Hurricane Katrina ripped the mask off the face of US imperialism, exposing the ugly, cruel, vicious, racist, exploitative nature of capitalism. The hurricane was an appalling destructive natural disaster. But for millions of Americans, overwhelmingly poor, US imperialism has turned it into a catastrophe. It shows the utter futility of capitalism, which, planless, riddled with corruption, putting private property before people, reacting after the event instead of preparing in advance, has nothing, absolutely nothing, to offer the poor and oppressed. US capitalism failed to evacuate everybody from the area in time, failed to rescue everyone afterwards, failed to bring relief in any kind of adequate and organised way and is preparing to turn reconstruction efforts into one big trough awash in billions of dollars for big corporations to guzzle down. Steve Palmer reports from the US.
A much-trumpeted evacuation plan for New Orleans turned out to be just hot air. The middle class fled in their SUVs. The hurricane hit, the levees (dykes) protecting the city burst, flooding the city. The city’s poor, who are overwhelmingly black, were without transport and were left behind to fend for themselves. The huge fleet of 700 school and transit buses, which might have evacuated thousands of people, were not used– and became flooded and useless.
Dramatic scenes were splashed across primetime television for days, with unceasing exposure of the plight of poor, predominantly black, New Orleaners trying to survive. The media quickly depicted black people the way they find most endearing: as helpless victims or congenital criminals, a pathetic yet anarchic mass. Wild unsubstantiated rumours of rape and murder were repeated as if fact, feeding racist fantasies. The madness reached its apogee when supposed ‘civil rights veteran’ Randall Robinson claimed that ‘black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive’. Inevitably, conservative commentators were soon repeating Robinson’s stupid fabrication, describing the tired and hungry masses as ‘savages’, ‘animals’ and ‘cannibals’.
Two paramedics, Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Slonsky, who are shop stewards from San Francisco, recounted what really happened.
Far from being a passive begging mass:
‘What we witnessed were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbours clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.’
Most of the ‘looting’ which shocked white America was in fact, semi-organised requisitioning, as Denise Moore, who was stuck in the convention centre explained:
‘Yes, there were young men with guns there. But they organised the crowd. They went to Canal Street and “looted”, and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. When the police rolled down windows and yelled out “the buses are coming”, the young men with guns organised the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back. Just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first.’
While the poor were left to slowly starve, the capitalist state sprang into action to defend private property, pouring armed National Guard into the city. Hundreds of mercenaries from Blackwater Associates, including two former bodyguards to Paul Bremer, patrolled the streets of rich neighbourhoods. Granta Police fired shots to prevent the refugees from entering dry areas of the city. The Army Times reported that ‘Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans’ to ‘fight the insurgency’.
The death and destruction also spread across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, devastating an area as big as Britain. Hundreds of thousands of Latinos live in the area, most of them undocumented workers. Scared of being thrown out of the country, only a few hundred have registered with the authorities for relief benefits. Workers from the Caribbean who worked on Mississippi’s casino boats, had visas tied to their jobs and don’t know their immigration status.
Was the bungled preparation, evacuation and rescue inevitable? Not at all: tiny socialist Cuba gets hit by many of the same hurricanes as the US, without the total human suffering, because the state represents not private property, but the majority of the people; people come before things; there is thorough planning, preparation and total involvement of the population. Planning in the US serves the large corporations, which dominate the economy, not the people. Walmart and Home Depot used their superbly organised supply chains to move water, food, plywood boards and emergency materials efficiently to their stores beforehand. But this was only for paying customers, not for everyone. So what stopped the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from doing the same thing for everyone?
Work for FEMA – no experience necessary
FEMA has horrified even some capitalists by turning away trailers full of water that companies were donating to flood victims in New Orleans. Not content with screwing up the rescue, the FEMA bureaucracy is turning the relief effort into a hopeless mess – turning away donations, preventing volunteers from participating ‘for security reasons’, delaying and postponing vital decisions, unable to coordinate its own operations.
The Democrats claim this is because Bush has replaced professionals, who know what they’re doing, with political appointees: for example, head of FEMA Michael Brown’s previous job, before he was fired from it, was with the International Arabian Horse Association. Republicans have responded by attacking ‘bureaucracy’. Is there something about large organisations or government departments which means that everything is delayed and disorganised? Not at all. Capitalist bureaucracy is dedicated to serving the needs of capital, not of working people: it was capable of organising effectively to attack Iraq. Anything else is a perfunctory duty, a crumb thrown to give some credibility to the appearance of helping everyone. A police officer who saves someone from drowning in the morning is just diverting from his main job: he or she will be hard at work cracking a striker’s skull in the afternoon and harassing and framing black youth in the evening.
There is no way that this kind of state can effectively organise, mobilise and harness the energy of the entire population: it must be in control, must be in charge at all times, dare not, cannot leverage the spontaneity of the population, when they volunteer or donate in kind, even if this kills people.
Where the buck stops
If the state is moving at snail’s pace to help the suffering population, it is moving like greased lightning to help capital profit from the crisis. Bush has signed an Executive Order waiving the application of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. The Davis-Bacon Act applies to Federal construction contracts, requiring that they pay at least the prevailing local wage. This is a clear attack on trade unions. The Department of Labor has suspended affirmative action requirements designed to ensure that minorities, women, veterans and disabled people are equitably represented amongst employees working on Federal contracts.
With the wholesale destruction of the housing stock, rented property is suddenly at capacity in the area. This will only lead to further rent rises. Gas is at a premium, having almost doubled in price over the last year. Public transport has been obliterated in some areas. Even their insurance policies may turn out to be worthless. Insurance companies, sitting on some $1.3 trillion of reserves, have decided that the storm damage was due to flood, not wind damage. Since only a minority of families, those residing in the floodplain, purchase flood insurance, this means that many families will be left without funds to rebuild their homes. The insurance companies have been offering small ‘emergency payments’ which quietly slip waivers of any future compensation into their fine print.
Yet, if workers have to tighten their belts, the capitalists are being encouraged to let them out. Along with a huge package of $62bn of Federal spending has come the raising of purchasing limits. Before, a purchase had to exceed only $2,500 to require scrutiny; now this has been raised to $250,000, a surefire guarantee of padded contracts, corrupt dealings and fraudulent purchases. A recent audit revealed that employees at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) diverted millions of dollars to personal purchases through their government credit cards. Investigators estimated that 15% abused their government credit cards at a cost of $5.8 million, buying Ozzy Osbourne concert tickets, tattoos, lingerie, bartender school tuition, car payments, and pizzas. Amongst the military, apparently a racier crowd, the cards have been used to finance gambling, visits to strip clubs, cruise tickets and ‘transactions at houses of prostitution’. Faced with this abuse, raising the spending limit a hundredfold will do nothing to help the hurricane victims, but is guaranteed to ensure a hundredfold increase in corruption.
These were the same changes that led to the phenomenal profiteering and mismanagement of money by the Provisional Administration in Iraq. And just like Iraq, huge no-bid contracts have been handed out to politically connected corporations like Fluor, the Shaw Group, Bechtel and KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary. These contracts are awarded on a ‘cost-plus’ basis, guaranteeing profits, however much money is spent.
The final, perhaps cruellest and most appropriate act of capital, however, may be in what it decides to do with New Orleans. The city was already a disaster area for black people, who were two-thirds of the inhabitants. One third of the population had incomes below the poverty line. 40% were functionally illiterate; the school dropout rate was between 35 and 50%. The infant mortality rate for blacks was 14.3 per thousand live births. The city was riddled with crime: in a recent experiment, the police fired off 700 blank rounds – no-one reported the gunfire. Serious measures to change this have been ignored until the hurricane gave developers the opportunity: ‘We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans’, Representative Richard Baker boasted: ‘We couldn’t do it, but God did.’ The anticipated renewal will completely remake the city. The wealthy white families want the black population removed. According to one: ‘Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically. … The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again or we’re out.’
FRFI 187 October / November 2005
