[NYTr] Katrina: US Govt'S Criminal Neglect

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

Workers World - Sep 8, 2005 issue (posted 9/1/2005)
http://www.workers.org/2005/us/hurricane-0908/

Billions spent on Iraq war

Relief for the rich, disaster for the poor:
Hurricane tragedy could have been averted

By Larry Hales

Aug. 31, 3:15 p.m. EDT--The mayor of New Orleans has just announced
that hundreds, probably thousands, have been killed by Hurricane
Katrina.

Last year in the midst of hurricane season, as Hurricane Ivan--a
category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which categorizes
hurricanes based on barometric pressure, winds and storm surge--was
bearing down on New Orleans, the city set aside 10,000 body bags.
Hurricane Ivan was to be the storm that forecasters were suspecting
would level the entire city.

New Orleans is essentially a bowl. It is below sea-level and
surrounded by water. New Orleans is flanked by Lake Pontchartrain and
the Mississippi River. Levees and pumps keep the city dry.

A storm like Hurricane Ivan would have wiped the levees out, destroyed
the pumps and have left parts of the city submerged under nearly 20
feet of water. The water would have grown stagnant, teeming with
bacteria and the dead, and oil and gas would have spilled into the
water with the storm. Thirty-three percent of the United States' oil
comes from the Gulf Coast.

Hurricane Ivan missed New Orleans. It veered to the east and New
Orleans narrowly escaped what many call an inevi table disaster, the
worst the country has seen yet.

On Aug. 28, 2005, New Orleans braced for Hurricane Katrina, a category
5 hurricane, but the kind of preparations necessary for such a
hurricane had not been made.

Fears of the damage and death were evoked. Residents of New Orleans,
other southern Louisiana counties and cities, and counties and cities
along the Gulf Coast were told to evacuate. The highways out of the
populated areas were clogged, but many--over 100,000 residents in New
Orleans alone--have no means of escaping. Thousands more along the
coast are in the same predicament; many of these poor are people of
color.

The major news stations, in covering and tracking the storm, of course
mentioned the people that would be stranded, but rarely the reasons.

Lines at the rescue stations, especially at the Super Dome--the
stadium where the New Orleans Saints team plays--were blocks long. The
Super Dome became the largest structure to house people that could not
leave the city. At one point, an estimated 35,000 people waited to
gain entrance to the stadium, but only around 9,000 were allowed to
enter and others were turned away. Many were relegated to riding the
storm out in their homes because they had no way out of the city.

When Katrina hit, the center of this storm also veered to the east of
New Orleans, but New Orleans was hit by the storm, which had been
downgraded slightly as it came ashore.

No one knows how many lives have been lost or the extent of the damage
done by the hurricane. The Gulf Coast was pounded and entire buildings
collapsed. One apartment building fell from the wind and surging
water, and at least 30 people there are said to have been killed.
Harrison county, in Mississippi, is counting at least 100 dead and
expects the number to continue climbing.

Eighty percent of New Orleans is submerged, with some areas being
covered by over 20 feet of water. Many people are stranded on their
rooftops and in trees, and rescuers are said to have to push aside the
dead to get to the still living.

A day after the hurricane, there were reports that at least 100,000
are stranded in New Orleans. People, desperate for food, without
electricity and other means, after having lost everything, are
relieving store shelves, as there is only scant emergency relief.
Thousands are huddled in the Super Dome, with nowhere to go. By
Tuesday, Aug. 30, food supplies had run out in the Dome.

The situation in New Orleans is especially tenuous. The levees have
broken in areas and flood waters continue to rise. Hospitals are
having to evacuate very ill patients, because as the waters rise, the
generators have malfunctioned and valuable life support has been cut
off. Also, the city's water supply is contaminated and much of the
food in the city is unfit for consumption. Many more could become ill
from the stagnant water, from the mosquitoes that carry the West Nile
virus and from other diseases resulting from the contaminated water
supply.

Loss of life could be averted

The doomsday scenario given by fore casters did not have to be as
deadly as predicted.

Many in the big business-controlled media claim that the city of New
Orleans was spared by the change of direction of the storm and that
things could have been worse. However, had the city taken proper
preparations, the loss of life, and the still potential loss of life,
would have been averted.

The residents of the hard-hit areas were told to eva cuate, but the
city was not mobilized to evacuate. What's more, part of the reason
for the doomsday scenario is because of the receding coastal marsh and
barrier islands. The south of Louisi ana loses about 24 miles of
coastal marsh a year. The loss of the marsh and barrier islands, which
slows down storms, means that every hurricane that hits southern
Louisiana could cause massive damage and loss of life.

A coastal restoration project was earmarked at $14 billion dollars,
but the Bush administration put pressure on the state to lower the
cost to $1.2 billion dollars; as of yet, only $375 million has been
allocated.

In addition, the National Guard, which is usually mobilized for
natural occurren ces, has been depleted and demoralized by the Bush
administration's growing imperialist disasters in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

One could contrast the preparedness of socialist Cuba with that of the
United States. Cuba--a resource poor country--spares nothing when it
comes to moving people from the path of tropical storms, hurricanes
and other natural occurrences. This year, Cuba was hit by Hurricane
Dennis, a category 4 hurricane. Cuba, through mobilizing the
Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the popular army, and
by being prepared to meet the needs of the Cuban people, was able to
evacuate 1.5 million people.

Hurricane Dennis hit the island, sweeping through Havana, and though
16 people were killed, the number would have been higher were it not
for the socialist response of revolutionary Cuba, and a head of state
who uses his influence to mobilize the Cuban people.

What happened in Cuba is markedly different from what happened in
Haiti, where scores died from Hurricane Dennis, and from the United
States, where the number of dead from Hurricane Katrina is already at
least 100.

While this hurricane ravaged, President Bush was on vacation on his
ranch in Crawford, Texas, itself deluged--but by activists galvanized
by the courage of Cindy Sheehan, and in opposition to the brutal war
in Iraq.

Nature cannot be stopped, but it doesn't have to spell wholesale
death. Hun dreds of billions of dollars a year are autho rized for the
Pentagon, and hundreds of billions more have been spent in Iraq and
Afghanistan. A fraction of this money could have saved the lives of
the people that live on and near the Gulf Coast. In the richest, most
technologically advanced country in the world, there is no reason that
every person could not have been evacuated and placed in shelters.

That storms do come is no mystery. They come every year around this
time. And, it is no mystery what has to be done to spare those in the
path of hurricanes. Society has to be organized around the needs of
the many, and that will never happen under capitalism, but only by the
overthrow of the capitalists and through building socialism. Under
socialism the masses can be organized and a socialist state apparatus
set up to plan the economy and use valuable resources to provide for
countries' needs, and to oversee massive efforts like evacuations.

                             ***

http://www.workers.org/2005/editorials/hurricane-edit-0908/

EDITORIAL

Hurricane Katrina: U.S. gov't guilty of criminal neglect

Almost all of the death, injury, damage and destruction arising from
hurricane Katrina is the result of the crimes of the Bush
administration.

President Bush was criminally negligent in diverting funds that had
been requested to protect the people of New Orleans for use in the
criminal war of conquest in Iraq. The Bush administration did this in
full knowledge of the impend ing danger. The highest government agency
in charge of dealing with disasters, the Federal Emergency Man age ment
Agency, warned of the potential for disaster as early as 2001.

With the complete evacuation of New Orleans, tens of thousands trapped
without food, water, or electricity, thousands of homes destroyed and
the death toll mounting by the hour, this is a disaster of
unprecedented proportion. It profoundly affects Black people, who are
a major part of the population in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi,
and are suffering disproportionately because they are subject to
racist discrimination--which leaves them in poverty and most
vulnerable to such disasters. Seventy percent of New Orleans'
residents are Black and live in apartheid-like conditions.

Some politicians are calling it "our tsunami." The tsunami last
December also took an excessive toll of life because of criminal
neglect. But a tsunami comes rarely. Hurricanes come to the delta
region almost every year. This disaster was not only predictable but
predicted. What seems like an inevitable tragedy caused by nature was
foreseen long ago by scientists, engineers, government agencies,
environmentalists and experts in disaster management.

The science writer for the Houston Chronicle wrote on Dec. 1, 2001:

"New Orleans is sinking.

"And its main buffer from a hurricane, the protective Missis sippi
River delta, is quickly eroding away, leaving the historic city
perilously close to disaster. ...

"So vulnerable, in fact, that earlier this year the Federal Emergency
Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among
the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."
The other two were an earthquake in San Francisco and a "terrorist
attack on New York City."

The federal, state and local governments knew of the danger. They knew
what caused it and how to deal with it. But they did little or
nothing. They left the people of the delta region unaware and helpless
to deal with the inevitable disaster.

Why did they do nothing? An Aug. 30 dispatch of Editor and Publisher
revealed that "$250 million in crucial projects" planned by the Army
Corps of Engineers in the delta for shori ng up levees and building
pumping stations could not be carried out. "The Corps never tried to
hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well
as homeland security--coming at the same time as federal tax cuts--was
the reason for the strain.

"The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that,
the federal government came back this spring with the steepest
reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in
history."

The Houston Chronicle's 2001 report cited a study by a consortium of
government agencies several years ago. This consortium recommended
that between $2 billion and $3 billion dollars was needed for projects
that could rectify the problem. That is less than the cost of one
month of spending on the Iraq occupation, which costs $4 billion a
month at the minimum! Certainly part of the $300-billion-plus spent on
the war could have been used to take preventive measures.

Of course, while Bush is the immediate culprit, it must not be
forgotten that the Democratic Party voted for the war and every nickel
spent on it. So the Democrats are also criminally liable for both the
devastation in New Orleans and the illegal war and occupation.

Now that the capitalist authorities have let this disaster happen,
Bush is taking a business-as-usual approach to dealing with the
disaster. Just as during the tsunami, it took him days to disrupt his
vacation and step away from his Crawford ranch.

The federal government is the only authority capable of mobilizing the
resources necessary for the rescue mission and the reconstruction. It
is said that a million people were evacuated from New Orleans and the
surrounding parishes (counties) before the hurricane. Actually, the
government did not evacuate anyone. The authorities simply declared a
mandatory evacuation and then left it to people to get out. Now they
are saying that "at least a hundred thousand people" were left in the
city itself.

People have no place to stay. Many have no food. Their personal
belongings are all gone. Medical care is cut off. Schools are
inaccessible. Countless are homeless. The immediate crisis requires a
national mobilization of medical personnel, social workers, rescue
experts, hydraulic engineers.

Food, water and medical supplies should be immediately commandeered
for the emergency from agribusiness, supermarket chains,
pharmaceutical companies. Wal Mart and other retail giants should be
required to ship, gratis, clothing and other necessities to meet basic
needs. Government food storage supplies in warehouses throughout the
Midwest and other regions should be made available.

Every form of transport--planes, helicopters, buses, ambulances, small
boats--should be mobilized to the region. These and other measures
should be immediately implemented by the federal government based on
its emergency powers and responsibilities.

In other words, all of this society's material and human resources
should be made available to the victims in this crisis. The
corporations have control of these resources, but the workers who
created them have every right to them.

Let the government and the bosses pay. Putting people--the suffering
people of the delta--before profits should be the order of the day.
The property restrictions of capitalism must be overruled in the
interest of the masses.

Particularly, the oil companies should be forced to cough up billions
of dollars for reconstruction out of the super-profits that they pump
out of the delta region every day. Exxon Mobil refines 493,000 barrels
of oil a day in Baton Rouge; Chevron, 325,000 a day in Pascgoula,
Miss.; Conoco Phillips, 247 ,000 a day, to name a few. All this wealth
has been taken out of the region, not to speak of the wealth spent
trying to conquer Iraq and its oil. And they should not only give back
the profits they gouged from the people by raising gasoline prices to
over $3 a gallon--they should be forced to lower prices drastically.

In general, the giant multinationals should be made to ante up because
of all the wealth and labor they have taken from New Orleans--through
which so much of the wealth of this country flows--while the majority
of people are left with just enough to survive.

As for the reconstruction effort, the authorities are taking a narrow
approach. They are talking about months and years to recover. People
with flood insurance can stand in line once they can get back to their
neighborhoods. Poor people who have no flood insurance are on their
own. Perhaps FEMA will give a few handouts to tide them over for a
while. All the racist hysteria being whipped up about "looters" is a
cover-up for the fact that the government has made no provisions to
feed the people, and that so many Black people are living in dire
poverty.

But the truth is, there is a much more rapid and comprehensive
solution to turning the situation around right in front of the
government's nose. There are millions of workers who can be mobilized
to go to the region to help out.

Right now there is a "housing boom" where hundreds of thousands of
construction workers are toiling away as real-estate developers race
to make super-profits on the speculation in the housing market.

What is needed is a full-scale mobilization of the building trades,
construction workers, hydraulic engineers, medical personnel,
social-service workers and workers from all over the country to stop
capitalist business as usual and mobilize to help the people of New
Orleans, Biloxi and the delta region--fully funded by the government.

Millions of unemployed workers could be hired at union wages to pitch
in. Organized labor could be in the vanguard of organizing the
reconstruction effort.

With all their technology, the bosses are preoccupied with how they
can collect damages from the insurance industry, how they can get
their profitable refineries back on line, and how they can resume
making profits in the area as soon as possible. The working class, in
contrast, is concerned with the fate of the masses of people,
especially the Black, Latin@, poor white and the exploited who suffer
the most and will get the least help.

Once the reconstruction effort begins and communications become
possible, unions, community organizations, and move ment groups should
set up independent channels by which they can give aid and assistance
to the people of the stricken area.

Mass mobilization, putting people before property, is how
reconstruction projects are handled in Cuba and under the socialist
organization of society. The demand should be put forward that the
government treat this as a national emergency crisis of the greatest
magnitude. Measures should be taken in proportion to the extent of the
crisis--measures such as giving extended unemployment insurance to
everyone in the area. Personal property loss should be fully restored.
And the government should subordinate all its efforts to giving
effective short term and long term aid to the victims. But at the same
time the working class in this country should try to find a way to get
beyond the capitalist authority and bring whatever aid and assistance
it can to the people of the delta.


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