I'll Huff And I'll Puff ...

In 1930, the Rivers and Harbors Act was enacted following a disastrous 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River. The notion that government could take preventative measures and act to lessen the effects of tropical storms was born. Despite that foresight, a devastating hurricane rolled over Florida in 1935, the so-called Great Labor Day Hurricane, leaving hundreds dead. Nevertheless, that failure did nothing to dampen a growing expectation amongst the people of the United States that public officials should be actively involved in disaster avoidance and relief.

In fact, however, those expectations didn’t result in fully institutionalized relief measures until the 1970s. It is a safe bet that most Americans have no idea when government officials decided to throw in the towel and rely on a hope and a prayer that they could dodge the inevitable storms forever. But they are surely learning at the end of summer 2005 that their government is feeble, inept, unable to cope with a large-scale catastrophe … and that much of this failure results from lack of planning or deliberate decisions to forgo planning.

Some critics are decrying the lack of National Guardsmen in the New Orleans area. They note that most of the available troops and the equipment needed to deal with Katarina are off on an adventure in Iraq. And those remarks are true: American resources, despite the enormous wealth of the country, are presently stretched very thin and the needed men and equipment, in large enough numbers, are elsewhere occupied. But it is also coming to light that officials in the New Orleans area have been trying for years to get the levees fortified, the pumps upgraded, the evacuation planning rethought … only to have the federal government not only fail to come up with funding, but to deliberately reduce the funds already available.

As the man currently in charge, President Bush will bear a lot of the blame for what has happened here. He didn’t cause the hurricane, he couldn’t have diverted it elsewhere. But he didn’t need to divert the emergency response people in the Delta area to a foreign adventure in Asia. He didn’t need to claw back funding for structural improvements in New Orleans and around the Mississippi levees. But he did, and for this he deserves condemnation. In fact, he cut $71.2 million from the New Orleans Corps of Engineers so that plans to fortify levees and upgrade the water pumping system had to be shelved. But successive presidents have also failed to heed the warnings about the peril New Orleans would face when that inevitable category four or five storm hit head-on. And all of those former presidents deserve condemnation for their negligence as well.

Bush had the audacity to take to the airwaves and proclaim that no one could have foreseen this tragedy even though he knew full well that such an event had been predicted for years. Worse, the White House politely refused all foreign offers of assistance, including from Canada, which the cynical among us believe is meant to signal that the usual suspect corporations in the US will make money out of the reconstruction … can’t have any of that potential profit upset by some do-gooder country trying to provide free assistance, just because it’s the right thing to do.

But what has really struck a sour note with Americans and astounded the rest of the world, is the ineptness of the response to this disaster. This is the same nation that is very often able to mobilize quickly to provide assistance to other countries in the aftermath of some catastrophic event. Apparently, they’re a little like the carpenter who builds everyone else’s houses but never seems to be able to finish his own.

When a massive tsunami struck the coast of Aceh in Indonesia last December, the carnage was unthinkable. However, this allegedly third-world nation managed to mobilize its troops, emergency and medical workers in the blink of an eye. To be sure, there was a great outpouring of help from much of the world; but the Indonesians were prepared to respond almost immediately. India also managed to act and react with speed.

The American government was lethargic in its reaction to this crisis although the Red Cross was on its way to the hurricane zone before the wind even stopped blowing.

It is not lost on anyone that the bastion of free enterprise is apparently ill-equipped to deal with its own emergencies. Writing for ZNet, Michael Parenti noted: “When an especially powerful hurricane hit [Cuba] last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million people, more than 10 percent of the country's population, with not a single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.” The American press today is hardly able to contain its derision of the Bush administration’s response.

Parenti goes on to note that a great deal of the problem can be traced directly to America’s lack of social planning. The free market will take care of everything important, to the profit of corporations; the unfortunate should rely on private charity. That thinking has permeated political levels in America to an unprecedented degree so that any form of assistance to people is denied because it doesn’t serve the interests of the market. The poor are on their own in the American system which can only be described as ‘free enterprise for the poor, socialism for the rich’. [It is worth noting that in the midst of all the devastation in the Delta region, Congress is making sure to set aside time on September 6 to pass another tax rebate for the wealthy.]

Even the American news networks who have generally given George Bush a pass on virtually every inane thing he has said or done since 2000 are criticizing the pathetic rescue efforts. And it is not lost on many that the folks still in New Orleans after the rain stopped falling were largely poor and black. One can’t help but wonder if the response would have been swifter had the damage occurred to some tony upscale white neighbourhood.

There are things that can be done to mitigate the potential damage from hurricanes, but they all cost money. Hurricane shutters can be installed, laminated glass can withstand high winds, roof bracing can be installed, side walls can be bolted to foundations … but year after year we see television images of frantic southerners heading off to their local Home Depot to buy all the plywood they can carry. A little planning would go a long way toward making life more tolerable in the high-risk hurricane zones. But what is really needed is the long arm and deep pockets of government to help. In the land of the free, the government is not going to interfere with the right of anyone to be ruined or killed by bad weather; it’s their own fault that they weren’t rich enough to take suitable precautions.