New Orleans: the Making of a Social Catastrophe

Robert Caldwell Jr. and Joanna Dubinsky

Most residents of metro New Orleans were unaware of the potential
destruction of Katrina until Saturday August 27- less than 48 hours before
landfall.

In New Orleans, violent tropical storms are routine and hurricanes are a
seasonal reminder of "mother nature's" power. As residents of the city, we
have often been faced with the choice- "stay or go?"-always weighing whether
it will be the fabled "big one."

What started as a category one hurricane that grazed Miami, quickly turned
into the most deadly Hurricane the Gulf Coast had ever seen.
But the toll is not simply the wrath of "nature." Especially in New Orleans,
the catastrophic consequences of Katrina were mostly social in their
dimensions.

The social factors contributing to Katrina's death blow to New Orleans are
many: funding for levies diverted to the war in Iraq; prior deployment of
the Louisiana National Guard to Baghdad; lack of an evacuation plan for the
poor, who primarily live in flood-prone areas; slow federal response with a
focus on securing property over people; environmental degradation increasing
the frequency and wrath of hurricanes and the vulnerability of the city.

Threaded throughout these factors is the complex way class, race and
gender-and classism, racism, and sexism- shape people's social position. For
days, national news reports of the developing crisis in New Orleans
highlighted what is often invisible to media but well known to the women and
men who change the sheets in French Quarter hotels, cook gumbo for tourists,
and operate the cash registers in the Lower Garden District Wal-mart: to be
poor- especially Black and poor- in the United States, is to live on the
very edge of survival.

What becomes of New Orleans-and the refugees of New Orleans- is tied up in
the social causes of the catastrophe, as well as the government, corporate
and community response. These reactions are not shaped in a vacuum-they
operate within a social system that puts profits and the whims of the market
above human lives. Social planning left to the market failed New Orleans.
Allowing the market to decide New Orleans fate is the recipe for another
disaster. It is also the recipe for cultural genocide and
"racial-cleansing." Developers want to create a white-washed French Quarter
Disneyland, but the heart of the city-the people of New Orleans-will not
cede it without a fight.

Misguided Priorities

New Orleans is a city "underdeveloped" by capitalism. Social services are
chronically underfunded, and many New Orleanians are locked in a cycle of
poverty spurred by inadequate schools and lack of living wage jobs. Despite
its once massive port, a seventy mile petro-chemical corridor, and
historical significance, the city has- like third-world Caribbean
islands-depended upon a tourism industry for sustenance.

So it is no surprise that Louisiana hurricane preparedness was woefully
under-funded by President Bush and Congress.

The Federal Government ignored expert testimony presenting the need for
critical infrastructure to prevent New Orleans from becoming inundated with
flood waters in the event of a levy break. Contrary to Bush's recent
assertions that this catastrophe in New Orleans could not be predicted, the
doomsday scenario was well-documented by academics and governmental
officials. According to columnist Sidney Blumenthal, "FEMA warned that a
hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in
the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding
by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war."

Congress initially authorized $10.5 billion dollars for Gulf Coast aid, but
Florida received $16 billion when hurricanes hit in 2004.
Congress has subsequently offered upwards of $50 billion for aid, but
contrast this amount with the $162 billion Congress appropriated for the
first year of the Iraq war.

In addition, at the time of the hurricane, almost half of the Louisiana
National Guard-first responders in any "natural" disaster- were deployed
outside the state. Some, like the 3,000 members of the 256th Infantry
Brigade were reportedly with critical high water equipment, in Iraq.

The race and class dynamics of a planned catastrophe

The poverty and blackness of those most affected by the disaster is obvious
to anyone watching CNN in the days following the levy break.
The plight of these victims underscores the existing race and class
inequalities in New Orleans, but also provides a lens to examine racism and
poverty-and a persistently growing underclass- in the US as a whole.

Poor people everywhere are the most ill prepared for disasters. Malik Rahim,
former Green Party candidate for City Council, and former Black Panther
explains:

"The hurricane hit at the end of the month, the time when poor people are
most vulnerable. Food stamps don't buy enough but for about three weeks of
the month, and by the end of the month everyone runs out. Now they have no
way to get their food stamps or any money, so they just have to take what
they can to survive."

The poorest people were without transportation, food, or resources.
No government hurricane preparedness plan, and none of the doomsday
exercises of federal, state, and local agencies, made any provisions for
those who could not evacuate. Disaster planning officials knew that 112,000
people in New Orleans are without any private form of transportation. In
2003, the New Orleans Times Picayune produced a five part series that
predicted that this segment-upwards of 100,000 people- would likely face
death in the event of direct hit of a category 5 hurricane. Despite this
well-known fact, city and public school buses flooded while residents were
stuck in the city and the Superdome-the "shelter of last resort"- with no
way out.

In fact, many institutions that once provided evacuation, such as the public
University of New Orleans, had implemented a policy of "fend for yourself"
in recent years. International students, one of the most vulnerable student
populations due to their lack of ties to the community, were encouraged to
vacate to the Superdome. This is not a surprising reflection of neoliberal
ideology-let the market decide who survives-that increasingly pervades
private, but public, institutions in our society.

An often quoted analysis of the increasing crisis in New Orleans came from
popular rapper Kanye West during a nationally broadcasted NBC benefit
concert. Ignoring the script, West said: "George Bush doesn't care about
black people," .[America was set up] "to help the poor, the Black people,
the less well-off as slow as possible."

You could see this slow reaction to the poor play out on the ground, as
private Tulane Hospital was evacuated well before Charity Hospital, the
region's trauma hospital and the hospital whose patients are uninsured,
poor, and overwhelmingly Black. Tenet paid private contractors to evacuate
at least one of their hospitals.

Katrina was not the first hurricane, nor the first major flooding disaster
to hit Louisiana where social decisions influenced the devastating outcome.
During Hurricane Betsy, the low-lying Lower Ninth Ward, an area almost
entirely under the poverty line and 98% black, was intentionally flooded to
"save" the wealthy white uptown neighborhoods. In Katrina's aftermath, the
Lower Ninth Ward was hard hit, as well as neighboring St. Bernard
Parish-which includes the predominantly white working-class towns of
Chalmette and Arabi. There is speculation that the Army Corps of Engineers
dynamited the levy this time, but nothing substantiates this claim.

Institutional policies favor ruling class interests, but the flipside of
these policies is for purveyors of ruling class ideology- including many
working class whites- to blame the victims hit hardest: poor African
Americans. This inter-class antagonism only sharpens race and class
inequalities. According to Malik Rahim, in the days following the levy
break, white vigilante gangs patrolled Algiers (the Westbank of New
Orleans): "riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed, and any young
Black they see who they figure doesn't belong in their community, they shoot
him."

Blaming Victims

Both (former) FEMA chief Don Brown and the dominant media spin indicated
that the high death toll is "going to be attributable a lot to people who
did not heed the advance warnings." Brown's comments suggest that hundreds
of thousands foolishly "chose" not to evacuate.
The reality is that tens of thousands-the 113,000 without cars, the sick,
the disabled or elderly- of New Orleanians did not have the means to comply
with an evacuation order.

Reporters and rightwing internet trolls have filled news outlets and message
boards with racialized stories of looting, while tens of thousands of the
city begged for help. The lawlessness of looting, full of drama and
intrigue of "savage black people" provided a narrative to shift focus away
from the political decisions that kept people without food, water, or
medical intervention.

Officials comforted tense onlookers with a promise of order: they would use
troops to protect stores from looting. But by doing so, they shifted scarce
resources away from the search, rescue, and evacuation of residents whose
lives they deemed less important.

As convoys of National Guard reinforcements finally rolled into New Orleans,
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco used the occasion to warn looters and
assure the ruling class that troops were under her orders to "shoot and
kill" if needed to restore order. "These troops are battle-tested. They
have M-16s and are locked and loaded," she said.
"These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will."
Meanwhile, people were dying of dehydration throughout the city.

Lackluster Response

The response from Federal agencies was too little too late. While the United
States has a history of dropping humanitarian relief to famine and disaster
affected areas, media reported that supplies were being diverted because
helicopters could not land, or because of a report of hostile gunfire
(accounts that could not later be substantiated by rescue pilots).

But if the United States is capable of sending planes that can withstand
enemy fire to drop bombs in Iraq, certainly they are capable of air-dropping
supplies into a US city.

On NPR's All Things Considered Homeland Security Czar Michael
Chertoff dismissed an NPR field reporter's claim that 2,000 or more stranded
people were at Convention Center without food or water, suffering
increasingly unsanitary conditions. Subsequent reports verified that
15,000-20,000 were at the convention center in deplorable conditions,
including mounting casualties do to lack of water, food, and medical aid.
The Convention Center was on dry ground and would have been accessible by
military transport ground vehicles of helicopters.

Although local government can certainly share in some of the blame of the
catastrophe, once the Federal Government was alerted to the dire situation
of thousands in the city, its promise to react was sluggish.
Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the slow response: "They're not here. It's too
doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the
biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country." An elected official
from Jefferson Parish (New Orleans suburbs) suggested that if New Orleans
were to secede from the Unites States perhaps foreign aid would be delivered
in a timelier manner.
Media reports exuded frustration at the federal response. Journalists were
embedded with the people, not the government and- like the people- were
receiving no information. On the evening of September 2,
2005 FOX News reporters- usually spin doctors for the Republican
Party-called attention to the stranded thousands at the Convention Center
who had not received aid or any attention from the government officials. On
location at the Convention Center, Geraldo Rivera cried while holding a
dehydrated baby and-seeing no relief or evacuation on its way-urged the
stranded thousands to march across the bridge into New Orleans' West Bank.
Fox correspondent Shepard Smith, also on location and equally distraught,
told Rivera and the viewers that the people couldn't march across the
bridge- as they would be pushed back
at gunpoint. They were truly trapped. Denise Moore, one of the
thousands stranded with her family at the Convention Center, had witnessed
ten people die in two days. "We weren't allowed to leave; we believed we had
been sent there to die."

Environmental Trigger

The ecological component of this disaster is central to its cause and will
be important to examine in its aftermath. New Orleans, like many major
cities-such as San Francisco and Los Angeles- was built in a
place that poses danger. Danger is inherent in any port or coastal
city. But man-made environmental problems, including global warming and
coastal erosion, have severely exacerbated the precarious position of the
city.

Marshes and wetlands help to slow a hurricane's effect as it approaches the
city. But erosion has diminished the size and ability of the coastal marsh
and swamp to absorb a hurricane's force.
Coastal erosion has two central causes. One is the once rich river silt that
built the delta is now being directed to deep waters off the continental
shelf to allow for easy river navigation. The second is salt water
intrusion from canals built for oil and natural gas drilling and pipeline
needs.

Global warming has contributed to a deadly hurricane season that is far from
over. Ross Gelbspan, columnist for the Boston Globe, explains that global
warming "generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent
heat waves, and more-severe storms." While Katrina began "as a relatively
small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with
extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface
temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico."
And while environmental degradation set the stage for Katrina, the aftermath
of environmental contamination in the city is far from
clear. While the city will likely be clear of water just a month
after the levy broke (far less time than initially anticipated), the city
will still be awash in toxic chemicals, which have long lingered in and
around New Orleans due to a Petrochemical refinery corridor not far from the
city; a Super Fund landfill site in one of the poorest, predominantly black,
and therefore most flooded areas; and dormant heavy metals in the Industrial
Canal. This, combined with untreated fecal matter and other germs, could
bring health concerns for years to come.

Conclusion: Rebuilding New Orleans

The Bush administration fiddled while New Orleans flooded. The
government failed twice: first to provide basic preventative infrastructure
to protect New Orleans and then to enact a plan to rescue those victimized
by poor social planning. An administration built upon the promise of
"homeland security" could provide no security for the worst-but most
predictable- disaster this country has seen.

This is just the latest in a line of Bush failures, where policies like tax
cuts for the rich and war in Iraq continue to strain resources. This
strain, the brunt of which is born by the poor and people of color, is seen
by many as the "war at home." But it is not simply Bush's failure; it is a
failure of our collective priorities in a global economic system that places
the market and profit above people.

Hurricane survivors rightly felt that they had been abandoned to die in the
toxic floodwaters and dehydrating heat of New Orleans. But the ruling class
abandoned New Orleans long before Katrina hit. Racism, environmental
disregard and capitalist deference to "the market" for social planning have
long been the hallmarks of New Orleans.

Despite assertions that a flood-prone city filled with so many poor people
should not be rebuilt, the city will, indeed, be rebuilt. In the coming
months, public money will trickle into the state. Hotels, casinos, chain
stores and "Disneyfied" developments will compete for the sorely needed
money and serve to reinforce a system that was unable to respond to peoples'
needs before, during, and immediately after the hurricane.

But New Orleans can be rebuilt with a different ethos, one with
environmentally sustainable planning, a vast transportation infrastructure
upgrade- including public evacuation plans, a bolstered public works system,
creation of stable union jobs, new and improved public schools, a renewed
investment in the public healthcare system, and cultivation of participatory
neighborhood councils as incubators for a new, participatory, and radical
democracy among the working class, poor, and oppressed.

As the well-heeled of New Orleans meet with government officials, corporate
leaders, and developers to discuss the fate of the Crescent City, eager to
take advantage of the opening to execute economic development plans that
would white-wash the city and permanently eliminate the Black underclass,
New Orleans community organizers and national Black leaders have come
together to fight for the city.
Community Labor United, a long-standing community coalition, has established
a People's Hurricane Fund and met in Baton Rouge September 10th to establish
a strategy to organize refugees and demand the city be rebuilt in the
interest of the people. Community organizers and activists are spread out
with the rest of the New Orleans' Diaspora in cities like Houston, TX.,
Jackson, MS., Baton Rouge, LA. and Lake Charles, LA. While demands are
still being developed, central will be the right of return for refugees, as
well as training and jobs for New Orleanians, and community input in all
aspects of the reconstruction process.

Building a city that responds to people's needs instead of corporate and
business interests will be an uphill battle. For one, New Orleans was a
city in economic decline before the hurricane hit. Although an important
port, the city serves more as a way-station for goods, raw materials,
agricultural products, and oil passing through the Mississippi river
corridor, than a place of manufacturing and production. Bush's recent
executive order to disregard prevailing wage rates guaranteed by the
Davis-Bacon Act for federally-funded construction projects ensures that many
jobs generated by the reconstruction efforts won't be good living-wage
jobs-exactly what New Orleans needs to bring back displaced residents and
give them the chance to rebuild their lives and community. The
Disney-fication of historic New Orleans- what the tourist-industry
businesses are chomping at the bit to develop- would provide the same
low-wage jobs that ensured the cycle of poverty that existed before Katrina
hit.

The challenges are enormous. But there are also many possibilities.
New Orleans unique culture, one of resistance to the homogenizing forces of
world capitalism, could facilitate the community organizing that must happen
to save New Orleans.

The struggle in New Orleans offers an opportunity for people throughout the
US and world to promote a different vision for social planning-one that
challenges cities developed for profit and not for human need. In addition
to demanding community control over the city's reconstruction, we must link
local and national priorities - demanding that troops deployed in Iraq come
home, so that a burgeoning military budget can be redirected to social
priorities. We-the people- must rebuild New Orleans and the US Gulf South.
But we must not stop there.

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Robert Caldwell Jr and Joanna Dubinsky are residents of the Ninth Ward in
New Orleans and are members of Solidarity. They plan to return to New
Orleans to work with Community Labor United's People's Hurricane Fund in
their effort to rebuild a socially and economically just New Orleans. You
can contact the authors at nolasolid@yahoo.com