The exploitation of Hurricane Katrina: remaking New Orleans for the rich

Of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people—the estimates range from 400,000 to 1 million—who have lost their homes and their jobs, the majority will never return. The press has begun speaking of them as the new Okies, recalling the mass migration of small farmers and rural workers who were uprooted from the Plains states by the “Dust Bowl” drought of the 1930s.

The overwhelmingly working class and poor ranks of evacuees have been scattered around the country, in many cases shipped off to remote regions where they are cut off from friends and family. Such was the incompetence and indifference of the authorities that many of those flooded out of New Orleans were not even informed where they were being taken to.

What is being envisioned for a “new” New Orleans was summed up by Joel Garreau, an editor and reporter for the Washington Post, who published a comment on September 11, entitled, “A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever.”

Garreau wrote: “The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt.... The tourist neighborhoods? The ancient parts from the French Quarter to the Garden District on that slim crescent of relatively high ground near the river? Yes, they will be restored. The airport and the convention center? Yes, those too. But the far larger swath—the real New Orleans where the tourists don’t go, the part that Katrina turned into a toxic soup bowl, its population of 400,000 scattered to the waves? Not so much.”

Garreau continued: “There are a lot of black and poor people who are not going to return to New Orleans any more than Okies did to the Dust Bowl.”

The hurricane and its immediate aftermath revealed in the starkest terms the social chasm between the wealthy few and the masses of working people that is the most essential feature of American society. It also revealed how completely the government—at all levels—functions as the instrument of the financial elite, starving the social infrastructure of resources, slashing wages and social programs in order to finance tax windfalls for the rich. The Hurricane Katrina disaster was a tragic result of the systematic plundering of society to further swell the coffers of the American plutocracy.

The same social dynamic is now at work in the so-called “reconstruction” of the cities devastated by Katrina. If anything, the descent of the American capitalist elite into manic greed and outright criminality is more grotesquely on display in this phase of the disaster than in the first two weeks after the storm.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/rich-s14.shtml