Alex Miller
The Australian Socialist Alliance expresses it deepest, most heartfelt sympathy to all those who lost loved ones in the death, destruction and chaos wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, Mississippi and other southern states of the USA.
This tragedy is, of course, a natural disaster. However, it is first and foremost a social disaster. The hundreds, maybe thousands, of deaths Katrina produced lie at the door of the Bush administration and the US corporate elite on whose behalf it rules.
This tremendous suffering and loss of life was not inevitable. With proper policies of anti-hurricane defence, loss of human life can be reduced to a minimum. For example, Cuba emerged from six major hurricanes in the seven years between 1996 and 2002 with the loss of only 16 lives. In 2004, a category-five hurricane slammed into the island with 160 mile-an-hour winds causing the destruction of 20,000 houses, yet not a single person died.
(This result is due to the island's comprehensive anti-hurricane defence system which is recognised as a model. For details see Oxfam report Weathering the Storm at < http://www.oxfamamerica.org/newsandpublications/publications/rA href="mailto:esearch_reports/art7111.html"><esearch_reports/art7111.html>.)
By contrast the richest country in the world, where the market and private profit rule, could not defend its own people, even though the effect of a hurricane of Katrina's severity on a city New Orleans — which lies well below sea level and is protected from the sea by a system of levees — has been well understood for years.
In 1998, Louisiana politicians developed a plan — "Coast 2050" — to improve the levee system: the plan was vetoed by the Bush administration after it was approved by Congress.
In 2005, the Bush administration cut the funds for levees and flood control in New Orleans by US$71.2 million, or 44%. The money was needed to fund Bush's astronomically expensive military misadventure in Iraq.
Moreover, in the mad drive for profit, building developers were allowed to drain vast areas of wetlands along the coast: wetlands that provide a natural barrier and absorbent for the hurricanes to which the area is frequently exposed.
Once Hurricane Katrina hit, the price of all this criminal neglect of basic social infrastructure and community protection was cruelly exposed.
In the face of the crisis, the Bush administration and local authorities simply advised the residents of New Orleans to flee the city. It is estimated that 28% of the city's residents live below the official poverty line. What about the 35% of black households who don't have a car? What about the thousands too poor to afford public transport (if they could find it), where were they to go with no money to pay for accommodation?
Why were thousands of poor people trapped in New Orleans when there were hundreds of trains and buses that could have taken them to safety lying unused as the flood waters rose?
Why was a third of the Louisiana National Guard in the Persian Gulf guarding the rape of Iraq by the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel when it could have been helping to evacuate the city?
Why did the US government order its troops and police to "shoot-to-kill" people merely struggling to survive in a watery hell it had helped to create?
The fact that the government had no evacuation plan is not the result of personal incompetence on the part of Michael Brown, sacked head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or even, indeed, of George W. Bush, the man who sacked him.
It is the natural position of a ruling elite that puts the pursuit of profit above all else, which attacks essential social spending as "big government" and which exhibits brutal racist indifference towards the country's black communities.
Moreover, any government that cared about protecting its citizens against the threat of hurricanes would also have been sensitive to a fact the Bush administration cannot afford to take seriously: the number and severity of hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico has been increasing in recent years.
While meteorologists are still divided on the impact of global warming on hurricane activity, there is gathering evidence that this trend may well be helping generate hurricanes of increasing destructive power.
For example, between 1944 and 1996 there were on average 10 named hurricanes per year. In 2004, there were 16 named hurricanes, and there are 20 expected in 2005. According to a recent study in the journal Nature by former global warming sceptic Kerry Emanuel, there has been a clear and unprecedented leap in the destructive potential of hurricanes since the early 1990s for which the rising sea surface temperatures brought on by global warming provide the most obvious explanation (see ).
Yet conservative politicians like Bush and Australian PM John Howard play down the reality threat of global warming and say that the free market, in time, will devise its own solutions to the problem.
Anyone still inclined to believe that should take a careful look at New Orleans. The "plan" that Howard and Bush have for dealing with global warming is the same as the evacuation plan Bush had for New Orleans: it doesn't exist.
In a perceptive comment on the New Orleans disaster, British socialist Alex Callinicos writes: "The aftermaths of such disasters always act as X-rays, exposing the inner faults of the societies where they occur". In a statement
to the media at the recent Forbes CEO conference in Sydney, right-wing US politician and former New York mayor Rudi Guliani said he had a message for the protesters outside: "The way out of poverty is business and capitalism".
The X-ray provided by Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and other towns and cities along the Gulf coast reveals how hollow Guliani's claim actually is. Capitalism cannot solve the problems of poverty, hunger and social catastrophe in the Third World: it increasingly replicates them within the so-called First World.
[This statement was adopted by the Socialist Alliance National Executive on September 18, 2005.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, September 28, 2005.
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