Hurricane Katrina and US capitalism

Bernie Wunsch

The wake of Hurricane Katrina in the southern United States seems to have reverberated all the way to Washington as more and more US citizens question their government’s response to their worst natural disaster in decades.

Internationally, the standing of the US as the world’s most powerful government, economy and military power has been questioned. It has failed to save its own citizens, who were abandoned into a Third World-like squalor following the inundation of New Orleans. Seeing thousands of people without water, medicine, housing, food or rescue efforts for more than a week has sickened millions in the US and across the globe.

Heated discussions have already erupted as to why New Orleans’ mainly poor and African-American population was abandoned, with accusations of racism and class prejudice being levelled at the Bush administration. Washington took a week to be convinced that it had to respond to a genuine humanitarian tragedy rather than labelling the survivors taking basic necessities to survive as looters.

Bush seemed more interested in securing the property of the wealthy, and race was used as a wedge to justify doing little. This has backfired in a major way, with sustained accusations of racism aimed at Bush and his administration.

While racism is a timely discussion in the US, and long overdue, the fact is that millions of Americans (including a disproportionately high number of African-Americans) have been abandoned to poverty and squalor for years by the US system of capitalism. You only have to visit downtown Los Angeles on any early morning to see more than 10,000 people huddling in sleeping bags and cardboard on the street every day to realise this is a systemic problem. While the poorest in the US have become more destitute, the wealthy have increased their wealth and hide within the confines of paid security and police surveillance in wealthy suburbs.

Hurricane Katrina only allowed the media to report (for once) the naked face of an extreme class-based society that has abandoned a significant part of the US population.

That corporate Australia, the Howard government and the Labor opposition embrace US-style free market extremism and are eroding welfare payments to those in need only demonstrates to us the future they envisage.

It is time to begin to abandon the system of capitalism, a system that will eventually abandon the people of Australia to the same fate as that suffered by so many in the US.

[The author is a member of the Green Left Weekly-Socialist Alliance editorial liaison board.]

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