Profit system, not nature, main obstacle to rebuilding New Orleans

The gigantic storm laid waste to 95,000 square miles. Within this vast territory, as large as Great Britain, there are many areas of near-total destruction. Waveland, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, has only two dozen residents remaining out of 7,000. All the rest are in shelters. Pass Christian, also on the Mississippi coast, has between 50 and 100 houses standing in a town once home to 8,500 people. Gulfport and Biloxi, the two largest Mississippi coast cities, are largely flattened.

The most extensive damage is in the New Orleans metropolitan area. One local emergency official estimated that in Orleans Parish alone, which includes the city, 150,000 houses are ruined and must be demolished, along with 163,000 wheeled vehicles—equipped with over 800,000 tires that must be disposed of—and 93,000 boats. Billions of dollars are required to rebuild the infrastructure of power generation and distribution, water supply, sewage treatment, roads and bridges, as well as to restore and upgrade the levee system. The city must remove an estimated 20 million tons of debris, much of it contaminated with toxic waste.

In St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, a suburban area east of New Orleans, there are 52 structures undamaged out of 28,000, and the entire county is under water. Officials told an assembly of 3,000 displaced residents from the parish, held at the state capitol in Baton Rouge, that they would not be able to move back until next year—and there is little to move back into. The largely working-class area, with a pre-Katrina population of 66,000, could be further devastated if any more Gulf hurricanes develop this fall, because Katrina entirely destroyed the levees that protect the parish from storm surges.

Neither private charity nor insurance will cover more than a fraction of the immense costs involved in reconstruction. Insurance company liability is estimated at $20 billion to $40 billion, a large sum, but dwarfed by the $200 billion-plus required to restore the losses incurred. Many parts of the Gulf Coast are woefully underinsured: of the 400,000 properties flooded in three coastal counties of Mississippi, only 21,600 had flood insurance, according to George Dale, the state insurance commissioner.

As for the outpouring of donations to the Red Cross and other charities, this far exceeds the record level of contributions after 9/11 and the Asian tsunami. These contributions, like the heroic exertions of rescue and relief workers, reflect the healthiest instincts of millions of working people: compassion, generosity, a sense of social solidarity. But the total raised by all charities will not even reach $1 billion, less than FEMA spends in two days on emergency relief.

Monopoly and inequality

Individual efforts to survive and rebuild, however determined, inevitably run up against an impassable barrier: the social structure of twenty-first century America, characterized by the monopoly ownership of society’s resources by a relative handful of wealthy individuals and giant corporations, and the subordination of the whole of society to their anarchistic pursuit of profit interests.

Enormous resources are required, both for relief and reconstruction. These material resources exist in superabundance in America, the richest society on the planet. There are food, clothing, shelter, generators and other supplies aplenty for the suffering people of the Gulf Coast. But the bulk of these resources are in the grip of giant corporations that will only make them available if their profit interests are served. To do that requires money.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/prof-s15.shtml