‘Drowning New Orleans’

President George W. Bush, flanked by his cabinet, deflected media questions about the slowness of the federal government’s response to the hurricane disaster by declaring that he did not want to “play the blame game.” This is akin to a bank robber caught in the act pleading that “Now is not the time to make accusations.”

Of course, the Bush-Rove strategy is precisely to play the “blame game.” The White House is trying to direct attention to the failures of state and local authorities. Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, has begun talking about the “breakdown of state and local authorities.”

Rep. Tom DeLay, the Republican House majority leader, has canceled House hearings on the Katrina response by declaring it is a local and state problem. “It’s the local officials trying to handle the problem. When they can’t handle the problem, they go to the state, and the state does what they can do, and if they need assistance from FEMA and the federal government they ask for it and it’s delivered.” (CNN, Sept. 7)

Of course, the Bush administration is the primary culprit in this disaster. It appointed Bush’s national campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, as director of FEMA for the first two years of the administration. Allbaugh knew nothing about disaster management. He resigned and appoin ted Michael Brown, another Bush crony, to be the new director. Brown also knew nothing about disaster management.

Allbaugh went on to become a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary KBR. Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, a giant oil services corporation, before he came to the Bush administration. These two directors, operating under Chertoff, choked off funds for New Orleans hurricane preparations.

Bush created the Department of Home land Security in March 2003. The DHS absorbed 22 agencies, including FEMA.

DHS diminished the progressive functions of these agencies, such as funding public health and preparing for natural disasters. It spent billions on giving out contracts to corporations for such things as “bioterrorism”—part of the campaign to sustain a permanent national frenzy over terrorism. The aim was to justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars on “staying the course” in the quagmire of the Iraq occupation.

Trying to get off the hook

Scientific American magazine, in its October 2001 piece entitled “Drowning New Orleans” by Mark Fischetti, revealed how the New Orleans authorities were preparing for a major hurricane.

“The boxes are stacked eight-feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. ‘As the water recedes,’ says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, ‘we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.’”

The Scientific American article revealed in detail both a computer model of the expected hurricane and a concrete program of prevention—including sea gates that would stop Gulf storm surges from reaching Lake Pontchartrain and measures to rebuild the city’s natural defenses against storms.

But instead of preparing to prevent the disaster, New Orleans disaster emergency authorities were preparing for 10,000 deaths.

It is doubtful that they informed the largely African American population of New Orleans about the 10,000 body bags. They didn’t call for mass demonstrations to demand funding. Neither did the governor, the mayor, the congressional repre sentatives or the senators. They all played by the rules of capitalism.

Hurricane after hurricane threatened New Orleans. Preparations moved at a snail’s pace. Staring disaster in the face—disaster for the people, that is—these capitalist politicians, mostly from the Demo cratic Party, confined their efforts to lobbying and horse trading in Baton Rouge and Washington. They settled for piecemeal handouts that did not come close to getting the job done.

Everyone is now trying to get off the hook.

Big business wants answers

But the Wall Street Journal, the voice of big business, is not waiting for Congress or the president to investigate. Their system has been shaken and they are conducting their own detailed investigation. The ruling class wants to know what really happened. They want to know right away and without the distortions and cover-ups expected from their own politicians.

As part of its investigation, to which it has assigned no less than 21 reporters, a WSJ article on Sept. 7 describes in chilling detail what Walter Maestri was preparing for in 2001. The newspaper precisely pinpointed the areas of flooding and how they developed by interviewing 90 eyewitnesses.

“Trapped between three cascades of water were the neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward, where nearly 14,000 African Americans lived, a third of whom owned no vehicle and a third of whom had physical disabilities, according to U.S. Census Data ... .

“To the north, water poured through Black and Vietnamese neighborhoods closer to Lake Pontchartrain, where an oth er 96,000 people lived ... large numbers of those people had not evacuated.”

The Lower Ninth Ward is located next to an industrial canal. “As the hurricane rolled into New Orleans, scores of boats broke free or sank. In the Industrial Canal, the gush of water broke a barge from its moorings. It isn’t known whose barge it was. The huge steel hull became a water-borne missile. It hurtled into the canal’s eastern wall just north of the major street passing through the Lower Ninth Ward,” creating a 500-foot breach.

In less than five minutes the water was 7 to 10 feet deep.

The canal is operated “mostly by the federal government,” according to the Journal. It is a crucial waterway “for vessels carrying petroleum products, industrial chemicals and oil-field pipes because it connects the river to the Gulf. ...

“Barges and ships were routinely delayed because of growing traffic levels and the lock was ‘literally falling apart at the hinges’ in 1998, according to a U.S. Army Corp of Engineers report.” It was never replaced.

As for the slanderous reports about people refusing to obey the mandatory evacuation, Stanley P. Stewart, a 49-year-old mechanic from the Lower Ninth Ward, told the Journal: “Where was I to go? I’d like to ask the mayor how you take 14 people with no finances and book them in a hotel. It’s not that we didn’t leave. It’s that we couldn’t.”

Guilty at all levels

What the Journal may not reveal is what Scientific American showed about how the oil and gas industry has built pipe lines and channels through the marsh lands over the years. It is estimated that these projects are responsible for a third of the erosion of the natural protection of the marshlands. Land developers also have played a destructive role.

What emerges clearly from the preliminary investigation is that, while Bush is to blame in the short run, all the capitalist authorities are to blame. They have no concern for the masses. They let the oil industry and shipping industry have their way year after year. The capitalist government is primarily organized to support the profit-making enterprises of the corporations and for purposes of repression.

Helping the workers and the oppressed people who suffer under this system of exploitation is the last thing on their list of priorities. But now that this disaster has happened, they will all blame each other and vie to show that they want to help the people.

Bush and the Congress rushed back to Washington overnight when Terri Schiavo, who was brain dead, was going to have a life-support tube removed. But the potential emergency affecting the lives of well over 1 million people never got their attention. They were too busy making deals and planning how to enhance their careers.

Suddenly they found $10.1 billion and are promising up to $50 billion more. Any significant portion of that money, appropriated at the proper time and used in a genuinely constructive way, could have saved thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs.

The political managers of the system realize that there is a deep crisis—a crisis of confidence in the system among the people. They are rushing belatedly to repair the image of the system while trying to balance “responsibility” with political ambition.

Only the Congressional Black Caucus, among all government bodies, has unequivocally denounced Bush. Former President Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is trying to shield Bush. He has said that we all have to pull together. He has teamed up with George Bush senior to show “bipartisan” class unity between the two capitalist parties in the crisis.

Senators Susan Collins, Republican from Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, Democrat from Connecticut, have called for a Katrina commission to investigate. But they should be investigating themselves. They are on the Senate Govern mental Affairs Committee. Hurricane preparedness definitely falls under the definition of governmental affairs.

Where were they? The New Orleans situation was known nationally as a disaster waiting to happen. There were debates and discussions in the open and behind the scenes in Congress over appropriations to deal with the situation.

Congress is all talk

As far as the people are concerned, Congress is just all talk, with capitalist politicians drawing high salaries and holding fancy titles—like chairperson of the Governmental Affairs Committee or of the environmental and coastal subcommittee, etc., ad nauseam. But their real job is to grease the wheels of the capitalist machine of exploitation.

Right now, the Navy has asked Halli burton to fix its installations damaged in New Orleans. Halliburton is a firm that services the giant oil monopolies, including Chevron, ExxonMobile, Conoco, Philips, and others. Halli burton is a corrupt war contractor in Iraq serving the oil industry there, among other things.

The oil companies pump hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil every day out of the Gulf. They refine hundreds of thousands of barrels in the Mississippi Delta region. They are gouging the public at the gas pumps. They have contributed mightily to the deterioration of the New Orleans environment. And their interest is primary in the Iraq war—which is being fought mostly for oil and fabulous profits.

With all the issues on the table—gas prices, the war, the oil industry’s role in the floods and the corruption of Halli burton—the Democrats could have a political field day and make gains among the people. But their orientation is to be the loyal imperialist opposition--with the emphasis on obsequious loyalty.

In addition, they have to be careful not to dig too deep or they will uncover the dereliction of the Clinton administration —before Bush—and the Democratic-controlled Congress. They too allowed the oil companies and the industry to have a free hand at eroding the ecology of the region and failed to fund and carry out responsible disaster management planning that all the experts said for years was necessary.

The lesson for the workers and the oppressed is that leaving their fate to the capitalist authorities is a prescription for disaster. The only way out is to organize independently and establish popular authority through organizations outside the framework of the capitalist political parties and governmental apparatus.

Community organizations, unions and all other organizations of the people must have supervisory authority and responsibility in matters of public safety. That means pushing aside the capitalist profit system. It must be done.