Barry Sheppard
Any person in the world who is not a stone cold racist or sociopath cannot help but react with visceral disgust, outrage and revulsion at the criminal response of the US government to the catastrophe of New Orleans; and to feel deep sympathy with the victims of that criminality.
The Cuban and Venezuelan governments immediately responded in solidarity, offering assistance of all kinds, from highly trained doctors to oil and gasoline. Washington compounded its criminal behaviour by refusing these offers, although i has since accepted Venezuela's.
Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster. The human-made one was far worse.
Reality of US capitalism
The TV pictures of bloated, rotting black bodies floating in flooded New Orleans streets; of the suffering of those "rescued" and cooped up in the Superdome and Convention Center — almost all African-American; of the prisoners brought to patches of dry ground as the prisons went under the waters — every one of which I saw was black; of the black parents sobbing because they have been separated from their children and vice-versa; of elderly blacks slumped over dead in their wheelchairs; and dead black children, who didn't receive food, water or medicine for days. These pictures graphically expressed a fundamental truth about the US.
That truth is that institutionalised racism remains part and parcel of the basic structure of US capitalism.
An article in the September 3 San Francisco Chronicle reports on "a tale of two cities". At a high-priced hotel in the French Quarter, the staff stayed behind to protect it from "looters". "We're eating like kings", one of them said of the T-bone steaks, bow tie noodles in basil sauce and grilled talapia washed down with fine wines. "We've got to eat it all before it goes bad."
"Less than half a mile away", the article continued, "at the Convention Center Sadique Jabbar's first meal was a bag of Cheetos someone gave her around 11a.m. 'You know the only reason we've been fed?' Jabbar said. 'Some men out of prison have been breaking into buildings, getting food for us and bringing it back here.'
"At the convention center, the stench from the bathrooms is overpowering. Feces cover the floors. After five days, no one bothers using them anymore."
Over two-thirds of New Orleans is black and 35% live in poverty. Many do not have the cars, credit cards, or drivers' licences that would have enabled them to escape.
It took days for President Bush to get off his arse at his Crawford, Texas farm where he had been vacationing and take a little look-see at the devastation. And it took even longer for the federal government to even begin to do anything. When Bush finally did say something, his speech sounded like his standard one about Iraq — that everything was going along just fine. Even the New York Times had to lambast that speech the next day.
Vice-President Dick "Halliburton" Cheney stayed on his vacation even longer than Bush, as did Secretary of State Condolezza "Big Oil" Rice. The Congress, too — Democrats and Republicans — couldn't find the urgency to cut short their vacations.
Racism
Racism played a big part in the government's allowing the catastrophe to grind on day after day, becoming progressively worse. At a concert to raise money for the victims, a Black rap singer pointed out that "Bush doesn't like Black people". While that remark was initially broadcast inadventantly by NBC, the station later censored it when it was played on the West Coast.
Blacks who were able to wade or swim to higher ground began to break into stores to get food and bottled water. Some also grabbed things poor people had been deprived of, such as clothes, shoes, and TVs. Media reporters, who were somehow able to be on the scene when the government just couldn't make it, began to call these people "looters". And yes, perhaps some anti-social elements began to take advantage of the situation (although scenes of these were never shown on TV), but the labelling of these desperate people as "looters" was an attempt to turn the victims into the criminals, as black rights leader Malcolm X explained decades ago.
When troops finally did start to arrive, their primary objective wasn't saving people but to shoot and arrest the "looters". Once again, property trumped people.
Rice firmly rejected that race played any role in the government's failure to act, but such buffoonery convinced no-one.
Of course whites suffered too, and poor whites suffered more than rich. But not even Rice attempted to deny that New Orleans was largely a black tragedy.
The callousness of the Bush regime has been exposed. When the president did finally visit the airport at New Orleans, without even visiting the emergency hospital on the tarmac filled with the dehydrated, starved, sick and dying patients, who were there because of him, he joked about how he used to have fun imbibing in the city during his drinking days before he found Jesus.
Bush's mother did him one better. Referring to the thousands of black refugees who had made it to temporary shelter in another football stadium in Texas, she opined that they were probably better off there since they were "disadvantaged" back home before. The hurricane was actually a blessing in disguise!
The criminal and anti-human behaviour of the US administration is part and parcel of a decades-long policy of Democrats as well as Republicans, and a logical expression of it. Step by step, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and successive administrations of both parties have been in a relentless drive to cut back "big government".
By "big government", they don't mean their bloated military and its budgets. They mean social services, such as unemployment benefits, welfare, social security, medical benefits, affirmative action to help women and minorities, and other aspects of the social wage that were won in struggle. They mean to beat back rights that blacks and women gained.
The Republicans are in the vanguard of this drive. But as the Republicans move to the right, the Democrats have followed along, remaining just a shade to the left of the Republicans. Sometimes the Democrats get out ahead. It was Bill Clinton who ended "welfare as we know it" and led the charge against "big government" when he was president.
Underneath this talk about "big government" is an ideology that both parties support, reflecting the views of the ruling capitalist class. The social wage that has been won from the capitalists cuts into their profits. They gave up these concessions to working people only under the duress of massive struggle. Franklin Roosevelt had to explain to the more backward sections of the capitalist class during the 1930s, that a "little socialism" was needed to "save capitalism" during the Great Depression and subsequent massive labour upsurge.
Another factor that was present in the 1930s was the existence of the Soviet Union, which had full employment and rising production while capitalism was in disarray. Since the stagnation of the Soviet bloc and then its collapse and return to capitalism, this pressure lessened and then evaporated. The way seemed open to smash the working class and drive to dominate the world. Why give anything to the workers?
Of course, whether they get away with it depends on whether the working people here and abroad fight back.
Regime in crisis
Part of the situation facing the ruling class is that the current regime it is counting on to press ahead for it on both the domestic and foreign fronts is facing a deepening crisis. The 9/11 attack was a godsend to the rulers. They made initial gains in Afghanistan, and had wide public support among the US people. There were more misgivings among millions before the war against Iraq, since the connection to 9/11 wasn't apparent, but that receded as it appeared the US would achieve a quick victory. As the war dragged on, and the resistance to the occupation grew, the price in treasure and lives increasingly eroded public support for the war.
The exposure of the lies told by both parties about the war, the revelations of Abu Ghraib and increasing international isolation further eroded that support. When Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq, made her pilgrimage to Bush's Crawford farm, her individual act of courage came at the right time. It struck a deep chord among tens of millions of people in the US.
The Bush administration was put on the defensive. The criminal reaction of the administration to New Orleans has been met with widespread revulsion. It has combined with the growing opposition to the war to create a major crisis of confidence in the US population.
Writers in the New York Times have compared Bush's situation to that faced by Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and Richard Nixon in 1973. The upcoming demonstrations against the war on September 24 will be larger than they looked like being a few months ago. And New Orleans will now be another theme of the protests.
From Green Left Weekly, September 14, 2005.
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