Bush Scapegoats
State, Local Officials
By Joseph Kay
05 September 2005
World
Socialist Web
The
Bush administration has set out to shift attention from its own responsibility
for the enormous damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. With the federal
government coming under increasing criticism for its shocking display
of indifference and negligence, the White House is seeking to transfer
blame onto the backs of local and state authorities.
In his weekly radio
address on Saturday, delivered live from the White House Rose Garden,
Bush sought to focus blame on state and local governments for failing
to deal with the hurricanes aftermath. The magnitude of
responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the
size of Great Britain, he said, has created tremendous problems
that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that
many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially
in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable.
Bushs remarks
echoed an earlier statement he made while in Biloxi, Mississippi. I
am satisfied with the response of the federal government, he said.
Im not satisfied with the results. In other words,
he and his administration bear no responsibility for the deaths of thousands
of people, left to drown, starve or expire for lack of water and medical
care for days on end after the hurricane hit and levees brokea
catastrophic scenario about which many warnings had been issued, only
to be ignored by Washington.
The plight of the
tens of thousands trapped in the flood, not to mention the hundreds
of thousands more who escaped but lost their homes and jobs, is, in
fact, entirely bound up with the systematic gutting of emergency relief
agencies and systems, compounded by the huge diversion of resources
and manpower to prosecute the war in Iraq. And the lack of any coordinated
federal response once New Orleans was flooded and nearby Gulf Coast
towns were ravaged has made it clear that no serious rescue and relief
preparations were made in the days preceding the hurricanes impact,
when the massive storm was headed toward the region.
But, according to
Bush and other administration officials, the blame for the catastrophe
lies elsewhere.
In his radio address,
Bush went on to say that the federal government will do its part
in responding to the disaster. In other words, the federal government
is only one of many agencies with responsibilityalong with state
and local authorities, private charities and the private sector.
Despite all the
criticisms of federal inaction, and despite enormous public anger, such
language is carefully chosen to signal that the administration will
not allow the hurricanes devastation to shift its basic social
policy, which is based on privatization, deregulation and dismantling
of any semblance of a social safety net. There will be no coordinated
or serious federal recovery effort to provide decent jobs, new homes,
schools or other social necessities to those whose lives have been destroyed.
Whatever reconstruction takes place in New Orleans and towns such as
Biloxi, Mississippi will be geared to the profit interests of corporations
and big investors.
On Saturday US Labor
Secretary Elaine Chao announced that the government would spend a paltry
$60 million to provide a mere 10,000 temporary jobs for workers who
have been forced to evacuate the area. There were 600,000 non-farm jobs
in the New Orleans metropolitan area, almost all of which have disappeared.
The US is currently spending upwards of $200 million a day on the war
in Iraq.
The presidents
attempt to shift blame onto the states and localities is part of a broader
campaign by administration officials. Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff said on Saturday that the federal government was unable to
respond more quickly in part because our constitutional system
really places the primary authority in each state with the governor.
Michael Brown, the
director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a part of
the Homeland Security Department and the agency tasked with responding
to natural disasters, pinned the blame on the mayor of New Orleans,
Ray Nagin, for failing to evacuate the city on time. If the mayor
does not have the resources to get the poor, elderly, and disabled,
those who cannot, out, he said, or if he does not even have
police capacity to enforce the mandatory evacuation, to make people
leave, then you end up with the kind of situation we have right now
in New Orleans.
According to an
article in Sundays Washington Post, the administration is also
seeking to secure federal control over local police and National Guard
troops. The newspaper reported, Louisiana officials rejected the
request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move
would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials
in the state suspected a political motive behind the request.
The newspaper quoted an unnamed state official as noting, Quite
frankly, if theyd been able to pull off taking it away from the
locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals.
While state and
local officials are far from blameless in failing to prepare for the
hurricane, the main reason that residents have remained stranded for
such a long period of time is that the federal government took days
to respond to the crisis. An editorial in the New Orleans Times-Picayune
attacked the governments failure to act, noting, Despite
the citys multiple points of entry, our nations bureaucrats
spent days after last weeks hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting
the fact that they could neither rescue the citys stranded victims
nor bring them food, water and medical supplies. Meanwhile there were
journalists, including some who work for the Times-Picayune, going in
and out of the city.
The statements by
administration officials have been accompanied by continued attempts
to suggest that no one could have prepared for the hurricane. Chertoff
said on Saturday that the combination of a hurricane and the breach
of New Orleans levee system was a perfect storm that
exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybodys
foresight. He added that the disaster was breathtaking in
its surprise.
Bush made a similar
claim on Wednesday, saying, I dont believe that anyone could
have foreseen the breach of the levees. In fact, it has long been
known that a category four or stronger hurricane would overpower the
levees and lead to massive flooding. Computer models predicted tens
of thousands of deaths, but nothing was done to preprare for the event.
In making these
statements, Chertoff is in part attempting to cover for the responsibility
of his own Homeland Security Department in undermining the ability of
the federal government to respond to natural disasters. FEMA became
part of the Department of Homeland Security when the latter organization
was created in 2002. Over the past three years, FEMAs response
capacity has been eroded by underfunding and neglect. The agency has
focused almost entirely on attacking democratic rights and beefing up
the military-police apparatus of the state on the pretext of waging
a war on terrorism.
The Washington Post
on Sunday quoted a veteran FEMA official as saying, We have less
capacity today then we did on September 11... Weve lost a lot
of what we were able to do then. The Post noted that Bush allies
such as former FEMA head Joe Allbaugh and current FEMA head Michael
Brown were critical of FEMAs natural disaster focus and
lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear
of terrorism. The newspaper quoted the unnamed veteran FEMA official:
Allbaughs quote was You dont get it. If
you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11
thinker.
The Bush administrations
campaign of political damage-control comes amidst increasingly ominous
indications of the high toll of death, destruction and misery in New
Orleans and surrounding areas. Administration officials have begun sounding
warnings in an attempt to prepare public reaction. We need to
prepare the country for whats coming Chertoff said on the
television program Fox News Sunday. We are going to
uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood...
It is going to be about as ugly a scene as I think you can imagine.
The death toll is
expected to number in the thousands, and perhaps the tens of thousands.
In New Orleans, one morgue at St. Gabriel prison alone is preparing
for 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. Mayor Nagin said on Saturday that city officials
were preparing to send refrigerated trucks through the city to collect
bodies. He suggested that there may be too many bodies to bury them
all, and instead they would be cremated.
According to most
reports, some 42,000 people had been removed from emergency shelters
and evacuated from New Orleans by Saturday. Officials estimated that
a similar number remain to be evacuated, but it is not clear where these
individuals are. Pre-hurricane estimates suggested that somewhere between
100,000 and 140,000 or more people would not be able to comply with,
or would not heed, evacuation orders.
Even according to
government estimates of the number of people left to be evacuated, this
leaves anywhere between 18,000 and 58,000 people unaccounted for. An
unknown number of people have been stranded on roofs or in attics for
days without food or water. How many have drowned? How many have died
in the past five days of dehydration, heat exhaustion or from other
causes? At this point it is impossible to know.
An unknown number
of dead were also left in the Superdome, where thousands of residents
spent days in hellish conditions as they waited for a way to leave the
city. A National Guardsman refused entry to one Reuters photographer,
saying it doesnt need to be seen, its a make-shift
morgue in there. Were not letting anyone in there anymore. If
you want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq.
It is likely that
there have been enormous casualties in parts of Mississippi and Louisiana
that have yet to be searched by rescue workers. The hurricane actually
passed slightly to the east of New Orleans, striking most directly parts
of a peninsula jutting into the Gulf of Mexico.
An indication of
the damage in these areas came with the discovery of the devastation
of the small town of Chalmette, which is home mainly to fishing and
oil workers. Perhaps hundreds have died in that town alone.
The Los Angels Times
reported on Sunday, Sheriff Jack Stephens said 31 residents of
a nursing home died in their sleep when the floodwaters filled the facility.
The bodies of another 21 residents of a subdivision were found tied
together, presumably as a way to stay together during the flooding.
Chalmette Fire Chief
Tommy Stone lashed out at the rescue effort of the federal and state
governments. I want the world to know that federal and state help
did not show up here right away, he said.
Also on Saturday,
Bush announced that he was sending 7,200 additional active duty troops
to New Orleans2,200 from the Armys 82nd Airborne, 2,700
from the 1st Calvary Division and 2,000 from the Marines. According
to federal law, these troops cannot be used for domestic law enforcement.
However, a Bush spokesman left open the possibility that the administration
would override the law by declaring an emergency.
Handling the tens
of thousands of residents remaining in the city is being treated mainly
as a military operation. On September 2, the Army Times quoted Brigadier
General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guards
Joint Task Force, as warning, This place is going to look like
Little Somalia. Were going to go out and take this city back.
This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.
On Sunday afternoon
there were reports that police shot eight people allegedly carrying
guns in New Orleans, killing five or six of them.