By now it's impossible not to have heard of the disaster unfolding in New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The category 4 (the highest category being 5) Hurricane slammed into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Western Florida, on Monday. As could be expected it left massive destruction in its wake across the affected area, with the world famous city of New Orleans receiving the worst of it due to the massive flooding that followed the storm and it's location below sea level. It's estimated that 90% of New Orleans is flooded with water levels in some areas reaching 15-20 feet in depth. The flood waters in addition to being deep in many places, are dangerous and filled with debris, dead bodies, raw sewage, oil, and chemicals. It's estimated that more than 100,000 of New Orleans' 480,000 residents were trapped inside the city by Monday's hurricane and the flooding that followed Tuesday when two major levees protecting the city were breached. All too familiar and echoing the recent Tsunami in Asia that killed hundreds of thousands, the images of desperation, sorrow, and unabated suffering seem like something from an impoverished country in some far off part of the world. For many it was near impossible to imagine that this could be happening in the world's lone superpower and the "richest country in the world".

Thousands are feared dead, in New Orleans alone, and more are threatened with the same fate as the National Guard didn't really begin arriving until Friday afternoon and many victims have gone without food, water, electricity, and medicine for nearly 5 days. Many in New Orleans are still trapped in their neighborhoods, waiting for rescue in, or on the roof of their homes, as the "lucky victims" have been able to be bussed to neighboring states, while others languish in fetid, dangerous, and unsanitary conditions in the New Orleans Superdome (sports arena) and Convention Center. It's estimated that 20,000 people were in the Superdome when the evacuation efforts began but Thursday afternoon the crowd in and around the Superdome had swelled to about 30,000. People poured into the overwhelmed arena, already declared a health hazard because of the lack of electricity, water or sanitation, because they believe it is the best place to get a ride out of town. Hospitals are without power as patients have had to be evacuated. Buildings have caught fire, some burning uncontested, and Friday morning was begun with a explosion at a chemical plant. 

As should be the case every channel that carries news has been blanketed with wall to wall coverage of the situation, most of it sympathetic. But almost as soon as the coverage began so too began the subtle double standards and apparently, racially motivated, attacks on the victims of the disaster. First there was the small internet firestorm caused when news, aggregator, Yahoo! posted pictures from the disaster with different captions for people apparently doing the same thing, the only apparent difference being the skin color of those involved. In one photo two whites were referred to as having "found" food apparently in a convenience store of some kind while in a similar photo a dark-skinned individual was accused of "looting" after doing the same thing. Yahoo! received so many complaints that they were forced to post a notice informing readers they are not responsible for the captions on their photographs as they simply re-post news from other sources, caption included. 

That would hardly be the end of the loaded, criminality angle, in the media's coverage, as it has become and continues to be a major line underlying theme in the coverage of the disaster. Media pundits have on numerous occasions referred to the "bad behavior" of those left stranded in a flooded city with no apparent infrastructure. The media has passed along unconfirmed and unsubstantiated reports of people being shot in hospitals and as well as rapes. In incidents where there were shots fired at rescue helicopters by people apparently attempting to place priority on the plights of their loved ones over others, the perpetrators have been referred to as "snipers". The victims crowded into squalid, temporary living conditions were initially being referred to as "refugees" as if they were from some other country, not tax-paying American citizens. And as far as the "looters", while a small percentage of people eventually began taking things like electronics and weapons, the vast majority of people took things for their own survival, like food, water, medicine, clothes, and diapers so I would challenge the accuracy of describing the situation as "looting". In one report flood victims commandeered a forklift to smash the security glass window of one pharmacy, fleeing with ice, water, and food and chased down a state police truck filled with food. Even city officials were accused of commandeering equipment from a looted Office Depot. But loot or no loot the response of the government and media has been telling. 

While the media has begun running sympathetic focus pieces on ordinary citizens threatening to shoot "looters", Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced late Thursday that 300 heavily armed National Guard troops from Arkansas, "fresh back from Iraq," had arrived and were being deployed immediately to downtown New Orleans. "They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded," she said grimly. "I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary. And I expect they will."

New Orleans Mayor, C. Ray Nagin worried about looting, announced that 1,500 police officers, nearly the entire department would be moved off of search and rescue operations to stop "looting", most likely of stores that are little more than insurance company write-offs at this point . For those reading between the lines, the message should be clear property over people, even if that "property" is in a disaster area. Seemingly they would rather watch food and other perishables rot on their respective shelves than have people acquire them without being charged.

Media pundits subtly attacked the residents of New Orleans asking "why didn't they leave" as if there predicament was little more than the result of them being stubborn. Few of them mentioned that those who were left behind were there because they were too poor and too sick to leave, and lacked private transportations. Few questioned why transportation was not organized or provided to evacuate those that could not evacuate themselves. Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the country. According to the 2000 US census, the Lower Ninth Ward district of New Orleans has a poverty level of 36.4 percent (the official definition of poverty is so low it should be defined as abject poverty). A quarter of households have an annual income of less than $10,000, while half live on less than $20,000. Over half of the population in the ward is categorized as “not in the labor force,” mainly because they have ceased looking for work. New Orleans itself, ranks fifth in United States cities in terms of African American population and 67 percent of the city's half million residents are black. The Congressional Black Caucus called a news conference to decry the response to the disaster and comment on the situation's racial overtones. The fact that the vast majority of those stranded in New Orleans were African-American and poor was not lost on even the mainstream media, as even they were forced to raise the issue of race and class being a factor in response to the disaster.

One account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune recounted how the hellish conditions in the city “stood in stark contrast to those of people nearby in the restricted-access New Orleans Centre and Hyatt Hotel, where those who could get in lounged in relative comfort". The account continued, "A few blocks farther away, guests were being fed ‘foie gras and rack of lamb’ for dinner, according to a photographer who stayed there, while the masses, most of them poor, huddled in the Dome.” A line of state police armed with assault rifles drove the crowds of homeless back from the entrance to the facility.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin issued a "desperate SOS" for help from state and federal authorities while officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) insisted they were working as fast as they could to get food, water and National Guard troops into the city and the tens of thousands of storm evacuees out. The head of New Orleans' emergency operations, decried FEMA's response as inadequate, "this is a national disgrace," said Terry Ebbert. "FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans." The normally very conservative and supportive of the President, Sun Herald of Biloxi, Mississippi published an editorial criticizing the relief effort. In one passage stating, "The coastal communities of South Mississippi are desperately in need of an unprecedented relief effort. We understand that New Orleans also was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, but surely this nation has the resources to rescue both that metropolitan and ours".

The lack of planning in the delayed response to the disaster is indicative of the ruling elite's callous indifference to the plights of the poor, working class, and people of color in this country. As the hurricane developed over two weeks in the Caribbean and slowly approached the coast of New Orleans and Mississippi, Bush continued his vacation at his ranch retreat in Crawford, Texas. He waited more than two days before reacting to the hurricane, eventually using Air Force One to fly over the area so he allegedly could see “how devastating the sights were.” Only after public outcry did he agree to actually visit the area. After witnessing it Bush remarked, "it's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine" (he probably wishes he could buy such a weapon). Bush himself initially called the emergency response to the situation "unacceptable" before later heaping praise on those responsible for directing the emergency efforts. 

This callousness, and indeed ruthlessness, was echoed by Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert who on Thursday suggested that we should not bother rebuilding the city of New Orleans. "It doesn't make sense to me," Hastert said to the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago. “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” he said. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask. We help replace, we help relieve disaster. But I think federal insurance and everything that goes along with it ... we ought to take a second look at that." This sentiment was echoed by the Republican-American newspaper out of Waterbury, CT: "If the people of New Orleans and other low-lying areas insist on living in harm's way, they ought to accept responsibility for what happens to them and their property."

Meanwhile like President Bush, the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was on vacation during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. Rice was seen enjoying her downtime in New York Wednesday and Thursday, shopping at at the pricey leather-goods boutique Ferragamo on Fifth Ave where according to the Web site www.Gawker.com, the 50-year-old bought "several thousand dollars' worth of shoes" . Allegedly, a fellow shopper shouted, "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" - presumably referring to Gulf Coast Region's Katrina tragedy. On Wednesday night, she was booed by some audience members  at the Monty Python musical "Spamalot!,"  when the lights went on after the performance. She re-appeared in Washington by Friday afternoon, and was back doing press conferences and the like after being briefed on the situation.

Of the disaster, Bush remarked, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees", but that statement was about as true or believable as the administration's claims that nobody could anticipate planes being used as weapons or being crashed into the World Trade Center. In fact the flooding situation was entirely predictable, and had already been predicted numerous times. If action had been taken a couple of years ago, it would also have been preventable. One of the main reasons New Orleans is so vulnerable to hurricanes is the failure to protect the wetlands on the Gulf Coast that once stood as a natural buffer between the city and storms coming in from the water. The disappearance of those wetlands can't be blamed on any one political party or a particular administration but many environmentalists will tell you more than a century of interference with the natural flow of the Mississippi, which cut off the movement of alluvial soil to the river's delta, is the root cause of the problem. 

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans, along with a major earthquake in California and Terror attack in New York, were the three most likely disasters to hit the U.S.. Computer models developed at Louisiana State University and other institutions made detailed projections of what would happen if water flowed over the levees protecting the city or if they failed. In July 2004, more than 40 federal, state, local and volunteer organizations practiced this very scenario in a five-day simulation code-named "Hurricane Pam," where they had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed over half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents. 

Well before that the October 2001 issue of the Scientific American detailed almost this exact scenario. In 2002, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a five-part series of stories that quoted flood experts warning specifically of the potential damage from rising water levels and broken levees, and that warned of this exact possibility. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent over $400 million shoring up levees and building pumping stations. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in region increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans, which were estimated could only handle a category 2 or 3 hurricane, continued to subside and sink. 

After 2003, the amount of federal dollars toward SELA dropped significantly. The Corps cited the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security, and federal tax cuts, as the reason for the funds drying up. No less than nine articles in the Times-Picayune between 2004 and 2005 specifically cited the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane and flood-control dollars. In acts of share cronyism and hoping to downsize and downgrade the organization, beginning in 2001 Bush appointed successive unqualified heads of FEMA, and by March 2003 it was folded into the Department of Homeland Security. It's new primary mission was "fighting acts of terrorism". In June of 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee construction in New Orleans was cut by $71.2 million, the largest single year reduction ever. 

In addition, about 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is now serving in Iraq, where 40 percent of the soldiers are in the Guard. The Louisiana National Guard also notes that dozens of its high-water vehicles and equipment, Humvees, re-fuelers, and generators have also been sent abroad.  The Guard is also encountering recruitment problems do to fear of being sent to Iraq. 

As much as this hurricane and it's aftermath is a "natural" disaster, it is a disaster of human making. I won't fully attribute this hurricane to global warming because Hurricanes at this time of the year are a natural occurrence. In fact "hurricane season" last until the end of September so this may not be the end of the Gulf Coast's misery. But if climate change is allowed to continue without redress, which it is clear is the intention of the current administration, the intensity and frequency of hurricanes will increase such that we will feel lucky to experience a category 3 hurricane. The redirection of public resources to tax cuts for the wealthy and illegitimate, imperial conflicts abroad has real human consequences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and domestically. Perhaps this is the war coming home yet again. The sad situation facing the Gulf Coast in general, but Louisiana particularly will require tens if not hundreds of Billions of dollars to address and will echo through the region indefinitely. It's estimated people won't even be able to return to whatever is left of New Orleans for months, and it will take weeks just to pump water out of the city. Those who choose to return will likely return to unemployment, even more poverty, and without homes. Calling this situation a tragedy is an understatement as it's probably the worse natural disaster ever in the U.S., but as much as it is a tragedy and an international embarrassment, the governmental response to it is an indictment of the profit system, contemporary American society, and it's leadership. Katrina's aftermath has truly allowed the country's highest leadership, and in many cases the media, to show their true colors. 

Released: September 2nd, 2005

The views and opinions expressed herein by the author do not necessarily represent the opinions or position of Playahata.com.