Victimised by Katrina

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 18 September

“Well, it thundered and lightenin’d and the wind began to blow
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go
Backwater blues done called me to pack my things and go
Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more … ”

BESSIE SMITH, legendary Queen of the Blues, recorded her poignant “Backwater Blues” in response to the great Louisiana flood of 1927, a catastrophe that took thousands of lives and washed away hundreds of thousands of homes. The lives and the homes belonged, overwhelmingly, to impoverished African-Americans. And the disaster was as much the result of racism and laisser-faire economics as of nature itself.

Thanks to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, much has changed since those days. Tragically, however, as the spectacle unfolding in and around New Orleans has made clear, not that much has changed.

Without a doubt, the callousness of the Bush administration contributed substantially to the avoidable suffering of U.S. citizens in the southland. If the U.S. were an effective democracy, the President would face impeachment and removal from office. But as the 1927 precedent shows, this isn’t just about the egregious cynicism of the Bush regime. The roots of the Katrina tragedy lie deep in the U.S. political system, that “American way of life” which we are told is the envy of the world.

Let’s start with the “federal system”, the distribution of power between local, State and national tiers of government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. When that document was drafted at the end of the 18th Century, it embodied some of the most advanced democratic thinking of its time. But it also reflected the specific interests of the merchants and slaveholders who were its authors. Many of its provisions were designed to curb popular power and entrench the privileges of the rich. For example, representation in Congress and in the electoral college that chooses the president was skewed towards under-populated rural areas and away from the subversive metropolitan stews. The constitution also legitimised the enslavement of African-Americans and, in general, made property rights sacrosanct while leaving human rights dependent on the whims of local elites exercising power at State level.

For those watching recent events from outside the U.S., the relation between local, State and national jurisdictions may seem baffling. Unlike the Indian Constitution (or the German, Spanish or Italian), the U.S. Constitution does not provide a coherent, integrated framework of governmental responsibilities. Instead, it leaves all powers not specifically granted to the national government to the states, which draw up their own constitutions, as do municipalities. As a result, most U.S. citizens are unclear just who is responsible for what, which enables politicians to evade accountability for their failures. It becomes easy for elected officials, including the President, to blame “government” when anything goes wrong. Thus the U.S. version of the “federal system” renders the actual operations of government opaque and fosters the buck-passing so vividly on display in recent weeks.

As the republic turned into an empire, the constitution’s checks and balances proved increasingly flimsy counter-weights to the plutocracy. Since the mid-1970s, U.S. citizens have been subject to a sustained propaganda barrage against “big government”. Subsidised by giant corporations and multi-millionaires, the propaganda was always two-faced. Those who rail against taxes, environmental regulation and investment in public services and infrastructure – the kind of investment that would have mitigated the impact of Katrina – are enthusiasts for limitless military spending and the unblushing use of “big government” power overseas.

Thus, the same Bush administration that has spent $170 billion on invading and occupying Iraq refused to spend the 0.05 per cent of that sum required to re-enforce the levees protecting New Orleans from the flood-waters.

The U.S. has the second highest per capita GDP in the world (behind only Luxembourg). At $40,000 per annum it is 50 per cent higher than the per capita GDP in the European Union. Yet when it comes to a basic measure of human welfare such as life expectancy at birth, the U.S. ranks 48th. In infant mortality it ranks 41st – well behind all EU countries and indeed many others whose national resources are minuscule compared with the U.S’s.

These shameful realities are disguised by the gated-community mentality prevailing among America’s wealthy and white. The richest country in the world specialises in rendering its millions of poor invisible. That’s made easier by the fact that so many of the poor are African-Americans, and in the minds of many of their fellow U.S. citizens they simply do not count – the enduring legacy of the racism inscribed in the country’s founding document. The civil rights movement won the franchise and abolished legal segregation, but it was unable to overturn second-class citizenship in healthcare, education, housing, employment, and treatment by the police. When the disaster of Katrina hit, the black and the poor had no means of escape. A system designed to protect the haves left the have-nots to fend for themselves.

Outside the U.S., millions of people are grateful to the black population of the southern U.S. for gifts of immeasurable spiritual value: jazz and blues and their progeny, soul, rock and hip-hop. The image-makers in Washington are said to be worried about the impact of the televised images from New Orleans on the U.S.’s standing abroad. It’s unlikely even to occur to them that the nation-within-a-nation victimised by Katrina has for many years supplied the country’s most admired global ambassadors. But then it’s pretty unlikely that they’ve listened to Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues”, and if they have, they’ve clearly still not got the message.