It is difficult to believe that it’s already been a year since Katrina devastated much of the Gulf Coast, breeching the levees in New Orleans and leaving the city under water.
But that is where we are, with the major news media offering a full menu of televised delights on the anniversary, everything ranging from heart-warming tales of rebirth to some solid reporting on the problems that still face the region.
The coverage is, as all anniversary coverage tends to be, somewhat shallow, following the standard script for these sort of things. What the coverage, for the most part, is not doing is talking in terms of legacy.
Three things to consider about Katrina:
1. It was the most visible example of the incompetence of the Bush administration, ripping from our eyes the rose-colored glasses that allowed far too many to view President Bush as a strong leader. The administration’s response (or lack thereof) to Katrina and the failures of Bush’s war policies are the reason his approval ratings have hovered in the 30s for the last year.
2. Katrina reminded us that race and class still matter in the United States and that if you’re poor and black you’re still likely to face an uphill climb.
3. The storm showed the bankruptcy of the anti-government, pro-market theology that has been in the ascendency for years. Adolph Reed Jr. offers one of the more cogent analyses of this aspect of the storm’s legacy:
The fact is that some people chose to ride out the storm in town because, like my cousin Ann, they had commitments to be on site to keep the city functioning and help return it to order. Some stayed for more idiosyncratic reasons, not least because They expected their homes to withstand the hurricane, which, incidentally, most did. The vast majority who didn’t evacuate as the storm approached, however, were either too poor or too frail to leave, or both. In the same news segment as the cat lover, a middle-aged man said that he had $5 to his name when the storm came. What, he asked, could he have done had he been deposited in some strange place with no money?
Two months before Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration determined that it couldn’t afford to provide public transportation to evacuate residents in the event of a major storm. So the city produced DVDs to distribute in poor neighborhoods, alerting residents that they would be on their own. There was no attempt, as part of the evacuation plan, to provide transportation for the nearly 100,000 New Orleanians who didn’t own dependable cars and couldn’t afford to pay their way out of the city. This was triage without the name or the courage of its convictions.
That decision—to shrug shoulders and conclude that the municipality couldn’t afford to mobilize adequately for evacuating up to a quarter of its population—speaks to the real sources of the devastation of New Orleans and the snail’s pace of its recovery. Every determination of what can or can’t be afforded depends on a calculation of costs and benefits and the relative weight of the interests that compete for use of resources. The Nagin administration couldn’t afford to deploy enough buses as part of its evacuation plan because it gave higher priority to dedicating funds to other purposes—such as subsidizing development and keeping taxes and fees low.The fetish of “efficient” government—code for public policy that is designed to serve the narrow interests of business and the affluent—is the ultimate cause of the city’s devastation. Remember that the city survived the hurricane. It flooded because the levees failed. The levees on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals failed because, in the words of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, “safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs.” This was the result of federal underfunding, the Corps of Engineers’ skimping, state and local officials’ temporizing, and a lack of adequate government oversight—or, in neoliberal parlance, cutting government red tape. Where the breech occurred on the 17th Street Canal, the Corps had made concessions in sturdiness of construction to accommodate real estate developers’ desire to stuff as much new upscale housing as possible into that neighborhood. The levee on the Industrial Canal failed because of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet’s extreme vulnerability to storm surge. MR-GO, as it is called, is a
forty-year-old white elephant of pure corporate welfare.The notion that government services are wasteful and unnecessary—the neoliberal idolatry that the market can take care of everything that needs to be taken care of—got exposed for the flim-flam that it is. FEMA was so feckless because Bush and the worthless cronies he put in charge of the agency fundamentally could not even conceive that a public institution should have any responsibilities for securing the public welfare. When disaster struck, none of them had paid enough attention even to imagine what the agency could do, that maybe its purview should include mobilizing rescue and assistance efforts for people on the Gulf Coast whose plight CNN was broadcasting round the clock. For Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and former FEMA Director Mike Brown, the organization existed only as an occasion for plunder, payoffs, and posturing.
As an illustration of how dominant that way of thinking is, Mayor Nagin, while the city was still submerged, fired 3,000 municipal employees, many, if not most, of whom had lost their homes or been displaced. Later, the Orleans Parish School Board laid off 7,500 teachers and other employees. No serious consideration was given to the possibility that maintaining a public workforce could help people return sooner by giving them income, providing services, and augmenting the cleanup and reconstruction efforts.
Isn’t it about time we rethought all of this?
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 