Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter has called Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina an “abject failure.” This was reported in today’s Guardian. The Guardian has had extensive coverage of the Hurricane damage; they now estimate that there are 10,000 dead in New Orleans alone and 25,000+ still trapped in the city.
In addition, the Guardian reports that Bush’s bungling could turn this into an international row with Britain, normally our strongest ally. They report on many UK citizens trapped in New Orleans with no way to get out.
Here is the summary of the news from the Guardian:
–60 fires burning in New Orleans; firefighters can’t put them out because they have no running water.
Condemnations from religious and civil rights leaders:
The Reverend Calvin Butts, president of New York City’s Council of Churches, writes in today’s Observer: ‘If this hurricane had struck a white middle-class neighbourhood in the north-east or the south-west, his response would have been a lot stronger.’
In an extraordinary outburst during a live television fundraising concert broadcast on America’s NBC network, the rapper Kanye West said: ‘Bush doesn’t care about black people. It’s been five days [waiting for help] because most of the people are black. America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. We already realised a lot of the people that could help are at war right now.’
Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, said he saw ‘a historical indifference to the pain of poor people and black people’ in the US and said it was poignant that blacks were suffering in New Orleans, for many years the south’s biggest slave-trade port.
‘Today I saw 5,000 African-Americans on Highway 10, desperate, perishing, dehydrating, babies crying – it looked like the hold of a slave ship. It’s so ugly and obvious. The issue of race as a factor will not go away.’
Mayor Nagin defends himself against right-wing charges he is to blame:
Nagin, who is black, was criticised for not mobilising buses for those who lacked transport, but Jackson said the blame lay elsewhere. ‘The mayor of New Orleans did not cut the budget on building a stronger levee to protect the city from a flood in the event of a storm,’ he said.
The rampant racism among the cops:
‘We had to wrap dead people in white sheets and throw them outside while the police stood by and did nothing,’ said Correll Williams, a 19-year-old meat cutter from the Crowder Road district in the east of the city, who waded two miles through waist-high water to make it to the Convention Centre after hearing on the radio it was being turned into a refuge.
‘The police were in boats watching us. They were just laughing at us. Five of them to a boat, not trying to help nobody. Helicopters were riding by just looking at us. They weren’t helping. We were pulling people on bits of wood, and the National Guard would come driving by in their empty military trucks.’
Authorities bungled an effort to flood the district in an attempt to drain water out of another submerged neighborhood:
Williams only left his apartment after the authorities took the decision to flood his district in an apparent attempt to sluice out some of the water that had submerged a neighbouring district. Like hundreds of others he had heard the news of the decision to flood his district on the radio. The authorities had given people in the district until 5pm on Tuesday to get out – after that they would open the floodgates.
‘We thought we could live without electricity for a few weeks because we had food. But then they told us they were opening the floodgates,’ said Arineatta Walker, who fled the area with her daughter and two grandchildren.
‘So about two o’clock we went on to the streets and we asked the army, “Where can we go?”. And they said, “Just take off because there’s no one going to come back for you.” They kicked my family out of there. If I knew how to hotwire a car I would have,’ Walker said.
Rape and lawlessness is rampant in the convention center:
Once inside the Convention Centre, Walker confronted a new hell. ‘People were being raped, there were cries and screams, there were gunshots, but the police did nothing,’ Walker said.
‘The police were afraid to do anything,’ said Chantelle, a black 22- year-old. ‘They wouldn’t come in. They took two white guys out one night but left the rest of us in here.’
Williams said: ‘The floor was a swamp, you couldn’t live in there. The police kept telling us buses were coming but they didn’t. People started getting aggravated and then one policeman got mad, he caught an attitude with somebody and they caught an attitude back and started banging on his car, and that’s how it started. He called for back-up and the next thing I know the military are down there throwing stun grenades. Everybody started running, bumping into each other, hurting each other.’
Congressman Bennie Thompson has called for the resignation of the FEMA head:
The shock confession prompted calls for Brown to be fired. ‘That was just a boneheaded statement,’ said Mississippi Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson. ‘The President will have to change the leadership so that a response this bad will never, never happen again for the American people,’ Thompson added.
UK Victims told, “You’re on your own!”
30 people are trapped in the Ramada Inn, including a woman with breast cancer badly in need to treatment:
Gerrard Scott, 35, spoke to his brother Peter from the Ramada Hotel in New Orleans where he has been stranded without assistance with wife, Sandra, 38, and seven-year-old son Ronan for the past six days. ‘Those that didn’t fit their criteria were told to help themselves. The police said they were evacuating Americans, and took away the majority.
‘The British who were left all thought the police would come back, but nobody has. They have just been left,’ said Peter Scott last night. Among the 30 or so people still inside the Ramada Hotel is a woman recovering from breast cancer who had been confined to a hotel room by herself because of fears over her immune system.
Operators are refusing to take their calls:
There is a payphone in the hotel lobby, but US operators have been refusing to accept collect calls from stranded Britons.
‘Some of them are just hanging up even after they have explained they are trapped in New Orleans. It’s like – what emergency?’ said Scott. He added that conditions in the lobby were described as atrocious, with sewage up to knee level last night.
These real-life horror stories, more than anything else, graphically illustrate the massive failure of Conservativism to provide answers to disasters of this scale.
What we need is a massive change in the way government does business. We need to recreate the old Works Progress Administration to put these refugees back to work so we can rebuild New Orleans. We must stop the massive draining of swamplands from Louisiana and elsewhere, as these swmaplands help protect against disasters of this scale. We must also end our involvement in Iraq, stop the Bush tax cuts from becoming permanent, and massively crack down on the $300 billion of unpaid taxes so we can pay to rebuild our country.
The problem with Conservatism is that it does not react well when massive change like this takes place. It assumes that incremental changes are all that is necessary to react to a disaster like this. Similarly, Herbert Hoover failed to exercise leadership in the aftermath of the depression, instead promising people that things were about to return to normal. But they didn’t, and things got worse until Hoover was thrown out of office and FDR got elected.
