[Marxism] New Orleans: "It's the system."

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        The New York Times has an interesting article Saturday: "Across
U.S., Outrage at Response."

        I think what it shows is something I've been observing at in my
own newsroom, and which friends at the Corporate News Network and Faux
News confirm: around THIS story, the protective dike of
corporate-republican censorship that has been evident in the U.S. news
media since well before 9-11, but has positively smothered it since, has
been breached. 

        Gerardo Rivera has been having shouting matches with the likes
of Sean Hannity on air. CNN correspondents have been challenging several
of the big foot anchors, and especially party-line loyalists. 

        A brief excerpt from the NY Times piece: 

*  *  *

"Jonathan Williams, an architect in Hartford, originally from Uganda,
said the delayed arrival of relief and aid supplies in New Orleans made
him wonder about how the United States responds to disasters abroad.

"'I am in utter shock,' he said in an interview at Grand Central
Terminal in Manhattan on Friday. 'There is just total disarray. This far
into the cleanup and they are still understaffed? I am just so
disappointed. It's just a terrible, sad situation.'

But Mr. Williams added: "You cannot just blame the president, or any one
person. Everyone is partly to blame. It's the whole system."

It was the combination of specific and systemic failures that many of
those interviewed - experts and ordinary people alike - echoed.

Andrew Young, the former civil rights worker and mayor of Atlanta who
was Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, was born in New
Orleans 73 years ago, walked on its levees as a boy and "was always
assured by my father that the Army Corps of Engineers had done a
masterful job." But, Mr. Young said, "they've been neglected for the
last 20 years," along with other pillars of the nation's infrastructure,
human and physical.

*  *  *

        "It's the whole system." 

        But I think it would be a mistake to just blame it on capitalism
*in general.*  Or "late capitalism" or "capitalism in the age of
imperialism" or anything else like that.

        This is late 20th Century, early 21st Century U.S. American
capitalism, "neoliberalism" if you want to use that term.

        Fred Feldman, among others, nailed it when he said something
like this wasn't just incompetence. This is decay and decadence.

        And I think there are signs that a division may open up in the
ruling class. Depraved indifference to human life, especially in Black
skin, is one thing. Depraved indifference to the infrastructure and
labor force it takes to keep the country going is something else.

*  *  *

        In picking out the excerpt from the New York Times article I
didn't stop with the quote from the Ugandan, but included the Andrew
Young quote for a reason. His time frame. This is really a phenomenon of
the last two decades or quarter century. 

        After Vietnam and Watergate, the ruling class made a turn to
return to Calvin Coolidge and Goldwater "conservatism" (what everywhere
else in the world is called liberalism). And it turned its back on what
the U.S. calls "liberalism" (what in Western Europe might be called
social democracy, although social capitalism would perhaps be a better
term).

        Things have reached such a pass that you have the sitting
president endorsing the teaching of "intelligent design" in high school
science classes. There has been a decades-long decline in SAT scores,
covered up in recent years by simply changing the grading scale. 

        This degree of accommodation to flat-earth ignorance is now
showing itself to be incompatible with modern relations of production. 
        
        After his speech and his photo-op-fly-by of New Orleans a couple
of days ago, Bush told the country on Dianne Sawyer's show that no one
thought the levees would give way. Factually, of course, he was
completely off the wall. But I think his statement must be looked at as
more than an after-the-fact exercise in plausible deniability or perhaps
a rationalization. 

        This is, I believe, a true account of the state of mind of the
president and his advisers and the team of policy-setting people they
have put in place at homeland security, FEMA and so on. They either did
not understand enough of the science, or the consequences, or were just
too narrow-mindedly focused on telling their bosses what they wanted to
hear. This is what they actually believed: that the levees could not be
breached.

*   *   *

        It is the same kind of short-sighted pragmatic calculation that
allows someone like Bush to say it's okay to not teach evolution in high
school, which is what blessing intelligent design amounts to. Bush says
it because he believes that there are votes to be gotten that way. 

        Bush's calculation on that are an illusion. Should the ruling
class decide, there would be front-page cartoons in major dailies
showing Bush as a banana-peeling ape saying something to the effect that
intelligent design is okay, with a caption below stating: "Proof that
man descended from the apes -- and not too far." 

        Newspapers would point out that there isn't a single person in
the entire field with a respectable post at any respectable university
not just in this country but in the entire world, and not just today but
for a century or so, who agrees with Bush on this. 

        Editorials would demand to know what's next, "2+2=5?" and urge
the President to stop embarrassing the nation, his party, his family,
his children, and himself by making pronouncements on subjects where his
ignorance can only be called encyclopedic. 

        It may yet come to that. 

        One battle I won at work this week involved a piece on
intelligent design. My draft said something to the effect that
"scientists reject this as thinly disguised religious propaganda." My
copy editor wanted to change it to "most scientists," and I objected,
because it is false that *some* scientists think there is any validity
to intelligent design as a scientific theory, because it is no more a
scientific theory than "I can't get no satisfaction" by the rolling
stones is a scientific theory. 

        This fight went up to network standards and practices with my
insisting I needed the names of at least a FEW reputable scientists in
THIS field to say "most." Whereas I had three college profs in the field
who were my sources for saying "scientists" period. Folks who not only
defended evolution but also said there were, in fact, NO real scientists
who disputed it. I won.

*   *   *

        The few people in the media who are trying to ward of the
criticisms of Bush are arguing along the lines that, well, it would have
taken many years to build up New Orleans defenses to withstand a direct
hit from a category five hurricane. It was Clinton's fault. 

        This ignores the facts.

        a) Katrina wasn't a category 5 when she came ashore, she was
category 4.
        b) New Orleans didn't take a direct hit, Katrina missed it by
dozens of miles.
        c) New Orleans was on the LUCKY side of the hurricane, where the
wind was blowing *towards the ocean* and not towards the shore and faced
a much-reduced storm surge.
        d) What finally did New Orleans in wasn't the hurricane but the
rain. Combined with the storm surge, the rain made the Mississippi and
the lake rise enough to go over the top of the levees or breach them. 
        e) Four or five years ago, New Orleans would probably have
emerged unscathed.
        f) If there had been a massive effort to shore up the levees and
build them up with sand bags as the lake and river water rose higher and
higher, the catastrophe *might* have been avoided. 

        The most important fact to focus on is e. A few years ago, the
levees would probably have held. Why? Because they were HIGHER then. New
Orleans and everything around it and especially any built-up earthen
structures like the levees are constantly *subsiding.* FEMA, the Army
Corps of Engineers, the Mayor and the Governor, the city fathers and all
the rest of them beg and pleaded to get the few hundred million dollars
it would take to build up the levees to their former height. The
Bushites said no.

        The levees were designed, in theory, to take a hit from what
today we call a category 3 hurricane. But the truth is as they have been
subsiding, a Category 2 hurricane that went just west of the city might
have caused something like this, especially a slow moving and large
cyclone that dumped massive amounts of water.
        
*  *  *

        What's the problem with that? Never mind the thousands of dead.
Focus instead on this:

        One hundred billion dollars. I repeat, one hundred billion
dollars. 

        That's the first estimate for the total UNINSURED direct
property damage done by Katrina and the flooding, on top of the 25
billion that the insurance and reinsurance firms will have to fork over.

        
        That's not counting indirect and consequential damages, like
export crops rotting on barges on the Mississippi because the port they
were headed for isn't there any more. There's been no attempt yet to
reckon these sorts of costs.

*  *  *

        It's not just the NYTimes or CNN. The Sunday Atlanta Journal and
Constitution devotes much of the front page to an editorial denouncing
the reaction to Katrina as worthy of a Third World country. Leave aside
the blatant --and quite inaccurate-- racism implicit in the comparison
(Cuba, which is a third world country, managed last year to evacuate a
million people from an approaching hurricane without any loss of life).
The message is that this level of unpreparedness and incompetence isn't
merely outrageous or intolerable or inexcusable, but that it is
*untenable.* 

        Letting New Orleans get flooded, which is what they have done,
is not an option.

        And thus the question starts to get posed on whether continuing
to run the country the way it has been run in the past quarter century
is still an option, a viable option.

Joaquín







        

        





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