Orleans, almost all of them poor and black, have sickened them, and shaken assumptions about American might. How can this be happening, they ask, in a nation whose wealth and power seem almost supernatural in so many struggling corners of the world. . . . International reaction has shifted in many cases from shock, sympathy and generosity to a growing criticism of the Bush administration’s response to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina.”

The same reporter wrote that “. . . many people see at best incompetence and at worst racism in the chaos gripping much of the Gulf Coast. Many analysts said President Bush’s focus on Iraq had left the United States without resources to handle natural disasters, and many said Hurricane Katrina’s fury mocked Bush’s opposition to international efforts to confront global warning, which some experts say contributes to the severity of such storms.”

The Katrina experience pointed to a larger conclusion about United States policy—that while millions of people in Africa and Asia, and even poor people in the United States, were dying of malnutrition and sickness, while natural disasters were taking huge tolls of life all over the world (as with the Tsunami earthquake in Southeast Asia in 2004), the United States government was pouring its enormous wealth into war and the building of empire.

There were many issues on the minds of people in the United States as they went to the polls in November of 2006 to elect the members of the House of Representatives and one third of the members of the Senate. But undoubtedly, uppermost in their thinking was the disaster going on in Iraq, and the wealth of the nation being drained by the requirements of the war.

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