[Marxism] FW: New Orleans: Making of an Urban Catastrophe

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Solidarity Organizer [mailto:solidarity.organizer@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2005 11:17 PM
To: Solidarity.Organizer@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: New Orleans: Making of an Urban Catastrophe

Dear Comrades, attached is a draft of New Orleans, the Making of an
Urban Catastrophe.  Feel Free to forward it or make suggestions. 
- Robert 


Most residents of metro New Orleans were unaware of the potential
destruction of Katrina until Saturday August 28, less than 48 hours
before it struck. 

In New Orleans violent tropical storms are routine and hurricanes are a
seasonal reminder of the power of "mother nature."  As a resident of the
city I have often been faced with a choice of whether or not to
evacuate, always judging whether this would be the fabled "big one."

Hurricane Katrina was the most awesome disaster that residents of
Louisiana have ever seen.  But the deadly results of Katrina were as
much a produce of human callousness as an act of nature.

The world watched as people were herded into the Superdome stopping for
searches only to find themselves in a wrenched and unsanitary place with
food, water, or proper medical care. Those in areas of high flooding
fled to their rooftops begging rescue helicopters to airlift them to
safety.

Many died trapped in their attics or waiting to be rescued. Meanwhile
hundreds of police were dispached to protect property from looters. 
 
At least half the city is at or below sea level including the Central
Business District and much of the housing stock of the city.

Under normal conditions massive drainage pumps drain rainwater from the
city. But even under "normal" conditions, poor areas of the city
routinely face minor flooding. 
 
As Hurricane Katrina promises to be the new textbook case for urban
"natural" disasters, social dislocation, and (lack of) urban planning,
it is important to begin to examine the social dimension of the failed
policies that contributed to such a massive disaster. 
 
Misguided Priorities 
 
New Orleans is a city "underdeveloped" by capitalism.   Social services
are chronically underfunded, while working people depend on low wage
service jobs and send their kids to dysfunctional public schools.
Despite its once massive port, a seventy mile petro-chemical corridor
and historical significance, the city has, like third- world Caribbean
islands, depended on scraps of the tourism industry for its sustenance.

 
So it may be no surprise that in the leadup to Katrina flood Louisiana
hurricane preparedness was woefully under-funded by President Bush and
Congress.  
 
Bush and Congress ignored those who explained that the critical
infrastructure that would prevent   New Orleans from becoming inundated
with flood waters in the event of a levy break.  In a 2003 interview of
Bill Moyers' NOW, scientist Daniel Zwerdling noted the cutting of
Hurricane funding to pay for the war in Iraq. According to columnist
Sidney Blumenthal, " FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans
was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush
administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to
pay for the Iraq war. " 
 
Congress did authorize $10.5 billion dollars for Gulf Coast aid, but
Florida received $16 billion when hurricanes hit in 2004.   Contrast
this amount with the  $162 billion Congress appropriated for the first
year of the Iraq war.  
 
At the time of the hurricane, almost half of the Louisiana National
Guard was deployed outside the state.  Some, like the 3,000 members of
the 256th Infantry Brigade were reportedly with critical high water
equipment, in Iraq.
 
The race and class dynamics of a planned catastrophe 
        
The poverty and blackness of those bearing the brunt of the hurricane is
obvious to anyone watching CNN.   The plight of these victims
underscores the existing race and class inequalities in New Orleans but
our case also provides a lens in which to understand another facet of
the racism that is ever-present in the United States.   
 
Poor people were the most ill prepared for a hurricane. Malik Rahim,
Green Party candidate and former Black panther explains: 

"The hurricane hit at the end of the month, the time when poor people
are  most vulnerable. Food stamps don't buy enough but for about three
weeks of the month, and by the end of the month everyone runs out. Now
they have no way to get their food stamps or any money, so they just
have to take what they can to survive."
 
The poorest people were without transportation, food, or resources, but
no hurricane preparedness plan-and none of the doomsday exercises of
federal, state, and local agencies made any provisions for their
evacuation. Disaster planning officials know that 112,000 people in New
Orleans are without any private form of transportation. In 2003 the
Times Picayune produced a five part series that predicted that this
segment would likely face death in the event of a category 5 hurricane. 
 
It 's not enough to order an evacuation without having policies in place
to carry an evacuation out.  City and public school buses flooded while
residents were stuck in the city with no way out. 
 
In fact many institutions that once provided evacuation (like the
dormitories of the University of New Orleans) now expected to fend for
themselves, an unforeseen 
logical extension of privatization and neoliberal ideology and a
continuation of 
 
white supremacy. 
 
In an unscripted NBC benefit concert, rapper Kanye West explains:
"George Bush doesn't care about black people," ?[America was set up] "to
help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible."
Tulane Hospital (a private hospital) was evacuated by well before
Charity Hospital, the region's trauma hospital and the hospital, whose
patients are poor, overwhelmingly black. Tenet paid private contractors
to evacuate at least one of their hospitals.    
 
Katrina was not the first hurricane, nor the first major flooding
disaster to hit Louisiana.  During Hurricane Betsy Lower Ninth Ward, an
area almost entirely under the poverty line and 99% black, was
intentionally flooded to "save" the wealthy white uptown neighborhoods.

 
Institutional policies favor ruling class interests, but the flipside of
these policies is for purveyors of ruling class ideology- including many
working class whites to blame the victims hit hardest: poor African
Americans, which, in turn, sharpens existing race and class
inequalities. According to Malik Rahim, white vigilante gangs  were
patrolling Algiers, " riding around in pickup   trucks, all of them
armed, and any young Black they see who they figure doesn't belong in
their community, they shoot him."  
 
Blaming Victims
 
Both FEMA chief Don Brown and the dominant media spin indicate that the 
high death toll is "going to be attributable a lot to people who did not
heed the advance warnings."  

Brown's comments suggest that hundreds of thousands foolishly "choose"
not to evacuate, but the reality is that tens of thousands of New
Orleanians did not have the means to comply with an evacuation order.

Reporters and rightwing internet trolls filled news outlets and message
boards with racialized stories of looting, while tens of thousands of
the city begged for help.  The lawlessness of looting, full of drama and
intrigue of savage black people provided a narrative that shifted focus
away from the thousands still stuck in the horror and the political
decisions that kept them in that hell.

Officials comforted tense onlookers with a promise of order: they would
use troops to protect stores from looting.  But by doing so, they
shifted scarce resources away from the search, rescue, and evacuation of
residents whose lives they deemed less important. 
 
As convoys of National Guard reinforcements finally rolled into New
Orleans, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco used the occasion to warned
looters and assure the ruling class that troops were under her orders to
"shoot and kill" if needed to restore order.  "These troops are
battle-tested. They have M-16s and are locked and loaded," she said.
"These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will."
 
Lackluster Response 

The response from Federal agencies was too little too late. While the
United States has a history of dropping humanitarian relief to famine
and disaster affected areas, media reported that supplies were being
diverted because helicopters could not land, or because of a report of
hostile gunfire.   
If the United States is capable of sending planes that can withstand
enemy fire to drop bombs in Iraq, certainly they are capable of air
dropping supplies into a US city. 

On NPR's All Things Considered  (September 1 st, 2005,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4828771) Homeland
Security Czar Michael Chertoff dismissed an NPR field reporter's claim
that 2,000 or more were at Convention Center without food or water and
in unsanitary conditions. Subsequent reports verify that 15,000-20,000
were at the convention center in deplorable conditions including dead
bodies.   The Convention Center was on dry ground and would have been
accessible by military transport ground vehicles of helicopters. 
Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the slow response: " They're not here. It's too
doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the
biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country."  

An elected official from Jefferson Parish (New Orleans suburbs)
suggested that if New Orleans were to secede from the Unites States
perhaps foreign aid would be more timely. On the evening of September 2,
2005 frustrated FOX News reporters called attention to the policies that
continued to trap refugees at the convention center.   
Environmental Trigger 

Looking at this disaster one cannot ignore the ecological component.
New Orleans, like many major cities, was built in a place that posed
danger, but environmental problems of global warming and coastal erosion
have exacerbated the precariousness of the city. 
  
Marshes and wetlands help to slow a hurricane's effect as it approaches
the city.   But erosion has diminished the size and ability of the
coastal marsh and swamp to absorb the hurricane's force.   Coastal
erosion has two important causes.   One is that the once rich river silt
that built the delta is now being directed to deep waters off the
continental shelf to allow for easy river navigation.   The second is
salt water intrusion from canals built for oil and natural gas drilling
and pipeline needs. 

Global warming has contributed to a deadly hurricane season that is not
yet over.   Ross Gelbspan, columnist for the Boston Globe, explains that
global warming "generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours,
more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms." While Katrina began
"as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was
supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively   blistering
sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico."
 
Conclusion
 
The Bush administration fiddled while New Orleans flooded. The
administration and Congress failed to provide basic preventative
infrastructure and failed to have a rescue plan in place, choosing
instead tax cuts for the rich and war spending in Iraq.    This is the
last in a line of Bush failures, and is seen so by a growing segment of
the population as a "war at home" on poor and Black people. 
 
Many hurricane refugees rightly feel abandoned. But the ruling class
abandoned New Orleans long before Katrina hit. Racism, environmental
disregard and capitalist deference to "the market" for social planning
have long been the hallmarks of New Orleans.  

 
Eventually public money will begin to trickle into the state. Hotels,
casinos, chain stores and "Disneyfied" developments will compete for the
sorely needed money and serve to reinforce a system that was unable to
respond to peoples' needs before, during, and immediately after the
hurricane.

But New Orleans can be rebuilt with a different ethos, one with
environmentally sustainable planning, a vast transportation
infrastructure upgrade, including public evacuation plans, a bolstered
public works system, creation of stable union jobs, new public schools,
a renewed investment in the public healthcare system, and cultivation of
participatory neighborhood councils as incubators for a new,
participatory, and radical democracy among the working class, poor, and
oppressed.

And the people of the United States can help with an alternative vision.
First we should demand that troops deployed in Iraq return to the United
States, and we should link this return to a change in national
priorities focused on focusing on the needs of working and oppressed
people, beginning with rebuilding the infrastructure of New Orleans and
the US Gulf South
 
Robert Caldwell Jr is a resident of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

  You can contact him at jamais.vu@xxxxxxxxx
  Feel free to forward this article or edit for length. 
 


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism