The hurricane disaster: US capitalism stands disgraced Statement of the *World 
Socialist Web Site *Editorial Board
2 September 2005 

*Use this version to
print*<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hurr-s02_prn.shtml>
* | Send this link by email <http://www.wsws.org/cgi-bin/birdcast.cgi> | Email 
the author <https://www.wsws.org/phpform/use/comments/form1.html>*

The catastrophe that is unfolding in New Orleans and on the Gulf coast of 
Mississippi has been transformed into a national humiliation without 
parallel in the history of the United States.

The scenes of intense human suffering, hopelessness, squalor, and neglect 
amidst the wreckage of what was once New Orleans have exposed the rotten 
core of American capitalist society before the eyes of the entire world—and, 
most significantly, before those of its own stunned people.

The reactionary mythology of America as the "Greatest Country in the World" 
has suffered a shattering blow.

Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the awful truths of contemporary America—a 
country torn by the most intense class divisions, ruled by a corrupt 
plutocracy that possesses no sense either of social reality or public 
responsibility, in which millions of its citizens are deemed expendable and 
cannot depend on any social safety net or public assistance if disaster, in 
whatever form, strikes.

Washington's response to this human tragedy has been one of gross 
incompetence and criminal indifference. People have been left to literally 
die in the streets of a major American city without any assistance for four 
days. Images of suffering and degradation that resemble the conditions in 
the most impoverished Third World countries are broadcast daily with 
virtually no visible response from the government of a country that 
concentrates the greatest share of wealth in the world.

The storm that breached the levees of New Orleans has also revealed all of 
the horrific implications of 25 years' worth of uninterrupted social and 
political reaction. The real results of the destruction of essential social 
services, the dismantling of government agencies entrusted with alleviating 
poverty and coping with disasters, and the ceaseless nostrums about the 
"free market" magically resolving the problems of modern society have been 
exposed before millions.

With at least 100,000 people trapped in a city without power, water or food 
and threatened with the spread of disease and death, the government has 
proven incapable of establishing the most elementary framework of logistical 
organization. It has failed to even evacuate the critically ill from public 
hospitals, much less provide basic medical assistance to the many thousands 
placed in harm's way by the disaster.

What was the government's response to the natural catastrophe that 
threatened New Orleans? It amounted to betting that the storm would go the 
other way, followed by a policy of "every man for himself." Residents of the 
city were told to evacuate, while the tens of thousands without 
transportation or too poor to travel were left to their fate.

Now crowds of thousands of hungry and homeless people have been reduced to 
chanting "we need help" as bodies accumulate in the streets. Washington's 
inability to mount and coordinate basic rescue operations will 
unquestionably add to a death toll that is already estimated in the 
thousands.

The government's callous disregard for the human suffering, its negligence 
in failing to prepare for this disaster and, above all, its utter 
incompetence have staggered even the compliant American media.

Patriotic blather about the country coming together to deal with the crisis 
combined with efforts to poison public opinion by vilifying those without 
food or water for "looting" have fallen flat in face of the undeniable and 
monumental debacle that constitutes the official response to the disaster.

Reporters sent into the devastated region have been reduced to tears by the 
masses of people crying out for help with no response. Television announcers 
cannot help but wonder aloud why the authorities have failed so miserably to 
alleviate such massive human suffering.

The presidency, the Congress and both the Republican and Democratic 
parties—all have displayed an astounding lack of concern for the hundreds of 
thousands of people whose lives have been shattered and who face the most 
daunting and uncertain future, not to mention the tens of millions more who 
will be hard hit by the economic aftershocks of Katrina.

In the figure of the president, George W. Bush, the incompetence, stupidity, 
and sheer inhumanity that characterize so much of America's money-mad 
corporate elite find their quintessentially repulsive expression.

As the hurricane developed over two weeks in the Caribbean and slowly 
approached the coast of New Orleans and Mississippi, Bush amused himself at 
his ranch retreat in Crawford, Texas. It is now clear that his 
administration made no serious preparations to deal with the dangers posed 
by the approaching storm.

In an interview Thursday on the "Good Morning America" television program, 
Bush reprised his miserable performance of the previous day, adding to 
Wednesday's banalities the declaration that there would be "zero tolerance" 
for looters.

The president blanched when ABC interviewer Dianne Sawyer asked about a 
suggestion that the major oil companies be forced to cede a share of the 
immense windfall profits they have reaped from rising prices over the past 
six months to fund disaster relief. He responded by counseling the American 
people to "send cash" to charitable organizations.

In other words, there will be no serious financial commitment from the 
government to save lives, care for the sick and needy, and help the 
displaced and bereft restore their lives. Nor will there be any national, 
centrally financed and organized program to rebuild one of the country's 
most important cities—a city that is uniquely associated with some of the 
most critical cultural achievements in music and the arts of the American 
people.

Above all, the suffering of millions will not be allowed to impinge on the 
profit interests of a tiny elite of multi-millionaires whose interests the 
government defends.

Later in the day, Bush described the aftermath of the flood as a "temporary 
disturbance."

The ruthless attitude of those in power toward the average poor and working 
class residents of New Orleans was summed up Thursday by Republican House 
Speaker Dennis Hastert, who declared "it doesn't make sense" to spend tax 
dollars to rebuild New Orleans. "It looks like a lot of that place could be 
bulldozed," he said.

While Hastert was forced to backtrack from these chilling remarks, they have 
a definite political logic. To rebuild the lives that have been ravaged by 
Hurricane Katrina would require mounting a massive government effort that 
would run counter to the entire thrust of a national policy based upon 
privatization and the transfer of wealth to the rich that has for decades 
been pursued by both major parties.

Can anyone truly believe that the current administration and its Democratic 
accomplices in Congress are going to launch a serious program to construct 
low-cost housing, rebuild schools and provide jobs for the hundreds of 
thousands left unemployed by the destruction?

Congress has been virtually silent on the catastrophe in the south. It has 
nothing to say, having voted to support Bush's extreme right-wing agenda of 
massive tax cuts for the rich, huge outlays for war in Iraq and Afghanistan 
and an ever-expanding Pentagon budget, and billions to finance the Homeland 
Security Department.

The millionaires club in the Capitol is well aware that it voted to slash 
funding for elementary infrastructure needs—including urgently recommended 
improvements in outmoded and inadequate Gulf Coast anti-hurricane and 
anti-flood systems.

The Democratic Party has, as always, offered no opposition. Indeed, the 
president was gratified to be able to announce that former Democratic 
president Bill Clinton would resume his road show with the president's 
father, the former Republican president, touring the stricken regions and 
drumming up support for charitable donations. In this way the Democratic 
Party has signaled its solidarity with the White House and the Republican 
policy against any serious federal financial commitment to help the victims 
and rebuild the devastated regions.

The decisive components of the present tragedy are social and political, not 
natural. The American ruling elite has for the past three decades been 
dismantling whatever forms of government regulation and social welfare had 
been instituted in the preceding period. The present catastrophe is the 
terrible product of this social and political retrogression.

The lessons derived from past natural and economic calamities—from the 
deadly floods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the dust 
bowl and Depression of the 1930s—have been repudiated and derided by a 
ruling elite driven by the crisis of its profit system to subordinate ever 
more ruthlessly all social concerns to the extraction of profit and 
accumulation of personal wealth.

Franklin Roosevelt—an astute and relatively far-sighted representative of 
his class—had to drag the American ruling elite as a whole kicking and 
screaming behind a program of social reforms whose basic purpose was to save 
the capitalist system from the threat of social revolution. Even during his 
presidency, the large-scale projects in government-funded and controlled 
social development, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, never became a 
model for broader measures to alleviate poverty and social inequality. The 
contradictions and requirements of an economic system based on private 
ownership of the means of production and production for profit resulted in 
any further projects being shelved.

From the 1970s onward, as the crisis of American capitalism has deepened, 
the US ruling elite has attacked the entire concept of social reform and 
dismantled the previously established restrictions on corporate activities.

The result has been a non-stop process of social plunder, producing an 
unprecedented concentration of wealth at the apex of society and a level of 
social inequality exceeding that which prevailed in the days of the Robber 
Barons.

Fraud, the worst forms of speculation and criminality have become pervasive 
within the upper echelons of American society. This is the underlying 
reality that has suddenly revealed itself, precipitated by a hurricane, in 
the form of a collapse of the most elementary forms of social life.

The political establishment and the corporate elite have been exposed as 
bankrupt, together with their ceaseless insistence that the unfettered 
development of capitalism is the solution to all of society's problems.

The catastrophe unleashed by Katrina has unmistakably revealed that America 
is two countries, one for the wealthy and privileged and another in which 
the vast majority of working people stand on the edge of a social precipice.

All of the claims that the war on Iraq, the "global war on terrorism" and 
the supposed concern for "homeland security" are aimed at protecting the 
American people stand revealed as lies. The utter failure to protect the 
residents of New Orleans exposes all of these claims as propaganda designed 
to mask the criminality of the American ruling elite and the diversion of 
resources away from the most essential needs of the people.

The central lesson of New Orleans is that the elementary requirements of 
mass society are incompatible with a system that subordinates everything to 
the enrichment of a financial oligarchy.

This lesson must become the new point of departure in the political 
orientation of the struggles of American working people. Only the 
development of a new independent political movement, fighting for the 
reorganization of economic life on the basis of a socialist program, can 
provide a way out of the chaos of which the events in New Orleans are a 
terrible omen.

See Also:
Hurricane's victims left to die on New Orleans streets
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/norl-s02.shtml>[2 September 2005]
Bush rules out significant federal aid to hurricane
victims<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hurr-s01.shtml>
[1 September 2005]
Crackdown on looting: New Orleans police ordered to stop saving lives and 
start saving property<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/loot-s01.shtml>
[1 September 2005]
Letter from New Orleans: tragedy at stranded
hospital<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/norl-s01.shtml>
[1 September 2005]

 Top of page <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hurr-s02.shtml#top> 

 The WSWS invites your
comments.<https://www.wsws.org/phpform/use/comments/form1.html>

 ------------------------------

*Copyright 1998-2005
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved*