Revolution #015, September 25, 2005, posted at revcom.us
September 15, New Orleans: Surrounded by death and destruction, George W. Bush addressed the nation with his plan to rebuild New Orleans—a big plan to cash in on the misery, suffering and death brought by hurricane Katrina.
First, he took a moment to channel Bill Clinton, and feel the pain of “fellow Americans calling out for food and water.” And he even acknowledged “a history of [note, history, not present day reality of] racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.”
Bush slandered the people who worked together to survive—those who foraged for food and survival supplies, the people—including many Black youth—who kept tens of thousands of people alive. He had the unbelievable gall to call them “criminals who had no mercy”—clueless to the glaring irony that he himself and the class he fronts for are the ones who saw the people of New Orleans as not worth the investment it would have taken to secure the city from a Level 5 Hurricane, and who are now lining up to profit off the misery of the people in the region.
Louisiana congressman Richard Baker revealed how these truly merciless criminals really think, when he said: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
These same religious conservatives preach that the poor should be “personally accountable” for their plight —covering up the reality of centuries of oppression and exploitation. (And let’s not forget it was Clinton who wiped out “welfare as we know it.”)
Bush bragged that the government was “beginning to bring in mobile homes and trailers for temporary use,” and bringing in a few doctors. Meanwhile, thousands of people are living in horrific conditions, getting deadlines to move out but with nowhere to go. Very ominouslyñand this says something about what the rulers are preparing to do—Bush announced that “the Department of Homeland Security is registering evacuees who are now in shelters, churches, or private homes.”
So now hundreds of thousands of displaced, hungry, angry Black and poor people will be added to the lists of randomly selected Middle Easterners, Muslims, political dissidents, and other “threats to U.S. security”—to be “registered” for possible surveillance, roundups, and detention.
This comes on top of knocking down laws that supposedly restrained the use of the US military to enforce laws on US soil, the widespread deployment of the National Guard, and statements like the one from Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, that the armed forces were going to turn New Orleans into a “little Somalia.”
Bush said: “It is entrepreneurship that creates jobs and opportunity. It is entrepreneurship that helps break the cycle of poverty, and we will take the side of entrepreneurs as they lead the economic revival of the Gulf region.”
Two things need to be said about this: Bullshit. And, bullshit.
First, entrepreneurship doesn’t do any of that. It promotes petty, competitive, look out for number one, dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest. The solution to the problem is not petty entrepreneurs competing with each other to get rich. In fact, in the midst of some of the most terrible conditions, we saw a glimmer of another way of people relating to each other. We saw people working together—not climbing on top of each other—to survive. As one elderly woman said, “Those looters are the only ones keeping us alive.” It is this kind of caring, cooperation, and creative initiative that Bush calls “criminals who had no mercy.”
Second, this entrepreneur thing is bullshit because Bush’s plan isn’t mainly about small time business. It’s about monopoly capital, like the corporations that are getting handed billion dollar contracts to “rebuild” the region, and who are busily and greedily getting rich “rebuilding” Iraq. (See “Pigs at the Trough,” page 4 in this issue.)
The actual picture that emerges from Bush’s plan is one of a stripped-down, leaner, meaner (in every sense) city, with zoning laws, minimum wage protections, environmental protection, and civil liberties blown away in a second hurricane of federal “help,” all in order to facilitate a restructuring of big capital to more ruthlessly and efficiently extract profits from the region.
The heart of this is Bush’s proposal for a “Gulf Opportunity Zone”—encompassing the disaster zones of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. He said, “Within this zone, we should provide immediate incentives for job-creating investment: tax relief for small businesses, incentives to companies that create jobs and loans and loan guarantees for small businesses, including minority-owned enterprises, to get them up and running again.”
This is the same model used in Third World countries to attract blood-sucking corporations—by promising them the highest possible profits, no taxes, minimal government regulations (for things like environmental protection and worker safety), and the lowest possible wages. Rightwing think-tanks have advocated such zones for decades to draw the poor of the inner cities into a profitable sweatshop economy.
Federal rules for competitive bidding have already been tossed aside, so that corporations are getting contracts for massive, open-ended construction, clean-up and supply projects—with a “blank check” for budgets and profits. On Sep-tem-ber 8, Bush suspended the Bacon-Davis Act, the federal law that requires subsidized construction projects to pay “prevailing wage rates.” So already low wages in this region will be driven further down.
While competing centers of capital fight over the details, a basic image is emerging of a “New Orleans theme-park” on the site of some of what was New Orleans, with troublesome housing projects and angry people dispersed, locked down, monitored by “homeland security,” and working for starvation wages.News reports of long lines of people applying for low wage jobs give a preview of the future in store for the people in Bush’s “recovery” vision.
Bush talked about a “determination to clear the ruins and build better than before”—but under the current system, “better” doesn’t mean a better life for the people, it means more profit sucked out of the people. And it means reinforcing and intensifying the oppression of Black people—locked at the very bottom of society for 400 years.
As columnist Paul Krugman wrote in the September 16th issue of the New York Times,
“It’s a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Herritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the adminstration’s recovery plan, has already publsiched a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on enviornmental rules, the elmination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.”
Instead of mobilizing vast numbers of people to donate their time, labor, and creativity to help—which would be done in a socialist society and has been done in socialist societies in response to natural disasters—this system starts from how to squeeze the most profit out of all this, seeing the hurricane as an act of god that wiped out troublesome public housing, and dispersed troublesome people whose slave, and proletarian ancestors built the city of New Orleans, and who worked at its hotels, restaurants, and other tourist attractions.
In the ruins and suffering, they can only see a giant opportunity to clear away obstacles that stand in the way of maximizing profit. How appropriate that Bush delivered his speech standing in front of a statue of former president Andrew Jackson, who was a slaveowner while he was president.
Katrina, and the official response, left millions suffering. And it brought forward millions of others straining to help. But capitalism can’t connect the desire and ability of people to help with the problem of rebuilding this region. Instead, the recovery effort itself is commanded, directed and twisted not by the needs of the people but by the demands of profit in the most cold, heartless, and intolerable ways.
Things cannot go down like this. Already, the system has compounded the misery and suffering of Hurricane Katrina, and now they want to plunder and profit off all the destruction in ways that will make things even worse yet.
The uncaring, cold-blooded actions of this system in the wake of Katrina revealed a reality of an uncaring, cold-blooded system. We must never forgive and never forget that. Nor can we accept, or accommodate ourselves to, Bush’s plan to bulldoze away human beings to pave the way for restructured capital investment and unleashed greed.
The demands in the August 31 Statement of the Revolutionary Communist Party must continue to be raised and fought for: At the government’s expense, people must get decent housing and care until they can safely return to their homes. Hotels, convention centers, and other buildings must be provided to people in need of shelter and there must be free communication for people to contact relatives.
Immediately, there must be emergency medical care and measures to prevent massive epidemics and needless dying. Those charged with so-called looting must have their charges dropped. People must NOT be abandoned or allowed to die. All necessary resources, including mobilizing volunteers, must be brought to bear on this. And the government must not repress people who volunteer or prevent them from helping, but instead must assist these efforts. And there must be no profiteering and speculation off people’s misery by the sharks of insurance companies, oil monopolies, real estate developers, and so on.