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It wasn’t so much a vote as a proclamation of ideology last Thursday when Republicans filibustered Obama’s nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The rebuff had nothing to do with the person, Richard Cordary, who even Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said appeared well qualified.  Rather, it was part of the GOP campaign to hobble the agency created to safeguard borrowers from dodgy payday lenders and predatory mortgage salesmen.

The GOP thwarts regulatory agencies in order to enforce its “you’re on your own” philosophy. That is, each citizen, like an island, fends for himself in a world where the invisible hand of the market serves as regulator. Democrats believe something very different. They espouse the principles set out by President Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and echoed by President Obama in his address there last week. That is America and Americans are better when citizens work together and watch out for each other, that cooperating invigorates the individual, the economy and the nation, and that primacy is in people and profit is subordinate.

The late Senator Paul Wellstone expressed the essential sentiment most succinctly:

 “We all do better when we all do better.”

Republicans don’t ascribe to that. They want to set up a country where every person is responsible for every aspect of daily life, from ensuring drinking water is safe to reducing workplace hazards. The GOP wants to shred regulations that protect citizens, even eliminate the federal agencies that enforce them. Congressional Republicans have worked to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, a move that would “empower” each citizen to persuade big industrial polluters to limit the particulates, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and lead belching from smokestacks. (more…)

It’s all the rage to condemn “big government,” until you need a policeman, or say, until you’re the Republican governor of Alabama and tornados mow down big cities and little towns and you need some of that Federal Emergency Management Agency money — expedited, please — to clean up.

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

We know the pathetic disaster response to Hurricane Katrina by the Bush administration was rooted in anti-government, pro-privatization conservative ideology. President Bush removed FEMA from the cabinet, repeatedly appointed FEMA chiefs with no disaster management experience, and privatized key functions.

Have conservatives learned anything from that experience? Apparently not.

The conservative movement’s intellectual leaders at The Heritage Foundation are attacking the Obama administration for … no, I’m not kidding … using FEMA too much.

Heritage’s Matt Meyer yesterday urged governors to “stiffen their spines and FEMA to get its finger off the declaration trigger.” He continued:

In the continuing (over)reaction to the failures of Hurricane Katrina five years ago, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) once again “leaned forward” in anticipation of a hurricane…

…Since his inauguration, President Barack Obama has issued 195 FEMA declarations despite the fact that not a single hurricane has hit the United States in that time span and only one minor earthquake has occurred. In less than two years, FEMA under President Obama has issued more declarations than the Eisenhower (106), Kennedy (52), Johnson (93), Ford (101), Carter (176), and H.W. Bush (174) Administrations and only slightly fewer than the Nixon (212) and Reagan (225) Administrations did throughout their entire presidencies…

…As we have long argued, this country needs to get FEMA out of the routine natural disaster business and reserve its capabilities for catastrophic events.

There’s a lot of nonsense there to break down. (more…)

David Cay Johnston

 By David Cay Johnston
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist

Atop the front page of the  Sept. 23 New York Times  is a color photo of Georgia homes flooded up to their rafters, an image that illustrates how when it comes to insurance our Congress applies two standards, separate and unequal, one for property and a lesser one for people.

Unlike people without health insurance, homeowners have access to public option flood insurance. 

Even those who fail to take personal responsibility to buy insurance to protect their property can get benefits, thanks in good part to politicians who are leading opponents of public option healthcare.

Consider the example of  Trent Lott of Mississippi, who was that state’s senior senator when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, flooding his home looking out on the Gulf. Lott had not exercised personal responsibility by taking out flood insurance even though it was available from the federal government at low cost. He did have private insurance, but his insurer refused to pay much of the claim, saying it was not wind damage (which was covered by the policy), but water damage (which was excluded).
    
Weeks later Lott introduced Senate Bill 1936, which would have authorized retroactive flood insurance. The idea came from Representative Gene Taylor, a Democrat who represented the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which should remind us that when there is voter demand for reform, and campaign contributions are not the driving force, the parties have worked together.    

Lott’s bill would have let flood victims pay 10 years of flood insurance premiums after-the-fact plus a 5 percent late payment penalty. Since this storm was rated a once in 500 years occurrence, even 10 years of premiums would not come close to covering the real costs, meaning a taxpayer subsidy was built into the Lott bill.

Instead of being laughed at by his fellow Republicans for promoting socialism, the concept of retroactive relief was warmly embraced, although not the idea for retroactive insurance. Instead the government went with handouts.

(more…)