Organized Labor

"Entitlement programs" -- which include Social Security are -- targeted with glee and fervor by neoconservatives such as Bush. The sin of such programs, from the perspective of the neoconservative pulpit, is that they bring the resources of the federal government directly to the aid of citizens; they give the federal government key roles in the domestic life of the country. For most of us, this is not their sin but their value. The highest collective expression of citizens, the federal government, helps citizens, and we applaud.

Allbaugh and then Brown, by contrast, ran a FEMA that was shrinking from aiding citizens. According to Seth Borenstein and Shannon McCaffrey of Knight Ridder Newspapers (September 9, 2005), "The Bush administration has filled FEMA's top jobs with political patronage appointees with no emergency-management experience, cut disaster-preparedness budgets and marginalized the agency by merging it with the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy, according to experts, which include four former senior FEMA officials. The number of career disaster-management professionals in senior FEMA jobs has been cut by more than 50 percent since 2000, federal personnel records show."

The Bush administration, then, backed consciously away from emergency response. States and localities, in their turn, were generally kept from picking up FEMA's abandoned responsibility both by the limits on their own budgets and by demands from Republicans at all levels for "leaner government." With the responsibility forsaken by the federal government and beyond the means or will of state and local governments, it was preordained that a major disaster would leave citizens to their own devices.

The Bush administration must at some level have recognized this. It must also have expected that the abilities -- and especially the financial abilities -- of citizens to respond to a disaster would be wildly unequal.

But at that level it must have been perfectly comfortable with a breakdown into individualism and inequality.

Likewise, the "ownership society" that Bush has proposed atomizes us. It disassembles the common institutions that have served us well for generations now and forces us into a radical individualism.

Instead of "defined benefit" pension plans, in which the resources of many workers are pooled toward a guaranteed payout, it seeks "defined contribution" plans, in which each worker decides the course of his or her own investments and hopes that there is a payout.

Instead of health plans, in which the resources of many workers are pooled to guarantee health care whenever the need for it arises, it seeks "health savings plans," in which each worker sets something aside periodically in an account and hopes that there is enough in it when he or she needs health care. It considers a collective effort as broad as national health care heresy fit for the stake.

Instead of a Social Security System that guarantees something in retirement to a generation of workers through the labors and contributions of succeeding generations, it seeks to sever worker from worker and generation from generation and, again, to substitute the hope of a return on individual investment for that guarantee.

Given long enough to have its way, it would probably end public education funded through taxation and substitute for it initially a system in which education would be purchased through a combination of vouchers and wealth, so that the poor would get only what vouchers could afford and the rich whatever vouchers plus their wealth could buy.

Certainly unions in their joining of individual workers to a collective force contradict the "ownership society." It wants workers to deal as individuals with their employers, no matter how large and powerful the employers. It wants workers to talk as individuals to politicians and political institutions, rather than together through their unions. Disproportions of power do not concern it; it advocates individualism, not equality. It is comfortable with undue advantage; it doesn't bother itself with fairness.

But we are as fundamentally parts of collectives as we are individuals. We do not feed, clothe, or house ourselves without the contributions of others. Even the man who builds his own house, raises his own food, and digs his own well does not do so entirely with tools of his own making or without having learned how from someone else. The language of our own thoughts is not something we create, each for himself. We receive it from others. It means something only through consensus with others. The very names by which we identify ourselves as individuals are not usually of our own invention, but are given us by our parents from a stock of names spoken in one or another form by numberless generations of others. We are individuals in our own skins and in our own minds and wills, but we exist only collectively.

To argue for a radical individualism is therefore to argue for a dangerous illusion.

Through its effects on pensions, health care, Social Security, education, and unions it would impoverish more workers, active and retired, and grow inequality.

Through its minimizing of the national institutions that protect even the poorest of our citizens, it has already assured many deaths. As poverty spreads, we can all now, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, picture with horrible clarity some of the future it would assure.