9-06-05, 12:09 pm
The unprecedented New Orleans disaster is reverberating through the world. After a generation of demagoguery about “reverse racism,” equating poverty with sin, and condemnations of activist big government, the Bush administration has no foreign power or ideology to blame for the fact that thousands of overwhelmingly poor and African American people are dead or in life-threatening situations because of a generation of right-wing rule. The Bush administration has no liberals to blame, because no liberals were involved in drafting any of the policies that have led to this disaster.
All they can do now is engage in damage control for themselves, but not for the people of the Gulf Coast, particularly the people of New Orleans, one of the world’s great cities. There are moments when a single dramatic event captures the contradictions of an age. This is such a moment.
The right-wing propaganda machine, which largely is what the mass media is today, will dance around the facts, deal with the human interest aspects, make some mention of the protests about the racist nature of what is happening, and do everything in its power to prevent citizens from examining the evidence in a context that can make sense of why what has happened has happened, and what it means for the future. We must fight back with an analysis rooted in a Marxist framework that offers people solutions connected to evidence, not political platitudes.
First, the evidence tells us that the overwhelming majority of the victims are both poor and African American in a city that is 2/3 African American and overwhelmingly poor. The evidence tells us that the Bush administration, which like its Republican predecessors since Nixon depends on the votes of the Southern states much more than any other region for both its congressional majority and its control of the presidency, has provided a vastly disproportional amount of federal funds for infrastructure development and protection to the districts of its rightwing Republican stalwarts, districts that are predominantly white, suburban and rural. Even with their lower wages, educational standards, and general living standards than the North, these districts are still less poor than the Black majority of New Orleans and other Southern cities.
This misappropriation of federal funds for infrastructure projects is also true in other regions of the country, most dramatically where “anti-terrorist” homeland security funds are distributed to states and districts which no one seriously consider a target of any terrorist (those areas of the rural South, Middle West, and Mountain States which are under right-wing Republican leadership), while chronically-underfunded, wealth-producing cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles get short shrift.
In the South, this policy is much more dramatically and directly a contemporary version of continued institutional racism in the “post-segregation” era. A city like New Orleans that is vital to the nation’s economy, a producer of and/or transmission belt for the nation’s gross domestic product, is institutionally underfunded, not in order to develop poorer, less productive regions, but in effect to subsidize throughout the South bible-belt reaction and social parasitism, to punish cities like New Orleans for being productive and cosmopolitan, and reward cheap-labor “enterprise zones” in a state like North Carolina, where a high-tech education complex co-exists with tobacco farmers, sweatshop mill hands, and bible-belters, or the region of northern Florida, where a military-industrial-complex economy co-exists with and complements a bible-belt political culture.
A look at New Orleans history will help provide a framework to understand these facts. New Orleans was the most important cosmopolitan center of the slave-holding South during the period of slavery. Its slave market was the most significant in the South and its port was the center of regional commerce. Its multicultural society produced within the slave system a sort of “tolerance,” in which there were a significant number of free Blacks in the city, some of whom were slaveholders themselves (a grotesque phenomenon but one that was rare in the region). However, former slaveholders and their followers participated actively in a campaign of racist violence and terror against post-Civil-War reconstruction forces. Louisiana followed the counter-reconstruction pattern of the former slave states, when the essentially bourgeois-democratic state governments of the multi-racial Republican Party were ousted by “white supremacy” Democratic Party-controlled state governments in the 1870s.
However, New Orleans also experienced significant European immigration, Italians, Irish and others, which set it apart from most of the segregationist South, as did the importance of Roman Catholicism in the city. New Orleans also developed a militant and radical labor movement, particularly around its port, which was the center of the economy.
In the period before and during WWI, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizers played a major role in the struggle to mobilize Black and white longshoremen in the city. In the 1920s, New Orleans became a major center for Marcus Garvey’s nationalist Back to Africa movement, called at the time “Black Zionism,” which like the Zionist movement among East European Jews, attracted pro-labor and other militant African-Americans, some of whom joined the Communist movement in the 1930s.
While reactionary segregationist Southern Democrats used their power in the national Democratic party to undermine Southern labor’s organizing drives, New Orleans was once more the exception, as the Communist and broad-left-led International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) and the left-led National Maritime Union (NMU) were the moving forces in the city’s labor movement..
New Orleans was also the organizing center for the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which pioneered during and immediately after WWII in integration and voter registration campaigns, which would subsequently be picked up by the Civil Rights movement.
New Orleans was detested by regional Southern reactionaries in the way New York City was long detested by national reactionaries, as an affront to all those for whom America was not a country or even a distinct nationality, but an ideology that placed work and property into an unregulated “free market” and social relations and moral values into a conservative, often theologically-defined straightjacket.
New Orleans remained a vital cultural center after WWII, even when the defeat of the CIO’s Operation Dixie ended the hopes for southern labor catching up to and joining with northern labor. New Orleans was a place where artists and intellectuals came to rather than left, the rare Southern city where people looked for and found freedom, although it suffered major economic decline over time, as did many older American cities.
The shift of old segregationist Democrats into the Republican column from the 1960s on and the shift of Louisiana, whose ethnic and cultural mix of traditions differentiated it from the rest of the deep South, along with the rest of the old confederacy, into a new Republican “solid South,” badly hurt New Orleans, whose neighborhoods became poorer and more segregated and whose infrastructure, on which survival depended, continued to deteriorate
In post 1960s America and the “post-segregation” South, many African American political leaders came to power in cities like New Orleans whose African American majorities then faced a hemorrhaging of private and especially public capital.
That New Orleans was vital to both the US economy and culture, much more so than the inland office-complex cities like Atlanta and Dallas, should have been evident to any macroeconomist, social-policy professional or corporate consultant with any medium- term vision, but it wasn’t.
To see that you would have to see cities and culture as vital “human capital” and the US economy as an integrated component of a larger world economy where scientific, technological, and cultural workers were essential to prosperity and progress. Most of the people who have been “privileged” in economics, its related fields, and social policy planning over the last generation, whether research institute theorists of the market (what Thorstein Veblen a century ago called the “higher superstition”) or the business school formulators of corporate strategies to maximize profit through labor restructuring and increased market share, do not see any of this and really cannot.
What they know how to do and are rewarded for doing is to rationalize (the theorists) and administer (the consultant odds-makers) public sector cutbacks and scarcity, and in the private sector to make short-term profits by manipulating stock prices, defrauding workers of pensions, and reducing labor costs generally. If all of the staff and fellows of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and their many minor league imitators in the US were sent to New Orleans by the Bush administration as part of a community service project, they would rapidly raise the consciousness of the people against them if they trotted out their predictable nostrums. Which is probably all that they could do.
These ideological middle managers of the “power elite,” to use C. Wright Mills’ famous characterization of the interlocking directorates of business, political, and military managers who direct policy through the banking and brokerage houses, law firms, elite universities and institutes that function as their employment agencies, might contemplate saving New York, because so much capital is invested there, especially after Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg had tamed its hated political culture. The managerial power elite of our ruling class might save Atlanta, where there is much more capital invested, not to mention cable TV, but not New Orleans, with its old buildings, old port, African American majority, and poor neighborhoods tucked away from the tourist quarter. They might not try to save Washington, DC with its legion of poor neighborhoods surrounding the federal district, until they realized that, even with the decades old rhetoric against big government, they would have to save Washington to save their own headquarters.
Right now, the Bush administration probably would want New Orleans to go away, only to live as a port and a place to export refined oil, but to die as the city it has been. The fact is the Bush administration has been adamantly against virtually everything that is necessary to revive and rebuild New Orleans as the great city it was, and they will have to be fought every step of the way, not praised and celebrated for their very small favors.
New Orleans has to be saved, restored, and only a vital national public sector effort can accomplish that. Its reconstruction can become a centerpiece of a larger American reconstruction
The effort could be funded by special surcharges on the corporations and banks that have profited from the de-taxation, de facto big business looting of the last generation. Just as Wall Street law firms take some cases pro bono to enhance their reputation, Halliburton should be required to work pro bono in the reconstruction of New Orleans as a first priority. In a city where the water danger makes the restoration of electric power difficult, Enron and other scandal-plagued corporations should be required to do extensive community service in reclamation projects and fund-raising for the projects.
All refunds granted to oil companies through the oil depletion allowance during the Bush years should be placed in a Reconstruction Trust Fund for New Orleans, along with half of all the profits received by prime military contractors through cost-plus contracts since 2001.
The Homeland Security Agency should have nothing to do with the effort, as it is showing itself incapable of anything except self-serving publicity. An expanded Department of Housing and Urban Development along with the Army Corp of Engineers, a revitalized FEMA, and HHS, all under a coordinating council centered in the Department of the Interior and under civilian control, should direct the reconstruction.
This would be a modern program of mass action, a peoples’ program to reconstruct New Orleans. New Orleans can be restored and protected from future disasters as part of a national plan and program. Much poorer countries have accomplished such goals in the midst of greater tragedies. Warsaw, a larger city than New Orleans, was gutted by the Nazis at the end of World War II. Warsaw was both reconstructed and restored through the Herculean effort of its own people and the government of the Polish United Workers Party with Soviet aid.
Soviet cities, which experienced far greater devastation than New Orleans has, were also restored through collective social efforts, as were German and other European cities, many with US capital, after the war. West Berlin, part of a city completely devastated by the last great battle of the European phase of World War II, was even turned into a “showcase” for both consumerist capitalism and social-democratic welfarism by enormous infusions of US capital. Everywhere public administration and planning led the physical reconstruction, and the economic burden was not simply placed on workers and the poor.
The United States has the skilled labor force to reconstruct New Orleans rapidly and save the poor who have been most victimized by the disaster. Can it utilize that labor force? That is a political question to be decided by political struggle. The US has real friends whom its government has declared enemies, most importantly, Cuba, willing to turn the other cheek after 45 years of blockade and send 1000 doctors to help the people of New Orleans (Cubans also have experience in hurricane relief and reconstruction, unlike Bush’s special friends in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan). Will the US government utilize the aid offered by Cuba, the Peoples Republic of China, and Venezuela, to name three, and perhaps use such aid as the basis for a new beginning in international affairs? That is a political question to be decided by political mobilization and struggle.
People have to be mobilized around such questions in order to fight for the reconstruction of New Orleans, and for the creation of public authorities that can protect people from the disasters that a decaying infrastructure and an anti-rationalist and anti-humanist rightwing politics have made much more likely than before.
--Contact Norman Markowitz at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
