A VIDEO showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that the storm could breach New Orleans’ flood defences has emerged and been shown. However, four days after Katrina hit New Orleans and flooded a good part of the city Bush said: ‘I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.’
The video shows the already sacked scapegoat for the disaster, Michael Brown, the top emergency response official, saying the storm would be ‘a bad one, a big one’. He added: ‘We’re going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event.’ Brown also warned that evacuees in the Superdome in New Orleans could not be given proper assistance.
Michael Brown said earlier this week that he did not ‘buy the “fog of war” defence’. ‘It was a fog of bureaucracy,’ he said. In fact, there was no fog at all.
The primary requirements of the US capitalists and their administration were, and remain, to make super profits and finance the war in Iraq.
To do this they exported entire industries to cheap labour areas, while screwing up productivity and cutting wages at home. They provided multi-billion tax cuts for the rich, and slashed social security, while pushing up the costs of health care and cutting the maintenance of vital defences such as the Louisiana levees.
What services there were, in the various states of the US, were handed over to charities, volunteer groups and churches.
The end result of this policy was that the richest country in the world did not have the means or the will to intervene as soon as the first warnings of imminent disaster were given.
The poor of New Orleans were left to their fate.
About 1,500 were drowned and up to 3,500 are still missing. Those ‘refugees’ who fled the state went to Texas and other states whose services were so meagre that they were completely overwhelmed and had to move people on.
The flooding of New Orleans and the subsequent disasters that followed were a product of the Bush administration’s policy of handing the wealth of the US to the bosses and the armed forces, while welfare and essential services were handed over to charities, volunteer groups and private businesses.
The Labour government is now carrying out this same policy. Last week Minister Milliband was telling us how state assets, and the tax payers’ money, were going to be handed over to charities, churches, volunteers and private companies to supply state services, currently the job of the public sector.
Previously, we heard Chancellor Brown pledge to the CBI how there would be the lightest possible regulation of all big business activities. And now we are witnessing the destruction of the public sector that provides life saving services for all.
Last night this was seen at its starkest at the reception for the heroes of the Buncefield fire at 10 Downing Street.
This was picketed by the real heroes, the FBU firefighters, plus local residents, with their ‘From Heroes to Zeros banner’. What they were referring to is that after the dousing of the biggest fire seen in Western Europe since the Second World War, the government intends cut 50 front line firefighters’ posts, a front line fire appliance, a hydraulic platform and to close a number of fire stations in the Buncefield area.
This is Blair following the lead of Bush and creating the disasters of the near future.
The whole trade union movement must support the firefighters and their vital service.
The only way for the trade unions to deal with the Blair government is to bring it down and go forward to a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies, and put people before profits.
