Essay: New Orleans crisis shames Americans
in...@economicdemocracy.org
By Matt Wells
BBC News, Los Angeles
At the end of an unforgettable week, one broadcaster on Friday bitterly
encapsulated the sense of burning shame and anger that many American
citizens are feeling.
The only difference between the chaos of New Orleans and a Third World
disaster operation, he said, was that a foreign dictator would have
responded better.
It has been a profoundly shocking experience for many across this vast
country who, for the large part, believe the home-spun myth about the
invulnerability of the American Dream.
The party in power in Washington is always happy to convey the
impression of 50 states moving forward together in social and economic
harmony towards a bigger and better America.
That is what presidential campaigning is all about.
But what the devastating consequences of Katrina have shown - along
with the response to it - is that for too long now, the fabric of this
complex and overstretched country, especially in states like Louisiana
and Mississippi, has been neglected and ignored.
Borrowed time
The fitting metaphors relating to the New Orleans debacle are almost
too numerous to mention.
First there was an extraordinary complacency, mixed together with what
seemed like over-reaction, before the storm.
A genuinely heroic mayor orders a total evacuation of the city the day
before Katrina arrives, knowing that for decades now, New Orleans has
been living on borrowed time.
The National Guard and federal emergency personnel stay tucked up at
home.
The havoc of Katrina had been predicted countless times on a local and
federal level - even to the point where it was acknowledged that tens
of thousands of the poorest residents would not be able to leave the
city in advance.
No official plan was ever put in place for them.
Abandoned to the elements
The famous levees that were breached could have been strengthened and
raised at what now seems like a trifling cost of a few billion dollars.
The Bush administration, together with Congress, cut the budgets for
flood protection and army engineers, while local politicians failed to
generate any enthusiasm for local tax increases.
New Orleans partied-on just hoping for the best, abandoned by anyone in
national authority who could have put the money into really protecting
the city.
Meanwhile, the poorest were similarly abandoned, as the horrifying
images and stories from the Superdome and Convention Center prove.
The truth was simple and apparent to all. If journalists were there
with cameras beaming the suffering live across America, where were the
officers and troops?
The neglect that meant it took five days to get water, food, and
medical care to thousands of mainly orderly African-American citizens
desperately sheltering in huge downtown buildings of their native city,
has been going on historically, for as long as the inadequate levees
have been there.
Divided city
I should make a confession at this point: I have been to New Orleans on
assignment three times in as many years, and I was smitten by the Big
Easy, with its unique charms and temperament.
But behind the elegant intoxicants of the French Quarter, it was
clearly a city grotesquely divided on several levels. It has twice the
national average poverty rate.
The government approach to such deprivation looked more like
thoughtless containment than anything else.
The nightly shootings and drugs-related homicides of recent years
pointed to a small but vicious culture of largely black-on-black crime
that everyone knew existed, but no-one seemed to have any real answers
for.
Again, no-one wanted to pick up the bill or deal with the realities of
race relations in the 21st Century.
Too often in the so-called "New South", they still look positively 19th
Century.
"Shoot the looters" is good rhetoric [for opportunistic politicians],
but no lasting solution.
Uneasy paradox
It is astonishing to me that so many Americans seem shocked by the
existence of such concentrated poverty and social neglect in their own
country.
In the workout room of the condo where I am currently staying in the
affluent LA neighbourhood of Santa Monica, an executive and his
personal trainer ignored the anguished television reports blaring above
their heads on Friday evening.
Either they did not care, or it was somehow too painful to discuss.
When President Bush told "Good Morning America" on Thursday morning
that nobody could have "anticipated" the breach of the New Orleans
levees, it pointed to not only a remote leader in denial, but a whole
political class.
The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being
first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to [have the wleathyplunder
what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while
at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society -
has reached a crisis point this week.
Will there be real investment, or just more buck-passing between
federal agencies and states?
The country has to choose whether it wants to rebuild the levees and
destroyed communities, with no expense spared for the future - or once
again brush off that responsibility, and blame the other guy.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4210674.stm
Published: 2005/09/03 08:43:13 GMT
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GWhyte
Nine Health Hazards in Katrina's Wake
How to stay well after a hurricane
By CHRISTINE GORMAN
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005
If life were fair, simply surviving a hurricane as devastating as Katrina
would be good enough. But as the residents of the Gulf Coast have now
discovered, there are plenty of threats to life and limb in the days and
weeks after the skies have cleared. Here's a rundown of some the hazards:
Drowning
As with other, less-ruinous hurricanes, the greatest cause of death is
drowning. Now that the actual storm surge has receded and thousands of
people have been rescued from rooftops, the greatest danger is that folks
will try their luck driving across flooded roadways. Two-thirds of the
drowning deaths from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 in North Carolina occurred when
people were trapped in their cars by floodwaters.
Electrocution
Water conducts electricity and live power lines can be deadly, especially if
they are downed or not easily visible.
Fire and Carbon-Monoxide Poisoning
With no light or electricity, it's natural to light candles and use camp
stoves for cooking. Even the water in some parts of the New Orleans may be
flammable, however, as gasoline leaks from submerged cars and other
vehicles. Fires have already erupted where gas pipes have broken. All cook
stoves, generators, charcoal grills or any other machine that runs on
gasoline or charcoal should be used out of doors as carbon monoxide can
build up in enclosed areas.
Physical Trauma
Cuts, bruises, sprained ankles and more serious injuries like broken bones
are common in the aftermath of a hurricane, often as a result of the
understandable desire to search for prized possessions in the rubble or to
start cleaning up right away.
Gastrointestinal Illnesses
Despite common belief, there is generally no health danger from corpses in
the water. However, flood waters are full of sewage and the sanitary
conditions in shelters, like the Superdome, are reportedly
deteriorating-leading to pressure to evacuate, possibly to the Astrodome in
Houston.
Drinking flood waters, either inadvertently or in desperation will lead to
diarrhea. Wherever water mains have broken, as in New Orleans, whatever
comes out of the tap is bound to be contaminated. All non-bottled water
should be strained and boiled for at least a minute-preferably five minutes.
Don't use even treated water to make up infant formula.
Throw away any food that has come into contact with water. Don't count on
being able to tell that canned foods have gone bad simply by checking to see
if they are bulging. If they are opened or damaged, throw them out.
Wash hands with soap and clean water or alcohol-based gels whenever
possible.
Respiratory Ailments
There is plenty of crowding in shelters, which has led in the past to
outbreaks of flu and even concerns about tuberculosis.
Pre-existing Conditions
The Gulf Coast is the buckle on America's diabetes belt. Folks who had to
run for their lives didn't necessarily have time to take their medications.
Insulin needs to be refrigerated and the needles used to administer it must
be clean-tough to do under current conditions.
Allergies and Asthma
As residents return to their homes-if the structures are still standing-mold
becomes an even greater issue, especially in the humid conditions of the
Gulf Coast. Wet, porous items like carpet and upholstered furniture should
be tossed. Wear a protective mask and clothing while cleaning up to minimize
exposure.
Mental Health
The stress of surviving a natural disaster and of losing house and home will
take its toll. In the aftermath of the tsunami, community leaders discovered
that getting back to as normal a routine as possible was a natural and
highly effective way of dealing with that stress. That's why you saw
children going to school right away, even if classes needed to be held
outdoors.
GWhyte
Like Baghdad on the Bayou
Iraq-war correspondent Brian Bennett joins an Air Force Katrina rescue team
over New Orleans
By BRIAN BENNETT/NEW ORLEANS
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1101257,00.html
Posted Saturday, Sep. 03, 2005
The last time I was in an HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter, it was screaming over
the Iraqi desert, doors open, hot air blowing in like a blast furnace. That
was in 2003, when I was an embedded reporter with an Air Force combat rescue
unit. Today, as we tear across the woodlands of central Mississippi, I'm
once again surrounded by guys in uniform whose mission is the same: to
rescue people in need. But this time we are in my own country. The scene
looks like a war zone, houses blown to splinters, cars abandoned on the
roads, crowds of huddled refugees escaping a fallen city. It also smells
like a war zone. Flying over the neighborhoods where water reaches the eaves
of most houses, my nostrils burn with the fumes of diesel fuel, which swirls
in rainbow iridescence in the fetid eddies below. It's the dry areas of the
city that smell the worst, where the water poured in fast and receded.
There, the smell is unmistakably of death - the rotting contents of
abandoned refrigerators, and the corpses of the drowned.
The scene on the ground is worse. We land on a patch of dry ground at New
Orleans Lakefront Airport. For days, rescue teams like this one have been
doggedly shuttling survivors from the putrid streets of the city to this
desolate airstrip. Hundreds and hundreds of refugees plucked from parking
garages, apartment buildings, highway overpasses, the roofs of their homes,
whatever high ground they could find, are now stuck standing on the dark
runway, waiting for someone to take them somewhere, anywhere but here.
A handful of airport firefighters who had weathered Katrina in nearby
hangers are trying to care for the throngs of dehydrated refugees coming in
to what had become an impromptu staging area, radioing out for water and
helicopters to get these folks to better-equipped triage areas - like New
Orleans International Airport where tents and medicine were available and
busses could deliver them to shelters in Texas and northern Louisiana.
Large, twin-blade Chinook helicopters had been able to ferry about 400 off
the strip. But more people just kept coming and coming, more than can be
accommodated with so few personnel, no rations and one port-a-potty.
Earlier in the day, fights had broken out for seats on outbound helicopters.
"The gang-bangers," said Jimmy Dennis, 34, a Lakefront Airport firefighter
who had been up for two nights trying to care for the sick and keep order,
"couldn't understand that we had to get the sick people out first."
Frightened, the small band of firefighters called in ten New Orleans levee
police with shotguns and semi-automatic weapons to calm the crowd. But once
the situation was diffused, half the cops had to respond to other calls.
"It's absolute chaos," Col. Timothy Tarchick screams into his satellite
phone, straining his voice to be heard over the thump-thump of Coast Guard
and military helicopters bringing more and more desperate souls. "It's not
safe here. I've got 1,000 people who have been dropped here. We're out of
food, and they're starting to get tense. I've got women separated from their
children. We have no medicine. We need security. It's like fricking Baghdad
here. You have got to take control of this." He is talking to the New
Orleans emergency operations center but isn't sure who has full command of
the patchwork of rescue services operating in the area. Tarchick, commander
of the Air Force Reserve 920th Rescue Wing, runs seven of the dozens of
rescue helicopters hovering over New Orleans and bringing the stranded to
dry land . He's sifting through conflicting information on where to go to
help the most needy, or where to take them once they're saved. Tarchick
would later find out that Lakefront was never designed to be a drop-off
point in the first place and just evolved into one with out the necessary
support. "Who's running things? Nobody as far as I can tell. I wish I knew."
During one of the many trips from Lakefront to pull families out of the
waterlogged city that evening, Tarchick's crew spots a signal. Below, Edna
Fleming (her head nearly bald from cancer chemotherapy), her boyfriend
Curtis and some of her relatives and friends have been camped for three days
out at the top apartment of a two story house on Upper Line in uptown New
Orleans. Early on, they could still be merry about the predicament, using
their gas stove to deep-fry the frozen chicken as it thawed, and celebrating
her niece Nakisha Washington's 29th birthday by opening a Jack Daniels Down
Home Punch cooler that had floated by. But the waters around the building
refused to recede, so day and night Curtis would flick a flashlight at
helicopters when they passed. It was that light that alerted Tarchick's team
on Thursday evening.
The pilot circled the house and got into position. Two para-rescue jumpers
(PJs), the Air Force's elite operators trained to go behind enemy lines and
extract downed pilots, strapped into a hoist and descended to the slippery
tile roof, aiming for the chimney which crumbled under their weight. The PJs
chopped through the roof and went inside, surprised to find all eight people
squatting in Edna's apartment. They hoisted them out one by one. Edna's
mother, Flora, came up with her walker. Her friend Mary came up with her
cane. None of them brought anything more than a change of clothes and a
small stash of money and medication.
Back on the airstrip at Lakefront, the stars in the sky were blacked out by
a layer of smoke over the city from uncontrolled fires. The only light came
from the head beams of a fire truck on the airstrip. Families stood and sat
and lay down in a 100-yard-long trash-strewn column. Many had only the
clothes on their backs. Some had a bit of money stashed away in pockets,
shoes and handbags or a few vital medications. Others had braved the rising
waters with a beloved pet. A green parakeet chirped in a white cage on the
tarmac. A lanky woman stood next to two cat carriers with her teenage son.
Several dogs nosed through the debris, their leashes dragging on the ground
behind them.
Among the many awaiting evacuation at Lakefront was Dorothy Route, 80.
Accompanied by her two-year old dachshund Shadow and her brother Van
Laurant, 78, who has alzheimers, she had run into looters while trying to
drive through the waters out of the city. They had very charitably given her
raw chicken taken from a freezer of a Church's chicken restaurant. But then
they stripped her red Jeep Cherokee of its battery. The car eventually went
underwater. Rescued by chopper, she and Shadow, were trying to make sure Van
didn't wander off. "He don't know what happened five minutes ago," she said
sadly. "He doesn't have any idea there was a hurricane." Dorothy tells me
how Van does remember the distant past, however, and likes to brag about his
prowess with women when he was young and strong. He knew the ladies before
Katrina, she adds. "He remembers Betsy and Camille."
GWhyte
The president stumbles in his initial handling of Katrina's aftermath. But
he has a history of righting himself
By MATTHEW COOPER/WASHINGTON
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1100564,00.html
Posted Thursday, Sep. 01, 2005
It was the end of summer and Bush's poll numbers had been in decline.
Congress was ornery about the president's stalled legislative agenda. And
cable TV was consumed with the disappearance of a beautiful girl far from
home. Such was the situation on September 10, 2001 and the same could be
said of Tuesday this week. Substitute Natalee Holloway, the missing American
girl in Aruba, for Chandra Levy, the murdered congressional aide, and the
parallels are kind of eerie.
The other parallel is Bush's awkward first hours of handling a crisis.
September 11, 2001 is remembered as Bush's finest hour but of course the day
was anything but. He sat frozen in a Florida school after being informed of
the attack, flew around the country, at first sending Karen Hughes to
reassure a worried nation before he made a statement from an Air Force base
while a macho Donald Rumsfeld helped carry stretchers out of a burning
Pentagon. By the time Bush got back to the Oval Office that night to address
the nation, his response had paled compared to that of Rudolph Giuliani. But
Bush began to turn things around quickly, the next morning promising
all-but-unlimited assistance to rebuild and culminating in his famed
bullhorn remarks to rescue workers at Ground Zero on September 14.
This time, Bush has been just as flatfooted. He couldn't seem to break off
his schedule in San Diego, where he was commemorating the 60th anniversary
of the Allied victory over Japan, while New Orleans filled like a bathtub.
His remarks to the country from the Rose Garden yesterday about the Katrina
disaster seemed oddly terse; his litany of aid meaningless without context.
Sending five million military MRE meals sounded impressive until you
realized there may be a million American refugees at this point. Does that
mean we're only handing out five meals per person? And his interview with
Diane Sawyer of ABC News seemed weirdly out of touch. His smirk came back;
he stumbled into jargon like SPRo, the nickname for the Strategic Petroleum
Reserve and said things that seemed patently out of touch, including the
now-infamous remark that no one could have foreseen the levee breaking. His
inability to see any moral distinction between those who steal water and
those who loot TV sets seemed odd-and at odds with local politicians like
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. Then where
was the call for sacrifice? While southern governors like Georgia Republican
Sonny Perdue worried publicly about gas shortfalls as soon as this weekend
and begged for conservation, Bush seemed to do so only as an afterthought.
But Bush has shown a tremendous capacity to right himself. Just as he blew
his initial response to the Indian Ocean tsunami with smalltime aid and a
comment from a lower level aide, and then came back strong by appointing his
father and former President Bill Clinton to encourage Americans to donate to
charity, he's done the same this time, even reenlisting the former
presidents. Clinton especially gives him insulation. How can Democrats
attack when Bill Clinton is at his side? They will anyway, but it'll be
harder.
The Battle of New Orleans may yet be a cataclysmic event that scuttles
Bush's political agenda. One can imagine how the reconstruction of an
American city will put unbearable pressure on him to pull out of Iraq or
abandon his partial privatization of Social Security. And it may yet emerge
that the federal response to Katrina was even worse than it seemed, making
the questions about pre-9/11 intelligence pale by comparison. Democrats
harbor such fantasies. But Bush's career is all about people underestimating
him and it would be a mistake to do so this time.
GWhyte
Up Against It: Buffeted by Iraq, gas prices and the fury over his response
to Katrina, Bush faces a new storm of his own.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9190580/
By Richard Wolffe
Newsweek
Sept. 12, 2005 issue - The members of the world's most exclusive club
gathered in the Oval Office in a state of disbelief. Between them, they
could draw on decades of experience of hurricanes and floods, at home and
overseas, yet Nos. 41 and 42 could only shake their heads at the severity of
Katrina's destruction. "Isn't it unbelievable," former presidents George
H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton said to the man who now sits in the black leather
chair.
Unbelievable, but not unexpected. No. 43 thought he'd gotten ahead of
Katrina by declaring major disaster areas-and readying emergency
supplies-before the winds roared in. But after a month of antiwar protesters
at his ranch and squabbling Iraqi politicians in Baghdad, President George
W. Bush seemed politically unprepared for his biggest domestic crisis since
2001. Bush, who loves to manage Iraq with metrics and outputs, spent two
days reeling off statistics about trucks en route to the Gulf before
expressing his frustration at the lack of progress. "I am satisfied with the
response," he said of the government's emergency operations. "I'm not
satisfied with all the results."
The political storm may only worsen for the White House. For most of this
year Bush's advisers have blamed the president's sliding poll numbers not on
the war in Iraq but on high gas prices at home. Those prices spiked after
Katrina, topping $3 a gallon in many neighborhoods, as the national average
rose to $2.68-a 44 percent hike since last year. And there are signs that
Bush's political capital is getting soggy. Former GOP House speaker Newt
Gingrich sharply questioned the last four years of emergency planning. John
Breaux, the former Democratic Louisiana senator and close Bush ally,
rejected the president's claim that nobody anticipated the failure of the
city's levees, saying he talked to Bush about it last year.
Bush partisans went on the offensive. Grover Norquist, the conservative
activist with close ties to Karl Rove, blamed the chaos on "looting in a
Democratic city run by a Democratic mayor and a Democratic governor." Still,
nobody accused Bush of an overly rapid response. It took two days for Bush
to fly over the disaster zone in Air Force One, and four days for him to
touch down. In contrast, 41 toured Florida hours after Hurricane Andrew
passed through in 1992; two days later he returned, while the rain was still
torrential. (Bush 43's aides claimed that an earlier visit would have
distracted local officials.) President Bush is at least lucky that his
re-election is behind him; what lies ahead is far harder to forecast.
With Holly Bailey and Eleanor Clift
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
GWhyte
Opinion: A civil-rights leader mourns an African-American population left
behind.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9190576/
By John Lewis
Newsweek
Sept. 12, 2005 issue - I was headed to New Orleans as a Freedom Rider in May
of 1961. It would've been my first visit, but we were arrested in Jackson,
Miss., and never made it. In happier times, though, I have been able to
visit New Orleans over the years. It's one of my favorite cities, one of the
great Southern cities. The people are friendly, warm, helpful. In the old
part of the city, there's so much history when you walk down Canal Street or
Royal. One of my favorite places is a shop on Royal, where they have lots of
art posters by African-American artists. After Katrina, there's a loss of
the music, the restaurants and the character in addition to the unbelievable
loss of lives. Maybe we will never know the number of people who have been
lost.
It's very painful for me to watch and read about what is happening. I have a
sense of righteous indignation. I think all Americans should rise up and
speak out. It's not like 9/11 that just happened. We saw this in the making.
The media told us for days this storm was coming, and for years people have
been telling us we need to do something to prepare. It took us so many days
to make the full force of the government available afterward.
In 1957, during the crisis in Little Rock, President Dwight Eisenhower-maybe
he was reluctant, maybe he had some reservations, but he put the full force
of the government behind the decision to desegregate Central High. During
the Freedom Rides, President John Kennedy didn't hesitate to federalize the
National Guard and put the whole city of Montgomery under martial law. It's
baffling to me that we didn't have the ability or the will to do something
much earlier. We still haven't had the passionate statement that should be
made by officials in this administration.
It's so glaring that the great majority of people crying out for help are
poor, they're black. There's a whole segment of society that's being left
behind. When you tell people to evacuate, these people didn't have any way
to leave. They didn't have any cars, any SUVs.
It's so strange that when we have something like this happening, the
president gets two ex-presidents-his father and Bill Clinton-to raise money.
What they propose to do is good, and I appreciate all the work the private
sector and the faith-based community are doing. But when we get ready to go
to war, we don't go around soliciting resources with a bucket or an offering
plate. We have the courage to come before Congress and debate the issue,
authorize money. That's what we need to do here. By next year we'll have
spent $400 billion to $500 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq. That money could
be used to help rebuild the lives of people. If we fail to act as a nation,
I don't think history will be kind to us.
We've got to do more than the $10 billion that Congress appropriated. We
need a massive Marshall-type plan to rebuild New Orleans. But in rebuilding
we should see this as an opportunity to rebuild urban America. New Orleans
could be a model. There must be a commitment of billions and billions of
dollars-maybe $50 billion to $100 billion. I think even in other urban
centers, there are people who are just barely existing. We sing the song
"Hope is on the way," but it's taking a long time before hope arrives. It
becomes very discouraging where you see people dying-children, the elderly,
the sick-the lack of food and water. I've cried a lot of tears the past few
days as I watched television-to see somebody lying dead outside the
convention center. I went to Somalia in 1992 and I saw little babies dying
before my eyes. This reminded me of Somalia. But this is America. We're not
a Third World country. This is an embarrassment. It's a shame. It's a
national disgrace.
Lewis is the U.S. congressman from the Fifth District of Georgia.
Š 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
GWhyte
The Fallout: The hurricane's shock waves are already hurting at the gas
pump. But the ultimate price tag depends on how fast America's energy hub
can recover.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9190518/
By Robert J. Samuelson
Newsweek
Sept. 12, 2005 issue - We're getting a painful lesson in economic geography.
What Wall Street is to money, or Hollywood is to entertainment, the Gulf
Coast is to energy. It's a vast assemblage of refineries, production
platforms, storage tanks and pipelines-and the petroleum engineers, energy
consultants and roustabouts who make them run. Consider the concentration of
energy activity. Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico accounts for nearly 30
percent of the U.S. total. Natural-gas production is roughly 20 percent.
About 60 percent of the nation's oil imports arrive at Gulf ports. Nearly
half of all U.S. oil refineries are there. Katrina hit this immense system
hard. The shock wave to the U.S. and world economies-which could vary from a
temporary run-up in prices to a full-blown global recession-depends on how
quickly America's energy-industrial complex repairs itself.
No one knows the answer to that, because damage assessments of closed
refineries and crippled production platforms and pipelines are still spotty.
In 2004, Hurricane Ivan dislodged undersea pipelines connecting production
platforms with the coast. "Some pipelines moved half a mile," says Jim Osten
of Global Insight. "It was as much as six months before the most damaged got
back into production." Nor is it clear how quickly the Port of New Orleans
will resume anything like normal operations. "I'm getting reports of weeks
or longer," says Aaron Ellis of the American Association of Port
Authorities. Port officials haven't been able to inspect fully shipping
channels and docks, because "they've been involved with search and rescue."
As Katrina approached, hundreds of the Gulf's production platforms were
evacuated, shutting down 95 percent of its oil production and 88 percent of
its natural-gas output. Refineries representing an eighth of the U.S. total
either halted or cut their runs. Energy prices jumped immediately, and most
economists expect them to stay up. In parts of the South, gasoline rose to
nearly $6 a gallon. Nationally, gasoline prices "have to be over $3 a gallon
for the rest of the year to bring supply and demand into balance" by slowing
consumption, says Lawrence Goldstein of the Petroleum Industry Research
Foundation. He thinks that some refineries won't come back for months.
President Bush decided to release crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum
Reserve, the nation's 700 million-barrel stockpile; but the immediate
problem was the refinery outages and the resulting gasoline shortages.
At a minimum, this will hit consumers' pocketbooks-and perhaps their
confidence. Before Katrina, Goldstein estimated that consumers' annual fuel
bills this year would average about $250 more for gasoline and $400 more for
home heating oil and natural gas than in 2004. Now he reckons those amounts
will go up 30 percent to 75 percent. Costlier energy could adversely affect
consumer spending, corporate profits and inflation-or all three. "We could
be reaching a tipping point on consumer psychology, especially when people
get their home heating bills," says Mark Zandi of Economy.com. "Those will
be big."
Still, few economists are predicting a recession. Zandi says he's
tentatively shaved his forecast for second-half growth from 4 percent to 3.5
percent. On the whole, the U.S. economy has stood up well to shocks. In the
three months following September 11, it actually pulled out of a brief
recession. The housing boom remains strong; the government reported last
week that home prices rose 13.4 percent in the past year, the largest
increase in more than 25 years. The 4.9 percent unemployment rate is the
lowest since August 2001. The Federal Reserve, which has been raising
overnight interest rates since June 2004, might decide to call a halt later
this year. "The run-up in energy prices, in terms of the negative effect on
the economy, can be a substitute for rate hikes," says economist Stuart
Hoffman of PNC Financial Services.
Even the direct effects of Katrina aren't entirely clear. Airlines will
inevitably suffer from higher jet-fuel prices, and tourism to the Gulf Coast
will plummet. But the impact on agriculture, aside from higher fuel prices,
may be slight. In 2004, Gulf ports handled 22 percent of U.S. wheat exports,
71 percent of corn exports and 65 percent of soybean exports, according to
the Agriculture Department. By themselves, the figures imply a nasty
bottleneck for U.S. exports and global food supplies. The good news is that
the big grain movements don't occur until late fall, after the harvests,
and, by that time, Gulf ports may be working again. Finally, the rebuilding
of devastated areas could actually boost the economy in late 2005 and 2006.
What clouds all forecasts is the precarious state of the world oil market.
Even before Katrina, it was operating on a razor's edge. In the 1990s,
global oil demand increased sluggishly, with annual increases averaging
about 1.4 million barrels a day (mbd), according to economist Mary Novak of
Global Insight. Then in 2003 and 2004, global demand-led by China-exploded,
adding about 5mbd over two years. This exhausted most spare worldwide crude
production capacity, she says. The resulting pressures pushed world prices
from about $25 a barrel in 2002 to near $40 in 2004 and now to almost $70.
Global refining capacity likewise failed to keep pace; it's increased only
700,000 barrels a day over the same period, says Goldstein.
Something similar has happened in natural gas. "American production has been
pretty much flat," says Jonathan Cogan of the Energy Information
Administration. Demand is rising, and imports (from Canada or as liquefied
natural gas) haven't filled the gap. Price pressures have intensified. In
2002, wholesale natural-gas prices averaged about $3.50 per thousand cubic
feet. Just before Katrina, they were $9.86; last week they rose to more than
$12.50.
These developments have profoundly altered global energy markets. "You have
always had problems of pipelines going out, refinery explosions or
weather-related disruptions," says Goldstein. But the system had ample spare
capacity to produce more crude oil, refine more finished fuels or store them
both. A supply shortfall in one part of the system could be made up in
another. The resulting price changes were typically small, a couple of cents
a gallon or less.
"Today when things go wrong, you don't have these cushions," he says. It's
possible to balance supply and demand only through price changes. Because
fuels are so essential to most people and companies, the needed increases
must be steep. Buyers don't quickly cut their consumption. Indeed, the fear
of shortages could make things worse by inspiring people to fill up more
often, says Goldstein.
It is this remorseless logic-the old law of supply and demand-that poses the
greatest peril for the American and world economies. The most obvious danger
is that there will be other disruptions that compound today's scarcities:
another damaging hurricane; a terrorist act in the Middle East; a
politically inspired production cut (from, say, Iran); political unrest in a
major supplier (say, Nigeria); an unplanned pipeline or refinery outage.
One way or another, the effects will ripple around the world. High prices
and tight supplies are already expected to attract fuel to the United States
from the rest of the world. If oil prices reach $100 a barrel, the United
States would come close to a recession, according to a projection by Global
Insight. The same depressing influences would also be felt in Europe, Japan
and China, which are all major oil importers. Katrina might then perversely
become the instrument by which oil prices collapse, because-being too
high-they overwhelmed the world economy.
Š 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
GWhyte
'Battered But Proud': A New Orleans partisan on the spirit of her
hometown-and why it will endure.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9190575/
By Julia Reed
Newsweek
Sept. 12, 2005 issue - In 1719, a year after Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur
de Bienville, established New Orleans as the capital of the fledgling French
colony of Louisiana, a hurricane wiped out the handful of palmetto huts that
comprised the city. An engineer named Le Blond de la Tour begged Bienville
to move New Orleans to another spot-one that was not, say, five inches below
sea level between a powerful and unruly river and a 40-mile-wide lake, but
Bienville refused. Two years later, after they'd managed to build four whole
blocks, another hurricane came and wiped them out. No wonder the city's
first commercial establishment was a wine shop.
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During the almost three centuries since, New Orleans has remained on the
brink of disaster, from continual outbreaks of deadly yellow fever in the
19th century to Hurricane Betsy, which killed 75 people in 1965. Since I
first came to New Orleans 14 years ago to cover an election, the nightmare
scenario currently being played out with Katrina has been predicted and
described in great detail by city and state officials, in countless
newspaper stories and on television specials just so you'll know-but not
apparently so that the powers that be could do something, anything, about
it. The "bowl" that has lately been explained ad nauseam on the news
channels has for centuries had another name, the "damp grave."
Yet we wouldn't think of living anywhere else. Nothing could have prepared
the city-or any American city, for that matter-for the unfolding
disintegration. It is cold comfort (but still some comfort) that New
Orleanians have long had a closer relationship with death than most people.
Graves in New Orleans are not underground and marked by discreet headstones
(early attempts at burial resulted in bodies' floating through the streets
every time it flooded); they are aboveground in vast, gleaming white "cities
of the dead."
From the beginning, the city was different, a heady mix of French, Spanish,
black and Roman Catholic cultures that separated it from the mostly
Protestant, Anglo-Saxon rest of the country, and even the rest of the South.
New Orleans gave the world jazz and Creole cooking, America's only
indigenous offerings in the fields of music and cuisine. Sherwood Anderson
found it "the perfect blend of the two best ethnic cultures in the world,
French and Black," and was so enthralled by it (he would have been-he was
from Ohio) he published an open invitation urging writers to come to "the
most civilized place I've found in the world."
Today New Orleans is anything but civilized. The images of the thousands of
African-American victims trapped by the flooding-there were some white
faces, but not many-illuminated the city's stark racial and economic
extremes. My husband and I could escape before the waters came because we
are lucky enough to have the means to do so; countless others were too poor,
too sick or too old to join the exodus in time. Until now, New Orleans was a
city known for taking in refugees, a tradition going back to the days when
the owner of what is now the Napoleon House bar at the corner of Chartres
and St. Louis streets offered it as a haven for the exiled emperor. Current
inhabitants include Andrei Codrescu, the writer and NPR commentator from
Romania, who told a reporter that he was drawn to the city because of the
"complete disdain for the whole yuppie, Puritan ethos of exercise and
denial."
Writers have also been drawn by the city's romantic nature, stemming from
its age and architecture, its dense tropical vegetation and often spooky
light, but also from the feeling that the rest of the world-and time
itself-has somehow fallen away. Tennessee Williams wrote of rainy afternoons
(which are pretty much all the afternoons of the summer) "when an hour isn't
just an hour but a piece of eternity dropped into your hands." When I lived
in the Quarter, in a house where Anderson is said to have lived, I was
awakened each morning by the children arriving at the cathedral school
behind me and kept awake most of each night by the bass beat emanating from
the enormous gay bars on either side of me. "There it is," wrote Walker
Percy, "a proper enough American city and yet the tourist is apt to see more
nuns and naked women than he ever saw before."
Percy immortalized the city in two of his novels, "The Moviegoer" and "Love
in the Ruins" (in which, presciently, gangs with guns terrorize the golf
courses while the protagonist holes up in an abandoned Howard Johnson with
cans of Vienna sausage and a case of Early Times). He had considered San
Francisco first, but found all that urban beauty depressing. Better to live
on the edge, to feel twice as alive in the face of impending catastrophe.
Now catastrophe has come. There are loved ones to mourn, disease to fear and
a city that must rise from the ruins. We are a battered but battle-proud lot
and do not take defeat well. My husband's father held him by the feet out of
a second-story window at the height of Betsy so he could unclog the gutters
that were pouring water into the house. Like the stoic native New Orleanian
he is, he has never evacuated before. This time, he grabbed me and we both
grabbed all the potential projectiles that surrounded our unfinished house
before jumping into the car to start the slow exodus from the city. Now all
I can think of is getting back there. I just hope there's some wine left.
Š 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
GWhyte
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9190577/
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Sept. 12, 2005 issue - Cities are not forever. They are delicate organisms
that require a proper balance of nutrients. You don't have to be Percy
Shelley to know that history is littered with the debris of dead cities,
though Pompeii is one of the only big ones wiped out by a natural disaster.
Most died because the civilizations they represented lost their moral
bearings-their souls-and thus their ability to create, renew and rebuild. In
his classic "The City in History," the historian Lewis Mumford writes that
when "glib ephemeralities" multiply, "necropolis is near, though not a stone
has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from
within. Come, hangman! Come, vulture!"
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I haven't seen them yet on TV, but vultures may have already descended on
the carcass of New Orleans. We know that human vultures are swooping in. And
the hangman prepared his noose this year, when the Bush budgeteers cut the
Army Corps of Engineers' request for fixing the levees by two thirds. For
the antitax conservatives who rule so much of the Gulf Coast and Washington,
this is a comeuppance. Remember Mumford's history: Government matters. Not
entertainment.
To survive, New Orleans must rewire its insouciance into seriousness. The
city is at once enchanting and exasperating, romantic and fatalistic. Will
the Big Easy learn to work hard enough to resurrect itself? Or is it, for
all practical purposes, gone-a place on the map and not much more? History
can make the argument either way.
The first week augurs ill. If House Speaker Dennis Hastert is saying
now-with sympathy at its peak-that pumping billions of federal dollars into
restoring a city below sea level "doesn't make sense," then aid from
Washington will plummet in a few months when attention turns elsewhere. Some
wealthier refugees are saying privately that they've all but given up on the
place. The pictures of looting seemed to burst a psychic dam inside them.
Invest in this? Pay more taxes for them? That's a recipe for white
flight-overnight. On the other side are blacks-well over half the city's
population-who are fed up with a power structure that could not keep them
alive, much less house and educate them. Whites and blacks in New Orleans
were swimming in a fetid swamp of racial tensions long before Katrina showed
up.
The "before" is critical. Experts in urban recovery say that the most
important factor in how a city fares is not the extent of the damage but the
pre-existing trend lines. Chicago was mostly destroyed by fire in 1871 and
San Francisco by earthquake and fire in 1906. But both cities had been on
the way up beforehand. So while the rubble still smoldered, entrepreneurs
were already getting loans to rebuild. Almost overnight, San Francisco
constructed 8,000 barrackslike "refugee houses," with six to eight families
in each. Within seven years it had recovered enough to host a world's fair.
The same dynamic applies to more recent disasters. Los Angeles, built on a
fault line, is as geographically nonsensical as New Orleans. But it bounced
back from an earthquake and riots in the early 1990s. The difference this
time is that New Orleans has been in decline for decades. The headquarters
of almost every energy company in town has moved away, usually to Houston.
Its business establishment lacks the entrepreneurial dynamism of other
Southern cities. Its work force is largely poor and uneducated.
The good news is that Mumford's litany of doomed cities is less relevant in
modern times. "In the last 200 years, city rebuilding has been almost
ubiquitous," says Lawrence Vale, professor of urban studies at MIT. "There's
a deeply rooted necessity to turn disaster into opportunity." Vale says it
was only a few days after 9/11 that he first saw that word-"opportunity"-in
The New York Times.
I have heard it already from Jimmy Reiss, the chairman of the New Orleans
regional transportation authority and the head of the city's Business
Council. Reiss, whose family came to New Orleans 150 years ago, has been
brainstorming with a handful of business leaders to "use this catastrophe as
a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic" that has crippled New
Orleans. "We have the opportunity to build communities from scratch that
don't just warehouse people." And because the historic French Quarter and
Garden District have been looted but not obliterated, tourism can eventually
revive. Eventually.
In the late 19th century, Camden, N.J., was a lovely, freewheeling river
city. Walt Whitman lived there. To avoid Camden's fate, New Orleans will
need not just the superhuman efforts of loyal locals, but the love of the
nation it does so much to enliven. To save this city-or any city where
people are hurting-requires rejecting the "glib ephemeralities" of heedless
tax cuts and I-got-mine selfishness in favor of the sense of community and
competence that all Americans deserve.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc