[Marxism] Mike Davis: The predators of New Orleans (Le Monde Diplomatique)

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: dispatch-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Behalf Of Le Monde diplomatique
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 6:02 AM
To: Le Monde diplomatique
Subject: The predators of New Orleans


Dear reader,

When Hurricane Ivan threatened the Gulf Coast in 2004, Mike Davis wrote 
of the callousness of officialdom towards the largely black poor of 
New Orleans*. Ivan missed the coast, but Davis's words came true this 
year when first Katrina, and then Rita, inundated New Orleans.

Because of Davis's reputation as a prophet of urban apocalypse, there 
is enormous public interest in the article that he has written for 
Le Monde diplomatique's October issue. In recognition of that, we are 
exceptionally emailing the article to all of you on our English edition 
mailing list in advance of its publication in print. It is also available 
online at
     http://mondediplo.com/2005/10/02katrina

We hope this will prompt you to subscribe to LMD either in print or on 
line (either will give you access to all our archives stretching back 
to 1997). Our website will give you full subscription details, so check us
out at:

http://mondediplo.com/

Regards from all on LMD's English edition team.
* See the article at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1849

__________________________________________________________

CATASTROPHIC ECONOMICS

The predators of New Orleans

After the criticism of his disastrous handling the Katrina disaster,
President George Bush promises a reconstruction programme of $200bn
for areas destroyed by the hurricane. But the first and biggest
beneficiaries will be businesses that specialise in profiting from
disaster, and have already had lucrative contracts in Iraq; they will
gentrify New Orleans at the expense of its poor, black citizens.

By MIKE DAVIS

THE tempest that destroyed New Orleans was conjured out of tropical
seas and an angry atmosphere 250km offshore of the Bahamas. Labelled
initially as "tropical depression 12" on 23 August, it quickly
intensified into "tropical storm Katrina", the eleventh named storm
in one of the busiest hurricane seasons in history. Making landfall
near Miami on 24 August, Katrina had grown into a small hurricane,
category one on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with 125 km/h
winds that killed nine people and knocked out power to one million
residents.

Crossing over Florida to the Gulf of Mexico where it wandered for
four days, Katrina underwent a monstrous and largely unexpected
transformation. Siphoning vast quantities of energy from the Gulf's
abnormally warm waters, 3°C above their usual August temperature,
Katrina mushroomed into an awesome, top-of-the-scale, class five
hurricane with 290 km/h winds that propelled tsunami-like storm
surges nearly 10m in height. The journal Nature later reported that
Katrina absorbed so much heat from the Gulf that "water temperatures
dropped dramatically after it had passed, in some regions from 30°C
to 26°C" (1). Horrified meteorologists had rarely seen a Caribbean
hurricane replenish its power so dramatically, and researchers
debated whether or not Katrina's explosive growth was a portent of
global warming's impact on hurricane intensity.

Although Katrina had dropped to category four, with 210-249 km/h
winds, by the time it careened ashore in Plaquemines Parish,
Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi river on early 29
August, it was small consolation to the doomed oil ports, fishing
camps and Cajun villages in its direct path. In Plaquemines, and
again on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama, it churned the
bayous with relentless wrath, leaving behind a devastated landscape
that looked like a watery Hiroshima.

Metropolitan New Orleans, with 1.3 million inhabitants, was
originally dead centre in Katrina's way, but the storm veered to the
right after landfall and its eye passed 55km to the east of the
metropolis. The Big Easy, largely under sea-level and bordered by the
salt-water embayments known as Lake Pontchartrain (on the north) and
Lake Borgne (on the east), was spared the worst of Katrina's winds
but not its waters.

Hurricane-driven storm surges from both lakes broke through the
notoriously inadequate levees, not as high as in more affluent areas,
which guard black-majority eastern New Orleans as well as adjacent
white blue-collar suburbs in St Bernard Parish. There was no warning
and the rapidly rising waters trapped and killed hundreds of
unevacuated people in their bedrooms, including 34 elderly residents
of a nursing home. Later, probably around midday, a more formidable
floodwall gave way at the 17th Street Canal, allowing Lake
Pontchartrain to pour into low-lying central districts.

Although New Orleans's most famous tourist assets, including the
French Quarter and the Garden District, and its most patrician
neighbourhoods, such as Audubon Park, are built on high ground and
survived the inundation, the rest of the city was flooded to its
rooftops or higher, damaging or destroying more than 150,000 housing
units. Locals promptly called it "Lake George" after the president
who failed to build new levees or come to their aid after the old
ones had burst.

Inequalities of class and race

Bush initially said that "the storm didn't discriminate", a claim he
was later forced to retract: every aspect of the catastrophe was
shaped by inequalities of class and race. Besides unmasking the
fraudulent claims of the Department of Homeland Security to make
Americans safer, the shock and awe of Katrina also exposed the
devastating consequences of federal neglect of majority black and
Latino big cities and their vital infrastructures. The incompetence
of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) demonstrated the
folly of entrusting life-and-death public mandates to clueless
political appointees and ideological foes of "big government". The
speed with which Washington suspended the prevailing wage standards
of the Davis-Bacon Act (2) and swung open the doors of New Orleans to
corporate looters such as Halliburton, the Shaw Group and Blackwater
Security, already fat from the spoils of the Tigris, contrasted
obscenely with Fema's deadly procrastination over sending water, food
and buses to the multitudes trapped in the stinking hell of the
Louisiana Superdome.

But if New Orleans, as many bitter exiles now believe, was allowed to
die as a result of governmental incompetence and neglect, blame also
squarely falls on the Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge, and
especially on City Hall on Perdido Street. Mayor C Ray Nagin is a
wealthy African-American cable television executive and a Democrat,
who was elected in 2002 with 87% of the white vote (3).

He was ultimately responsible for the safety of the estimated quarter
of the population that was too poor or infirm to own a car. His
stunning failure to mobilise resources to evacuate car-less residents
and hospital patients, despite warning signals from the city's
botched response to the threat of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004,
reflected more than personal ineptitude: it was also a symbol of the
callous attitude among the city's elites, both white and black,
toward their poor neighbours in backswamp districts and rundown
housing projects. Indeed, the ultimate revelation of Katrina was how
comprehensively the promise of equal rights for poor
African-Americans has been dishonoured and betrayed by every level of
government.

A death foretold

The death of New Orleans had been forewarned; indeed no disaster in
American history had been so accurately predicted in advance.
Although the Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, would
later claim that "the size of the storm was beyond anything his
department could have anticipated," this was flatly untrue. If
scientists were surprised by Katrina's sudden burgeoning to
super-storm dimensions, they had grim confidence in exactly what New
Orleans could expect from the landfall of a great hurricane.

Since the nasty experience of Hurricane Betsy in September 1965 (a
category three storm that inundated many eastern parts of Orleans
Parish that were drowned by Katrina), the vulnerability of the city
to wind-driven storm surges has been intensively studied and widely
publicised. In 1998, after a close call with Hurricane Georges,
research increased and a sophisticated computer study by Louisiana
State University warned of the "virtual destruction" of the city by a
category four storm approaching from the southwest (4).

The city's levees and stormwalls are only designed to withstand a
category three hurricane, but even that threshold of protection was
revealed as illusory in computer simulations last year by the Army
Corps of Engineers. The continuous erosion of southern Louisiana's
barrier islands and bayou wetlands (an estimated annual shoreline
loss of 60-100 sq km) increases the height of surges as they arrive
at New Orleans, while the city, along with its levees, is slowly
sinking. As a result even a category three, if slow moving, would
flood most of it (5). Global warming and sea-level rise will only
make the "Big One", as folks in New Orleans, like their counterparts
in Los Angeles, call the local apocalypse, even bigger.

Lest politicians have difficulty understanding the implications of
such predictions, other studies modelled the exact extent of flooding
as well as the expected casualties of a direct hit. Supercomputers
repeatedly cranked out the same horrifying numbers: 160 sq km or more
of the city under water with 80-100,000 dead, the worst disaster in
United States history. In the light of these studies, Fema warned in
2001 that a hurricane flood in New Orleans was one of the three
mega-catastrophes most likely to strike the US in the near future,
along with a California earthquake and a terrorist attack on
Manhattan.

Shortly afterwards, the magazine Scientific American published an
account of the flood danger ("Drowning New Orleans", October 2001)
which, like an award-winning series ("The Big One') in the local
newspaper, the Times-Picayune, in 2002, was chillingly accurate in
its warnings. Last year, after meteorologists predicted a strong
upsurge in hurricane activity, federal officials carried out an
elaborate disaster drill ("Hurricane Pam") that re-confirmed that
casualties would be likely to be in the tens of thousands.

The Bush administration's response to these frightening forecasts was
to rebuff Louisiana's urgent requests for more flood protection: the
crucial Coast 2050 project to revive protective wetlands, the
culmination of a decade of research and negotiation, was shelved and
levee appropriations, including the completion of defences around
Lake Pontchartrain, were repeatedly slashed.

Washington at work

In part, this was a consequence of new priorities in Washington that
squeezed the budget of the Army Corps: a huge tax cut for the rich,
the financing of the war in Iraq, and the costs of "Homeland
Security". Yet there was undoubtedly a brazen political motive as
well: New Orleans is a black-majority, solidly Democratic city whose
voters frequently wield the balance of power in state elections. Why
would an administration so relentlessly focused on partisan warfare
seek to reward this thorn in Karl Rove's side by authorising the
$2.5bn that senior Corps officials estimated would be required to
build a category five protection system around the city? (6).

Indeed when the head of the Corps, a former Republican congressman,
protested in 2002 against the way that flood-control projects were
being short-changed, Bush removed him from office. Last year the
administration also pressured Congress to cut $71m from the budget of
the Corps's New Orleans district despite warnings of epic hurricane
seasons close at hand.

To be fair, Washington has spent a lot of money on Louisiana, but it
has been largely on non-hurricane-related public works that benefit
shipping interests and hardcore Republican districts (7). Besides
underfunding coastline restoration and levee construction, the White
House mindlessly vandalised Fema. Under director James Lee Witt (who
enjoyed Cabinet rank), Fema had been the showpiece of the Clinton
administration, winning bipartisan praise for its efficient dispatch
of search and rescue teams and prompt provision of federal aid after
the 1993 Mississippi River floods and the 1994 Los Angeles
earthquake.

When Republicans took over the agency in 2001, it was treated as
enemy terrain: the new director, former Bush campaign manager Joe
Allbaugh, decried disaster assistance as "an oversized entitlement
programme" and urged Americans to rely more upon the Salvation Army
and other faith-based groups. Allbaugh cut back many key flood and
storm mitigation programmes, before resigning in 2003 to become a
highly-paid consultant to firms seeking contracts in Iraq. (An
inveterate ambulance-chaser, he recently reappeared in Louisiana as
an insider broker for firms looking for lucrative reconstruction work
in the wake of Katrina.)

Since its absorption into the new Department of Homeland Security in
2003 (with the loss of its representation in the cabinet), Fema has
been repeatedly downsized, and also ensnared in new layers of
bureaucracy and patronage. Last year Fema employees wrote to
Congress: "Emergency managers at Fema have been supplanted on the job
by politically connected contractors and by novice employees with
little background or knowledge" (8).

A new Maginot Line

A prime example was Allbaugh's successor and protégé, Michael Brown,
a Republican lawyer with no emergency management experience, whose
previous job was representing the wealthy owners of Arabian horses.
Under Brown, Fema continued its metamorphosis from an "all hazards"
approach to a monomaniacal emphasis on terrorism. Three-quarters of
the federal disaster preparedness grants that Fema formerly used to
support local earthquake, storm and flood prevention has been
diverted to counter-terrorism scenarios. The Bush administration has
built a Maginot Line against al-Qaida while neglecting levees, storm
walls and pumps.

There was every reason for anxiety, if not panic, when the director
of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Max Mayfield, warned Bush
(still vacationing in Texas) and Homeland Security officials in a
video-conference on 28 August that Katrina was poised to devastate
New Orleans. Yet Brown, faced with the possible death of 100,000
locals,-exuded breathless, arrogant bravado: "We were so ready for
this. We planned for this kind of disaster for many years because
we've always known about New Orleans." For months Brown, and his boss
Chertoff, had trumpeted the new National Response Plan that would
ensure unprecedented coordination amongst government agencies during
a major disaster.

But as floodwaters swallowed New Orleans and its suburbs, it was
difficult to find anyone to answer a phone, much less take charge of
the relief operation. "A mayor in my district," an angry Republican
congressman told the Wall Street Journal, "tried to get supplies for
his constituents, who were hit directly by the hurricane. He called
for help and was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually, a bureaucrat
promised to write a memo to his supervisor" (9). Although
state-of-the-art communications were supposedly the backbone of the
new plan, frantic rescue workers and city officials were plagued by
the breakdown of phone systems and the lack of a common bandwidth.

At the same time they faced immediate shortages of the critical food
rations, potable water, sandbags, generator fuel, satellite phones,
portable toilets, buses, boats, and helicopters, Fema should have
pre-positioned in New Orleans. Most fatefully, Chertoff inexplicably
waited 24 hours after the city had been flooded to upgrade the
disaster to an "incident of national significance", the legal
precondition for moving federal response into high gear.

Far more than the reluctance of the president to return to work, or
the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to interrupt a mansion-hunting trip,
or the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to end a shoe-buying
expedition in Manhattan, it was the dinosaur-like slowness of the
brain of Homeland Security to register the magnitude of the disaster
that doomed so many to die clinging to their roofs or hospital beds.
Lathered in premature, embarrassing praise from Bush for their heroic
exertions, Chertoff and Brown were more like sleepwalkers.

As late as 2 September, Chertoff astonished an interviewer on
National Public Radio by claiming that the scenes of death and
desperation inside the Superdome, which the world was watching on
television, were just "rumours and anecdotes". Brown blamed the
victims, claiming that most deaths were the fault of "people who did
not heed evacuation warnings", although he knew that "heeding" had
nothing to do with the lack of an automobile or confinement in a
wheelchair.

Despite claims by the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, that the
tragedy had nothing to do with Iraq, the absence of more than a third
of the Louisiana National Guard and much of its heavy equipment
crippled rescue and relief operations from the outset. Fema often
obstructed rather than facilitated relief: preventing civilian
aircraft from evacuating hospital patients and delaying
authorisations for out-of-state National Guard and rescue teams to
enter the area. As an embittered representative from devastated St
Bernard Parish told the Times-Picayune: "Canadian help arrived before
the US Army did" (10).

A conservative New Jerusalem

New Orleans City Hall could have used Canadian help: the emergency
command centre on its ninth floor was put out of operation early in
the emergency by a shortage of diesel to run its backup generator.
For two days Nagin and his aides were cut off from the outside world
by the failure of both their landlines and cellular phones. This
collapse of the city's command-and-control apparatus is puzzling in
view of the $18m in federal grants that the city had spent since 2002
in training exercises to deal with such contingencies. Even more
mysterious was the relationship between Nagin and his state and
federal counterparts. As the mayor later summarised it, the city's
disaster plan was: "Get people to higher ground and have the feds and
the state -airlift supplies to them." Yet Nagin's Director of
Homeland Security, Colonel Terry Ebbert, astonished journalists with
the admission that "he never spoke with Fema about the state disaster
blueprint" (11).

Nagin later ranted with justification about Fema's failure to
pre-position supplies or to rush buses and medical supplies promptly
to the Superdome. But evacuation planning was, above all, a city
responsibility; and earlier planning exercises and surveys had shown
that at least a fifth of the population would be unable to leave
without assistance (12). In September 2004 Nagin had been roundly
criticised for making no effort to evacuate poor residents as their
better-off neighbours drove off before category-three Hurricane Ivan
(which fortunately veered away from the city at the last moment).

In response, the city produced, but never distributed, 30,000 videos
targeted at poor neighbourhoods that urged residents "Don't wait for
the city, don't wait for the state, don't wait for the Red Cross,
leave." In the absence of official planning to provide buses or
better, trains, such advice seem to imply that poor people had to
start walking. But when, after the breakdown of sanitation and order
in the Superdome, hundreds did attempt to escape the city by walking
across a bridge into the white suburb of Gretna, they were turned
back by panicky local police who fired over their heads.

It is inevitable that many of those left behind in drowning
neighbourhoods will interpret City Hall's unconscionable negligence
in the context of the bitter economic and racial schisms that have
long made New Orleans the most tragic city in the US. It is no secret
that its business elites and their allies in City Hall would like to
push the poorest segment of the population, blamed for high crime
rates, out of the city. Historic public-housing projects have been
razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In
other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offences
as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal
seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans, Las Vegas on the
Mississippi, with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer
parks and prisons outside the city limits.

Not surprisingly, some advocates of a whiter, safer city see a divine
plan in Katrina. "We finally cleaned up public housing in New
Orleans," a leading Louisiana Republican confined to Washington
lobbyists. "We couldn't do it, but God did" (13). Nagin boasted of
his empty streets and ruined neighbourhoods: "This city is for the
first time free of drugs and violence, and we intend to keep it that
way."

A partial ethnic cleansing of New Orleans will be a fait accompli
without massive local and federal efforts to provide affordable
housing for tens of thousands of poor renters now dispersed across
the country in refugee shelters. Already there is intense debate
about transforming some of poorest, low-lying neighbourhoods, such
the Lower Ninth Ward (flooded again by Hurricane Rita), into water
retention ponds to protect wealthier parts. As the Wall Street
Journal has rightly emphasised, "That would mean preventing some of
New Orleans's poorest residents from ever returning to their
neighbourhoods" (14).

Epic political dogfight

As everyone recognises, the rebuilding of New Orleans and the rest of
afflicted Gulf region will be an epic political dogfight. Already
Nagin has staked out the claims of the local gentrifying class by
announcing that he will appoint a 16-member reconstruction commission
evenly split between whites and blacks, although the city is more
than 75% African-American. Its "white-flight" suburbs (social
springboards for neo-Nazi David Duke's frightening electoral
successes in the early 1990s) will fiercely lobby for their cause,
while Mississippi's powerful Republican establishment has already
warned that it will not play second fiddle to Big Easy Democrats. In
this inevitable clash of interest groups, it is unlikely that the
city's traditional black neighbourhoods, the true hearths of its
joyous sensibility and jazz culture, will be able to exercise much
clout.

The Bush administration hopes to find its own resurrection in a
combination of rampant fiscal Keynesianism and fundamentalist social
engineering. Katrina's immediate impact on the Potomac was such a
steep fall in Bush's popularity, and, collaterally, in approval for
the US occupation of Iraq, that Republican hegemony seemed suddenly
under threat. For the first time since the Los Angeles riots of 1992,
"old Democrat" issues such as poverty, racial injustice and public
investment temporarily commanded public discourse, and the Wall
Street Journal warned that Republicans had "to get back on the
political and intellectual offensive" before liberals like Ted
Kennedy could revive New Deal nostrums, such as a massive federal
agency for flood -control and shoreline restoration along the Gulf
coast (15).

The Heritage Foundation hosted meetings late into the night at which
conservative ideologues, congressional cadres and the ghosts of
Republicans past (such as Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan's former
Attorney General) hashed a strategy to rescue Bush from the toxic
aftermath of Fema's disgrace. New Orleans's floodlit but empty
Jackson Square was the eerie backdrop for Bush's 15 September speech
on reconstruction. It was an extraordinary performance. He sunnily
reassured two million victims that the White House would pick up most
of the tab for the estimated $200bn flood damage: deficit spending on
a scale that would have given Keynes vertigo. (It has not deterred
him from proposing another huge tax cut for the super-rich.)

Bush wooed his political base with a dream list of long-sought-after
conservative social reforms: school and housing vouchers (16), a
central role for churches, an urban homestead lottery (17), extensive
tax breaks to businesses, the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone
(18), and the suspension of annoying government regulations (in the
fine print these include prevailing wages in construction and
environmental regulations on offshore drilling).

For connoisseurs of Bush-speak, the speech was a moment of exquisite
déjà vu. Had not similar promises been made on the banks of the
Euphrates? As Paul Krugman cruelly pointed out, the White House,
having tried and failed to turn Iraq "into a laboratory for
conservative economic policies", would now experiment on traumatised
inhabitants of Biloxi and the Ninth Ward (19). Congressman Mike
Pence, a leader of the powerful Republican Study Group which helped
draft Bush's reconstruction agenda, emphasised that Republicans would
turn the rubble into a capitalist utopia: "We want to turn the Gulf
Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a
federal city where New Orleans once was" (20).

Symptomatically, the Army Corps in New Orleans is now led by the
official who formerly oversaw contracts in Iraq (21). The Lower Ninth
Ward may never exist again, but already the barroom and strip-joint
owners in the French Quarter are relishing the fat days ahead, as the
Halliburton workers, Blackwater mercenaries, and Bechtel engineers
leave their federal paychecks behind on Bourbon Street. As they say
in Cajun, -- and no doubt now in the White House too --"laissez les
bons temps rouler!"

* Mike Davis is the author of 'The Monster at Our Door. The Global
Threat of Avian Flu' (New Press, New York, 2005), 'Dead cities, and
other tales' (New Press, 2002), 'Late Victorian holocausts: El Nino
famines and the making of the third world' (Verso, London and New
York, 2001), 'Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of
disaster' (Picador, London, 2000) and many other works.

Original text in English

(1) Quirin Schiermeier, "The Power of Katrina," Nature, no 437,
London, 8 September 2005.

(2) Editorial note: legislation dating from the New Deal obliging
public employers to respect the minimum local wage.

(3) Though Louisiana voted for Bush in 2004 (56.7%), New Orleans is
traditionally Democrat.

(4) Study by engineering professor Joseph Suhayda described in
Richard Campanella, Time and Place in New Orleans, Gretna, Los
Angeles, 2002.

(5) John Travis, "Scientists' Fears Come True as Hurricane Floods New
Orleans", Science, no 309, New York, 9 September 2005.

(6) Andrew Revkin and Christopher Drew, "Intricate Flood Protection
Long a Focus of Dispute," New York Times, 1 September 2005.

(7) "Katrina's Message on the Corps," New York Times, 13 September
2005.

(8) "Top Fema Jobs: No Experience Required," Los Angeles Times, 9
September 2005.

(9) Congressman Bobby Jindal, "When Red Tape Trumped Common Sense,"
Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005.

(10) Melinda Deslatte, "St Bernard Parish residents overflow the
Capital," Times-Picayune, 12 September 2005.

(11) New York Times, 7 and 11 September 2005.

(12) Tony Reichhardt, Erika Check and Emma Morris, "After the flood,"
Nature, no 437, 8 September 2005.

(13) Congressman Richard Baker (Baton Rouge) quoted in "Washington
Wire," Wall Street Journal, 9 September 2005.

(14) "As Gulf Prepares to Rebuild, Tensions Mount Over Control," Wall
Street Journal, 15 September 2005.

(15) "Hurricane Bush," Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.

(16) Editor's note: rental vouchers were issued, backed by
Congress-approved funds, to 20,000 homeless after the 1994 Los
Angeles earthquake to pay for rent anywhere in the state.

(17) Editor's note: a plan to distribute federal land to those who
would pledge to erect a house on it and could afford to do so. It is
estimated that this would provide about 4,000 sites for 250,000
displaced people, 125,000 of whom were renting.

(18) Editor's note: a zone in which relief is related to private
financial initiatives.

(19) "Not the New Deal," New York Times, 16 September 2005.

(20) John Wilke and Brody Mullins, "After Katrina, Republicans Back a
Sea of Conservative Ideas," Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.

(21) Editorial, "Mr Bush in New Orleans," New York Times, 16
September 2005.



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