Katrina’s Lessons
by Steve Thomas2005 might just be remembered as the Year the Bullshit Stopped. The year that power finally took off its rugged-individualist/apple-pie democracy American mask and revealed its true nature.
Apparently—of all things—people in New Orleans (who have, you know, had their entire city destroyed) are taking things without paying for them. Oh the humanity! Send in the National Guard—wait, they’re in Iraq; send in the police. This is what President Bush had to say about it:
“I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting, or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving, or insurance fraud.�
Do you year that? Your whole world may have just been shattered by a disaster partially caused and certainly exacerbated by the industrial economy and by the war. But it’s still not okay to have stuff for free. Not food; not gas; not a pair of tennis shoes. Police have been dispatched to stop looters; in their words, “we’ve met some resistance.� Translation: We’re turning our guns on desperate people. And of course they’re applauded by the reasonable gentlemen in the “mainstream media.� And of course, there was universal condemnation of the recent attack upon a police barracks.
There has perhaps never been a more fitting demonstration of Derrick Jensen’s axiom, the property of those at the top of the hierarchy is worth more than the lives of those at the bottom. The whole situation is really exposing everything rotten within the American political-economic system. Consider:
1. The devastating effects of the industrial economy upon the natural world have been revealed.
2. The real role of the police force—to serve and protect capitalist property relations—has been exposed to any who will see it.
3. The National Guard, which is allegedly supposed to help in times like this, is instead halfway across the world slaughtering brown people.
4. The incredible fragility of the oil economy may be exposed, as gas prices soar. I’m told we’re at $3/gallon in Pittsburgh. Elsewhere they’re paying as much as $5 or $6.
5. With the vast increase in gasoline prices, the utter stupidity of non-local economics is going to be demonstrated.
What might the consequences of all these factors turn out to be? Surely something big. Every sector of this society is going to feel the effects of this—the confluence of environmental destruction; peak oil; war and political authoritarianism. Here is just one example of where the crisis might come from: A close friend of mine is a truck driver. Apparently—he tells me—companies are refusing to pay drivers more, despite the increase in gas prices, because that would require raising prices on products. If gas continues to rise, one of a few things has to happen. 1. The companies pay drivers more, increasing prices on almost everything we can imagine. The result? Incredible hardship; the hollowing-out of the middle class; the exposure of the violence inherent in the “1500 mile salad�; social chaos and civil disorder; mass state repression; a good case made for local self-sufficiency. 2. The companies do not pay truck drivers more; drivers suffer economic hardship and begin to a. quit their jobs en masse b. strike c. commit civil disobedience; all of which will lead to economic hardship and state repression. Unfortunately in the second case the Middle Class can probably be convinced to blame the truck drivers for the problem, rather than the wealthy who are actually responsible.
This is just one segment of our society from which the crisis might emerge. There are many, many others. Predictions are usually a bad idea (don’t want to end up looking stupid), but I have one: this is going to be a hard winter. Here is another one: The America of September 1, 2006 is may look very different from the America of September 1, 2005.
Update:
Lots of good stuff on this at From the Wilderness, Counterpunch, and Common Dreams.
Comment by Steve Thomas — 1 September 2005 @ 11:50 AM
I’m writing a piece on Katrina right now! Ah well, significantly different portions of the subject, enough to justify finishing it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 September 2005 @ 11:57 AM
About looting… First of all, these people have little to no food or water, and none of the stores are open to sell it to them. So it’s not like they have the choice of purchasing these items. Second of all, by the time the store owners get back, all that stuff will have spoiled or damaged by the flood. They’re not stealing anything that’s going to be sold - everything’s going to be thrown out in the end. So why do we care?
Oh, and by the way… police officers aren’t even protecting commercial goods. They’re looting too.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 September 2005 @ 12:58 PM
And a little more on looting -
“Yahoo News photos:
Photo number one: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store�.
Photo number two: “A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store�.
Two guesses as to the relative melanin levels of “two residents� and “a young man�.
Remember, white people “findâ€? things; black people “lootâ€?.”
see: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006681.html#006681
and from: http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
“They had about a week to shore up the levees, evacuate the poor, and prepare for disaster management. They knew all the details of the full scope of the disaster, and the official warnings were as bleak as any official warnings can be. They didn’t try to do anything. Bush golfed and pretended to play guitar. Since the funding, manpower, and equipment that would normally be used for such purposes was in Iraq, trying to do something constructive would only have embarrassed them, so they just relaxed and let it happen. Needless to say, the next step will be the announcement of billions of dollars of reconstruction contracts for Halliburton and Bechtel, thus proving that Bush really does care. Disaster is another opportunity to make money, while trying to stop disaster is just a drain on public finances.”
Also see her previous article: The Symbolism of Katrina
In 1984, my town, General Luna on Siargao Island, suffered a storm surge of about 3.5m - one third of the height of the storm surge that hit the Gulf Coast. The town got no aid at all, just as most of the inhabitants (at least the uninsured) of New Orleans won’t. In the aftermath, the good local bishop of the Catholic Church sent a bill to the town council for the accomodation of those who had taken storm shelter in his concrete church.
see: http://www.coconutstudio.com/Coconuts%20First%20Survivors.htm
I get angry about what America (and us poodle Brits) are doing in Iraq, (and many, many other places, but more quietly) but I would be a lot angrier if my own ‘elected’ government’ had the same attitudes in my own country.
Luckily, I live in the Philippines, where the ‘government’ is so ineffective that we have to fend for ourselves.
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 1 September 2005 @ 3:02 PM
Thankyou Giulianna
This came from the link you posted on looting:
“Sandra Smith of Baton Rouge walked through the parking lot with a 12-pack of Bud Light under each arm. ‘I came down here to get my daughters,’ she said, ‘but I can’t find them.’
The essence of the ‘American Dream’
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 1 September 2005 @ 3:08 PM
OK, that’s totally unfair. Katrina was a wimpy little cat. 1 when she crossed Florida. Then she entered the Gulf and became the she-beast from hell. On Friday she was a pup; by Tuesday, that bitch was clobbering Cerberus. The warning was a matter of a few days, nowhere close to a week.
Actually, there’s serious talk now of abandoning New Orleans.
Also, my own, previously mentioned, article, “On Katrina,” is now up.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 September 2005 @ 3:42 PM
Fresh from the Ivory Tower:
In a City Without Rules, is Looting OK?
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9160453/
Excerpt:
City reverts to ‘state of nature’
But as the looters have grown more brazen, law enforcement has begun to crack down, especially when thieves have taken guns or preyed upon innocent people with food and water.
By Thursday, National Guard, state and local police were deployed from search-and-rescue operations specifically to restore order to the city.
Jan Boxill, associate director of the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, draws a clear line: Looting on its face is wrong because it’s stealing.
But she said New Orleans appears to have regressed into what ethicists call the state of nature — an atmosphere without rules or infrastructure, where the needs are so great that anything goes.
“It isn’t that it justifies it,� she said, “but where there’s no laws that can help anybody, one way or the other, obviously people need what they need to survive.�
I bet Nature’s pretty pissed off at that comparison…
Comment by Raku — 1 September 2005 @ 4:09 PM
Torture a pit bull for years, and then release it on the streets. Surprised that it goes around biting people? Does that make dogs naturally violent?
This has as much to do with the “state of nature” as Frankenstein has to do with natural birth.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 September 2005 @ 4:17 PM
Actually, there’s serious talk now of abandoning New Orleans.
Ironically, that article ends with the phrase, “We will rebuild.”
Comment by Raku — 1 September 2005 @ 4:17 PM
This has as much to do with the “state of nature” as Frankenstein has to do with natural birth.
Evey: All this riot and uproar, V…is this anarchy? Is this the Land of Do-As-You-Please?
V: No. This is only the Land of Take-What-You-Want. Anarchy means “without leaders;” not “without order.” With anarchy comes an age of ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order. This age of ordnung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course. This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos.
And in case you’re wondering, V for Vendetta is my new favorite comic book. But Jason and Giuli are probably sick of listening to me rave about it by now, so I’ll stop there.
Comment by Mike Godesky — 1 September 2005 @ 9:42 PM
The America of September 1, 2006 is may look very different from the America of September 1, 2005.
Having read this just now two days after your target date, I would say your prediction is basically accurate in its nature, but you jumped the gun a bit. Big systems such as our fossil-fuel energy infrastructure have a lot of intertia built into them, so it might take a while for the changes you discussed to become apparent to people who watch CNN and Fox News and read Time and Newsweek.
Comment by Thomas Rondy — 3 September 2006 @ 1:13 PM
Most of the article was dealing with much longer-range issues. You’ll note I said that predictions are difficult, but here’s two I’m willing to stand behind, and I think it holds. It was a hard winter—especially in Europe, which was my main concern—and America today does look very different, I think.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 9:29 AM
I have noted the extraordinary difference between the help given to the results of Katrina, a year ago, and the rather more immediate funding for the lost homes, etc,caused by a similar violent tidal wave of destruction (entirely by human factors) last month in Lebanon. I know Lebanon better than New Orleans, because I lived there for a bit.
Sure, Shi’a Hizbollah get their money from Shi’a Iran, but they got it, and handed out (in cash) 6 times as much as America did for the Katrina refugees.
I’ve met one of Hizbollah’s senior leaders, and I know they’re not “terrorists”. I was trying to sell him some kitchen and laundry equipment for his new hospital programme, about a decade ago. We happened to find that we were educated about half a mile apart in England, I at a boarding school, and he (much better) at a university built next door. The two new hospitals we discussed were entirely destroyed last month.
What also shocked me about Katrina was the total lack of interest from ethnic leaders - why weren’t Jesse Jackson, Usama Barack, and even Colin Powell making their voices heard, even for charity appeals?
I’m sorry, Americans, but you’ve lost the plot, and you’re getting quite ridiculously introspective.
regards
Richard
Comment by richardparker01@yaho — 5 September 2006 @ 12:47 PM
Sure they are. Terrorism is nothing more or less than acting like a state, when you’re not one (as defined by other states). Like all other states, Hizb’allah provides services to try to legitimize itself, murders innocent people in order to terrify others into obedience, and provides help only to those loyal to it. That’s what makes a state. The difference between “state” and “terrorist” is whether we like to pretend they have a right to behave in such a manner or not. Hizb’allah does as much good as any other state—i.e., exactly as much as is necessary for its tyranny to be tolerated. Same goes for Israel and the U.S.
Is this surprising? Terrorists are simply states in formation, and their leaders are educated in precisely the same manner as our own.
You weren’t paying attention, were you? They’ve been all over the news this past year, doing precisely that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 12:57 PM
Jason, you were a bit selective in what you picked from my message to attack, weren’t you?
I haven’t actually been keeping up with current progress after Katrina, because I honestly did think the largest, wealthiest, and ‘most free’ democracy on earth might just be able to cope, just as so many other countries with far less advantages, after earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, landslides, destructive bombing campaigns, etc are forced to do after the disaster news has gone out of the headlines.
I’m no anarchist, and I’ve always felt I enjoyed my state’s protection, so long as it allowed me, within reason, to do what I wanted to do.
Now, I actually feel personally threatened because my Prime Minister has gone so goggle-eyed crazy that he’s sending our military to places they’ve got no business to be, and in both of which we’ve had previous ignominious defeats.
He’s thinking more about his future executive position with the Carlyle Group than he is about me or my country.
An innocent British tourist was shot dead this morning in Amman, Jordan, by an angry local. I spent much of 20 years going back and forth there, and never felt less than safe. I can’t say I could go back now with the same confidence.
Just 50 miles from where I now live in the Philippines, there’s an almost wholly unknown war going on. The US and EU have decreed that the NPA, a local resistance group, trying (for the last 50 years) to keep the forests and people of Mindanao from being raped by exploitative business interests, are ‘terrorists’, so anything goes, with the heavy weapons (helicopters, bombs, etc) supplied by the same US and EU doing the business.
I certainly wouldn’t classify any local resistance group, genuinely defending themselves, and not going out of their own territory to attack others, as terrorists, or as inherently evil states in the making..
regards
Richard
Comment by richardparker01@yaho — 5 September 2006 @ 2:22 PM
I always am. What I agree with does not need mentioning, since you already did; it’s what I disagree with that I’m going to pick up on. Why would I launch a comprehensive attack against your entire argument, attacking even the parts I agree with? That wouldn’t make any sense at all.
It can’t, because this is a case of diminishing marginal returns on complexity. We won’t be able to rebuild New Orleans because we’re “the largest, wealthiest, and ‘most free’ democracy on earth.”
Where it defines “within reason” at its sole discretion, and provided your loyalty—usually in the form of taxes—is regularly provided. We are anarchists, because we don’t believe it’s ever good or necessary to coerce obedience from others through such bullying.
This is not new at all. This is the very nature of the state. For 10,000 years, states have used their people as fodder to gain power for elites. That’s what established states do, and what would-be states like Hizb’allah aspire to.
I’m quite familiar with that war, and have been following it for some time, and I couldn’t think of any better way to describe the NPA. Like Hizb’allah, they were created in response to state aggression; like Hizb’allah, they aspire to statehood themselves, so that they can do the raping and pillaging, rather than being raped and pillaged.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 2:38 PM