(Photo: NOAA.)

Starving the beast....

One year after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, more than half the city’s population have not returned. Blame Mother Nature for the storm’s birth, but for the devastation it delivered to The Big Easy blame a succession of Republican administrations dating back to President Reagan.

Radical followers of the "starving the beast" philosophy in these administrations systematically dismantled a panoply of FDR-era social programs, including public health programs, consumer safety, public education, welfare, and maintenance of municipal infrastructure, including that of NO’s levees.

The strategy of these proponents of "small government" was to avoid direct assaults on popular programs, favouring a stealth approach instead in which they demonized all taxes while slashing income and property taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Enormous deficits and a zero-sum economy did the rest.

Twenty-five years later, with their city's levees weakened, emergency services understaffed, and evacuation plans nonexistent, New Orleans' poor and infirm had literally no way out. GW's war in Iraq diverted valuable construction and rescue equipment along with the National Guard units to operate it, while his free-market cronyism reversed wetlands restoration and sold the Mississippi delta’s protective acreage literally down the river. Add bipartisan inaction and incompetence, and the city’s elderly, young, poor and mostly black residents were forsaken to drown, swelter, starve and die of thirst in one of the richest countries in the world.

The aftermath reminded me of a much less severe emergency I witnessed in 1989. The Loma Prieta earthquake struck on an October Tuesday while I was in journalism school at UC Berkeley. Red Cross volunteers set up a temporary shelter in the San Francisco Convention Centre, located in the gritty South of Market (SOMA) district. Expecting to house "refugee” baseball fans from the interrupted World Series, the centre was inundated instead with poor, predominately black, Latino and Asian, chronically homeless San Franciscans as word spread on the street that there was free food and lodging.

When I arrived Thursday evening, hundreds of men, women and children, a number of the adults suffering obvious substance-abuse and/or other psychological problems, milled about inside the upscale centre. It was obvious that the local Red Cross were in over their heads with a population they had neither the experience nor the resources to handle, but they meant well and were doing their best. To the relief of homeless women I spoke with, they had enforced compulsorily segregation between the women and children, and the men. Even so, the presence of a range of noticeably sketchy individuals insured the situation felt just short of chaos.

I spent the next three days there, going home briefly each night to sleep. I grew familiar with the shelter’s routine, how a buzz would build in anticipation of celebrities who breezed in for photo ops, then die down as they left. As in New Orleans 16 years later, Jesse Jackson showed up, preceded by a huge entourage of television, radio and print reporters. He swept through on a tour then stopped for questions. Standing there clutching my reporter's notepad, a woman then, surrounded by the big guns of the national media, I gathered my courage and, identifying myself as a student, asked a question.

I’ll paraphrase it from memory here. “Do you think with the eyes of the nation focused on those San Franciscans made homeless by the earthquake, the idea that some homeless people deserve help while others do not might illustrate the wrong-headedness and moral bankruptcy of leaving people to live and die on the streets when there's no emergency?”

Without warning, Rev. Jackson, a large man, exploded into motion, grabbed my arm and swept me along with him in the middle of the cameras, reporters and hangers-on. He was talking the whole time and I was trying to scribble while running to keep up with his large stride. Suddenly we stopped, he released my arm, jumped into a limo that appeared before us at the curb and poof! was gone. Hands shaking, I looked down at my notepad to read what he’d said. Then re-read it. I couldn’t believe it! Consummate politician that he is, Jackson had spoken many words but they amounted to nothing of substance. No real position, no criticism, no proposed solution.

Sometime on Friday or Saturday, professional national Red Cross employees arrived in town. First thing they did was hire the company that oversaw rock impresario Bill Graham Productions to provide security at the doors. “I’m running this like a Dead concert!” I overheard one guard say to another. As word spread that you'd be frisked at the doors, the shelter population shrank by more than half. Which was exactly the goal. With the situation becoming safer, San Francisco politicians and business people had shown up to hold meetings behind closed-doors at the centre. Word leaked out that a convention was scheduled for the following Tuesday and big bucks were on the line. Somehow, someway, the convention centre had to be cleared.

And cleared it was. On Sunday, the “undeserving” homeless, probably a quarter of the number who’d originally shown up, were shipped off in city busses--the men to a decommissioned navy ship tied up at dock, the women and children to the Navy Presidio. From what I could gather later, many (most?) trickled back to the streets in subsequent days.

Nothing was done to address homelessness and poverty in the Bay Area—or the rest of the nation, including New Orleans. Clinton’s business-friendly administration was followed by Bush’s incompetent and utterly-indifferent-to-the-poor regime. Then 16 years later, Katrina upped the Loma Prieta ante.

One year beyond that, and the poor are still waiting.