[Mb-civic] Politics Of Gulf Coast Renewal

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Op-Ed: Politics Of Gulf Coast Renewal
http://newreconstruction.civilrights.org/details.cfm?id=40367

By Marcellus Andrews 
February 7, 2006

Marcellus Andrews is a senior research associate at the Center for 
Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C., and an economist 
in New York City. Today on Capitol Hill, an alliance of groups led by 
the Hip-Hop Caucus is gathering to urge action to rebuild the Gulf 
Coast. 

This morning, a wide-ranging collection of citizens will gather at the 
Rayburn Office Building, under the auspices of members of U.S. 
Congress, to hammer out a strategy for a Gulf Coast Renewal 
Campaign. The plan is to chart a course of action in light of our 
government's malignant incompetence before, during and especially 
after the near-biblical destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. These 
good people include displaced men and women of the Gulf region, 
Congress members, activists from the Gulf region and beyond, artistic 
luminaries from every venue--stage, screen, music, theater and the 
literary world--public intellectuals, and other concerned citizens. They 
are united by their determination to force the government to do 
something about the plight of the hundreds of thousands of American 
citizens stranded without jobs, housing or hope by a nation that is 
somehow blind to their fate. By showing up on Capitol Hil todayl, they 
seek to make visible the imperative that an effective and just response 
to their plight remains at the top of the Congressional agenda. 

This meeting--the Katrina Emergency Summit--asks for simple things 
that should be provided to all Americans aftera natural disaster, but 
have been withheld from the poor and disproportionately black victims 
of Katrina and her equally malign cousin, Rita: the right to a place to 
live; to return to one's home and neighborhood; to get medical care 
after the disaster; to have protection against financial ruin as a 
consequence of disaster; and to resume life as a member of the city, 
town or hamlet. This strategy session asks all governments involved--
especially the federal government--to provide many of the goods and 
opportunities that Katrina's displaced had been denied by virtue of 
poverty and color: a decent education, housing, employment and equal 
voting rights. It would be a mistake to think that this gathering of 
citizens is using the suffering of Katrina's victims to press their own 
agenda, for the demands being made form the root-level demand that 
the nation provide equal protection for the lives, livelihood and property 
of all citizens without regard to race, wealth, region or position. 

Life In The Face Of Disaster 

There will be a tendency among many--including progressives--to see 
demands for an inclusive, democratic and egalitarian rebuilding 
process as a racial justice issue, as a response to the fact that black 
people are being evicted from the Gulf region by a free-market 
reconstruction process that makes protection from natural disasters 
dependent upon race and wealth. The would be a great mistake: The 
poor and working-class victims of Katrina, though disproportionately 
black, are suffering because the government of the United States has 
failed to provide equal protection for the lives and livelihoods of all 
citizens. This is a national security issue in the strict sense that the 
nation has permitted economic inequality to undermine the basic right 
to life and livelihood of all citizens in the face of natural disasters. 
Economic inequality--which has a profound racial component in the 
Gulf region and the nation--meant that hundreds of thousands of 
people were vulnerable to Katrina because they could not afford high 
ground, or could not afford a car, gasoline or a bus ride out of New 
Orleans, or were too poor to buy insurance for homes that they had 
inherited from their forbearers. 

We all tend to interpret "national security" in military terms.Yet, a 
hurricane of the size and power of Katrina, just like a major earthquake 
or a tsunami, is a distinct threat to the national community because of 
the destabilizing scale of death and destruction. The lives of millions of 
citizens are at risk; the nation as a whole, through the federal 
government, is the only actor capable of responding to the crisis in a 
manner that treats all citizens as equally valuable. For rich and poor 
alike, the effects of the disaster reverberate throughout the nation 
through the economy, through family ties and through our federal 
system of taxation that redistributes monies from rich to poor regions. 
Major storms like Katrina, and, unfortunately, like the future monsters 
that will be born as a consequence of global climate change, are 
national security problems. If the citizens of this country to not have an 
equal right to protection of life and livelihood in the face of natural 
disasters, then there is little meaning to the idea of American 
citizenship or an American commonwealth. 

Allowing the free market to allocate the risk of death and financial ruin 
in the face of natural disaster on the basis of race and class is a direct 
violation of the principle that all citizens' lives are of equal value in the 
eyes of the government. First, all citizens should have an equal right to 
be protected from death, injury and penury in the wake of disaster. 
Second, all citizens should have an equal right to be restored to at 
least their pre-disaster state when calamity destroys their lives and 
well-being. 

A free-market rebuilding process like the one underway in the Gulf at 
this moment necessarily means that as a matter of public policy the 
lives of the poor, the black and the weak are deemed less valuable 
than those of the well-off, white and strong. It is not enough to say that 
the many victims of Katrina did not buy flood insurance, or enough 
homeowners' insurance, or did not pay attention to the warnings of 
potential disaster and the fact that they could not afford to take such 
big risks with their lives. No one deserves to die or become destitute 
because they cannot afford insurance, fail at school, make bad 
choices when young, or happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong 
time when disaster strikes. The right to recover livelihood after 
disasters should not be based on wealth or race. There is nothing 
radical about this idea, as it is simply an implication of the principle that 
governments need to protect their citizens equally, without regard to 
the size of their bank accounts or the color of their skin. 

Beyond Failure 

Unfortunately, the Katrina Emergency Summit will likely fail for two 
reasons. First, because the balance between markets and 
governments in this age of conservatism tilts in favor of property rights 
over citizens' rights. This need not be so: We can surely have a 
capitalist society where the government taxes well-off people in order 
to provide life and livelihood protection from natural calamities for 
everyone--if this kind of solidarity is valued by those who own politics. 
But in our current economy, freedom from taxation is in and sharing is 
definitely out. 

Second, the summit will fail because the participants are without 
practical political power, because the Democratic Party has turned its 
collective back on the poor--especially poor black Americans. 

The hard economics of the current predicament mean that the poor 
residents of the Gulf region are a completely replaceable labor force 
whose low wages and modest schooling make them too poor to serve 
as a reliable customer base. They are too dependent on government 
help in a region committed to the conservative program of low wages 
and low taxes. And they are too expensive compared to an immigrant 
labor force that will work for even less and make no demands on the 
public purse. The Democratic Party is an organization with no reason 
to help poor people who do not contribute money, do not vote and do 
not exert pressure through organized resistance to abusive employers, 
business elites and conservative governments. In fact, too many poor 
and black people in the Gulf region, like their brothers and sisters 
throughout the United States, have waited for the Democrats to 
represent their interests. But the party sees no benefit to protecting the 
lives and well-being of people who have little economic weight in the 
marketplace. It is time for poor people and black people to understand 
that we are seen as a dead weight on American society, both because 
our demands for justice are expensive and because we are despised. 

Despite all this, a meeting in Washington dedicated to improving the 
well-being of Katrina's poor victims is encouraging, not least because it 
finally acknowledges the right of all people to literal and economic 
survival in the face of disasters. But meetings in Washington are of 
little value when global climate change promises more Katrinas in the 
future, and when our society has chosen to abandon poor people to 
the ravages of the free market rather than protect them. The summit 
will matter, however, if it is the birth of a new politics of equal 
protection--a politics of the right to life and livelihood in the face of 
disasters, and, perhaps, in the face of a whole spectrum of risks that 
are beyond the control of individuals or communities. 

We need a new politics of equal protection if the poor and the weak 
are going to survive in the world of death and suffering that the 
conservatives have so deliberately constructed. 

© 2006 TomPaine.com. All rights reserved. Used by permission. 


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
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