From Mitch to Katrina: Nature is Politics

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Sun, 04 Sep 2005 16:36:08 -0500

From Mitch to Katrina: Nature is Politics

 

 

 

 

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09032005.html

 

Weekend Edition

September 3 / 4, 2005

 

CounterPunch Diary

 

From Mitch to Katrina: Nature is Politics

 

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

 

Nature really kicks the door down once in a while, and let's us know

how humans have made a mess of things. A few years ago Hurricane Mitch

laid waste much of Guatemala and neighboring countries. The hills

crumbled and topsoil sluiced into the sea. There was politics, class

politics, in that sluicing, same way there's politics in most

" natural " disasters. The US had crushed land reform in Guatemala in

the 1950s, with the CIA overseeing a coup against Arbenz and launching

decades of savage repression. The peasants had to surrender the good

flat land to the United Fruit Co and scratch small holdings for

subsistence into ever steeper hillsides

 

Katrina the aftermath is payback time for decades of stupidity, greed,

pillage, racism. My thought is that the tempo towards catastrophe

really picked up in the Reagan era. That's when the notion of this

society being in some deep sense a collective effort, pointed towards

universal human betterment ­ the core of the old Enlightenment ­ went

onto the trash heap.

 

Once you stop believing in universal betterment, you stop investing in

social defenses, like health care, or flood control. You build your

shining condo on the hill, put a fence round it, and cancel the local

bus service so the poor can't get at you. What was the final answer to

the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama? Cancel the busses!

 

So collective effort goes out the window, and soon the society forgets

how collective effort works. Tens of thousands of poor people standing

on roofs in the Delta and they haven't the slightest idea how to get

them off. The ones they have brought to dry land they dump on the

highway, where they stand as the Army trucks roll by.

 

There are all sorts of bargains the rich and the powerful in any

society make with the poor. But one way or another ­ through bread,

circuses, the dole, the promise that Anyone Can Make It ­ there's the

offer of a deal: Don't make trouble: we'll take care of you. Empires

collapse when the offer ­ the " marginal rate of return " ­ becomes

empty: we won't take care of you. Or, we can't take care of you. We

don't need you and we're not frightened of you.

 

We're at that point here. Malthus, a Christian, proposed locating the

surplus poor next to unhealthy marshes, in the hope they would get

sick and die. How much of a difference is there between that and the

" emergency preparedness " and evacuation procedures before, during and

after Katrina? How did Washington perceive New Orleans and most of the

Gulf coast? Basically as a vast huddle of the mostly poor and the

mostly black. So, year after year, they denied funds to shore up

levees that all experts agree are bound to give way in more than a

Force Three storm. They hollowed out every state economy so that in

the end Mississippi's tax base was its cut of the gambling take, from

floating casinos because the Christians said the Devil's Work couldn't

take place on dry land.

 

Mainstream politics in America has ceased to deliver the goods in

anything but the meanest terms. The bigger the hog, the bigger the

bucket of slops. There's no worthwhile opposition at the established

level. Generally I think people are looking at the scenes along the

Gulf coast and in the Delta with horror, at the realization of what

our society has come to.