How the free market killed New Orleans

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Michael Parenti

THE FREE MARKET played a crucial role in the August 2005 destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Forewarned that Katrina--a momentous category rive hurricane--might hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. All were expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market countries in the Third World.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby affects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does the invisible hand work its wonders in mysterious ways.

In New Orleans there would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When a powerful category rive hurricane hit that island nation in 2004, the Castro government--abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres--evacuated some 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country's population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane--but not a single person was killed, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

On day one of the disaster caused by Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans had perished in New Orleans. Many people had "refused" to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain "stubborn."

It wasn't until day three that 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, and over 100,000 people without cars of their own, many had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market didn't 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 the flood hit them. 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 are paid poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.

The free market played a role in the disaster in other ways. George W. Bush's agenda throughout his presidency has been 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 and were even referred to as "pork." In addition, Army Corps of Engineers personnel had started work to build new levees several years ago but many of them were taken off such projects and sent to Iraq. And the president also cut $30 million in flood control appropriations.

It wasn't actually the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans. Katrina swerved and hit parts of Mississippi much harder. For New Orleans most of the destruction was caused by the flood that came when the levees broke, a flood that had long been feared by many.

On September 1 Bush took to the airways on "Good Morning America" and said "I don't think anyone anticipated that breach of the levees"--another untruth tumbling from his lips. The catastrophic flooding of New Orleans had been foreseen by storm experts, engineers, Louisiana journalists, state officials, and even some federal agencies. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for years, pointing to the danger of rising water levels and the need to strengthen the levees and pumps, and fortify the entire coastland. And disaster drills were run just a year ago.

In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bush reactionaries allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market was supposed to take care of things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, were expected to devise outcomes that would benefit us all.

But the Louisiana wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from the Gulf. And for some years now, the wetlands of the Gulf coast have been disappearing at a frightening pace. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the White House.

This brings us to another way that the free market helped destroy New Orleans. By relying almost entirely on fossil fuel as an energy source--far more expensive and therefore more profitable than solar, tidal, or wind power--the free market has been a great contributor to global warming. Global warming, in turn, has caused a drastic rise in sea levels. And rising sea levels have been destroying the protective fringe of barrier islands and coastal marshlands along the Louisiana coast.

On September 5, 2005, the New York Times reported that "Every year, another 25 square miles, an area roughly the size of Manhattan, sinks quietly beneath the waves. In some places, the [Louisiana] coastline has receded 15 miles from where it was in the 1920s."