Independent panel report on Hurricane Katrina

Independent panel report on Hurricane Katrina
Cost-cutting and poor planning behind New Orleans levee failures
By Joe Kay
23 May 2006

The Independent Levee Investigation Team released a draft report
Monday on the failure of the New Orleans flood protection systems
during Hurricane Katrina, which struck Louisiana and Mississippi in
the southern US on August 29, 2005. The report is an indictment of the
American political and social system, concluding that much of the
damage and loss of life caused by the hurricane could have been
prevented with better planning and more resources.

Ray Seed, a geotechnical engineer at the University of California-
Berkeley and head of the team, said at a press conference in New
Orleans on Sunday, “People didn’t die here because the storm was
bigger than the system could handle...People died because mistakes
were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced
costs.”

“New Orleans flooded not so much because there was a hurricane, but
because of human error, poor decisions and judgments, and failed
policies,” Seed said.

The investigation team included 36 engineers, scientists and other
experts from universities and private firms. Some of the funding from
the panel came from the National Science Foundation, a government
agency. A final version of the over 700-page report is due out by the
end of June, including several additional appendices.

The conclusions of the panel differ significantly from another
investigation carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers, which
concluded that much of the flooding resulted from the fact that the
levees were overpowered by a hurricane they were not designed to
withstand. In contrast, the independent panel concludes that while the
overtopping of the levees was one factor, more significant were poor
construction and maintenance, and inadequate funds.

The difference is significant. Not only was New Orleans potentially
left helpless in the face of a major hurricane—a Category 4 or 5 storm—
that the levee systems were never designed to withstand, the city was
also vulnerable to a less powerful hurricane because the levee system
in place suffered from several major flaws. According to the
Independent Levee Investigation Team, the Hurricane Katrina disaster
fell into the latter category. If Katrina had been a more powerful
storm when it struck land, or if it had struck the city head-on, the
consequences would have been even more devastating than they were.

Though it suffers from deficiencies when it comes to an explanation of
the historical and political background to the Hurricane Katrina
disaster, the report is well worth examining in some detail in order
to understand the events leading up to the flooding of New Orleans.
Among the causes of the levee failures cited by the panel were the use
of poor materials, the construction of levees on unstable soils and
the failure to allocate funds necessary to complete and maintain parts
of the levee system.

For example, a section of the levee system protecting the St. Bernard
Parish was incomplete when the hurricane struck, and “as a result
large portions of this critical levee frontage were several feet below
final design grade,” the panel found. In other words, the levee system
was not complete to specifications, in spite of decades of warnings
that a major hurricane would have devastating consequences for the
city.

Approximately 30 percent of the official deaths from Hurricane Katrina
in the New Orleans area occurred in St. Bernard Parish.

Some sections of the levee in this and another area (protecting the
New Orleans East area) were constructed using “highly erodible sand
and lightweight shell sand fill,” according to the report, severely
undermining the levee’s structural integrity. These materials were
taken from soil excavated in nearby locations, apparently to reduce
costs.

The report asserts that the “catastrophic erosion” of these levees was
avoidable if better materials had been used and the levees completed
in a timely manner. While some overtopping of levees would still have
occurred, the resulting damage would have been substantially reduced.

Further breaches of the levee system occurred near the Lower Ninth
Ward area, one of the poorest sections of the city and an area that
experienced some of the most severe damage, flooding and loss of life.
While overtopping of the levees occurred here, the panel again
concluded that this was not the principal problem, pointing instead to
“underseepage”—the flow of water beneath the levees, eroding the soil
and undermining the stability of the entire foundation. These
underseepage flows resulted from the fact that sheetpiles, which are
driven into the ground to prevent water from passing beneath the
levees, were too shallow to perform their intended function.

The panel found that the breaches near the Lower Ninth Ward and along
St. Bernard Parish actually occurred before the storm surge (the
elevation of the surrounding waters as a result of the hurricane)
peaked. This meant that when the surge did reach its peak, these areas
were completely unprotected. Water levels in the Ninth Ward reached as
high as 18 feet above ground level, completely submerging many of the
one-story homes in the working class neighborhood.

Another area of the levee system was compromised because floodgates
had not been installed to prevent storm surges on Lake Pontchartrain,
on the northern side of the city, from raising the water levels in
adjacent drainage canals. The report blamed the failure to construct
these floodgates on the “dysfunctional interaction” among local
government bodies.

The authors note that several of the breaches were caused by common
factors: inadequate materials, underseepage and stability failures of
foundation soils. The frequency of these failures suggests that the
problems may be more widespread.

The panel concludes, therefore, that the catastrophic damage caused by
Hurricane Katrina was not inevitable, much less an ‘act of God.’ It
points to several different factors behind the failure to adequately
secure the city. These include inadequate coordination and integration
of local and federal agencies responsible for flood protection.

The report also notes that for many years the Army Corps of Engineers,
which oversees many infrastructural projects such as the levee system
around New Orleans, “has been subject to extreme pressures at the
federal and state levels to do more with less; do their projects
better, faster, and cheaper; and improve project management...Our
study indicates that as in the case of NASA [a reference to the events
leading up to the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia in February
2003]...technical and engineering superiority and oversight was
compromised in attempts to respond to all of these constraints and
pressures.”

It was well known that New Orleans would be flooded in the event of a
major hurricane. Yet the levee system was not adequately maintained,
let alone expanded, and procedures to minimize the loss of life and
property damage were not put in place. What explains this? The report
of the independent panel fails to examine in any detail the historical
and social causes of the disaster. Their ultimate source lies in the
extraordinary misallocation of social resources, in which billions are
spent on wars and tax cuts, while basic social needs are ignored or
underfunded.

During the past three decades in particular, the American ruling class
has waged a relentless attack on government regulations and social
spending. Social resources have been plundered in the interests of a
small layer of the population, which has accumulated unprecedented and
unimaginable sums of wealth. The protection of an American city has
been, under these conditions, a minor issue for the corporate elite.

More than anything else, Hurricane Katrina exposed the fundamental
conflict between the basic needs of society and a system in which all
decisions are made in the interests of a financial oligarchy.

According to recent figures, Hurricane Katrina led to the deaths of
1,747 people, including 281 individuals who died after being displaced
but were considered to have perished from causes associated with the
hurricane. Several hundred people are still listed as “missing.” Much
of New Orleans was destroyed, with $100 to $150 billion in damages to
that city alone.

This destruction was caused not only by the failure to maintain the
levee system, but also by the indifferent response to the disaster by
the Bush administration, which provided no resources for days to those
trapped in the city. Nearly nine months after this event, no one has
been held responsible for this event, a product of what can only be
described as criminal negligence.

The full report of the Independent Levee Investigation Team can be
accessed at: http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~new_orleans/

Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath: from natural disaster to national
humiliation
30 August 2007

We are reposting below a statement that originally appeared on the
WSWS on September 2, 2005, four days after Hurricane Katrina made
landfall. It is also published in the pamphlet “Hurricane Katrina:
Social Consequences & Political Lessons,” which brings together
articles and statements posted on the WSWS in the immediate aftermath
of the Katrina disaster, and can be ordered online.

We will resume our series “Hurricane Katrina two years on” tomorrow,
August 31.

The catastrophe that is unfolding in New Orleans and on the Gulf coast
of Mississippi has been transformed into a national humiliation
without parallel in the history of the United States.

The scenes of intense human suffering, hopelessness, squalor, and
neglect amidst the wreckage of what was once New Orleans have exposed
the rotten core of American capitalist society before the eyes of the
entire world—and, most significantly, before those of its own stunned
people.

The reactionary mythology of America as the “Greatest Country in the
World” has suffered a shattering blow.

Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the awful truths of contemporary
America—a country torn by the most intense class divisions, ruled by a
corrupt plutocracy that possesses no sense either of social reality or
public responsibility, in which millions of its citizens are deemed
expendable and cannot depend on any social safety net or public
assistance if disaster, in whatever form, strikes.

Washington’s response to this human tragedy has been one of gross
incompetence and criminal indifference. People have been left to
literally die in the streets of a major American city without any
assistance for four days. Images of suffering and degradation that
resemble the conditions in the most impoverished Third World countries
are broadcast daily with virtually no visible response from the
government of a country that concentrates the greatest share of wealth
in the world.

The storm that breached the levees of New Orleans has also revealed
all of the horrific implications of 25 years’ worth of uninterrupted
social and political reaction. The real results of the destruction of
essential social services, the dismantling of government agencies
entrusted with alleviating poverty and coping with disasters, and the
ceaseless nostrums about the “free market” magically resolving the
problems of modern society have been exposed before millions.

With at least 100,000 people trapped in a city without power, water or
food and threatened with the spread of disease and death, the
government has proven incapable of establishing the most elementary
framework of logistical organization. It has failed to even evacuate
the critically ill from public hospitals, much less provide basic
medical assistance to the many thousands placed in harm’s way by the
disaster.

What was the government’s response to the natural catastrophe that
threatened New Orleans? It amounted to betting that the storm would go
the other way, followed by a policy of “every man for himself.”
Residents of the city were told to evacuate, while the tens of
thousands without transportation or too poor to travel were left to
their fate.

Now crowds of thousands of hungry and homeless people have been
reduced to chanting “we need help” as bodies accumulate in the
streets. Washington’s inability to mount and coordinate basic rescue
operations will unquestionably add to a death toll that is already
estimated in the thousands.

The government’s callous disregard for the human suffering, its
negligence in failing to prepare for this disaster and, above all, its
utter incompetence have staggered even the compliant American media.

Patriotic blather about the country coming together to deal with the
crisis combined with efforts to poison public opinion by vilifying
those without food or water for “looting” have fallen flat in face of
the undeniable and monumental debacle that constitutes the official
response to the disaster.

Reporters sent into the devastated region have been reduced to tears
by the masses of people crying out for help with no response.
Television announcers cannot help but wonder aloud why the authorities
have failed so miserably to alleviate such massive human suffering.

The presidency, the Congress and both the Republican and Democratic
parties—all have displayed an astounding lack of concern for the
hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been shattered and
who face the most daunting and uncertain future, not to mention the
tens of millions more who will be hard hit by the economic aftershocks
of Katrina.

In the figure of the president, George W. Bush, the incompetence,
stupidity, and sheer inhumanity that characterize so much of America’s
money-mad corporate elite find their quintessentially repulsive
expression.

As the hurricane developed over two weeks in the Caribbean and slowly
approached the coast of New Orleans and Mississippi, Bush amused
himself at his ranch retreat in Crawford, Texas. It is now clear that
his administration made no serious preparations to deal with the
dangers posed by the approaching storm.

In an interview Thursday, September 1, on the “Good Morning America”
television program, Bush reprised his miserable performance of the
previous day, adding to Wednesday’s banalities the declaration that
there would be “zero tolerance” for looters.

The president blanched when ABC interviewer Dianne Sawyer asked about
a suggestion that the major oil companies be forced to cede a share of
the immense windfall profits they have reaped from rising prices over
the past six months to fund disaster relief. He responded by
counseling the American people to “send cash” to charitable
organizations.

In other words, there will be no serious financial commitment from the
government to save lives, care for the sick and needy, and help the
displaced and bereft restore their lives. Nor will there be any
national, centrally financed and organized program to rebuild one of
the country’s most important cities—a city that is uniquely associated
with some of the most critical cultural achievements in music and the
arts of the American people.

Above all, the suffering of millions will not be allowed to impinge on
the profit interests of a tiny elite of multimillionaires whose
interests the government defends.

Later in the day, Bush described the aftermath of the flood as a
“temporary disturbance.”

The ruthless attitude of those in power toward the average poor and
working class residents of New Orleans was summed up Thursday by
Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who declared “it doesn’t make
sense” to spend tax dollars to rebuild New Orleans. “It looks like a
lot of that place could be bulldozed,” he said.

While Hastert was forced to backtrack from these chilling remarks,
they have a definite political logic. To rebuild the lives that have
been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina would require mounting a massive
government effort that would run counter to the entire thrust of a
national policy based upon privatization and the transfer of wealth to
the rich that has for decades been pursued by both major parties.

Can anyone truly believe that the current administration and its
Democratic accomplices in Congress are going to launch a serious
program to construct low-cost housing, rebuild schools and provide
jobs for the hundreds of thousands left unemployed by the destruction?

Congress has been virtually silent on the catastrophe in the south. It
has nothing to say, having voted to support Bush’s extreme right-wing
agenda of massive tax cuts for the rich, huge outlays for war in Iraq
and Afghanistan and an ever-expanding Pentagon budget, and billions to
finance the Homeland Security Department.

The millionaires club in the Capitol is well aware that it voted to
slash funding for elementary infrastructure needs—including urgently
recommended improvements in outmoded and inadequate Gulf Coast anti-
hurricane and anti-flood systems.

The Democratic Party has, as always, offered no opposition. Indeed,
the president was gratified to be able to announce that former
Democratic president Bill Clinton would resume his road show with the
president’s father, the former Republican president, touring the
stricken regions and drumming up support for charitable donations. In
this way the Democratic Party has signaled its solidarity with the
White House and the Republican policy against any serious federal
financial commitment to help the victims and rebuild the devastated
regions.

The decisive components of the present tragedy are social and
political, not natural. The American ruling elite has for the past
three decades been dismantling whatever forms of government regulation
and social welfare had been instituted in the preceding period. The
present catastrophe is the terrible product of this social and
political retrogression.

The lessons derived from past natural and economic calamities—from the
deadly floods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the
dust bowl and Depression of the 1930s—have been repudiated and derided
by a ruling elite driven by the crisis of its profit system to
subordinate ever more ruthlessly all social concerns to the extraction
of profit and accumulation of personal wealth.

Franklin Roosevelt—an astute and relatively far-sighted representative
of his class—had to drag the American ruling elite as a whole kicking
and screaming behind a program of social reforms whose basic purpose
was to save the capitalist system from the threat of social
revolution. Even during his presidency, the large-scale projects in
government-funded and controlled social development, such as the
Tennessee Valley Authority, never became a model for broader measures
to alleviate poverty and social inequality. The contradictions and
requirements of an economic system based on private ownership of the
means of production and production for profit resulted in any further
projects being shelved.

From the 1970s onward, as the crisis of American capitalism has
deepened, the US ruling elite has attacked the entire concept of
social reform and dismantled the previously established restrictions
on corporate activities.

The result has been a non-stop process of social plunder, producing an
unprecedented concentration of wealth at the apex of society and a
level of social inequality exceeding that which prevailed in the days
of the Robber Barons.

Fraud, the worst forms of speculation and criminality have become
pervasive within the upper echelons of American society. This is the
underlying reality that has suddenly revealed itself, precipitated by
a hurricane, in the form of a collapse of the most elementary forms of
social life.

The political establishment and the corporate elite have been exposed
as bankrupt, together with their ceaseless insistence that the
unfettered development of capitalism is the solution to all of
society’s problems.

The catastrophe unleashed by Katrina has unmistakably revealed that
America is two countries, one for the wealthy and privileged and
another in which the vast majority of working people stand on the edge
of a social precipice.

All of the claims that the war on Iraq, the “global war on terrorism”
and the supposed concern for “homeland security” are aimed at
protecting the American people stand revealed as lies. The utter
failure to protect the residents of New Orleans exposes all of these
claims as propaganda designed to mask the criminality of the American
ruling elite and the diversion of resources away from the most
essential needs of the people.

The central lesson of New Orleans is that the elementary requirements
of mass society are incompatible with a system that subordinates
everything to the enrichment of a financial oligarchy.

This lesson must become the new point of departure in the political
orientation of the struggles of American working people. Only the
development of a new independent political movement, fighting for the
reorganization of economic life on the basis of a socialist program,
can provide a way out of the chaos of which the events in New Orleans
are a terrible omen.


The exploitation of Hurricane Katrina: remaking New Orleans for the
rich
By Joseph Kay and Barry Grey
14 September 2005

Even as the grim task of locating bodies and counting the dead
continues, it is already clear that whatever reconstruction effort is
mounted in New Orleans, it will be geared entirely to advancing the
interests of the city’s elite and the profits of corporations across
the country.

Of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people—the estimates range
from 400,000 to 1 million—who have lost their homes and their jobs,
the majority will never return. The press has begun speaking of them
as the new Okies, recalling the mass migration of small farmers and
rural workers who were uprooted from the Plains states by the “Dust
Bowl” drought of the 1930s.

The overwhelmingly working class and poor ranks of evacuees have been
scattered around the country, in many cases shipped off to remote
regions where they are cut off from friends and family. Such was the
incompetence and indifference of the authorities that many of those
flooded out of New Orleans were not even informed where they were
being taken to.

What is being envisioned for a “new” New Orleans was summed up by Joel
Garreau, an editor and reporter for the Washington Post, who published
a comment on September 11, entitled, “A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t
Forever.”

Garreau wrote: “The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt....
The tourist neighborhoods? The ancient parts from the French Quarter
to the Garden District on that slim crescent of relatively high ground
near the river? Yes, they will be restored. The airport and the
convention center? Yes, those too. But the far larger swath—the real
New Orleans where the tourists don’t go, the part that Katrina turned
into a toxic soup bowl, its population of 400,000 scattered to the
waves? Not so much.”

Garreau continued: “There are a lot of black and poor people who are
not going to return to New Orleans any more than Okies did to the Dust
Bowl.”

The hurricane and its immediate aftermath revealed in the starkest
terms the social chasm between the wealthy few and the masses of
working people that is the most essential feature of American society.
It also revealed how completely the government—at all levels—functions
as the instrument of the financial elite, starving the social
infrastructure of resources, slashing wages and social programs in
order to finance tax windfalls for the rich. The Hurricane Katrina
disaster was a tragic result of the systematic plundering of society
to further swell the coffers of the American plutocracy.

The same social dynamic is now at work in the so-called
“reconstruction” of the cities devastated by Katrina. If anything, the
descent of the American capitalist elite into manic greed and outright
criminality is more grotesquely on display in this phase of the
disaster than in the first two weeks after the storm.

When not obliged to give out for public consumption declarations of
sympathy and concern, not a few politicians and corporate movers and
shakers are rubbing their hands and gloating over the prospects for
turning the human calamity into a new source of personal enrichment—at
public expense. Among themselves, they speak of the obliteration of
Gulf Coast towns and the drowning of New Orleans as an opportunity to
rid the region of the poor and turn it into a Mecca for wealthy
residents and tourists.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Representative Richard
Baker, a 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told a group
of lobbyists, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We
couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Baker’s comments echoed those of Republican House Speaker Dennis
Hastert, who declared on September 1, “It looks like a lot of that
place [New Orleans] could be bulldozed.”

Brent Warr, the mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi, where the storm
obliterated entire blocks and took scores of lives, was quoted in the
September 12 New York Times as saying, “Property values are going to
skyrocket here. All the unattractive stuff has been blown away.... We
have an opportunity now to make it an absolutely unique place. God has
come in and wiped the slate clean for us.”

Within storm-ravaged New Orleans itself, the class divide in America
is seen in the contrast between the fate of the working class, and
their treatment by the authorities, and that of the city’s patricians.
More than two weeks after the hurricane hit, and days after state and
local officials announced a mandatory evacuation, not a few members of
the city’s elite remain camped out in their gated mansions, feasting,
according to press reports, on jumbo shrimp and fine wine. Rifles and
shotguns at hand, they are further protected by hired guards,
including Blackwater mercenaries returned from stints in Iraq.

The US military, National Guard and police patrol their neighborhoods—
not to roust them out, seize their weapons and arrest them, as is the
practice with working class and poor holdouts in the city—but to
guarantee that their property remains intact.

Describing the conditions of some of the rich who have chosen to
remain in the city, the Wall Street Journal reported on September 8:
“The power elite of New Orleans—whether they are still in the city or
have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail,
Colo.—insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. New
Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass,
substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate
headquarters. The new city must be something different, [James] Reiss
says, with better services and fewer poor people.”

James Reiss, according to the Journal, is a “descendant of an old-line
Uptown family” who “fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and
returned soon afterward by private helicopter.” He “helicoptered in an
Israeli security company to guard his Audubon house and those of his
neighbors,” the Journal notes.

That the outlook expressed by Reiss is shared by Democratic as well as
Republican officials is underscored by Reiss’s role as chairman of the
New Orleans Regional Transit Authority in the administration of Mayor
Ray Nagin, a Democrat. Nagin, a former executive at Cox
Communications, is a representative of the small and wealthy elite
within the black population of New Orleans.

Already, real estate developers, construction firms and speculators
have descended on New Orleans like vultures. They are securing choice
no-bid, cost-plus government contracts and exploiting the pool of
cheap labor guaranteed by President Bush’s suspension in parts of the
South of the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federally financed
employers to pay the prevailing local wage to their workers.

Those companies reaping the fattest contracts include Halliburton,
formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, and others with close
links to the Bush administration. Even the bourgeois press has noted
the similarity between the profiteering and cronyism already evident
in the “recovery and reconstruction” effort in New Orleans and the
massive corruption that has characterized the so-called “rebuilding”
of Iraq.

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has been brought
forward to appear on television news shows and argue in the press for
the establishment of a “Zone of Recovery, Reconstruction and
Prosperity” in the storm-hit region. He echoes the calls in the Wall
Street Journal and other organs of big business to turn the region
into an “enterprise zone” where business will be freed of all
regulations and allowed to make super-profits on the basis of the
super-exploitation of workers.

All of this will be financed with public funds, and there have already
been calls from within Congress for allocations for the Gulf Coast to
be offset by cuts in other federal programs.

The analogies to the Okies and the Dust Bowl in the press implicitly
raise social issues with vast repercussions. The profound historical
and political questions are almost universally ignored in the media
accounts.

A comparison of the two mass migrations says much about the present
state of American society. Beginning in 1930 and lasting until the
early 1940s, a massive drought plagued much of the Southwest in the
US, leading to a series of dust storms that forced hundreds of
thousands, and perhaps as many as 2 million, to flee their homes and
farms. These migrants became known as Okies because many were from the
state of Oklahoma, where 15 percent of the population left.

The Dust Bowl was part of a social disaster that fed into the Great
Depression. The economic breakdown compounded by natural disaster
discredited capitalism in the eyes of millions of Americans, and
precipitated a massive political radicalization and the eruption of
explosive class struggles.

In the 1930s, this led, under the administration of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, to a series of federal initiatives—public works, the
Tennessee Valley Authority—and benefit programs such as Social
Security. Fearful of the threat of social revolution—which had been
realized in Russia less than two decades before and was foreshadowed
in the radicalization of the American working class—the section of the
American ruling class represented by Roosevelt saw the need to make
certain concessions to the demands of workers in order to contain
class antagonisms.

But American capitalism, even in the depths of the Depression, was in
a far stronger position to pursue such a policy than it is today.
Then, the US was the dominant industrial and financial power in the
world, and there was a certain constituency—although a minority—within
the ruling class for a policy of social reform.

Today, the global economic position of American capitalism is
immensely weaker than in the heyday of American-style mass production.
The US is beset by economic contradictions for which it has no
answers. It is the world’s largest debtor nation, and continues to
pile up huge budget, trade and balance of payments deficits.

The collapse of the anti-flood system in New Orleans and the utter
incompetence of the government response have revealed to a shocked
world the enormous decay in the underlying physical and social
infrastructure of the United States.

The decline in the global position of American capitalism has been
accompanied by a vast political, intellectual and moral decay within
the ruling elite itself. The most backward, predatory and criminal
elements have risen to the top. The breakup of the Soviet Union and
the collapse of the trade unions have created conditions in which the
American oligarchy feels itself unconstrained. It sees a window of
opportunity to roll back and destroy all of the social gains made by
the working class over the previous century.

Nor is there any significant liberal intelligentsia that criticizes
the profit system and seeks to rein in its worse excesses.

Hurricane Katrina has exposed the disastrous consequences of decades
of policies pursued by both parties in the United States:
deregulation, the dismantling of programs to shore up the
infrastructure and deal with social problems, the funneling of vast
amounts of money to plutocrats whose fortunes surpass anything seen in
previous modern history.

In the wake of the disaster, the overwhelming response from the ruling
elite is to continue its policy of economic plunder—indeed, to exploit
the tragedy to establish new beachheads for its own enrichment.

These experiences will have a deep and lasting impact on public
consciousness, leading to a new period of mass social struggles. What
is essential is that the working class draw the central lessons of
Hurricane Katrina. The failure of all of the official institutions of
American society in the disaster is rooted in the failure of the
profit system itself.

On Aug 27, 10:28 am, VT Sean Lewis wrote:
Frank get your head out of your ass.....Lame duck means you are powerless, like Bush has been since Katrina.

================

Hey VT Sean Lewis!

Just a quick observation;

Telling Frank to get his head out of his ass, is like telling you that your Democrat Party's leadership and platform have become Socialist....Frank knows all of this, Frank is a communist, he openly admits it, and in Frank's view, the Democrat Party is not moving hastily enough, to get to Utopia.

Speaking of Katrina, where President Bush was criticized by all socialists and the few Democrats who haven't realized they have been sold out by socialists, the thing that made me, and other conservatives so outraged at President Bush and the federal government, is that they did not send the National Guard down and order them to shoot to kill the next Son of a Bitch who was caught robbing, raping, pillaging, plundering, and murdering other Americans. We saw how locally elected Democrats handle the situation, and if it were not for President Bush and the federal government, the good people of Louisiana would most likely still be sitting in squalor. This is a classic example of liberalism gone totally amuck. By example, we saw the government issue "debit cards" that were misused. We have seen literally billions of federal tax dollars squandered by a local Democrat run city, that has again squandered federal funds and misplaced federal aid.

Thankfully, the good people of Louisiana elected a Republican Governor with a little sense, who has attempted to "right the ship" down there.

If the people of New Orleans had any sense, they would have dumped that crooked Democrat mayor who proclaimed New Orleans to be "Chocolate City". You, and your liberal brethren should be saluting George Bush, and all that he did for your socialist counterparts down there. The audacity of socialists critizing the Bush Administration for a natural disaster, and then the response by the federal government, when it was not the federal government's duty or job to go into New Orleans, is frankly, quite baffling! If it were not for George Bush, that national calamity would have been far worse!

The other areas that were just as devastated by Katrina in Mississippi, (which had a conservative, Republican Governor) fared quite differently, were self reliant, and have rebuilt in half the time that New Orleans was still crying for more federal dollars, but that is a topic for another thread. This is just one example, of how you, and your socialist brethren are so misguided.