Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster, but the flooding of the city of New Orleans and the terrible death toll and social collapse which followed it were the result of human action -or rather inaction - in combating the effects of nature.
• Hurricanes happen in the region regularly, but the warming of the Gulf of Mexico has made them fiercer, and therefore more deadly.
• Coastal erosion as a result of industrial development has destroyed much of the marshes and wetlands that can help alleviate the effects of hurricanes and other strong weather events
• The colossal resources in terms of person power, machinery and finance poured into the illegal war in Iraq meant they are not available to be used to evacuate or rescue the people of the area.
• Free market policies since the 1970s, with their emphasis on small government and tax cuts, have meant that resources have been cut from the cities.
No one can doubt that the brunt of this disaster has fallen massively on those who were left behind in the city to suffer. George Bush interrupted his holiday to make a television broadcast advising New Orleans residents to evacuate the city before the hurricane struck: tens of thousands did so, jamming freeways and filling every available flight.
Most who stayed behind and suffered the full impact of the flooding remained not by choice but because they were simply to poor to leave, either having no means of transportation or being unable to afford alternative accommodation outside the city: they were invariably poor, and overwhelmingly black.
Black people make up 67.3 per cent of the population of New Orleans, and 32.5 per cent of the state of Louisiana, as distinct from 12.3 per cent of the US as a whole.
And while 12.4 percent of the population of the richest country on earth live below the poverty line, more than double that proportion, almost 28 per cent of the city of New Orleans, lives in desperate poverty. In the land of the free market, those who can afford to travel, travel: those who don't don't. So we have seen the obscene sight of city buses and countless other vehicles being left to disappear
While 12.4 per
cent of the
population of the richest country on
earth live below
the poverty line, more than double that proportion, almost 28 per cent of the city of New
Orleans, lives in desperate poverty. under the rising floodwater, rather than being mobilised to save lives: countless thousands of individuals and families did not even have the bus fare for a trip across town, let alone the resources to leave the city.
The plight of this huge neglected underclass has gone largely unremarked for decades: it took a hurricane to show many Americans the hellish plight of so many tens of thousands of their compatriots.
But the aftermath of the hurricane brought other disturbing images that also summed up the grim reality of George Dubya's USA: the pictures of army lorries crammed with well-fed, white, gun-toting National Guard, that arrived after days of misery, not to comfort or inform, not to deliver food or to aid the relief effort, but to intimidate and further brutalise the wretched thousands of homeless survivors.
The imposition of "order" at the point of a gun was not linked with any delivery of relief supplies or transport out of town: for days on end the homeless were simply kept at bay before a bumbling and incompetent military finally began to deliver supplies of food and water, and the promised convoys of buses began to ship people out.
There has still been no satisfactory answer which can explain the staggering incompetence of the Federal government response, and the length of time it took for the first relief supplies to arrive in New Orleans.
While we can see clearly that the welfare poor black population is nowhere on Bush's political agenda, his government's inability to respond has inflicted longterm damage on the image of the administration and of the USA on a global level.
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dence of this comes from reports of TPG's chairman David Bonderman's 60th birthday party, the "most expensive bash in Las Vegas history", where his 300 guests witnessed "performances by Robin Williams and the Rolling Stones." (4)
His spending on the party was only slightly less than the £7 million price tag of the proposed redundancy measure possible to support our fellow union members." (5)
For now, Gate Gourmet has returned to the bargaining table, but this isn't the first and will not be the last that we hear about a TPG company putting profits before workers' welfare in the most callous of fashions.
With both the US and British union movements in