How the Free Market Killed New Orleans
By Michael Parenti
The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.
They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.
It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works its wonders.
There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island 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.
On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost in New Orleans. Many people had "refused" to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain "stubborn."
It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.
Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had jobs before Katrina's lethal visit. That's what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they're lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.
The free market played a role in other ways. Bush's agenda is to cut government services to the bone and make people rely on the private sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had to be shelved.
Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have foreseen this disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for New Orleans, pointing to the need to strengthen the levees and the pumps, and fortify the coastlands.
In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise outcomes that would benefit us all.
But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the Gulf? coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the White House.
As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that "private charity can do the job." And for the first few days that indeed seemed to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.
The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into action. Its message: "Don't send food or blankets; send money." Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network---taking a moment off from God's work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court---called for donations and announced "Operation Blessing" which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment of canned goods and bibles.
By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free marketeers always want.
But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable of answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it take helicopters five hours to get six people out of one hospital? When would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks? the shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?
Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the $33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even ABC-TV evening news (September 1, 2005) quoted local officials as saying that "the federal government's response has been a national disgrace."
In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and several other nations. Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for the victims. Predictably, all these proposals were quickly refused by the White House. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch in the nose?
Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the truth---that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most extreme straits. Next thing you know, people would start thinking that George W. Bush was really nothing more than a fulltime agent of Corporate America.
-------Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in paperback. His forthcoming The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press) will be published in the fall. For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-09/03parenti.cfm
What does this have to do wit
What does this have to do with Starbucks? Nothing, at all. People could have left New Orlens, even the poor. They can walk, they would have gotten shelter elsewhere. But no, they choose not to. Now, when people go in to help out, those assholes shoot at police and national gaurd? They loot stores (they're looting every store, not just grocery stores so don't try and use that as a defense, they cause mayham, they do all this stuff, and you actually side with them? This totally sucks yes, but the reality is that they caused this situation for themselves, they were given fair warning. Also, don't try and turn this on me, making me seem like a heartless asshole. I've donated to the Red Cross, but in hope that it will help a family who actually left when they were told to.
What has happened in New Orle
What has happened in New Orleans is nothing short of a nightmare. I would appreciate it if the focus of the union, its supporters and its foes was the issues.
We are here to talk about Starbucks and the prospect of organizing a union at Starbucks. Our economic system may or may not have something, everything to do with the people who are dead and dying in New Orleans but now is not the time to debate it.
If you want to talk about Starbucks' response to the hurricane it has been fine. They gave everyone in the affected areas $500 to hold us over, they are helping displaced partners find housing, they are letting partners know who has checked in with them and where they are located, and in general being very, very helpful. Starbucks has many faults however, I am very pleased with the way they are trying to help the hurricane victims.
Its hard not knowing when you will be able to go home and its even harder not knowing if your friends are ok or even alive. Thats what I'm going through. Its hard to think about unions, capitalism, socialism, Starbucks, or anything for that matter when the people you love and the city you love are in this condition.
If you want to do anything for the people of New Orleans, please give to the charity you deem most appropriate and pray for the people of New Orleans.
Also pray for this dontformaunion person because he/she has absolutely no clue what harm words like those can do.
Thank you,
Wishing I stayed home
If saying that I don't care f
If saying that I don't care for a bunch of people causing mayham can cause harm, then I guess my words are like a fist.
"If you are more interested i
"If you are more interested in and disgusted by rumors of civilian "troublemakers" on the streets of New Orleans and other Gulf Coastal communities than in the massive failings of the United States government before, during and since this tragedy began, consider a career in journalism."
"The sheer failure of official agencies at nearly every level warms the core of this colossal tragedy. Katrina gave days of warning -- really a final warning following up years of doomsday predictions from climatologists. Lake Pontchartrain and its levees and the missing wetlands gave years of advance notice as well, by way of engineers and others sounding alarms to little avail.
Even those mystery snipers and roving gangs, if they really exist in any numbers, are a product -- more than a cause -- of the failure of those whose most basic job should be the safeguarding of the public. Sometimes scapegoats are morally reprehensible, but those who scapegoat are worse still."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=8639
no gods no masters
There are some things you can
There are some things you can do that can help us respond effectively to this disaster.
Organize a meeting this week - calling, emailing and posting flyers about the need for people to help and the day, time and location of the meeting.
At the meeting organize groups to call for food donations, another group to call for propane stoves, tanks of gas, tables and cooking equipment. Ask another group to get more volunteers.
Choose a time date and location of where your vehicles will gather to take the trip to the disaster area.
Collect 25 and 50 pound bags of rice, beans, 25 and 50-pound bags of rice, beans, black-eyed peas, lentils and any other large amounts of dry goods, pasta or non perishable food. We can also use propane stoves, kitchen equipment, toothpaste, soap, shampoo and other personal items.
Stay in touch by emailing Katrina@foodnotbombs.net or calling 1-800-884-1136.
The Houston Kitchen can be called at 713-802-9642
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/katrina.html
no gods no masters
Whatever pointless bullshit y
Whatever pointless bullshit you're spewing now really has nothing to do with Starbucks, a union, or anything else on this forum. President Bush "not doing his job" and not getting those people out on time (even though I'm pretty sure the mayor of New Orleans is more responible than him) really has no concern to me when I'm at work and thinking about how stupid a union would be. Maybe if this was a forum for the Red Cross, or some anarchist punk forum, I'd be happy to discuss it with you. But until that day that we cross pathes on an appropriate website, maybe you should stop talking about it.
Let the People Rebuild New Or
Let the People Rebuild New Orleans
Naomi Klein
On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants.... We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."
The statement came from Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans. It went on to demand that a committee made up of evacuees "oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations collecting resources on behalf of our people.... We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans."
It's a radical concept: The $10.5 billion released by Congress and the $500 million raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government; it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.
Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimizing them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami."
There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic." The Business Council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels. Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: While their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatized French Quarter (where only 4.3 percent of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans' reputation is 'a great place to have a vacation but don't leave the French Quarter or you'll get shot,'" Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labor organizer told me the day after he left the city by boat. "Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification--poor people."
Here's a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimized by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass Senior High School into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn't they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?
For a people's reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster's starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. "We had no caretakers," he says. That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi -- many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood -- need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organizing evacuees -- currently scattered through forty-one states--into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.
These ideas are not without precedent. When Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1985, the state also failed the people: poorly constructed public housing crumbled and the army was ready to bulldoze buildings with survivors still trapped inside. A month after the quake 40,000 angry refugees marched on the government, refusing to be relocated out of their neighborhoods and demanding a "Democratic Reconstruction." Not only were 50,000 new dwellings for the homeless built in a year; the neighborhood groups that grew out of the rubble launched a movement that is challenging Mexico's traditional power holders to this day.
And the people I met in Sri Lanka have grown tired of waiting for the promised relief. Some survivors are now calling for a People's Planning Commission for Post-Tsunami Recovery. They say the relief agencies should answer to them; it's their money, after all.
The idea could take hold in the United States, and it must. Because there is only one thing that can compensate the victims of this most human of natural disasters, and that is what has been denied them throughout: power. It will be a long and difficult battle, but New Orleans' evacuees should draw strength from the knowledge that they are no longer poor people; they are rich people who have been temporarily locked out of their bank accounts.
Those wanting to donate to a people's reconstruction can make checks out to the Vanguard Public Foundation, 383 Rhode Island St., Suite 301, San Francisco, CA 94103. Checks should be earmarked "People's Hurricane Fund."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050926/klein
no gods no masters
Once again, you post some mor
Once again, you post some more bullshit that has nothing to do with the Starbucks union.
no gods no masters no chance
One last thing, you should ch
One last thing, you should check the title of this thread to see the silly spelling error you made. PROFIT not PROFET.
Thank you. no gods no mast
Thank you.
no gods no masters
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