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| Sunday, 11 September 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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America's
shame: the aftermath of Katrina
by Arvind Sivaramakrishnan
"America's dirty secret." That is what a British TV news reporter, speaking live from Louisiana, called the underclass of America's poor. A tale of systematic neglect, administrative incompetence, market-driven environmental destruction, and desperate poverty is unfolding in Louisiana. It is exposing squalor that would shame a third-world country, as well as racial and political divisions reminiscent of apartheid South Africa. The facts themselves are grim enough. As if the rain brought by Hurricane Katrina did not do enough, the dykes and levees built to keep the sea out of the city of New Orleans collapsed for lengths of hundreds of metres. The resultant flooding caused what may well amount to thousands of deaths, untold billions of dollars worth of damage, and rendered the city uninhabitable for what is now estimated to be another two years. Minimal aid, in the form of basic food and water, is finally reaching those who have survived. It is simply not known how many are still stranded in the upper floors of their homes and apartment blocks, nor how many have perished. Some experts have said the forensic task of identifying the dead will be far harder than that which followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as the bodies in Louisiana are decomposing very quickly in temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius. State officials say there is no system for collecting and storing the bodies. What is most shocking about this disaster is that it has occurred in the world's richest and most powerful country. To start with, the hurricane warnings predicted an even stronger storm than Katrina turned out to be. Although the effects of such a storm and of a breach in the levees were modelled by officials a year or two ago, the federal government said there was no money to implement a response to such an emergency. Further, in 2004 the federal government in Washington stopped funding for maintenance and fortification work on the levees, which were therefore neglected for the first time in nearly 40 years. Environment protection is an easy target for the budget cuts central to neoliberal economics and politics. In addition, wetlands around New Orleans - which provide vital protection against flooding and tidal surges - have been drained and built upon, and the federal government has tied all environmental funding to the promotion of inter-State commerce. (A similar problem has occurred in southern England, where in some areas planning regulations were abolished for ideological reasons, despite municipal engineers' warnings; building contractors made huge profits on the deregulated floodplains, and the new residents were inevitably the victims of severe winter flooding. Now the owners of the houses cannot get insurance for their properties and cannot find buyers when they seek to sell.) Secondly, officials at all levels were very slow to see the scale of the disaster, and President George W. Bush and his immediate circle are being openly accused of neglect or even indifference. It took the President two days to curtail his holiday and make a flight over New Orleans in his official jet, and when he did make a ground visit he kept well away from the worst-hit areas. In his public statements, he has shown none of the spontaneity he showed when he - again after some days - appeared at the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001. He has struggled to express any shred of emotion about the Louisiana disaster. Not for President Bush the ordinary compassion shown by Senator Edward Kennedy, who in 1971 tramped knee-deep in mud through the refugee camps on the Indian side of the India-Bangladesh border. Further, having said in purported justification of the invasion of Iraq that "the American way of life is not negotiable," he has been shown on TV pleading with those in Louisiana who could drive not to use too much petrol. As to other senior federal officials, Vice-President Dick Cheney is still on holiday in Wyoming, and as the disaster took place Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was publicly seen in Manhattan shopping for shoes at $7,000 a pair. Meanwhile worldwide television was showing, for example, dead bodies of victims in wheelchairs abandoned in sports stadia and convention centres, pushed against walls and left. Other TV news reports showed outbreaks of violence, with gangs looting every shop they could, and at one point relief helicopters turned back because they were being shot at. Even the initial relief effort, slow as it was, was hampered by the fact that some 10,000 of the Louisiana State Guard are in Iraq, pursuing a war which very large numbers of Americans are now questioning very deeply. The U.S. political system is also showing the characteristic reactions of rich countries when faced with refugees. Politicians in the State of Texas, to which about 100,000 refugees have fled from Louisiana, are saying they cannot take any more and that they need federal government help from Washington DC. They openly cite the fact that Texas, one of the most extreme Republican States, has no public services worth the name. Texas is most of the size of Europe, is soaking rich with oil money, and has a population of 22 million. It is not known if the Texan exchequer has offered any aid, but Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist, has offered $1 million as aid via the Red Cross, and Cuban President Fidel Castro, a communist, has offered 1100 doctors and 26 tonnes of medicines. Dealing with refugees Bit by bit too, the potential long-term costs of the disaster are starting to emerge. The economy of Louisiana itself has suffered incalculable damage. The neighbouring State of Mississippi, which has some of the worst poverty in the United States, is faced with the collapse of the tourist business on which it depends. Other southern States are faced with the costs of housing hundreds of thousands of refugees for two years or more; the refugees are just that, with nothing left but the clothes they stand in. Maintaining the levees of New Orleans would have cost a few tens of millions of dollars, loose change for a country that has already spent $170 billion on its war in Iraq and is subsidising private agribusiness corporations to the tune of $180 billion. Among the most significant of the political issues is the very status of the victims themselves. The overwhelming bulk of them are poor and black. For centuries they have had next to no voice in the politics of the U.S., and it has even been said that, since the start of the Reagan presidency in 1980, significant Supreme Court rulings and federal tax cuts (such as the impending abolition of death duties on estates) have been intended to harm them and to favour the rich, who are overwhelmingly white. Even African-Americans' access to the most formal elements of the political system has been severely restricted. Byzantine voter-registration procedures, many of which in the southern States were designed to make it as hard as possible for black voters to register, mean that African-Americans are hugely underrepresented on the States' electoral rolls. They are people whom, it seems, America does not want to think about. They are the single poorest group in the U.S., large proportions of them are not on the voting lists, and even if they are and even if they vote, they certainly do not vote Republican. Indeed it is not even clear if President Bush and his Republican cohorts regard them as Americans at all. The flood waters of Louisiana may now be a gigantic open sewer, riddled with disease and with sharks, alligators, and snakes swimming through city streets, but the political secrets now being washed up may be even dirtier. (Dr. Sivaramakrishnan is lecturer in politics at Taunton's College, Southampton, U.K.) (Courtesy: The Hindu) |
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