Alexander Cockburn: New Orleans After Katrina

From: <www.counterpunch.org

Cockburn / St. Clair New Orleans After Katrina August 31, 2005 CounterPunch

Tuesday night, as water rose to 20 feet through most of New Orleans, CNN relayed an advisory that food in refrigerators would last only four hours, would have to be thrown out. The next news item from CNN was an indignant bellow about "looters" of 7/11s and a Walmart. Making no attempt to conceal the racist flavor of the coverage, the press openly describes white survivors as "getting food from a flooded store," while blacks engaged in the same struggle for survival are smeared as "looters."

The reverence for property is now the underlying theme of many newscasts, with defense of The Gap being almost the first order of duty for the forces of law and order. But the citizens looking for clothes to wear and food to eat are made of tougher fiber and are more desperate than the polite demonstrators who guarded The Gap and kindred chains in Seattle in
1999. The police in New Orleans are only patrolling in large armed groups. One spoke of "meeting some resistance," as if the desperate citizens of New Orleans were Iraqi insurgents.

Also on Tuesday night the newscasts were reporting that in a city whose desperate state is akin the Dacca in Bangladesh a few years ago, there were precisely seven Coast Guard helicopters in operation. Where are the National Guard helicopters? Presumably strafing Iraqi citizens on the roads outside Baghdad and Fallujah.

As the war's unpopularity soars, there will be millions asking, Why is the National Guard in Iraq, instead of helping the afflicted along the Gulf in the first crucial hours, before New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile turn into toxic toilet bowls with thousands marooned on the tops of houses.

As thousands of trapped residents face the real prospect of perishing for lack of a way out of the flooding city, Bush's first response was to open the spigots of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at the request of oil companies and to order the EPA to eliminate Clean Air standards at power plants and oil referiners across the nation, supposedly to increase fuel supplies--a goal long sought by his cronies at the big oil companies.

In his skittish Rose Garden press conference, Bush told the imperiled people of the Gulf Coast not to worry, the Corps of Engineers was on the way to begin the reconstruction of the Southland. But these are the same cadre of engineers, who after three years of work, have yet to get water and electrical power running in Baghdad for more than three hours a day.

It didn't have to be this bad. The entire city of New Orleans need not have been lost. Hundreds of people need not have perished. Yet, it now seems clear that the Bush administration sacrificed New Orleans to pursue its mad war on Iraq.

As the New Orleans Times-Picayune has reported in a devastating series of articles over the last two years, city and state officials and the Corps of Enginners had repeatedly requested funding to strengthen the levees along Lake Pontchartrain that breeched in the wake of the flood. But the Bush administration rebuffed the requests repeatedly, reprograming the funding from levee enhancement to Homeland Security and the war on Iraq. This year the Bush administration slashed funding for the New Orleans Corps of Engineers by $71.2 million, a stunning 44.2 percent reduction from its 2001 levels. A Corps report noted at the time that "major hurricane and flood protection projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. . . . Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now."

Work on the 17th Street levee, which breached on Monday night, came to a halt earlier this summer for the lack of $2 million.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana told the Times-Picayune in June of last year. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." These are damning revelation that should fuel calls from both parties for Bush's resignation or impeachment.

The greatest concern for poor people in these days has come from President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who - fresh from a chat with Fidel Castro, has announced that Venezuela will be offering America's poor discounted gas through its Citgo chain. He's says his price will knock out the predatory pricing at every American pump. Citgo should issue to purchasers of each tankful of gas vouchers for free medical consultations via the internet with the Cuban doctors in Venezuela.

No politician in America has raised the issue of predatory pricing as gasoline soars above $3. The last time there was any critical talk about the oil companies was thirty years ago.

Maybe the terrible disaster along the Gulf coast will awaken people to the unjust ways in which our society works. That's often the effect of natural disasters, as with the Mexican earthquake, where the laggardly efforts of the police prompted ordinary citizens to take matters into their own Hands.