The Politics
Of The Blame Game
By Patrick Martin
10 September 2005
World
Socialist Web
The
Bush administrations response to the social disaster unfolding
in Louisiana and Mississippi is to deny any responsibility for the horrifying
conditions facing more than one million people. White House officials,
from Bush on down, have rejected all criticism of the federal governments
failure to prepare before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast or respond
adequately afterwards.
Im not
going to engage in the blame game, Bush press spokesman Scott
McClellan said repeatedly at a press briefing Wednesday, when reporters
sought a response on whether Bush had confidence in Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) Director Michael Brown. Bush and his congressional
Republican defenders used the same phrase to rebuff any effort to think
critically about the destruction of New Orleans and much of the Louisiana
and Mississippi Gulf coast, the biggest natural disaster in US history.
What is the meaning
of this banal but mind-boggling phrase? Is there nothing to be learned
from the cataclysm which has killed thousands, if not tens of thousands,
in New Orleans and surrounding areas? Is it the case that no individual
or institution can be held accountable for failures in myriad areas,
from the planning and maintenance of adequate infrastructure to the
preparation and execution of rescue and reconstruction?
This is a government
and a ruling eliteDemocratic as well as Republicanthat endlessly
preach the gospel of personal responsibility for the great
mass of Americans who work for a living. When it comes to cutting federal
social programs for the poor or restructuring the Medicaid, Medicare
and Social Security systems, Bush is all for personal responsibility.
Finding a job, securing
adequate health care coverage, paying for college education, saving
for retirementthese are all obligations which should, in the view
of the Republican Right, be placed squarely on individuals. That was
the logic of the recent congressional passage of a bankruptcy
reform bill, signed into law by Bush, making it much harder for
workers to escape the burden of debts caused, in the majority of cases,
by sudden or severe illness, inadequate health insurance, or layoff.
The bill takes effect October 17just about the time many Katrina
victims may be compelled to file for bankruptcy.
But when it comes
to the performance of the ruling elite itself, including high government
officials like Brown, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff,
and Bush himself, that is another matter. Any attempt to fix responsibility,
hold officials accountable, or remove themeven though the consequence
would be departure to a well-paid retirement, not the colossal losses
facing the victims of Katrinais rejected out of hand.
One measure of the
indifference at the White House came in an incident recounted by House
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who described a conversation with Bush
on Tuesday when she urged him to fire Brown. He said Why
would I do that? Pelosi told the New York Times.
I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didnt go right
last week. And he said, What didnt go right?
Bush & Co. denounce
the blame game even as reports continue to emerge of gross
indifference and incompetence, if not outright sabotage, in the operations
of FEMA and other federal agencies responsible for disaster planning,
relief and reconstruction. On Thursday, NBC found thousands of trailer
homes still parked at a Georgia facility, although the state of Mississippi
ordered them from FEMA more than a week ago to provide emergency housing.
There were reports of hospital ships held offshore, doctors, nurses
and other medical workers diverted from the disaster zone, and hundreds
of buses blocked from entering the New Orleans area for post-storm evacuations.
Hurricane Katrina
has laid bare the essential irrationality of the profit system and the
human cost of the colossal social inequality it engenders, and discredited
the claims, incessantly repeated by the media and political establishment,
that the capitalist market is the solution to all social problems.
The expenditure
of a few billion dollars, to strengthen the New Orleans levees and revitalize
the downstream delta marshland and barrier islands that long provided
natural protection to the city, would have sufficed to prevent hundreds
of billions in damages and save thousands of lives. But an economic
system driven by the profit motive and a political system controlled
by the biggest financial interests prevented such an elementary exercise
in prudence and forethought.
Last year a planning
exercise dubbed Hurricane Pam simulated a direct hit on
New Orleans by a storm weaker than Katrina. The scientists and disaster
management professionals who engaged in this simulation predicted inundation
of the city and the death of tens of thousands. The response of the
Bush administration was to propose hundreds of billions of additional
tax cuts for the wealthy, while cutting spending on the New Orleans
levees by more than 50 percent.
After virtual silence
for a week, spokesmen for the Democratic Party on Wednesday began to
criticize the Bush administrations conduct, some more stridently
than others, calling for an independent bipartisan commission to investigate
the preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina. But these criticisms
focused on a handful of officials, particularly Brown and Chertoff,
while obscuring the deeper social issues.
Senate Minority
Leader Harry Reid sought to reduce the disaster to Bushs personal
laziness, sending a letter to the Homeland Security Committee demanding
answers to questions about Bushs vacation and whether it had any
effect on the federal governments response.
Senator John Kerry
of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, said
in an interview, What you see here is a harvest of four years
of complete avoidance of real problem-solving and real governance in
favor of spin and ideology. Democratic National Committee Chairman
Howard Dean said, The idea that somehow government didnt
care until it had to for political reasons, its appalling.
Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton appeared on several television news programs opposing
the plans by the Republican leadership for an investigation of the Katrina
disaster by a special House-Senate committee which would have a majority
of Republicans. I dont think the government can investigate
itself and I dont think the government should be distracted from
the main job, which is the recovery process that needs to go on,
she said on ABCs Good Morning America.
Clinton, Reid and
Pelosi are all pushing for the establishment of an independent bipartisan
commission modeled on the panel which delivered its report last year
on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This only shows that what
the Democrats are seeking is a cover-up more sophisticated than the
crude one proposed by the Republicans.
All of the official
investigations into 9/11, the lies used to justify the war in Iraq,
and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal have served to protect the key institutions
of the American statethe military and intelligence agencies, the
White House, Congresswhile at most a handful of underlings are
punished or removed from their positions. The routine of whitewash and
cover-up has become stereotyped and almost farcical.
In the case of Katrina,
Bush first proposed an investigation on Tuesdayone which he claimed
he would head himself. Then congressional Republicans proposed an investigation
they would control. They were followed by the Democrats demanding a
procedure in which they would have equal influence. (There are, of course,
Democratic officials to protect as well, in the New Orleans and Louisiana
governments and the Clinton administration).
Working people should
reject all such investigations as futile and fundamentally dishonest.
The government and its top officials, beginning with Bush and Cheney,
must be held accountable, not just their political stooges like Brown.
More than that, every major institution of the American ruling elite
is implicated in the disaster: Congress, the Democratic and Republican
parties, the military, the media.
The root cause of
the disaster is the profit system itself, which all of these institutions
uphold. Working people and young people must draw definite political
conclusions from the destruction of New Orleans: it is time to build
an independent political movement of the working class to replace the
capitalist system with a socialist economy that is democratically and
rationally planned to serve human need, not profit.
.