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Bush scrambles to salvage his retrogressive agendaNew Orleans: The human cost of capitalism's brutalityHurricanes and bodies of water do not target social groups of people, yet when natural disasters hit, the poor and the racially oppressed become overwhelmingly the victims. And they lose everything. The very nature of capitalism in this country, riven with deep racial and class divisions, has made this truer than ever. This was demonstrated in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina whose storm surge overwhelmed levees surrounding New Orleans Aug. 29, flooding the city. So ingrained is racism in the U.S. that the outcome was predictable. The plight of the working poor, infirm, disabled, elderly, new born and mostly Black residents of New Orleans mattered little in flood prevention planning, and they were left in harm's way when disaster struck. With the withdrawal of those with power and means, fleeing to high ground west and south of the city, order collapsed. Yet officials attempted to characterize their abandoned city as orderless. The truth is the residents of New Orleans who could not leave were left to fend for themselves in the most abject conditions of need. Needs included food, water, and shelter as well as protection from antisocial acts of a few among the victims. The media trained cameras upon where authorities feared to go, revealing what was plain to see, residents organizing themselves to survive starvation and dehydration by opening markets and drugstores, sometimes with the assistance of merchants or local police, and taking what they and helpless neighbors needed. Arrayed against the residents of New Orleans were the leaders: an overwhelmed New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who ordered the evacuation one day before Katrina hit without organizing public transportation; an equally overwhelmed Governor Kathleen Blanco, who failed to mobilize the Louisiana National Guard to lead the with evacuation; and most of all, the Bush administration whose policies, from infrastructure improvements to disaster planning, are based on immiseration of poor, working class and Black people. Fronting for a malfeasant administration, Condoleezza Rice at times minimized the racism involved with the victimization of Black residents. Reversing herself in the face of the obvious, she promised a war on poverty, capitalist-style, led by "non-governmental organizations" and "the private business sector." Developers are salivating over the prospects of speculating real estate once occupied by the expatriates and the resistant residents who left their homes and pets at gunpoint. One revelation after another paints a picture of capitalism and bourgeois rule in the twentieth century. The incompetence of the crony appointee at the head of the agency charged with preparing for disasters, Michael Brown, is only the face of a cynical restructuring of government which has no intention of serving the public. Disarming the part of the bureaucracy responsible for disaster planning, gutting funding for infrastructure, fashioning Homeland Security into homeland repression, speeding up destruction of wetlands in the service of developers-- all shape an inhuman agenda dedicated to prolonging the life of capitalism. "A large population of Americans who serve no purpose to the agenda of this administration were allowed to die," is how one angry young woman put it. However in the two and a half weeks since the floods hit New Orleans, it has become clear that large parts of the country are either not comfortable with Bush's agenda, now that its ramifications have become clear in New Orleans, or reject it outright. Even so conservative a cheerleader for the administration as David Brooks declared that "canning Michael Brown or appointing some tough response czar will not change the endemic failures at the heart of this institutional collapse" (The New York Times, Sept. 11, 2005). Reporters conveyed with passion the inhuman conditions of 20,000 residents called to the New Orleans Superdome and the thousands more to the Convention Center as a sanctuaries only to experience abandonment and hell-on-earth conditions. In communities across the nation, people responded ahead of the relief engines belatedly put into motion to evacuate and take care of people from New Orleans. Thousands of homes have been opened to evacuees. The invitations extended by people are a far cry from the cynical attitude of ex-First Lady Barbara Bush who uttered what most racist ideologues may not feel free to say openly, that the thousands relocated to the Houston Astrodome never had it so good. The Bush agenda is suddenly uncertain, a turnaround from the three years of opportunities provided his administration by the September 11, 2001 attacks, opportunities to start two wars and to exercise police powers at home. The staggering costs of recovery may have eroded plans to privatize Social Security and end the estate taxes for the rich. Most of all, the occupation of Iraq, already a massive dump of money and resources while the budget deficit balloons, looks different now, economically and politically. Nevertheless even a pull-out, partial or total, would not mean an end to the U.S.'s single superpower reach in Iraq or elsewhere. Now Bush's efforts are aimed at preserving the agenda. Sugarcoating a relief effort, which cannot recover the lives lost in the weeks after Katrina, has included installing not one, but two military leaders in charge of relief. We cannot be lulled into thinking that the crisis of Hurricane Katrina itself will reverse that agenda. Unlike the aftermath of 9/11, milked more this week to distract from the Gulf Coast crisis, Bush & Co. will do everything they can to make us forget his culpability. We cannot allow New Orleans to be forgotten in six months or six years from now. To do so would allow the illusion to endure, that capitalism is eternal. Like the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, New Orleans has exposed the achilles heel of American capitalism, its racism, but the difference is that in 2005 the U.S. is at war in Iraq. The internal crisis is seriously threatening to undermine the continuation of an already most unpopular war. Only weeks ago, Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan's vigil spotlighted the war's unpopularity. With New Orleans, we have the type of crisis not seen since the 1960s, when urban insurrections by the Black masses gave pause to the Vietnam War. At no time since then have the issues of race, poverty, and war come together in such a threatening way to the rulers. Already nervous about Bush's reckless wars and economic policies, they are on the threshold of a split in the dominant classes that could create a true opening for thinkers and activists in movements against racism and global capital. Karl Marx, viewing the endemic economic crises that capitalist development spawned, remarked that the bourgeoisie "is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery." This is clear in New Orleans, but it is also true of the many "Katrinas" across the country. Although many among the working poor fall below the "poverty line" of $16,000 in annual income for a family of two or $18,000 for a family of three, the truth is that the poor who are at or above the mark cannot make ends meet, so low are their incomes. Worse, the average poor family lives 40% below the poverty level. Furthermore, 70 million in this country fall into poverty one or more months each year (Brandeis University Center on Hunger and Poverty, centeronhunger.org). Among the supposedly better off, some 45 million have no health insurance and are one health incident away from destitution. The floods tore the veneer of permanence off of this system, showing that crisis is in its heart and soul. Any illusions of stability have been blown away by Hurricane Katrina. A full statement on the human response to the flooding of New Orleans and Bush's inhuman policies which led to the disaster will appear in the September-October News & Letters, here. September 13, 2005 |
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