"Brownie" Spills Some Beans

New Orleans Racist Atrocity: Crime and Cover-Up

Untold numbers are dead and tens of thousands dispersed, their homes rotting shells, the land they lived on eyed by greedy speculators. Even as human remains still lie unidentified and unclaimed in the Gulf Coast region, thousands upon thousands of the living are being pushed relentlessly into homeless, jobless, rootless misery. The lethal incompetence and racist contempt displayed by all levels of government for the fate of New Orleans’ black and poor population before, during and after Hurricane Katrina spelled a crime of enormous magnitude. And the crime continues, blossoming into fuller malignity, as the capitalist vultures and their cronies in Washington, D.C. pick over this vast tragedy to maximize their profit opportunities.

The Washington Post (12 February) writes that now—nearly six months after the disaster—an all-Republican House of Representatives committee is about to issue a 600-page report on Katrina. A draft of the report includes “90 findings of failures at all levels of government.” Between House and Senate investigations, over 800,000 pages of documents have been produced based on testimony and evidence from more than 250 witnesses. These hearings may well be the bourgeoisie’s attempt to do some “damage control”—after all, the whole world watched on TV as the Gulf Coast was devastated and the people of New Orleans left to die.

But every new revelation should underline to working people one inescapable conclusion: The real truth about New Orleans is that it was not just incompetence, not just mistakes, not just bureaucratic inertia that condemned thousands to death and misery. It was the brutal workings of the racist U.S. capitalist system.

Testifying before the Senate “Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs” committee on February 10, former FEMA head and administration fall guy Michael Brown denounced as “baloney” White House and Homeland Security claims that they thought New Orleans had “dodged the bullet” and that they only heard of levee breaks on Tuesday, August 30, some 24 hours after they had occurred. The Senate hearing revealed that reports of a levee breach were available to the government as early as Monday morning. These even included a “White House Homeland Security Council” report at 11:13 a.m. that stated that “a levee in New Orleans has reportedly been breached, sending six to eight feet of water throughout the Ninth Ward area of the city.”

Brown said he spoke directly to White House aides who were with Bush on vacation about the situation on Monday, the day the storm hit land. He said he didn’t bother to call his boss Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, because “it would have wasted my time.” Brown said that if the government had “confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal Levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that.” He commented that handling “a natural disaster” had “become the stepchild within the Department of Homeland Security.” The fact that FEMA has been absorbed by Homeland Security only underscores its decades-long role as an agency of state repression (see “New Orleans: Racist Atrocity,” WV No. 854, 16 September 2005).

The Bush White House has been stonewalling for weeks, blocking investigations into its role in Katrina, and no wonder: They lied about what they knew and when they knew it. While George Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were off playing—ranching in Texas, fly-fishing in Wyoming, shopping for shoes in Manhattan—helpless wheelchair-bound patients were drowning behind nursing home doors, entire black neighborhoods were swept away, families were gasping their last as the waters trapped them up under their attic roofs, old people were dying of exposure and lack of medicine. As we wrote in a September 4 statement issued by the Spartacist League (reprinted in WV No. 854):

“The unspeakable, smirking George W. Bush trimmed his month-long vacation by a couple of days to survey the disaster zone from his presidential jet and asked inanely: Who knew the levees would break? Answer: Everyone. For years, scientists and Army Corps of Engineers warned that the levees were sinking and incapable of withstanding a powerful hurricane.”

The Katrina disaster laid bare the class and race divisions in America, underlining that the oppression of black people is rooted in the very bedrock of American capitalism. The capitalist rulers have their priorities, and taking care of working people is not one of them. The devastation of New Orleans was prepared by decades of bipartisan neglect by a ruling class that, driven by lust for immediate gain, doesn’t want to pay for repairing its deteriorating infrastructure.

When any child with the ability to manipulate a TV remote control could see New Orleans drowning, could see thousands starving, desperate for drinkable water at the convention center, what kind of monster would not just get help down there? The answer is: the kind of monster that never had any intention of helping, the United States government. This government exists not to help the people but to serve the capitalist rulers. Democrats and Republicans alike, at all levels of government, from New Orleans mayor Nagin to Louisiana governor Blanco on up to the White House: Their loyalty is to the capitalist profit system.

The crimes continue. FEMA announced an early Valentine’s Day present: cutting funding as of February 13 for 12,000 Katrina evacuee families scattered in motels around the country, who now face immediate eviction. Last week, occupants of some 4,500 rooms already had their funding cut. Where will they go? Not to FEMA trailers. Of some 135,000 requests for trailers, FEMA has only filled about half, while in Orleans Parish, only 3,000 out of 21,000 requests have been filled. Insurance rates are going sky high, while FEMA claimed last year to have run out of money to pay existing flood insurance claims.

Behind the Mardi Gras glitter and tourist-fueled Bourbon Street jazz, New Orleans has a port vital to the U.S. economy (the port will be reconstructed). It is also one of America’s poorest, blackest cities. And now, a Brown University study has confirmed what many had already feared: “New Orleans could lose as much as 80 percent of its black population if its most damaged neighborhoods are not rebuilt and if there is not significant government assistance” (New York Times, 27 January). As for the likelihood of “government assistance”—well, one float in the first Krewe du Vieux Mardi Gras parade on February 11 had a display asking France to buy Louisiana back, as the state’s people might then get better treatment.

As we wrote in our September 4 statement: “The situation cries out for workers revolution in the U.S. to do away with the capitalist system and establish a society with a planned, collectivized economy…. As New Orleans shows, the choice is clear: socialism or barbarism.”