Disaster industrial complex: New Orleans gripped by greed
New Orleans was not devastated by a hurricane. From my travels around New Orleans and surrounding areas, it’s clear that very little damage was done to my city by Hurricane Katrina.
Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, Gulfport and other Gulf cities have suffered extensive hurricane-related damage. However, the damage to New Orleans came from brutal negligence, a lack of planning and a stunningly slow response, created by a federal government that didn’t care about the people of New Orleans and still doesn’t.
Academic Cornel West has called it Hurricane Povertina. Poet Suheir Hammad has referred to the “survivors of the rescue.” Others have referred to the displaced as “victims of Hurricane FEMA” or simply “Michael Brown’s victims.”
The houses of New Orleans were not hit by 35-foot tall waves or 200-mile winds. On the day after the hurricane, most of the city was in good shape and many of us still in the city felt that New Orleans had once again come through, battered and bruised but all right.
Then, over the next few days, the levee broke and water rushed into the city and relief, rescue and repair efforts were far too little, far too late.
But the worst damage is what is being done now, this confluence of forces barraging New Orleans and its Diaspora, what some local organizers have referred to as “the Disaster Industrial Complex.” This is the perfect storm created by an orgy of greed and opportunism engaged in by the jackals of disaster profiteering.
The list of those who are gaining from our loss is large, and it includes everyone from the heavily armed thugs of Wackenhut Security and Blackwater USA, to the often well-meaning but ineffective bureaucrats of Red Cross and FEMA, to the Scientology missionaries crowding the shelters, to journalists and disaster-gazers taking up a chunk of available housing, to the major multi-nationals such as Halliburton, working in concert with rich elites from uptown New Orleans, seeking partners with which to exploit this tragedy.
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Stories from the displaced: Post-Katrina housing attacked on multiple fronts
Katrina survivors receiving rental assistance or living in FEMA trailers face serious threats to their already tenuous housing situation. Thousands of hurricane evacuees are being dropped from the FEMA housing programs. Evacuees have voiced major concerns over new FEMA policies, HUD policies and inaction by the federal government to appropriately address the housing crisis.
Outside of Lafayette, Louisiana, thousands reside in FEMA trailers without transportation to jobs, without the option to move and now under threat of a second displacement by FEMA.
Katrina survivor Van Parker, who drives fellow trailer residents around because there is no bus system, is frustrated by FEMA. ‘If you were homeless before the storm, FEMA is now trying to kick you out of the trailers. It doesn’t matter if you are working now or trying to turn your life around.’
George Galloway: Katrina shows there are two Americas
The scenes from the stricken city almost defy belief. Many, many thousands of people left to die in what is the richest, most powerful country on earth.
This obscenity is as far from a natural disaster as George Bush and the U.S. elite are from the suffering masses of New Orleans.
The images of Bush luxuriating at his ranch and of his secretary of state shopping for $7,000 shoes while disaster swamped the U.S. Gulf Coast will haunt this administration.
In the most terrible way imaginable, they show to the whole world that it is not only the lives of people in Baghdad, Fallujah and Palestine that Bush holds cheap. It is also his own citizens – the Black and poor people left behind with no food, water or shelter.
This is not simply manslaughter through incompetence, though the White House’s incompetence abounds. It is murder, for Bush was warned four years ago of the threat to New Orleans, as surely as he was warned of the disaster that would come of his war on Iraq.
Yet he plundered the city’s defenses to fill the maw of his war machine and the body count rises at home and abroad.