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Indybay Feature
New Orleans and the Death of the Common Good
The destruction of New Orleans represents a confluence of many of the most pernicious trends in American politics and culture: poverty, racism, militarism, elitist greed, environmental abuse, public corruption and the decay of democracy at every level.
Much of this is embodied in the odd phrasing that even the most circumspect mainstream media sources have been using to describe the hardest-hit victims of the storm and its devastating aftermath: "those who chose to stay behind." Instantly, the situation has been framed with language to flatter the prejudices of the comfortable and deny the reality of the most vulnerable.
It is obvious that the vast majority of those who failed to evacuate are poor: they had nowhere else to go, no way to get there, no means to sustain themselves and their families on strange ground. While there were certainly people who stayed behind by choice, most stayed behind because they had no choice. They were trapped by their poverty and many have paid the price with their lives.
Yet across the media spectrum, the faint hint of disapproval drips from the affluent observers, the clear implication that the victims were just too lazy and shiftless to get out of harm's way. There is simply no understanding not even an attempt at understanding the destitution, the isolation, the immobility of the poor and the sick and the broken among us.
This is from the "respectable" media; the great right-wing echo chamber was even less restrained, of course, leaping straight into giddy convulsions of racism at the first reports of looting in the devastated city. In the pinched-gonad squeals of Rush Limbaugh and his fellow hatemongers, the hard-right media immediately conjured up images of wild-eyed darkies rampaging through the streets in an orgy of violence and thievery.
Not that the mainstreamers ignored the racist angle. There was the already infamous juxtaposition of captions for wire service photos, where depictions of essentially the same scene desperate people wading through flood waters, clutching plastic bags full of groceries were given markedly different spins. In one picture, a white couple are described as struggling along after finding bread and soda at a grocery store. But beneath an almost identical photo of a young black man with a bag of groceries, we are told that a "looter" wades through the streets after robbing a grocery store. In the photo I saw, this evil miscreant also had a gasp! pack of diapers under his arm.
Almost all of the early "looting" was like this: desperate people of all colors stranded by the floodwaters broke into abandoned stores and carried off food, clean water, medicine, clothes. Perhaps they should have left a check on the counter, but then again what exactly was going to happen to all those perishables and consumer goods, sitting around in fetid, diseased water for weeks on end? (The mayor now says it could be up to 16 weeks before people can return to their homes and businesses.) Obviously, most if not all of it would have been thrown away or written off in any case. Later, of course, there was more organized looting by criminal gangs, the type of lawless element of every hue, in every society whose chief victims are, of course, the poor and vulnerable. These criminal operations were quickly conflated with the earlier pilferage to paint a single seamless picture of the American media's favorite horror story: Black Folk Gone Wild.
But here again another question was left unasked: Where were the resources the money, manpower, materiel, transport that could have removed all those forced to stay behind, and given them someplace safe and sustaining to take shelter? Where, indeed, were the resources that could have bolstered the city's defenses and shored up its levees? Where were the National Guard troops that could have secured the streets and directed survivors to food and aid? Where were the public resources the physical manifestation of the citizenry's commitment to the common good that could have greatly mitigated the brutal effects of this natural disaster?
"President Coolidge came down here in a railroad train,
With a little fat man with a notebook in his hand.
The president say, "Little fat man, isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker's land?"
Well, we all know what happened to those vital resources. They had been cut back, stripped down, gutted, pilfered looted to pay for a war of aggression, to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest, safest, most protected Americans, to gorge the coffers of a small number of private and corporate fortunes, while letting the public sector the common good wither and die on the vine. These were all specific actions of the Bush Administration including the devastating budget cuts on projects specifically designed to bolster New Orleans' defenses against a catastrophic hurricane. Bush even cut money for strengthening the very levees that broke and delivered the deathblow to the city. All this, in the face of specific warnings of what would happen if these measures were neglected: the city would go down "under 20 feet of water," one expert predicted just a few weeks ago.
But Bush said there was no money for this kind of folderol anymore. The federal budget had been busted by his tax cuts and his war. And this was a deliberate policy: as Bush's mentor Grover Norquist famously put it, the whole Bushist ethos was to starve the federal government of funds, shrinking it down so "we can drown it in the bathtub." As it turned out, the bathtub wasn't quite big enough -- so they drowned it in the streets of New Orleans instead.
But as culpable, criminal and loathsome as the Bush Administration is, it is only the apotheosis of an overarching trend in American society that has been gathering force for decades: the destruction of the idea of a common good, a public sector whose benefits and responsibilities are shared by all, and directed by the consent of the governed. For more than 30 years, the corporate Right has waged a relentless and highly focused campaign against the common good, seeking to atomize individuals into isolated "consumer units" whose political energies kept deliberately underinformed by the ubiquitous corporate media can be diverted into emotionalized "hot button" issues (gay marriage, school prayer, intelligent design, flag burning, welfare queens, drugs, porn, abortion, teen sex, commie subversion, terrorist threats, etc., etc.) that never threaten Big Money's bottom line.
Again deliberately, with smear, spin and sham, they have sought and succeeded in poisoning the well of the democratic process, turning it into a tabloid melee where only "character counts" while the rapacious policies of Big Money's bought-and-sold candidates are completely ignored. As Big Money solidified its ascendancy over government, pouring billions over and under the table into campaign coffers, politicians could ignore larger and larger swathes of the people. If you can't hook yourself up to a well-funded, coffer-filling interest group, if you can't hire a big-time Beltway player to lobby your cause and get you "a seat at the table," then your voice goes unheard, your concerns are shunted aside. (Apart from a few cynical gestures around election-time, of course.) The poor, the sick, the weak, the vulnerable have become invisible in the media, in the corporate boardroom, "at the table" of the power players in national, state and local governments. The increasingly marginalized and unstable middle class is also fading from the consciousness of the rulers, whose servicing of the elite goes more brazen and frantic all the time.
When unbridled commercial development of delicately balanced environments like the Mississippi Delta is bruited "at the table," whose voice is heard? Not the poor, who, as we have seen this week, will overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the overstressed environment. And not the middle class, who might opt for the security of safer, saner development policies to protect their hard-won homes and businesses. No, the only voice that matters is that of the developers themselves, and the elite investors who stand behind them.
"Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away"
The destruction of New Orleans was a work of nature but a nature that has been worked upon by human hands and human policies. As global climate change continues its deadly symbiosis with unbridled commercial development for elite profit, we will see more such destruction, far more, on an even more devastating scale. As the harsh, aggressive militarism and brutal corporate ethos that Bush has injected into the mainstream of American society continues to spread its poison, we will see fewer and fewer resources available to nurture the common good. As the political process becomes more and more corrupt, ever more a creation of elite puppetmasters and their craven bagmen, we will see the poor and the weak and even the middle class driven further and further into the low ground of society, where every passing storm economic, political, natural will threaten their homes, their livelihoods, their very existence.
"Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away"
Chris Floyd is a columnist for The Moscow Times and regular contributor to CounterPunch. A new, upgraded version of his blog, "Empire Burlesque," can be found at http://www.chris-floyd.com.
It is obvious that the vast majority of those who failed to evacuate are poor: they had nowhere else to go, no way to get there, no means to sustain themselves and their families on strange ground. While there were certainly people who stayed behind by choice, most stayed behind because they had no choice. They were trapped by their poverty and many have paid the price with their lives.
Yet across the media spectrum, the faint hint of disapproval drips from the affluent observers, the clear implication that the victims were just too lazy and shiftless to get out of harm's way. There is simply no understanding not even an attempt at understanding the destitution, the isolation, the immobility of the poor and the sick and the broken among us.
This is from the "respectable" media; the great right-wing echo chamber was even less restrained, of course, leaping straight into giddy convulsions of racism at the first reports of looting in the devastated city. In the pinched-gonad squeals of Rush Limbaugh and his fellow hatemongers, the hard-right media immediately conjured up images of wild-eyed darkies rampaging through the streets in an orgy of violence and thievery.
Not that the mainstreamers ignored the racist angle. There was the already infamous juxtaposition of captions for wire service photos, where depictions of essentially the same scene desperate people wading through flood waters, clutching plastic bags full of groceries were given markedly different spins. In one picture, a white couple are described as struggling along after finding bread and soda at a grocery store. But beneath an almost identical photo of a young black man with a bag of groceries, we are told that a "looter" wades through the streets after robbing a grocery store. In the photo I saw, this evil miscreant also had a gasp! pack of diapers under his arm.
Almost all of the early "looting" was like this: desperate people of all colors stranded by the floodwaters broke into abandoned stores and carried off food, clean water, medicine, clothes. Perhaps they should have left a check on the counter, but then again what exactly was going to happen to all those perishables and consumer goods, sitting around in fetid, diseased water for weeks on end? (The mayor now says it could be up to 16 weeks before people can return to their homes and businesses.) Obviously, most if not all of it would have been thrown away or written off in any case. Later, of course, there was more organized looting by criminal gangs, the type of lawless element of every hue, in every society whose chief victims are, of course, the poor and vulnerable. These criminal operations were quickly conflated with the earlier pilferage to paint a single seamless picture of the American media's favorite horror story: Black Folk Gone Wild.
But here again another question was left unasked: Where were the resources the money, manpower, materiel, transport that could have removed all those forced to stay behind, and given them someplace safe and sustaining to take shelter? Where, indeed, were the resources that could have bolstered the city's defenses and shored up its levees? Where were the National Guard troops that could have secured the streets and directed survivors to food and aid? Where were the public resources the physical manifestation of the citizenry's commitment to the common good that could have greatly mitigated the brutal effects of this natural disaster?
"President Coolidge came down here in a railroad train,
With a little fat man with a notebook in his hand.
The president say, "Little fat man, isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker's land?"
Well, we all know what happened to those vital resources. They had been cut back, stripped down, gutted, pilfered looted to pay for a war of aggression, to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest, safest, most protected Americans, to gorge the coffers of a small number of private and corporate fortunes, while letting the public sector the common good wither and die on the vine. These were all specific actions of the Bush Administration including the devastating budget cuts on projects specifically designed to bolster New Orleans' defenses against a catastrophic hurricane. Bush even cut money for strengthening the very levees that broke and delivered the deathblow to the city. All this, in the face of specific warnings of what would happen if these measures were neglected: the city would go down "under 20 feet of water," one expert predicted just a few weeks ago.
But Bush said there was no money for this kind of folderol anymore. The federal budget had been busted by his tax cuts and his war. And this was a deliberate policy: as Bush's mentor Grover Norquist famously put it, the whole Bushist ethos was to starve the federal government of funds, shrinking it down so "we can drown it in the bathtub." As it turned out, the bathtub wasn't quite big enough -- so they drowned it in the streets of New Orleans instead.
But as culpable, criminal and loathsome as the Bush Administration is, it is only the apotheosis of an overarching trend in American society that has been gathering force for decades: the destruction of the idea of a common good, a public sector whose benefits and responsibilities are shared by all, and directed by the consent of the governed. For more than 30 years, the corporate Right has waged a relentless and highly focused campaign against the common good, seeking to atomize individuals into isolated "consumer units" whose political energies kept deliberately underinformed by the ubiquitous corporate media can be diverted into emotionalized "hot button" issues (gay marriage, school prayer, intelligent design, flag burning, welfare queens, drugs, porn, abortion, teen sex, commie subversion, terrorist threats, etc., etc.) that never threaten Big Money's bottom line.
Again deliberately, with smear, spin and sham, they have sought and succeeded in poisoning the well of the democratic process, turning it into a tabloid melee where only "character counts" while the rapacious policies of Big Money's bought-and-sold candidates are completely ignored. As Big Money solidified its ascendancy over government, pouring billions over and under the table into campaign coffers, politicians could ignore larger and larger swathes of the people. If you can't hook yourself up to a well-funded, coffer-filling interest group, if you can't hire a big-time Beltway player to lobby your cause and get you "a seat at the table," then your voice goes unheard, your concerns are shunted aside. (Apart from a few cynical gestures around election-time, of course.) The poor, the sick, the weak, the vulnerable have become invisible in the media, in the corporate boardroom, "at the table" of the power players in national, state and local governments. The increasingly marginalized and unstable middle class is also fading from the consciousness of the rulers, whose servicing of the elite goes more brazen and frantic all the time.
When unbridled commercial development of delicately balanced environments like the Mississippi Delta is bruited "at the table," whose voice is heard? Not the poor, who, as we have seen this week, will overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the overstressed environment. And not the middle class, who might opt for the security of safer, saner development policies to protect their hard-won homes and businesses. No, the only voice that matters is that of the developers themselves, and the elite investors who stand behind them.
"Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away"
The destruction of New Orleans was a work of nature but a nature that has been worked upon by human hands and human policies. As global climate change continues its deadly symbiosis with unbridled commercial development for elite profit, we will see more such destruction, far more, on an even more devastating scale. As the harsh, aggressive militarism and brutal corporate ethos that Bush has injected into the mainstream of American society continues to spread its poison, we will see fewer and fewer resources available to nurture the common good. As the political process becomes more and more corrupt, ever more a creation of elite puppetmasters and their craven bagmen, we will see the poor and the weak and even the middle class driven further and further into the low ground of society, where every passing storm economic, political, natural will threaten their homes, their livelihoods, their very existence.
"Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away"
Chris Floyd is a columnist for The Moscow Times and regular contributor to CounterPunch. A new, upgraded version of his blog, "Empire Burlesque," can be found at http://www.chris-floyd.com.
For more information:
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd09012005....
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President Bush is to blame for the scale of the disaster as a result of his administration's policies and actions
Sidney Blumenthal
Friday September 2, 2005
The Guardian
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, the storm has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter, and hundreds reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.
A year ago the US army corps of engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, the Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Operated by the corps of engineers, levees and pumping stations were strengthened and renovated. In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers' request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration's additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate debated adding funds for fixing levees, but it was too late.
Read More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561356,00.html
Sidney Blumenthal
Friday September 2, 2005
The Guardian
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, the storm has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter, and hundreds reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.
A year ago the US army corps of engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, the Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Operated by the corps of engineers, levees and pumping stations were strengthened and renovated. In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers' request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration's additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate debated adding funds for fixing levees, but it was too late.
Read More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561356,00.html
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact, Washington, abetted by the US media, has begun a process of historical falsification aimed at obscuring government responsibility for the enormous extent of damage, particularly to the city of New Orleans. Definite decisions were made that served to exacerbate the hurricane’s effects and endanger the lives of tens of thousands of people.
In its lead editorial on Thursday, “Katrina’s Awful Wake,” the Wall Street Journal began by declaring, “Right now, the lesson chiefly worth noting is also the most obvious: All the cunning of man cannot defeat the greatest fury of nature.” Walter Baumy, chief of engineering for the US Army Corps of Engineers division in New Orleans, said on Wednesday that there was nothing authorities could have done to prepare for Katrina and its aftermath. “There was a plan in place,” he said, but the hurricane “was much more than envisioned. The city has never seen anything like this.”
President Bush himself declared in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Wednesday, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”
Such statements are made for a definite purpose: to draw attention away from the long history of warnings that the city was unprepared to weather a direct hit from a major hurricane. Calls to upgrade the levee system and make other preparations to protect the city from flooding have been ignored for years, as have calls to develop plans to evacuate the tens of thousands of people lacking their own transportation.
With the frequency of serious hurricanes increasing over the past decade, and with a number of close calls including Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Ivan in 2004, it was understood that it was only a matter of time before a category four or five storm made a direct hit on New Orleans. Proposals to improve the city’s defenses have been rejected as too costly, and even the existing projects to maintain the levee system and restore protective wetland areas have been underfunded.
The existing levee system in New Orleans, which protects the below-sea level city from the water that surrounds it, has been in place for over a century. It has been upgraded numerous times, most recently in response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Betsy was a Category 3 storm, and the levee system was designed only to protect the city from a similar intensity storm at best. Hurricane Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck New Orleans Monday morning.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Georges there were a series of initiatives to investigate the upgrading of the levee system. On November 18, 1998, the New Orleans Times-Picayune noted that the city council of St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans proper and one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina, “asked Congress...for money to study the New Orleans hurricane levee system in order to improve the community’s protection from hurricanes as strong as Georges or Mitch [also in 1998]...The move comes after a request last week from the Army Corps of Engineers asking local governments to lobby federal officials to upgrade the levee system to withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane.”
In an article from March 17, 2001, the paper quoted Al Naomi, senior project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers as noting, “Had [Georges] hit us directly, our levees would not have protected us,” since the surge accompanying such a powerful storm would extend above the heights of the levees. The Army Corps of Engineers headed a project that would evaluate the threat and propose possible solutions.
A December 1, 2001 article in the Houston Chronicle examined the extreme vulnerability of New Orleans to a hurricane from the Gulf. Earlier that year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the damage to New Orleans from a hurricane as one of the three likeliest and most catastrophic disasters in the US. The Chronicle wrote: “In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water.”
The article pointed to the fact that over a period of decades, no serious steps had been taken to upgrade the city’s protection. “It’s been 36 years since Hurricane Betsy buried New Orleans 8 feet deep. Since then a deteriorating ecosystem and increased development have left the city in an ever more precarious position. Yet the problem went unaddressed for decades by laissez-faire government, experts said.”
One solution that scientists and officials were looking at was an extensive project to rebuild protective wetlands, which slow down approaching hurricanes. This natural barrier had been eroded over a sustained period, in part due to the levee system itself, which prevents silt from the Mississippi from rejuvenating the wetlands. A Congressional act in 1990 created a task force funded with $40 million a year, but this was thoroughly inadequate, only slowing the destruction of the wetlands by a very small amount.
The Chronicle noted, “Other possible projects include restoration of barrier reefs and perhaps a large gate to prevent Lake Pontchartrain from overflowing and drowning the city. All are multibillion-dollar projects.” None of these projects have received adequate funding, even though computer models predicted the deaths of tens of thousands and a loss of tens of billions of dollars in the event that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane hit the city.
Heightening the system of levees to provide greater protection would have cost about $1 or $2 billion. Another proposal that would address some of the long-term geographical problems in New Orleans, such as wetland degradation, had a price tag of $470 million annually over 30 years, for a total of $14 billion.
All of these projects have fallen by the wayside. Funding for social infrastructure has been neglected over a period of decades by both Republican and Democratic administrations, in favor of policies designed to enrich a tiny layer of the population. Most recently, the costs of the war in Iraq and Bush’s tax cuts for the rich have played a direct role. Federal funds for the city aimed at protecting it against hurricanes and floods, authorized by Congress in 1995 and limited to begin with, have largely dried up over the past five years.
According to an August 30 article by Will Brunch of Editor & Publisher, the Army Corps of Engineers, which administers the federal funds, “never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security—coming at the same time as federal tax cuts—was the reason for the strain.” The article continues, “At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.”
The cuts in funding have continued up to the time of the hurricane itself. A June 2005 article in New Orleans CitiBusiness noted that in fiscal year 2006, “the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is bracing for a record $71.2 million reduction in federal funding. It would be the largest single-year funding loss ever for the New Orleans district, Corps officials said...One of the hardest-hit areas of the New Orleans district’s budget is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project [SELA], which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes. SELA’s budget is being drained from $36.5 million awarded in 2005 to $10.4 million suggested for 2006 by the House of Representatives and the president.”
100,000 poor left to fend for themselves
In the wake of Katrina, local officials have also been quick to blame those trapped in the city during the hurricane for not getting out on time. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said on Wednesday, “We begged all those people to get out. Even those with limited circumstances were given the opportunity.” Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, suggested on Monday that all of those still in the city were there of their own volition. He demonstrated the indifference and callousness with which the government views those most devastated by the hurricane when he said, “Some of them, it was their last night on Earth. That’s a hard way to learn a lesson.”
The same line has been parroted by the media. A Washington Post article on Thursday (“In New Orleans, a Desperate Exodus”) referred to those still in New Orleans as “people who had resisted previous evacuation orders, including many elderly and infirm residents” (emphasis added).
In fact, the government has long known that in the event of a major hurricane requiring an evacuation of the city, more than 100,000 people would be unable to get out, mainly for lack of transportation. In an article entitled “Left Behind” published in the Times-Picayune in 2002, the paper warned, “Once it’s certain a major storm is about to hit, evacuation offers the best chance for survival...And 100,000 people without transportation will be especially threatened...A large population of low-income residents do not own cars and would have to depend on an untested emergency public transportation system.”
The response of city officials to the problem of evacuating the poor has been to leave them to fend for themselves. A little over a month before Hurricane Katrina hit, a July 24 article in the Times-Picayune reported, “City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: in the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own.”
The paper continued, “In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm’s way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation...Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane.”
As the storm approached, city officials were cognizant of the fact that their hastily ordered evacuation order could not be heeded by large sections of the population. An Associated Press report on the evening of August 27, about 36 hours before the storm hit, noted that “at least 100,000 people in the city lack the transportation to get out of town.” The service quoted 74-year-old Hattie Johns: “I know they’re saying ‘Get out of town,’ but I don’t have any way to get out...If you don’t have no money, you can’t go.”
In addition to lacking transportation, many of the city’s poor had no way of paying for hotel rooms. Since no government agency—city, state or federal—would provide funds to those turned into refugees, these people had no choice but to remain in their houses and hope that the storm passed. Perhaps thousands of these people have drowned in the floods brought on by Katrina.
While some damage from the massive hurricane was inevitable under any conditions, the enormous and unprecedented devastation of New Orleans was a product of definite policies, for which the US ruling elite and its political representatives bear definite responsibility.
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/prep-s02.shtml
In its lead editorial on Thursday, “Katrina’s Awful Wake,” the Wall Street Journal began by declaring, “Right now, the lesson chiefly worth noting is also the most obvious: All the cunning of man cannot defeat the greatest fury of nature.” Walter Baumy, chief of engineering for the US Army Corps of Engineers division in New Orleans, said on Wednesday that there was nothing authorities could have done to prepare for Katrina and its aftermath. “There was a plan in place,” he said, but the hurricane “was much more than envisioned. The city has never seen anything like this.”
President Bush himself declared in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Wednesday, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”
Such statements are made for a definite purpose: to draw attention away from the long history of warnings that the city was unprepared to weather a direct hit from a major hurricane. Calls to upgrade the levee system and make other preparations to protect the city from flooding have been ignored for years, as have calls to develop plans to evacuate the tens of thousands of people lacking their own transportation.
With the frequency of serious hurricanes increasing over the past decade, and with a number of close calls including Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Ivan in 2004, it was understood that it was only a matter of time before a category four or five storm made a direct hit on New Orleans. Proposals to improve the city’s defenses have been rejected as too costly, and even the existing projects to maintain the levee system and restore protective wetland areas have been underfunded.
The existing levee system in New Orleans, which protects the below-sea level city from the water that surrounds it, has been in place for over a century. It has been upgraded numerous times, most recently in response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Betsy was a Category 3 storm, and the levee system was designed only to protect the city from a similar intensity storm at best. Hurricane Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck New Orleans Monday morning.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Georges there were a series of initiatives to investigate the upgrading of the levee system. On November 18, 1998, the New Orleans Times-Picayune noted that the city council of St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans proper and one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina, “asked Congress...for money to study the New Orleans hurricane levee system in order to improve the community’s protection from hurricanes as strong as Georges or Mitch [also in 1998]...The move comes after a request last week from the Army Corps of Engineers asking local governments to lobby federal officials to upgrade the levee system to withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane.”
In an article from March 17, 2001, the paper quoted Al Naomi, senior project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers as noting, “Had [Georges] hit us directly, our levees would not have protected us,” since the surge accompanying such a powerful storm would extend above the heights of the levees. The Army Corps of Engineers headed a project that would evaluate the threat and propose possible solutions.
A December 1, 2001 article in the Houston Chronicle examined the extreme vulnerability of New Orleans to a hurricane from the Gulf. Earlier that year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the damage to New Orleans from a hurricane as one of the three likeliest and most catastrophic disasters in the US. The Chronicle wrote: “In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water.”
The article pointed to the fact that over a period of decades, no serious steps had been taken to upgrade the city’s protection. “It’s been 36 years since Hurricane Betsy buried New Orleans 8 feet deep. Since then a deteriorating ecosystem and increased development have left the city in an ever more precarious position. Yet the problem went unaddressed for decades by laissez-faire government, experts said.”
One solution that scientists and officials were looking at was an extensive project to rebuild protective wetlands, which slow down approaching hurricanes. This natural barrier had been eroded over a sustained period, in part due to the levee system itself, which prevents silt from the Mississippi from rejuvenating the wetlands. A Congressional act in 1990 created a task force funded with $40 million a year, but this was thoroughly inadequate, only slowing the destruction of the wetlands by a very small amount.
The Chronicle noted, “Other possible projects include restoration of barrier reefs and perhaps a large gate to prevent Lake Pontchartrain from overflowing and drowning the city. All are multibillion-dollar projects.” None of these projects have received adequate funding, even though computer models predicted the deaths of tens of thousands and a loss of tens of billions of dollars in the event that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane hit the city.
Heightening the system of levees to provide greater protection would have cost about $1 or $2 billion. Another proposal that would address some of the long-term geographical problems in New Orleans, such as wetland degradation, had a price tag of $470 million annually over 30 years, for a total of $14 billion.
All of these projects have fallen by the wayside. Funding for social infrastructure has been neglected over a period of decades by both Republican and Democratic administrations, in favor of policies designed to enrich a tiny layer of the population. Most recently, the costs of the war in Iraq and Bush’s tax cuts for the rich have played a direct role. Federal funds for the city aimed at protecting it against hurricanes and floods, authorized by Congress in 1995 and limited to begin with, have largely dried up over the past five years.
According to an August 30 article by Will Brunch of Editor & Publisher, the Army Corps of Engineers, which administers the federal funds, “never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security—coming at the same time as federal tax cuts—was the reason for the strain.” The article continues, “At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.”
The cuts in funding have continued up to the time of the hurricane itself. A June 2005 article in New Orleans CitiBusiness noted that in fiscal year 2006, “the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is bracing for a record $71.2 million reduction in federal funding. It would be the largest single-year funding loss ever for the New Orleans district, Corps officials said...One of the hardest-hit areas of the New Orleans district’s budget is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project [SELA], which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes. SELA’s budget is being drained from $36.5 million awarded in 2005 to $10.4 million suggested for 2006 by the House of Representatives and the president.”
100,000 poor left to fend for themselves
In the wake of Katrina, local officials have also been quick to blame those trapped in the city during the hurricane for not getting out on time. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said on Wednesday, “We begged all those people to get out. Even those with limited circumstances were given the opportunity.” Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, suggested on Monday that all of those still in the city were there of their own volition. He demonstrated the indifference and callousness with which the government views those most devastated by the hurricane when he said, “Some of them, it was their last night on Earth. That’s a hard way to learn a lesson.”
The same line has been parroted by the media. A Washington Post article on Thursday (“In New Orleans, a Desperate Exodus”) referred to those still in New Orleans as “people who had resisted previous evacuation orders, including many elderly and infirm residents” (emphasis added).
In fact, the government has long known that in the event of a major hurricane requiring an evacuation of the city, more than 100,000 people would be unable to get out, mainly for lack of transportation. In an article entitled “Left Behind” published in the Times-Picayune in 2002, the paper warned, “Once it’s certain a major storm is about to hit, evacuation offers the best chance for survival...And 100,000 people without transportation will be especially threatened...A large population of low-income residents do not own cars and would have to depend on an untested emergency public transportation system.”
The response of city officials to the problem of evacuating the poor has been to leave them to fend for themselves. A little over a month before Hurricane Katrina hit, a July 24 article in the Times-Picayune reported, “City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: in the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own.”
The paper continued, “In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm’s way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation...Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane.”
As the storm approached, city officials were cognizant of the fact that their hastily ordered evacuation order could not be heeded by large sections of the population. An Associated Press report on the evening of August 27, about 36 hours before the storm hit, noted that “at least 100,000 people in the city lack the transportation to get out of town.” The service quoted 74-year-old Hattie Johns: “I know they’re saying ‘Get out of town,’ but I don’t have any way to get out...If you don’t have no money, you can’t go.”
In addition to lacking transportation, many of the city’s poor had no way of paying for hotel rooms. Since no government agency—city, state or federal—would provide funds to those turned into refugees, these people had no choice but to remain in their houses and hope that the storm passed. Perhaps thousands of these people have drowned in the floods brought on by Katrina.
While some damage from the massive hurricane was inevitable under any conditions, the enormous and unprecedented devastation of New Orleans was a product of definite policies, for which the US ruling elite and its political representatives bear definite responsibility.
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/prep-s02.shtml
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