The tragedy of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was both a huge natural disaster, and a product of poverty, racism and imperialism. The answer, argues Sean Murray, is a new American revolution
Around the world people gazed in astonishment. At first it was at the force of nature. But then something even more incredible became clear. The world’s richest and most powerful state had been unable to evacuate the population of New Orleans, or to come to their rescue. People were told to go to the Superdome, but they found no food, no water, no sanitation.
Broadcasters described scenes “like something in the Third world”. One American reporter said: “a foreign dictator would have responded better”. Cuba, a tiny and poor country by comparison, was hit by category five Hurricane Ivan last year but 1.3 million people were evacuated with no loss of life. In the United States ten thousand people may have lost their lives. How was this possible?
The answer is class and race: and behind them both – capitalism.
New Orleans is a city with a population of 500,000 of which 67 per cent are black and 30 per cent live below the poverty line. The 100,000 residents trapped in the city were almost entirely African Americans, who had no way of leaving.
The government and the authorities called on people to leave but then left it to those with cars to do so. The bus station was closed. They could have used the rail system and the school buses to evacuate the poor. In fact, it took five days for any serious supplies to arrive in the city and transport sufficient to start moving out survivors.
Racism and private property
Two days after the hurricane, the press was filled with stories of looting. “Forget survivors, shoot the looters” the Daily Express headlined it. Fifteen hundred police were re-directed from rescue operations to anti-looting. Private property was more important than the lives of tens of thousands of poor Americans.
Images were repeated over and over of young black people, emerging from flood-damaged stores, goods in hand. Did it not occur to them that these people “looting” were often getting food and water? Where else should they find them?
The hysteria whipped up by the media served to stigmatise the victims of the disaster as somehow undeserving, thus covering the Bush administration’s woefully inadequate response.
Unsurprisingly, many poor black people, with no water and no food, armed themselves before setting out to find some, To the racist white police force any black person in an abandoned shop would automatically be deemed a looter and shot. An unknown number were.
War on Iraq
Plans have been drawn up to strengthen the defences of the New Orleans and the Gulf coast since Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965. But successive governments refused to spend the money required.
A hurricane of similar strength to Katrina had been expected for the past three years. In 2004, the army, which maintains the flood defences, requested $11 million for hurricane protection in the New Orleans area. It was allotted $5.5 million. In 2005, it requested $22.5 million, and received $5.7 million. For 2006, the Bush administration offered just $2.9 million.
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, said in June 2004: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq.”
Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been systematically downgraded, and resources shifted to the “war on terrorism”. The security of Americans in their own homeland was sacrificed to robbing Iraqis of any security in theirs.
Congress has promised $10.5 billion, but this only covers emergency relief. There is nothing for the rebuilding of any of the storm-devastated region, an area larger than Britain. The US meanwhile spends on average $5.4 billion a month on the war in Iraq.
Global Warming
A special posting on Time magazine website just before the arrival of the hurricane said the following:
“From 1995 to 1999, a record 33 hurricanes struck the Atlantic basin…One especially sobering study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that hurricane wind speeds have increased about 50 per cent in the past 50 years. And since warm oceans are such a critical ingredient in hurricane formation, anything that gets the water warming more could get the storms growing worse. Global warming, in theory at least, would be more than sufficient to do that. While the people of New Orleans may not see another hurricane for years, the next one they do see could make even Katrina look mild.”
In fact the BBC reports that it will take eight months to fully restore the levees in New Orleans and other cities and two further hurricanes are very possible within the next four months.
George Bush is not only the president who slashed state spending on flood defences, not only the man who is spending billions on Iraq, he is also the man who refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement to cut carbon emissions, and vetoed any serious discussion of it at the G8 in Gleneagles
Rebuilding
As the scale of the disaster became clear, the stock prices of some of the US’s biggest construction companies jumped massively in anticipation of the large and lucrative reconstruction contracts.
A massive programme of public works must be undertaken to rebuild New Orleans and all the other towns and cities destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. This must be paid for by a punishing tax on corporate America and by the savings that can be made by the immediate and total withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
In the cities affected a public works programme must be placed under the control of residents’ committees from all the destroyed localities. The massive construction companies must be nationalised and their resources, equipment and technical know how planned to meet the specifications set by these residents’ committees.
In the meantime adequate housing, clothing and food must be provided to all those left homeless by the disaster and resources to help them relocate if they so choose.
An armed residents’ and poor people’s militia must replace the racist police. They can tell the difference between those legitimately confiscating food, medicine, clothes and the criminal elements.
Getting rid of Bush and capitalism
George Bush and the billionaire class that put him in power are a danger not only to the people of the Middle East, but to the workers, the black population and the poor of America itself. His discredit over the war, over Katrina, over the economy, which will grow over the next few years, present the possibility of a huge mass movement of revolt. But the Democrats would be no better.
The time is ripe to create a new party that fights for the interest of this majority. The American working people have time and again in history shown themselves capable of rising up against their oppressors. They can and will do so again. But no one should imagine for a minute that this ruling class will go quietly or peacefully.
It will have to be a party of the American socialist revolution.