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	Workers Vanguard No. 955	26 March 2010

An Orgy of Post-Katrina Bourgeois Reaction

Notes on New Orleans

By Joe Vetter

The following article was written by Joe Vetter, a founding member of the Spartacist League/U.S. and the organizer of the SL’s former New Orleans branch.

Following Hurricane Katrina’s devastating strike on New Orleans in August 2005, the business community and the Bush-Cheney administration saw an opportunity to “change the demographics” of the city. Local businessman James Reiss, chairman of the local Regional Transit Authority and one of the leaders of an exclusive gated community in New Orleans, immediately told the Wall Street Journal (8 September 2005): “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically. I’m not just speaking for myself here.” That meant cleaning out the public housing projects, and terrorizing, especially, the black population.

Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine (Picador, 2007), wrote that while she was at a Baton Rouge shelter later that September, “the news racing round the shelter that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, ‘We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did’.” Klein continued: “Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: ‘I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities’.”

Milton Friedman’s Free Marketeers

The imperialist endeavors of the U.S. inform government policies at home. Under Bush a section of the State Department was set up to monitor countries where natural disasters (such as tsunamis) or man-made disasters (wars like Iraq) had created a big enough shock to create “opportunities” to force the implementation of “free market” economic reforms. This section of the State Department continues to exist under Obama, who declared during the 2008 presidential campaign, “I am a pro-growth, free market guy. I love the market.” Borrowing from the “free market” model, public housing near the French Quarter was hungrily eyed as land that could be used for the development of luxury hotels and housing. This followed the lead, too, of former president Bill Clinton’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros, who got the ball rolling with the destruction of public housing projects like Cabrini Green in Chicago.

Milton Friedman himself literally got up from his deathbed to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal (5 December 2005), noting that “most New Orleans schools are in ruins” and that this was “an opportunity” for privatizing the school system in New Orleans. The privatization was done with great speed, making most of the schools in New Orleans into private charter schools. There are only four public schools left controlled by the elected school board, while most public school teachers have been fired, decimating the union. Friedman called for the distribution of vouchers to make it possible for parents to send their kids to any school of their choice. In New Orleans this mostly means the notoriously bad Catholic schools, where the teaching staff have little or no educational training and are grossly underpaid (in the name of service to the church and “his holy father” the Pope).

Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” were the architects of the “shock treatment” mass unemployment and starvation in Chile following Pinochet’s bloody military coup in 1973. In “Behind Friedmania” (WV No. 260, 11 July 1980), we pointed out: “Business Week (12 January 1976), hardly an organ of liberal protest, recognized that only a brutal military dictatorship could impose the Friedmanite economic model: ‘Because a drastic cut in government outlays often triggers a sharp jump in unemployment, the almost inevitable result is labor unrest. Countries that try the cold-turkey approach to inflation therefore tend, like Brazil and Chile to be regimes that use police power to contain the social fallout of these economic policies’.”

In New Orleans today, many hospitals are still closed. Hundreds of people are suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and are unable to get help. This is the Friedmanite shock therapy that has been created.

Naomi Klein points out in The Shock Doctrine:

“On September 13, 2005—fourteen days after the levees were breached—the Heritage Foundation hosted a meeting of like-minded ideologues and Republican lawmakers. They came up with a list of ‘Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices’—thirty-two policies in all, each one straight out of the Chicago School playbook, and all of them packaged as ‘hurricane relief.’ The first three items were ‘automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas,’ a reference to the law that required federal contractors to pay a living wage; ‘make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone’; and ‘make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).’... All these measures were announced by President Bush within the week.”

To ease the way for the rebuilding of the state power by repression, the race card was played and a media offensive was launched against “looting.” Whites were described as “resourceful” and blacks as “looters.” Eddie Compass (then chief of police) appeared on Oprah attributing the most heinous crimes to the people trapped in the Louisiana Superdome and the Convention Center. Mayor Ray Nagin called the trapped people “animalistic.” Claims of looting and crime were picked up by every major media outlet, and retailed as fact in The Tin Roof Blowdown, a best-selling Dave Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke. But after the crisis passed, a Times-Picayune reporter investigated the rumors and found no truth in them.

Camp Greyhound

The blog “dystopolitik” (May 2008) states, “Pentagon planners, and military officials are using Katrina data to conduct war-games of future domestic scenarios, according to Army Times.” On the ground, upon entering New Orleans a few days after Katrina, Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, said, “This place is going to look like little Somalia.” In bourgeois parlance that means a “failed state.” With that comment the mission of the military was clarified: The rescue operation was a far distant second to the repression of the city. People actively engaged in rescue work, even actor Sean Penn, were attacked as in the way. As military checkpoints were set up, Jones further said, “This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

A recent book by Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeney’s Books, 2009), tells one family’s ordeal. It is the story of how New Orleans painting contractor Abdulrahman Zeitoun stayed behind to watch over his and his clients’ properties in the flood, feeding trapped dogs and rescuing people with his canoe. One day his wife and children, who had driven out, suddenly lost touch with him, finally to discover after weeks of agony that he had been seized and dumped into the notorious “Camp Greyhound.”

This “camp” was built using hundreds of prisoners from Angola state penitentiary, creating a maze of wire cages topped with razor wire on the parking lot of the Greyhound bus station. It was made so that one guard could watch everyone at once, with no privacy for the prisoners, who were forced to sleep on the dirty bare asphalt. If the prisoners moved too near the fencing, they were sprayed with pepper gas and then doused with water several minutes later (to prevent visible blistering). Many routinely had plastic bags placed over their heads to simulate smothering, like waterboarding, a long-standing torture method of the New Orleans Police Department. No one was ever told the charges against them. No prisoner was allowed to see a lawyer or make a phone call. This prison resembled Guantánamo Bay or the “black site” at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan. Some military personnel referred to New Orleans as New Oraq, or Baghdad by the Bayou.

The warden from Angola prison oversaw the construction of Camp Greyhound and said that this was the first step in the rebuilding of New Orleans: “You can’t have the security until you have the jail.” One ended up in Camp Greyhound by simply being “foreign” (Zeitoun was originally from Syria), black or in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Zeitoun, Eggers writes:

“One man said he was a sanitation worker from Houston. His company had been contracted shortly after the storm to come in and begin the cleanup. One morning he was walking from the hotel to his truck when a National Guard truck pulled up. He was arrested on the spot, and brought to Camp Greyhound…. He usually picked up garbage in Houston, but after the hurricane, his supervisor said they had taken a contract in New Orleans. This prisoner, thinking it would be interesting to see what had become of the city and wanting to help in its cleanup, went willingly. He was in uniform, and had identification, the keys to his truck, everything. But nothing worked. He was charged with looting and put in the cages behind the bus station.”

Corruption, Killing and the NOPD

Corruption is almost synonymous with the word Louisiana. It goes back for many decades, possibly to the post-Reconstruction period. The story goes that the night before he was inaugurated as governor, segregationist Jimmie Davis (country singer and author of the song, “You Are My Sunshine”) was asked by a reporter: “What is going to be the first thing that you do as governor?” Davis’s reply was, “Steal!” Davis was responsible for building the “Sunshine Bridge,” which went across the Mississippi from nowhere to nowhere—when first constructed, the south end of the bridge emptied into a swamp.

Corruption is also synonymous with the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD)—as is daily murderous repression of the black population. Now under federal investigation is the infamous Danziger Bridge incident in which the NOPD killed two black people, one a mentally retarded man who was shot in the back. There is the burned-out car containing the body of Henry Glover, found behind a police station. This was not investigated until the Nation broke the story online in December 2008—and there are many, many more post-Katrina atrocities still coming to light.

For a sample of the death squads run by the NOPD in the pre-Katrina period you can read Workers Vanguard articles going back decades. “New Orleans Cop Death Squad” (WV No. 322, 28 January 1983) recounted the story of the 1980 execution-style slaying of four black people in the ghetto of Algiers, the subject of an exposé on 60 Minutes. A decade later, another article with the same headline (WV No. 615, 27 January 1995) detailed the execution of Kim Marie Groves, who had filed a brutality complaint against NOPD cops, an execution NOPD cop Len Davis was charged with ordering.

But this is not simply about the local cops, who are plenty brutal, murderous and corrupt. Their mission is to repress blacks and labor. A few years ago as sanitation workers were shutting down Mardi Gras, they were attacked by the cops. Though the cops’ class hatred is up-front, their corruption can sometimes get in the way. More recently, the cops attacked unionized transit workers of the Amalgamated Transit Union. This was an embarrassment, as the New York Times (9 October 2009) reported: “Contentious episodes have kept the department in litigation, including a 2008 racially charged bar brawl involving off-duty police officers and transit workers; the integrity bureau reported that officers tried to cover up the facts of the brawl, and some officers were fired.”

The NOPD is so corrupt and therefore so little trusted by the bourgeoisie that Blackwater and other private mercenary groups resembling the Freikorps murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brought in to patrol New Orleans streets. Their self-described mission was “securing neighborhoods” and “confronting criminals.” These mercenaries were brought in by Homeland Security and deputized by then-governor Kathleen Blanco. Or they were hired by the wealthy Bourbons. F. Patrick Quinn III hired them to guard his $3 million private estate and his luxury hotels—hotels that were considered for contracts for housing FEMA workers (see “Blackwater Down,” Nation, 10 October 2005). One reporter actually saw drones flying overhead. Blackwater frequently operates and loads armed drones in Afghanistan for the U.S. government. Meanwhile, some local cops were out “liberating” Cadillacs from a local dealership.

The idea of private military security fits right in with the free market concept, though even some “free marketeers” like the cultish Ayn Rand hesitate. As a New Yorker (9 November 2009) article on Rand noted: “Allowance is made for the state to run an army, a police force, and courts, but that’s it.” That is the core of the state, whether its functions are partially “outsourced” or not. As we wrote in “‘War on Terror’: Torture, Spying, Imperialist Butchery” (WV No. 890, 13 April 2007):

“The veneer of ‘democracy’ is meant to cover the reality of the capitalist state—with its cops, courts, prisons and army—as an apparatus of violence designed to protect capitalist profits and rule against the exploited and the oppressed. This murderous apparatus has been greatly bolstered by the ‘war on terror.’ But as sinister as the new measures are, what the government is actually able to get away with will ultimately be determined by the level of social struggle.”

It will take a proletarian socialist revolution to end the savage exploitation and brutal racial oppression of capitalist class rule and the barbarism through which it is enforced. Our purpose is to build the workers party necessary to lead the proletariat in that struggle.