THE HURRICANE DISASTER: US CAPITALISM STANDS DISGRACED
Statement of the World Socialist Web Site
Editorial Board
2 September 2005
<http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hurr-s02.shtml>
The catastrophe that is unfolding in New Orleans and on the
Gulf coast of Mississippi has been transformed into a
national humiliation without parallel in the history of the
United States.
The scenes of intense human suffering, hopelessness,
squalor, and neglect amidst the wreckage of what was once
New Orleans have exposed the rotten core of American
capitalist society before the eyes of the entire world --
and, most significantly, before those of its own stunned
people.
The reactionary mythology of America as the "Greatest
Country in the World" has suffered a shattering blow.
Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the awful truths of
contemporary America -- a country torn by the most intense
class divisions, ruled by a corrupt plutocracy that
possesses no sense either of social reality or public
responsibility, in which millions of its citizens are deemed
expendable and cannot depend on any social safety net or
public assistance if disaster, in whatever form, strikes.
Washington's response to this human tragedy has been one of
gross incompetence and criminal indifference. People have
been left to literally die in the streets of a major
American city without any assistance for four days. Images
of suffering and degradation that resemble the conditions in
the most impoverished Third World countries are broadcast
daily with virtually no visible response from the government
of a country that concentrates the greatest share of wealth
in the world.
The storm that breached the levees of New Orleans has also
revealed all of the horrific implications of 25 years' worth
of uninterrupted social and political reaction. The real
results of the destruction of essential social services, the
dismantling of government agencies entrusted with
alleviating poverty and coping with disasters, and the
ceaseless nostrums about the "free market" magically
resolving the problems of modern society have been exposed
before millions.
With at least 100,000 people trapped in a city without
power, water or food and threatened with the spread of
disease and death, the government has proven incapable of
establishing the most elementary framework of logistical
organization. It has failed to even evacuate the critically
ill from public hospitals, much less provide basic medical
assistance to the many thousands placed in harm's way by the
disaster.
What was the government's response to the natural
catastrophe that threatened New Orleans? It amounted to
betting that the storm would go the other way, followed by a
policy of "every man for himself." Residents of the city
were told to evacuate, while the tens of thousands without
transportation or too poor to travel were left to their
fate.
Now crowds of thousands of hungry and homeless people have
been reduced to chanting "we need help" as bodies accumulate
in the streets. Washington's inability to mount and
coordinate basic rescue operations will unquestionably add
to a death toll that is already estimated in the thousands.
The government's callous disregard for the human suffering,
its negligence in failing to prepare for this disaster and,
above all, its utter incompetence have staggered even the
compliant American media.
Patriotic blather about the country coming together to deal
with the crisis combined with efforts to poison public
opinion by vilifying those without food or water for
"looting" have fallen flat in face of the undeniable and
monumental debacle that constitutes the official response to
the disaster.
Reporters sent into the devastated region have been reduced
to tears by the masses of people crying out for help with no
response. Television announcers cannot help but wonder aloud
why the authorities have failed so miserably to alleviate
such massive human suffering.
The presidency, the Congress and both the Republican and
Democratic parties--all have displayed an astounding lack of
concern for the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives
have been shattered and who face the most daunting and
uncertain future, not to mention the tens of millions more
who will be hard hit by the economic aftershocks of Katrina.
In the figure of the president, George W. Bush, the
incompetence, stupidity, and sheer inhumanity that
characterize so much of America's money-mad corporate elite
find their quintessentially repulsive expression.
As the hurricane developed over two weeks in the Caribbean
and slowly approached the coast of New Orleans and
Mississippi, Bush amused himself at his ranch retreat in
Crawford, Texas. It is now clear that his administration
made no serious preparations to deal with the dangers posed
by the approaching storm.
In an interview Thursday on the "Good Morning America"
television program, Bush reprised his miserable performance
of the previous day, adding to Wednesday's banalities the
declaration that there would be "zero tolerance" for
looters.
The president blanched when ABC interviewer Dianne Sawyer
asked about a suggestion that the major oil companies be
forced to cede a share of the immense windfall profits they
have reaped from rising prices over the past six months to
fund disaster relief. He responded by counseling the
American people to "send cash" to charitable organizations.
In other words, there will be no serious financial
commitment from the government to save lives, care for the
sick and needy, and help the displaced and bereft restore
their lives. Nor will there be any national, centrally
financed and organized program to rebuild one of the
country's most important cities--a city that is uniquely
associated with some of the most critical cultural
achievements in music and the arts of the American people.
Above all, the suffering of millions will not be allowed to
impinge on the profit interests of a tiny elite of
multi-millionaires whose interests the government defends.
Later in the day, Bush described the aftermath of the flood
as a "temporary disturbance."
The ruthless attitude of those in power toward the average
poor and working class residents of New Orleans was summed
up Thursday by Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who
declared "it doesn't make sense" to spend tax dollars to
rebuild New Orleans. "It looks like a lot of that place
could be bulldozed," he said.
While Hastert was forced to backtrack from these chilling
remarks, they have a definite political logic. To rebuild
the lives that have been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina would
require mounting a massive government effort that would run
counter to the entire thrust of a national policy based upon
privatization and the transfer of wealth to the rich that
has for decades been pursued by both major parties.
Can anyone truly believe that the current administration and
its Democratic accomplices in Congress are going to launch a
serious program to construct low-cost housing, rebuild
schools and provide jobs for the hundreds of thousands left
unemployed by the destruction?
Congress has been virtually silent on the catastrophe in the
south. It has nothing to say, having voted to support Bush's
extreme right-wing agenda of massive tax cuts for the rich,
huge outlays for war in Iraq and Afghanistan and an
ever-expanding Pentagon budget, and billions to finance the
Homeland Security Department.
The millionaires club in the Capitol is well aware that it
voted to slash funding for elementary infrastructure
needs--including urgently recommended improvements in
outmoded and inadequate Gulf Coast anti-hurricane and
anti-flood systems.
The Democratic Party has, as always, offered no opposition.
Indeed, the president was gratified to be able to announce
that former Democratic president Bill Clinton would resume
his road show with the president's father, the former
Republican president, touring the stricken regions and
drumming up support for charitable donations. In this way
the Democratic Party has signaled its solidarity with the
White House and the Republican policy against any serious
federal financial commitment to help the victims and rebuild
the devastated regions.
The decisive components of the present tragedy are social
and political, not natural. The American ruling elite has
for the past three decades been dismantling whatever forms
of government regulation and social welfare had been
instituted in the preceding period. The present catastrophe
is the terrible product of this social and political
retrogression.
The lessons derived from past natural and economic
calamities--from the deadly floods of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, to the dust bowl and Depression
of the 1930s--have been repudiated and derided by a ruling
elite driven by the crisis of its profit system to
subordinate ever more ruthlessly all social concerns to the
extraction of profit and accumulation of personal wealth.
Franklin Roosevelt--an astute and relatively far-sighted
representative of his class--had to drag the American ruling
elite as a whole kicking and screaming behind a program of
social reforms whose basic purpose was to save the
capitalist system from the threat of social revolution. Even
during his presidency, the large-scale projects in
government-funded and controlled social development, such as
the Tennessee Valley Authority, never became a model for
broader measures to alleviate poverty and social inequality.
The contradictions and requirements of an economic system
based on private ownership of the means of production and
production for profit resulted in any further projects being
shelved.
- From the 1970s onward, as the crisis of American capitalism
has deepened, the US ruling elite has attacked the entire
concept of social reform and dismantled the previously
established restrictions on corporate activities.
The result has been a non-stop process of social plunder,
producing an unprecedented concentration of wealth at the
apex of society and a level of social inequality exceeding
that which prevailed in the days of the Robber Barons.
Fraud, the worst forms of speculation and criminality have
become pervasive within the upper echelons of American
society. This is the underlying reality that has suddenly
revealed itself, precipitated by a hurricane, in the form of
a collapse of the most elementary forms of social life.
The political establishment and the corporate elite have
been exposed as bankrupt, together with their ceaseless
insistence that the unfettered development of capitalism is
the solution to all of society's problems.
The catastrophe unleashed by Katrina has unmistakably
revealed that America is two countries, one for the wealthy
and privileged and another in which the vast majority of
working people stand on the edge of a social precipice.
All of the claims that the war on Iraq, the "global war on
terrorism" and the supposed concern for "homeland security"
are aimed at protecting the American people stand revealed
as lies. The utter failure to protect the residents of New
Orleans exposes all of these claims as propaganda designed
to mask the criminality of the American ruling elite and the
diversion of resources away from the most essential needs of
the people.
The central lesson of New Orleans is that the elementary
requirements of mass society are incompatible with a system
that subordinates everything to the enrichment of a
financial oligarchy.
This lesson must become the new point of departure in the
political orientation of the struggles of American working
people. Only the development of a new independent political
movement, fighting for the reorganization of economic life
on the basis of a socialist program, can provide a way out
of the chaos of which the events in New Orleans are a
terrible omen.
See Also:
Hurricane's victims left to die on New Orleans streets
[2 September 2005]
<http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/norl-s02.shtml>
Bush rules out significant federal aid to hurricane victims
[1 September 2005]
<http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hurr-s01.shtml>
Crackdown on looting: New Orleans police ordered to
stop saving lives and start saving property
[1 September 2005]
<http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/loot-s01.shtml>
Letter from New Orleans: tragedy at stranded hospital
[1 September 2005]
<http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/norl-s01.shtml>
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