An Ill Wind
By Paul Harris
05 September, 2005
Axis
Of Logic
There is nowhere here to hide
Waiting for the hurricane.
Oh there is nowhere you can hide,
Waiting for the hurricane.
Waiting For The Hurricane
From Best Moves
By Chris de Burgh, 1981
Everyone who is supposed to know about
these things, knew that Katarina was coming. They didnt know her
name, and they didnt know when to expect her, but they knew she
was coming. They had known it for years.
Among those who
are supposed to know about these things, the responsible ones had predicted
with a chilling accuracy what would happen when that unnamed category
four or five hurricane finally took direct aim at New Orleans. Weather
experts, engineers, environmentalists, anyone who had lived through
a category three hurricane in New Orleans, knew that when the big one
came there would be hell to pay. Because they knew they werent
ready, they knew with a grim certainty that the levees would not hold,
that the sea or Lake Pontchartrain would rush in through those levees
and the city foolishly built below sea level would learn what below
sea level really means.
And they knew that
all their pleas for aid and prudent planning had fallen on deaf ears.
In 1930, the Rivers
and Harbors Act was enacted following a disastrous 1927 flooding of
the Mississippi River. The notion that government could take preventative
measures and act to lessen the effects of tropical storms was born.
Despite that foresight, a devastating hurricane rolled over Florida
in 1935, the so-called Great Labor Day Hurricane, leaving hundreds dead.
Nevertheless, that failure did nothing to dampen a growing expectation
amongst the people of the United States that public officials should
be actively involved in disaster avoidance and relief.
In fact, however,
those expectations didnt result in fully institutionalized relief
measures until the 1970s. It is a safe bet that most Americans have
no idea when government officials decided to throw in the towel and
rely on a hope and a prayer that they could dodge the inevitable storms
forever. But they are surely learning at the end of summer 2005 that
their government is feeble, inept, unable to cope with a large-scale
catastrophe
and that much of this failure results from lack of
planning or deliberate decisions to forgo planning.
Some critics are
decrying the lack of National Guardsmen in the New Orleans area. They
note that most of the available troops and the equipment needed to deal
with Katarina are off on an adventure in Iraq. And those remarks are
true: American resources, despite the enormous wealth of the country,
are presently stretched very thin and the needed men and equipment,
in large enough numbers, are elsewhere occupied. But it is also coming
to light that officials in the New Orleans area have been trying for
years to get the levees fortified, the pumps upgraded, the evacuation
planning rethought
only to have the federal government not only
fail to come up with funding, but to deliberately reduce the funds already
available.
As the man currently
in charge, President Bush will bear a lot of the blame for what has
happened here. He didnt cause the hurricane, he couldnt
have diverted it elsewhere. But he didnt need to divert the emergency
response people in the Delta area to a foreign adventure in Asia. He
didnt need to claw back funding for structural improvements in
New Orleans and around the Mississippi levees. But he did, and for this
he deserves condemnation. In fact, he cut $71.2 million from the New
Orleans Corps of Engineers so that plans to fortify levees and upgrade
the water pumping system had to be shelved. But successive presidents
have also failed to heed the warnings about the peril New Orleans would
face when that inevitable category four or five storm hit head-on. And
all of those former presidents deserve condemnation for their negligence
as well.
Bush had the audacity
to take to the airwaves and proclaim that no one could have foreseen
this tragedy even though he knew full well that such an event had been
predicted for years. Worse, the White House politely refused all foreign
offers of assistance which the cynical among us believe is meant to
signal that the usual suspect corporations in the US will make money
out of the reconstruction
cant have any of that potential
profit upset by some do-gooder country trying to provide free assistance,
just because its the right thing to do.
But what has really
struck a sour note with Americans and astounded the rest of the world,
is the ineptness of the response to this disaster. This is the same
nation that is very often able to mobilize quickly to provide assistance
to other countries in the aftermath of some catastrophic event. Apparently,
theyre a little like the carpenter who builds everyone elses
houses but never seems to be able to finish his own.
When a massive tsunami
struck the coast of Aceh in Indonesia last December, the carnage was
unthinkable. However, this allegedly third-world nation managed to mobilize
its troops, emergency and medical workers in the blink of an eye. To
be sure, there was a great outpouring of help from much of the world;
but the Indonesians were prepared to respond almost immediately. India
also managed to act and react with speed.
The American government
was lethargic in its reaction to this crisis although the Red Cross
was on its way to the hurricane zone before the wind even stopped blowing.
It is not lost on
anyone that the bastion of free enterprise is apparently ill-equipped
to deal with its own emergencies. Writing for ZNet, Michael Parenti
noted: When an especially powerful hurricane hit [Cuba] last year,
the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and
local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million people, more than
10 percent of the country's population, with not a single life lost,
a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.
The American press today is hardly able to contain its derision of the
Bush administrations response.
Parenti goes on
to note that a great deal of the problem can be traced directly to Americas
lack of social planning. The free market will take care of everything
important, to the profit of corporations; the unfortunate should rely
on private charity. That thinking has permeated political levels in
America to an unprecedented degree so that any form of assistance to
people is denied because it doesnt serve the interests of the
market. The poor are on their own in the American system which can only
be described as free enterprise for the poor, socialism for the
rich. [It is worth noting that in the midst of all the devastation
in the Delta region, Congress is making sure to set aside time on September
6 to pass another tax rebate for the wealthy.]
Even the American
news networks who have generally given George Bush a pass on virtually
every inane thing he has said or done since 2000 are criticizing the
pathetic rescue efforts. And it is not lost on many that the folks still
in New Orleans after the rain stopped falling were largely poor and
black. One cant help but wonder if the response would have been
swifter had the damage occurred to some tony upscale white neighbourhood.
© Copyright
2005 by AxisofLogic.com
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Paul Harris is an
Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada. He can be reached
at [email protected]