THE CATASTROPHE on the Gulf Coast was the most widely anticipated "natural disaster" in U.S. history. Yet the response of the U.S. government was universally condemned as a failure. What happened?

HURRICANE KATRINA occurred on the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act-- the culmination of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

It provides a kind of tragic measure of the degree to which the civil rights revolution has been turned back. Not only in exposing the degree of criminal neglect and social Darwinism on the part of the Bush administration, but if you look at the event in detail, it will also tell you about the appalling contradictions of power and inequality in U.S. cities.

First of all, everybody has known for generations the vulnerability of New Orleans to large hurricanes. This became even clearer after the near miss of 1998. Since then, there have been computer studies and analyses that have shown in exacting detail-- not just one, but a whole series that corroborated each other-- that a direct hit by a Category Five hurricane would kill between 85,000 and 100,000 people in New Orleans. And even if the impact were moderate, parts of the city would be devastated.

Last year, you had Hurricane Ivan, and the evacuation of the city. So the death of New Orleans has been utterly foretold in unprecedented detail.

Despite the unparalleled foreknowledge that this was the single-biggest disaster scenario and should have been the absolute priority of the so-called Department of Homeland Security, the Republicans-- with little Democratic opposition-- have cut back spending on levee improvement in New Orleans designed to help protect the city from a storm surge event.

At the very same time, of course, they were spending money to fortify the border with Mexico. So you had this obscenity of undersized and sinking levees in New Orleans, and this gigantic triple wall between San Diego and Tijuana. I'm sure there are a lot of folks in New Orleans who wish they had had a wall that big.

Precisely at the time that you have a unanimity of warning about the danger of the situation, you're cutting back and reducing expenditure.

Secondly, within the existing system of levees in New Orleans, roughly three-quarters are designed to protect the city from the two lakes that surround it. The only levee built to a high enough standard is the one that lines the Mississippi River.

Within this levee system, which is something like 25 miles long, there have always been glaring inequalities. In the eastern, forgotten part of New Orleans-- including both the upper and lower Ninth Wards, bordering the Industrial Canal-- the levees are lower and far worse maintained than those that protect the central parts of the city, with the large tourist assets.

Even within the city's defenses, you had very unequal provision, reflecting the economic and political clout of different neighborhoods. And of course, land values have always been on the basis that the highest values are on the land with natural levees, while working class, and particularly poor Black populations, were located on the back swamps of New Orleans.

The third point-- and the one we know from a variety of different journalistic sources-- is that every time the question of evacuating the homeless, the elderly and the poor people of New Orleans came up, it was ignored and passed over in silence.

There are actually two crucial levels of disaster planning-- one that's handled by the federal government and the state government, and one that's handled by the city. On both these levels, this question was passed over, despite the fact that everybody knew exactly what the problem would be.

There was a very accurate estimate of how many people would be stuck in the city. During Hurricane Ivan, in September 2004, the city was evacuated, except for the poorest population, which was left behind. The Times-Picayune, the city's major paper, ran a very bitter article about
immense anger in the neighborhoods about being totally abandoned. In fact, in that case, they were reluctant to open the Superdome, because the mayor was reportedly worried about damage that people might do to it.

People were, in a sense, criminalized in advance. And there is no way to get around a cynical, criminal abandonment-- way in advance-- of any safeguards on behalf of the population that was living in those low-lying areas of the city. That extends from Bush down to the mayor, Ray Nagin.

Which then brings us to a fourth point: Why was there such neglect-- seemingly racist neglect-- of people in a city that has been governed by legatees of the civil rights movement since the mid-1970s?

Part of the answer is the way power works in New Orleans. You have a Black political class that governs in junior partnership with one of the most ruthless white local business establishments in the South, and maybe in the country. Ever since the collapse of the economy in the oil recession of the 1980s, their strategy has basically been to push as many poor people-- and especially poor Black people-- out of New Orleans as possible.

There has been a kind of policy of triage, where you tear down two of the largest public housing projects in the city-- the famous Desire project and St. Thomas in the Warehouse District-- to make room for a Wal-Mart and gentrification. You re-house only a portion of the population-- a minority-- and the other residents are basically thrown out onto the streets, with the expectation that they would leave the city.

The city's working-class Black population-- the people who are the very soul of the city, and who created its culture and made it famous-- is now largely seen as the major obstacle to the city's economic recovery.

A portion of them is necessary to be service workers in casinos and hotels. But the bigger idea has been to shrink the Black population and push the poor out of the city.

This is seen is the absolute condition, not just for gentrification, but for the ideal that the Black political elite and the white business class in Audubon Park are agreed on-- literally turning New Orleans into a theme park of its history, but without the people who actually created that history and culture.

It's hard not to believe that such a ruthless attitude toward the poor didn't also inform some of the planning for a disaster in New Orleans. Of course, this opens the way to the statement by a Republican congressman from Baton Rouge that the housing projects were finally cleaned up-- we
couldn't do it, but God did.

All kinds of extravagant claims have been reported about how the city can use this to its advantage-- about how New Orleans might even become a Republican city as the result of the silver lining that the French Quarter, the Convention Center, the Garden District and Audubon Park are all high and dry, and therefore safe.

So the flood becomes part of an ethnic cleansing, basically. City politics has been aiming at that for the last 20 or 25 years.

The elites are talking now about abandoning whole parts of the city-- and that will probably be given an ecological gloss.

The housing destruction is enormous. The poor areas of New Orleans-- where most people are renters, and where slumlords for generations neglected maintenance of housing-- were infested by tropical termites for the last few years. That caused immense damage to the housing stock. Now all this rotten housing has just been washed away or rendered irreparable. You are going to see the loss of tens of thousands of units of housing, which will be used by local elites as a fait accompli to keep people out of the city.

Some people give the impression that there is a wider policy of dispersing evacuees. Whether deliberately or not, it further serves the purpose of basically encouraging people not to return to the city.

Disasters in American history have almost always been theaters of class struggle and racial struggle. This is class struggle on an extraordinary scale.

In the meantime, I think, there is a huge opportunity in the sense that New Orleans neighborhoods have rich traditions of resistance and rank-and-file leadership. I don't think people are going to accept their forced evacuation from the city. They are going to fight to return to the city, and that provides an opportunity to build very broad unity around the right of people to return to decent housing and jobs, particularly over the way the administration and local elites have handled the question.


MIKE DAVIS is an author and activist whose books include City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, The Ecology of Fear and the forthcoming The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. He spoke to Socialist Worker's LEE SUSTAR about the political impact of
Hurricane Katrina.

full:  http://socialistworker.org/2005-2/558/558_04_MikeDavis.shtml