New Orleans:
The Specter Of
Military Dictatorship
By World Socialist
Web
11 September 2005
World
Socialist Web
The
appalling incompetence and negligence that characterized the governments
response at the outset of the human tragedy unleashed by Hurricane Katrina
have now given way to ruthlessly efficient methods of military occupation
and repression in the ravaged city of New Orleans.
For four critical
days, Washington proved incapable of mounting any credible effort to
rescue the tens of thousands of largely poor and working class New Orleaneans
who were left to their fate in the citys flooded streets, many
of them losing their lives not to the surging waters, but to the lack
of food, water or medicine.
Now the city has
been inundated with troops, federal agents and cops of all descriptions,
turning it into one of the most heavily armed camps on the face of the
globe. Combat-equipped soldiers and police wearing helmets and flak
jackets are going door to door in the city to enforce a mandatory evacuation
at the point of a gun.
City authorities
claimed Friday that they have yet to order forced removal of residents
and would do so only with minimum force. In many cases,
demands by armed troops have proven sufficient to drive people from
their homes. When you get 15 M16s pointed at you and they line
you up against the wall, its kind of scary, one New Orleans
resident told the Washington Post, explaining why she was leaving.
In other cases,
however, the official assertions are belied by televised images of cops
and troops kicking in the doors of homes and dragging people away in
plastic cuffs. The New Orleans Police Department acknowledged Friday
that it had arrested 200 people that day.
With an estimated
10,000 residents still in the city, far worse is yet to come. Many justifiably
fear that if they leave they will have no homes to come back to. They
are trying to get this neighborhood for the rich people, one man
told the New Orleans Times-Picayune Thursday.
The first 11 days
of the disaster have revealed two political truths about present-day
America. First, for all the talk about beefing up homeland security
against an alleged terrorist threat, the US government has developed
no serious civil defense plans to protect the American people from mass
disasters, either natural or man-made.
Second, in the wake
of September 11, 2001, Washington has exploited the terrorist attacks
to concentrate ever-growing power in its military-police apparatus,
while elaborating extensive preparations for martial law nationwide.
At its outset, the
disaster exposed the Bush administration and the government agencies
responsible for emergency relief as totally unprepared. Preventive measures
that could have avoided the massive loss of life and displacement of
people were not taken. Money requested by the US Army Corps of Engineers
to reinforce the levees that are supposed to protect the city from flooding
was systematically cut over a period of years, with the funds diverted
to pay for the war in Iraq.
In the period immediately
preceding the hurricanes landfall, no serious efforts were made
to evacuate the tens of thousands of residents who lacked transportation
or the means to get out of the city on their own. In its aftermath,
a general state of confusion and paralysis appeared to grip every layer
of government, delaying emergency relief efforts precisely at the point
when they could have saved the most lives.
The principal agency
responsible, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was clearly
not up to the task, its capabilities having been severely downgraded
over the past several years. This degeneration accelerated rapidly after
FEMA was folded into the Department of Homeland Security, with funding
and resources diverted into the global war on terrorism.
Meanwhile, under the Bush administration, the agencys top ranks
turned into a political patronage dumping ground.
The Washington Post
revealed Friday that five of the eight top positions at FEMA are occupied
by former Bush presidential campaign workers and other Republican political
hacks. None of these five have any experience in emergency operations
or disaster relief.
On Friday, FEMAs
director, Michael Brown, was relieved of his duties as the nominal head
of relief efforts in the Gulf Coast disaster zone. The move represented
an attempt at damage control following a firestorm of criticism over
Browns incompetence and evidence that he falsified his resume.
While leading Democrats have demanded Browns outright firing,
the presence of such an individual at the head of FEMA is merely symptomatic
of the agencys gutting.
Significantly, Browns
replacement as head of the Gulf Coast disaster operation is Vice Admiral
Thad Allen, the third-ranking officer in the US Coast Guard. In announcing
the shift, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that having
a senior officer take charge would facilitate inter-action with
the military forces that now effectively control New Orleans.
This shift at the top formalizes what had already become the militarization
of the response to the disaster.
Confronted with
the inability of FEMA and other civilian agencies to organize a relief
effort, the government had no option but a military one. Once it decided
to use it, there were definite consequences.
While there was
no adequate planning for disaster relief, the military and the Homeland
Security Department had well developed and rehearsed blueprints for
imposing martial law and the suppression of civil unrest. These have
been the key focus of planning at both the Pentagon and the Homeland
Security Department in the four years since the September 11 attacks.
Once these plans
were taken off the shelf and the military was called in, its own protocols
and doctrines drove the intervention, with deadly consequences.
First, the city
was effectively sealed off, with residents seeking to flee the disaster
turned back at gunpoint and those trying to bring in relief supplies
turned back. The Red Cross, which has played the leading role in countless
previous disasters, was never allowed to enter the city. This took place
as a horrified world watched people dying in the hungry crowds that
waited outside the New Orleans Convention Center and amid the squalor
of the Superdome.
The order for the
military to go in came only after the Pentagon was assured that it could
intervene with overwhelming force. Senior commanders spoke in terms
of a combat operation and storming the convention
center, where people were waiting to be evacuated.
Now the city is
bristling with automatic weapons and is patrolled by troops in armored
vehicles fresh from Iraq. The obvious question is what is this massive
armed force doing in New Orleans, a city that is largely submerged under
water and nearly deserted? This level of military occupation is on its
face absurd, but it has been executed according to existing plans for
martial law that are the product of protracted secret deliberations.
The central focus
of this military operation has been the establishment of law and order,
the protection of private property and, to those ends, the forced evacuation
of the remaining residents of the city.
The most chilling
revelation coming out of New Orleans is that for Americas ruling
elite and its state apparatus, the lives of ordinary Americans count
for nothing. This has found its most grotesque expression in the failure
of the authorities for a full 10 days to make any effort to recover
the bodies of the storms victims, which lie rotting in the streets.
The storms
survivors complained bitterly about the medias referring to them
as refugees, understandably bridling over a term that suggests
that the largely poor and black masses of newly homeless are foreigners
in their own land. Yet, the reality is that many of them have been treated
more as criminals than victims.
Those loaded onto
trucks in the mandatory evacuation are not told where they are going.
As the Salt Lake Tribune reported, one planeload of evacuees was informed
that they were being shipped off to Utah only after their plane had
taken off from New Orleans International Airport. There also were multiple
reports that those being dispersed across the country are in many cases
subjected to restrictions on their movements and behavior that come
close to penal confinement.
Both the lack of
preparation in terms of civil defense or humanitarian relief and the
turn towards martial law have deep roots in the social structure and
political system of the United States.
For more than a
quarter century, both Democratic and Republican administrations have
pursued a policy designed to transfer wealth from the vast majority
of working people to the financial elite. They have systematically slashed
every program aimed at ameliorating conditions of poverty in order to
award ever fatter tax cuts to those at the top of the economic pyramid.
In the process, the ruling elite has created conditions of profound
social inequality and instability that have erupted to the surface with
the disaster in New Orleans.
The deepening of
social inequality has been accompanied by an unprecedented attack on
basic democratic rightsconducted under the pretext of a war
on terrorism and homeland securityand an increasing
reliance on military force, both at home and abroad.
The events in New
Orleans provide a sobering warning of the immense dangers posed by these
developments. The assumption of extraordinary and unconstitutional powers
by the president, the development of a secret shadow government, revealed
in the aftermath of September 11, the passage of the Patriot Act, the
establishment of the Homeland Security Department, and the creation
of a US Northern Command, the first such military command to prepare
and conduct nationwide operations on US soil, have together established
the framework for a police-military dictatorship. In New Orleans, such
a regime is being given a dry run.
The response of
the Democrats to the momentous events in New Orleans is one of impotence
and duplicity. They themselves, of course, are implicated in the failure
to adequately prepare for or respond to the disaster, on the national,
state and local level. They have acted as full partners of the Republicans
in the buildup of the military, as well as in the imposition of the
Patriot Act and other attacks democratic rights.
Now the Democrats
principal demands have been for the sacking of the hapless FEMA Director
Brownlikely to be chosen as a scapegoat by the Bush White House
itselfand the convening of an independent commission,
along the lines of the 9/11 panel, to probe the New Orleans disaster
andinevitablyproduce a similar whitewash. The party has
advanced no alternative program or proposals for the relief of the millions
whose lives have been devastated by the catastrophe, nor has it raised
the slightest objection to the handing over of control to the military.
The outrage felt
by broad masses of American working people over the appalling treatment
of the hurricane disaster victims must be joined with a political understanding
of the stark dangers that are posed by these developments.
These dangers cannot
be countered within the framework of the existing two-party system.
They require an irrevocable break with the Democratic Party and the
emergence of a new, independent political movement of the working class
fighting for the socialist reorganization of society.