A KATRINA-NEW ORLEANS REFLECTION

By Jim Harney

Katrina and the tragedy left behind in New Orleans, the rest of Louisiana and Mississippi: breath taking. With each passing day it becomes more so.

I ponder America and its tormented soul. The hurricane of record unearthed the kind of violence that lies hidden behind US Democracy. Violence rarely seen, talked about, criticized, more importantly, dealt with in creative ways. American Exceptionalism hides it, which means violence lurks in our discussion of democracy absent of any explanation and resolve to deal with racism, poverty, imperial power, outlandish defense spending and a few getting richer while inequality widens in the richest country in the world.

Financial journals point to inequality in the United States. Our country refuses to open its economic purse to the poor of the world, nor to our own people hurting in New Orleans and the myriad places throughout the southwest where they’re living in makeshift camps, if that.

Four days after the hurricane of record struck President Bush musters energy garnered while at his vacation camp, in a five-week vacation time, to board a plane; he even had the aircraft hover low over the flooded city so he could check it out. Days later he actually enters the water-covered city, at a press conference he babbles about American greatness and with his body exudes a “fear not” mentality, everything will be okay. Well it won’t. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Commentators now call New Orleans a “third world” place. A no-brainer: the whole nation has developed pockets of “third world” realities, but we never seem to notice them in our mega cities.

Doctors and nurses find themselves in a “third world” medical situation. It reminds me of what a health promoter told me some ten years ago in the backwater of Guatemala with the Communities of Population in Resistance, poor people who spent a decade eluding the Guatemalan army hot on their trails to do away with them. A young man, sitting on a hammock in a clinic, holding his five year old son with a swollen eye, pus coming out of it, looked at me and said the only resemblance between this clinic and one in the United States is the name.

Now a glaring third world reality stains the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the world, virtually helpless in the face of human tragedy. It’s been here for some time in the way our impoverished citizens are treated; workers with disgraceful salaries, and the mushrooming of humiliating minimum wage service sector jobs with little meaning behind them; New Orleans replete with them.

The “Other America” glares at us but we turn away, lack the spiritual, political and economic muscle to deal with it; millions of those others we can’t bear to deal with have been with us for some time.

A bubble economy of the nineties, reminds some of the roaring twenties, a Great Gatsby life-style, with millionaires enjoying the good life, one appears every fifty seconds, and the billionaires club does well.

Imagine in the United States of America, 160,000 people in the securities industry, who hang out at Wall Street, divided up 10.5 billion in bonuses, that’s roughly what the President first asked for in relief for those trapped in New Orleans, the mostly poor who couldn’t get a bus out. Last year the number of people below the poverty line swelled by one million, now there are some 37 million hurting people and most of them are children. One child in five in this country stands a better chance of making it in another country. Let’s not even think of the millions a paycheck away from a breadline, or wondering where the oil this year is going to come from. Unemployment hovers around 9%, not 6%, when we consider those with part-time jobs and who desire full-time work, those who have given up looking for work and the two million or more people locked up in our growing prison system.

In the backdrop of New Orleans and the devastated surrounding areas an Administration lauds its competence in Regime Change, dropping bombs, using depleted uranium as a weapon of choice in taking out Iraqi tanks. Meanwhile, it is incompetent to respond to disaster in its own backyard. There’s just not enough money. New Orleans is now a toxic dumb. Wading in the water poses health problems, never mind the risk of drinking it.

At the same time as the Administration calls for international aid and for citizens to send cash it refuses humanitarian assistance from Cuba, doesn’t even reply to the gift of 1,500 doctors, some of the best in the world to help take the strain off of healthcare people at their wits end.

Bush snubs his nose at an offer by Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela. The Latin American leader wants to send a hundred thousand barrels of oil to those traumatized by Katrina.

A shame that the Administration can’t take up these humanitarian gestures made by Castro and Chavez with welcoming arms and see them as a way to initiate a positive foreign policy with both countries instead of one premised on the ruse of “axis of evil” countries.

Speaking about the Axis of Evil, the Pentagon frets about a triple frontier, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. US Generals believe terrorists abound in that region. Now the US has 400 troops in Paraguay, in an airbase few ever talk about, Mariscal Estigarriba. US troops on foreign soil with guaranteed impunity, something Argentina and Brazil refuse to go along with, indicates that the Administration is worried sick about the poor having too much voice, especially in Bolivia with large resources in coal, gas and some of the largest fresh-water lakes in the world. We’re not talking about making the planet a better place to live in, improving the lives of the dirt poor: it’s about wealth and sucking it out, so it heads north. Why can’t Bush pull those 400 troops out and bring them home to a place that is very insecure. Growing numbers of US troops in Latin America aren’t needed, remember 500 US troops fight in Colombia and another 500 bought and paid for by the Pentagon, mercenaries fight there as well, the latter keep the official number of troops down by half. Left to themselves our southern sisters and brothers will make it: history illustrates that the US has weighted on their backs for too long a period and the weight has made that part of the world the most unequal in distribution of wealth, it’s very much like what the US is coming in its inability to spread wealth around.

Speaking of getting the wealth around, Katrina and the human negligence that covers the nightmarish reality of New Orleans and surrounding areas forced the Senate to put on hold legislation abolishing an estate tax that with its passage would mean $1.5 billion. It also delayed devastating Medicare with a $35 billion slash in funds. Now is not the time to hit the poor Republican legislators are opining.

The market dominated by capitalist ethos has created an apartheid world globally, and we see it unfolding in New Orleans, it was always there, but hidden; now the whole country takes in the hard reality, the whole world now sees that the Other America that Michael Harrington spoke about in the sixties covers a huge swath of this nation and its spreading.

It’s disturbing; it’s trauma. Imagine the pain and hurt for those who spend their waking hours wondering where relatives are, whose alive, whose disappeared and will they ever be found, imagine the mothers who have lost new born babies and wonder whether they’ll ever see them again.

The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, in a radio address stated: “I need reinforcements. I need troops, man, I need 500 buses. Now get off your asses and fix this. Let’s do something and let’s fix the biggest goddam crisis in the history of this country.”

The Administration registers negative feedback in its response.

The Financial Times touches on the apartheid-racism implications: “The elderly poor would have found it physically difficult to make the trip. Most of the people who died in Katrina’s wake have been black.”

Few troops were made available for the disaster because they’re in Iraq creating one. If Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq, Louisiana would have had 3,000 National Guards people in the area; Mississippi would have 4,000 supporting disaster evacuations. The US has the audacity to ask countries around the world for monetary assistance when it spends $5.6 billion a month to keep more than a 170,000 troops in Iraq. Afghanistan will send $100,000: the US spends that in a minute in Iraq and a huge chunk of it going to Halliburton, corporate leaches making a fortune off of the Iraqi people, low and behold Halliburton surfaces as a beneficiary of Katrina being the first company to receive government contracts.

Not enough buses to get people out. A no brainier on this one that the Administration failed to cue into: with Presidential leadership he could have demanded that no bus in the country runs unless it is filled with people leaving New Orleans. It’s done through a declaration of state of emergency, then taking action rather that cleaning up brush at the President’s Texas hideaway ranch. Remember we have a vacationing President when most who work in this country are overworked. Over the last five years the President vacationed for 336 days.

Katrina demanded leadership and it was wanting. We’ll have to deal with the elderly, the poor who weren’t able to get into SUVs as tourists gave priority to their luggage rather than the human beings they left behind to die. An ethos at work here, protect property and forget human beings: the market pushes those values.

The Financial Times says “Many poor people did not have the cars or the financial means to pay to get out of New Orleans, or to pay for somewhere else to stay.” In a crisis like this poverty means sure death.

Sheila Zediwski of the Urban Institute says, “Poverty was definitely a factor. Maybe it’s awake up call that poverty in America is still a very big issue. People just don’t want to talk about poverty.”

A war on terrorism has shrouded a war against the poor in our own country: rarely spoken about in favor of a bullish market and unprecedented profits it’s brought to a few. Hidden into the terror of New Orleans lies an alarming defense budget of more than $500 trillion annually and growing. When is the last time you’ve heard President Bush say to the American people just send cash to finance the war in Iraq? The government feeds military budges with tons of pork while it cuts funds to the poor. Before Katrina hit Bush wanted to slash $35 billion from Medicare. With cash cuts to the region hit by the worst hurricane in history the US spends more money annually on selling arms, used to kill, than any other country in the world: a staggering $12.4 billion annually. And the money doesn’t go to poverty alleviation. More than 37 million people live in poverty many of them penalized because of it in New Orleans, for some the penalty was their death, and the body bags are coming, some twenty-five thousand of them.

Poverty elimination isn’t a priority. All the tax right-offs for the largest 500 corporations in the country that don’t pay a cent in taxes. CEOs get richer by the day. A headline in the Financial Times (September 21, 2005) reads, “Goldman earnings increase 84% to record $1.62 billion”. And Oil tycoons raking in profits of 35% - a capitalist utopia - while the poor in our country will face a hard cold winter ahead of them, and we’re refusing Venezuela’s help! Those close to the “black-gold” business project the cost of oil per barrel to hover around $70 dollars and stay that way for years. Last year, at this time, we saw the price of a barrel go for $35.

Staying with the oil: remember the oil mess in New Orleans amounts to a third of the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989.

Poverty, and then take into consideration our new Ambassador to the UN who wants to sabotage a worldwide effort to reduce it by fifty percent by the year 2015: the US doesn’t want to have anything to do it. He guttered an attempt at reducing poverty by adding on some 175 amendments.

In a close analysis of what happened in the aftermath of Katrina, a focused look at macro and micro economic policy is an essential. We can’t talk about Katrina without speaking about deficit, privatization, job loss, disparity between the mega rich and the dirt poor whose numbers grow at frightening speed. Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse in Mother Jones summed it up with Iraq and New Orleans morphing into “New Oraq”.

And now we’re dealing with Rita which took out many refineries in the Gulf. Both Katrina and Rita have brought to the forefront oil policy and how it favors oil giants with record prices. It’s worth checking out Tyson Slocum’s testimony (http://commerce.senate.gov/pdf/slocum.pdf) before a Senate Committee, he’s with Public Concern and has been quoted frequently in newspaper and magazine articles on hurricanes and it’s impact on the oil industry. One of the points of his testimony reveals that “Since 2001, the five largest oil refining companies operating in America, ExxonMobil, Valero, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP – have recorded $28 billion (Tyson’s emphasis) in profits.” The oil companies also come up with huge contributions 80% of which goes to Republicans.

A swath of oil company mergers since the 1990s allowed the industry to keep relatively low oil prices and still enjoy nifty profits. The oil companies stayed clear of refineries, an excuse for keeping production on the low side and still make big bucks. Now refineries crank at 90% capacity a worrisome activity given problems of keeping them in good repair and that could lead to an ecological nightmare.

The oil industry blames OPEC for high oil prices. Others lean toward hedge funds making a fortune of oil futures as the problem.

However, data now has surfaced indicating that oil companies have deliberately stayed clear of refining oil, which kept prices high. Different perspectives surfaced over this debate within OPEC. Venezuela, and Mexico as an OPEC observer, say the issue isn’t more production, the problem lies with the inability to refine what the oil producing countries come up with.

When the industry told OPEC countries to produce more oil reasoning that lack of production was the reason for the present crisis plaguing power economies, the oil cartel called the industry’s bluff and offered to place on the market millions of barrels of oil. But the industry refused to buy the oil because it could not process it given oil refineries running at 90% of their capacity.

Tyson’s testimony underscores the role of financial capital and of derivatives; over the counter (OTC) derivates, which is a way financial firms have of not working through major exchanges in New York and Chicago, and too, escape minimum regulatory power of the government. OTCs enjoy little transparency: investors froth for it. OTC exchanges take place mostly in financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and hedge funds that cater to institutions and wealthy individuals. To bet in hedge funds, casino capitalism at its best, means that an individual has to come up with millions of dollars in cash and have millions in assets just to play. But when they play they win high interest rates, particularly on oil in these times when it goes for close to seventy dollars a barrel.

Tyrson says that hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts are taken out in over the counter sales (OTC), as I mentioned they’re outside the exchanges and thus distant from government regulation which means more room for profit and secrecy. The Bank of International settlements reveled that OTC notional derivatives are worth more than $248 trillion. The Senate rejected an appeal to regulate them. It’s difficult to speak of Katrina and New Orleans without derivatives coming into play.

The FT reports: “Some security companies were hired to ‘extract’ people from the storm-hit areas: one contract for the extraction of one person was said to be an offer for $20,000 – an hourly rate of about $500 for each person in a 10-man armed team.”

Now the question as to how to rebuild New Orleans and the hurricane devastated area in Louisiana and Mississippi. The costs could well pass $200 billion dollars. Who’s going to pay for it? Enter a world full of possible conversations: Will it be the poor? Chances are it will. The Chinese and Japanese will come up with money, just like both countries have come up with the money to finance the war in Iraq. And who will pay both of these countries back: it won’t be the rich. They’ll profit from the aftermath of Katrina and Rita. They’ll profit from the political decisions made by human beings not to funnel money into an area where commonsense had it would be destroyed if a class-5 hurricane hit it.

Now like 9/11 we have an opportunity to look at who we are as a people in the aftermath of a hurricane and the lackadaisical attitude the Administration had toward it. We have a reflective opportunity to ponder a world of class, gender, race and political economy based on imperial power. Whether we like it or not they’ve woven themselves into what has become know as Katrina-New Orleans. Let’s not pass up this moment of opportunity of making connections: the consequences for not doing so are grave.