If September 2001 signaled an opening bid by U.S. imperialism to impose its
hegemonic will on the rest of the world, then September 2005 represents
closure for a project that had already been faltering under the impact of
Iraqi resistance. Richard Haass, director of policy planning in Bush's
State Department and an open defender of imperialism, put it this way recently:
>>Katrina will also have an impact on how citizens of the United States
view foreign policy. The enormous problems and costs associated with the
hurricane will raise additional questions about the ability of the United
States to "stay the course" in Iraq. The aftermath of the catastrophe will
inevitably increase political pressure on President Bush to begin to reduce
the U.S. involvement in Iraq and refocus U.S. resources at home, be it on
the expensive reconstruction of flood-ravaged areas or on improving the
country's capacity to deal with future disasters of this magnitude.1<<
Hurricane Katrina exposed a number of fault-lines that are rooted in the
very foundations of American capitalist society. The frequent
characterizations in the media about New Orleans looking "third world,"
while somewhat overstated, do get to the heart of whether or not the
strategic path of the American bourgeoisie over the past 30 years, which
amounts to a dismantling of the New Deal legacy by Republican and
Democratic presidents alike, is tenable. In the pages of the Nation
Magazine, William Greider calls for a 'new' New Deal:
>>Senator Edward Kennedy calls for a "Gulf Coast Regional Redevelopment
Authority," modeled after FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority, to lead the
rebuilding. Former Senator John Edwards proposes a vast new jobs program,
patterned after the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) and
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in which the displaced and the poor are
hired at living wages to clean up and rebuild their devastated communities.
In the week after Katrina, Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Stephanie
Tubbs Jones swiftly rounded up eighty-eight House co-sponsors, including
some from Mississippi and Louisiana, for a similar initiative.2<<
The conclusion to this article will propose some alternatives to both
Haass's overweening, neoconservative ambitions and to Greider's nostalgia
for a welfare state that can never be recreated.
Although the mass media has depicted the New Orleans disaster as
unprecedented, Mike Davis had already called attention to how devastating
such a storm could be on the lives of poor Black people in the aftermath of
the 2004 Hurricane Ivan:
>>The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked
sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white
people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less --
mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks
and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.
New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the
storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded
they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case
scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate
the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane
hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming
story about the "large group
mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods"
who wanted to evacuate but couldn't.3<<
One might expect Davis, an authority on environmental crisis, to turn his
attention next to Katrina's origins and impact. This storm is a case study
in how capitalism is not a sustainable system.
To start with, Katrina-like the previous year's Ivan-was a category 5
Hurricane. Scientists have grown increasingly alarmed about the possibility
that such storms might be caused by global warming, since hurricanes are
spawned by warm ocean currents. The warmer the water, the more intense is
the storm. Although it is difficult to "prove" that global warming is
directly related to the intensity of recent storms, respected scientists
believe that the trends are unmistakable. One such scientist, M.I.T's Kerry
A. Emanuel, formerly skeptical about such ties, is now convinced otherwise:
>>While looking at historical records, the atmospheric physicist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the total power released
by storms had drastically increased -- more than doubling in the Atlantic
Ocean in the past 30 years. The evidence was so overwhelming that he could
not stand by his earlier statements.
"I wasn't even looking for it," says Mr. Emanuel. "The trend was just so
big that it stood out like a sore thumb."
He withdrew his name from the forthcoming paper that plays down global
warming's influence on hurricanes. Then he published a new study in Nature
last month, proclaiming the opposite conclusion.
"I didn't feel comfortable saying what we said a year ago," he says. "I
think I see a strong global-warming signal."4<<
If the devastation wrought on New Orleans does not serve as a wake-up call
to the American ruling class, then probably nothing ever will. The
combination of a powerful hurricane and inadequately maintained levees in
close proximity to oil refineries has turned a major city into a toxic dump
that will take months, if not years to reclaim. In an exclusive interview
with the Independent on September 11, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic
waste at the Environmental Protection Agency official, warned the city will
be unsafe for human habitation for a decade or more. He added that the Bush
administration was covering up the danger.
>>Whatever future the city has, the nation's elite has few plans for the
poor Blacks who were the main victims of government ineptitude. While some
conspiracy theorists argue that the 17th street canal levee was
deliberately dynamited in order to flood Black neighborhoods and drive the
inhabitants out in order to facilitate gentrification, it is far more
likely and easier to prove that evacuation and rescue efforts were given
short shrift in order to accomplish more or less the same thing. Just as
the Bush administration took advantage of 9/11 in order to penetrate and
control the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia, it and its local allies
in New Orleans (including many Black Democrats) seek to recast New Orleans
as more economically viable and whiter metropolis.<<
Such plans were already underfoot under African-American Mayor Ray Nagin's
administration. According to the September 6, Los Angeles Times, Nagin, who
donated thousands of dollars to Bush's campaign in 2000, was behind "a
controversial plan to replace many public housing projects with
single-family homes and businesses. The notorious St. Thomas housing
projects, for example, were replaced a few years ago by a Wal-Mart."
In a gesture that symbolized ruling class insensitivity to its most
vulnerable subjects, President Bush's mother stated: "What I'm hearing,
which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so
overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena
here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well
for them."
Considering the fact that this is the largest internal migration in the
U.S. since the Great Depression, one might hope and expect a militant
reaction to this sort of Hooverville mentality.
Although hostility and contempt for poor Black people crosses party lines,
there is a growing perception that the Bush administration with its
commitment to "small government" (except when it comes to military
adventures overseas) is simply inadequate to solving the mess in New
Orleans or responding to future disasters, like an earthquake in California
or another major terrorist attack. When you gut agencies like FEMA and the
EPA and hire toadies like Michael Brown to run them, you eliminate the
possibility of providing adequate protection against disaster and ensuring
a rapid recovery. Ultimately, this involves corporate profits. Hurricane
Katrina, with all due respect to conspiracy theorists, was a major blow to
big business as well as the housing project denizen.
As a seaport, New Orleans was second to none. A vast array of exports made
their way overseas, especially farm goods that were sent south on barges on
the Mississippi River just as they have for over a century. In addition,
oil drilling and refining infrastructure was heavily damaged. It is
entirely conceivable that this damage can be repaired and that a New
Orleans might be constructed on a new basis consisting of petrochemicals,
farm exports and tourism, but it is a challenge to a weakened labor and
Black movement, as well as the organized left to take the needs of a vast
refugee population into account.
Unlike the period following September 2001, society is now far more
favorably disposed to challenges to the Bush administration and its liberal
accomplices. Despite former President Clinton's efforts to soften criticism
of Bush through his partnership with the elder Bush in charitable
fund-raising around Katrina, there are signs that other mainstream
politicians and the press are finally reacting to widespread alienation
from the neoconservative agenda and are ready to speak out.
In contrast to March 2003, when embedded reporters in Iraq served as
virtual public relations operatives for the Pentagon, the media has openly
challenged the Bush administration and its hard-core supporters in
Murdoch-controlled outlets.
The sight of bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans and babies
crying for milk has had even the most flag-waving reporter crying out in
anguish against government inaction and insensitivity. Anderson Cooper, a
CNN host not particularly noted for challenging officialdom, conducted an
interview with Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu on September 1. When she
began by complementing both Republican and Democratic politicians for their
response to the crisis, Cooper interjected:
>>Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting, I haven't heard that,
because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the
streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each
other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are
a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very
frustrated. And when they hear politicians slap -- you know, thanking one
another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now,
because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday
being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48
hours.<<
Cooper clearly reflects a shifting mood in the country. Continuing
casualties in Iraq, mounting energy prices, insecurity over a jobless
"recovery" have made the ordinary citizen less receptive to Karl Rove
orchestrated media events featuring the president. The N.Y. Times's Maureen
Dowd, never a great fan of the president to begin with, had this to say on
September 17, 2005:
>>In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of
garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the
miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their
lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes
of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without
either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention
a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the
president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?
The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.'s "High
Noon" snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting - the same Reaganesque
stagecraft they had provided when W. made a prime-time television address
from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On that
occasion, Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, and Bob DeServi, a former
NBC cameraman and a lighting expert, rented three barges of giant Musco
lights, the kind used for "Monday Night Football" and Rolling Stones
concerts, floated them across New York Harbor and illuminated the Statue of
Liberty as a backdrop for Mr. Bush.<<
Dowd dismissed these efforts as a kind of "Disney on Parade" in the title
of her op-ed piece. All in all, there is the ineluctable sense that the
media is beginning to conclude that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
Ultimately, the Maureen Dowds and William Greiders of the U.S. pin their
hopes on an ouster of the Republican Party in 2008 and a restoration of
honest government and a willingness to treat social ills with something
more than private charity. They have fond memories of New Deal traditions
extending through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Realistically, there is
about as much chance of restoring the welfare state as there is in time
travel. The period they look back nostalgically upon owed more to the
fortuitous circumstances enjoyed by the American capitalist economy than
the beneficence of its rulers.
World War Two broke the back of the Great Depression through military
spending and post-war prosperity. Programs like the G.I. Bill, subsidized
housing and Medicare feasible rested on the U.S.'s hegemonic role in the
global economy. With a recovered Europe and Japan following the 1960s and
with newer challenges from China and India, it is no longer possible to
sustain imperialism abroad and the welfare state at home. The meanness of
the Bush administration is a necessary outcome of fierce global
competition. If you are forced by the logic of capital accumulation to
drive down wages and cut expenses, the inevitable outcome is politicians
like Bush. When the Democrats are forced by the very same iron laws to
support neoliberal trade bills and assaults on Social Security, voters will
most often back the Republicans rather than a cheap imitation.
As these contradictions deepen, more and more people will be open once
again to the socialist alternative. Even the N.Y. Times resorted almost
inexplicably to featuring a story that had originally appeared in Socialist
Worker, the newspaper of the International Socialist Organization, about
the difficulties involved with evacuating New Orleans. On September 10,
Gardiner Harris reported, "Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were
so fearful of the crowds trying to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina
that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned
back hundreds of desperate evacuees, two paramedics who were in the crowd
said." Harris relied heavily on an account that was filed by Larry Bradshaw
and Lorrie Beth Slonsky in the Socialist Worker and that was widely
distributed on the Internet. Among other things, Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote:
>>WE WALKED to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and
were told the same thing--that we were on our own, and no, they didn't have
water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting
to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command
post. We would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly
visible embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we
couldn't stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp.5<<
Their report and many others out of New Orleans describe in sorry detail
how necessary it was for ordinary citizens to act on their own behalf in
the face of government indifference-or worse-armed hostility from the cops.
How much better it would be if the government was made up of ordinary
working people who knew what it meant for a baby not to have milk to drink
or for an old person in a nursing home to be abandoned to flood waters.
Such a government not only exists, it offered to send physicians to the
U.S. in a generous offer to help victims of Katrina that Bush turned down.
We speak of revolutionary Cuba, of course, a nation that despite rationing
and hardships of one sort or another at least knows how to protect its
citizens against the ravages of a category 5 hurricane.
When Mike Davis was calling attention to the indifference of the
authorities in New Orleans following Hurricane Ivan's onslaught in 2004,
Cuban officials behaved much differently in the face of that same storm. In
a report by Marjorie Cohn that was widely circulated on the Internet, we
learn how Cuba rose to the occasion:
>>Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba
with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated
to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed
20,000 houses, no one died.
What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson
Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and
specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the
community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."
"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with
George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit
the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV
appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing
editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the
president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of
carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."
"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said.
"Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have
family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and
already know, for example, who needs insulin."
They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators,
"so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their
stuff," Valdes observed.6<<
Perhaps the jibes about the U.S. looking like a third world country might
have to be qualified in light of the Cuban example. Although this is
conventionally understood as a developing country, Cuba demonstrates that a
commitment to social need rather than private profit can go a long way,
even if the country is not a major global economic power like the U.S.
Furthermore, if penurious Cuba can do so well in such a crisis situation,
what would a wealthy nation like the U.S. be able to accomplish? These will
not simply be rhetorical questions as the economic and environmental
contradictions of late capitalism deepen as senseless warfare is pursued in
far-off lands.
1. http://slate.msn.com/id/2125994?nav=wp
2. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051003/greider
3. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0924-02.htm
4. http://chronicle.com/free/2005/09/2005090803n.htm
5. http://socialistworker.org/2005-2/556/556_04_RealHeroes.shtml
6. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090305Y.shtml
