AfricaMaat: Katrina ripped cover off poverty by Rvd Jesse Jacskon

I was in New Orleans on Thursday night with state Sen. Cleo Fields. Fields has been running private buses into New Orleans, desperately trying to rescue as many people as possible. We took the buses to Xavier University to pick up 450 displaced students. When we got there, the buses were surrounded by a human circle of desperate families. They were without food or water. They prayed the buses were for them. We took as many as possible. But we were forced to leave more than a conscience can bear.

Katrina was a nightmare of a storm, but she hit a country suffering a nightmare of neglect. Just as when storms hit Haiti or Indonesia, Katrina ripped the cover off poverty in America. Residents were warned to leave New Orleans and coastal regions as Katrina approached. But many of the poor — mostly urban black in New Orleans, rural white and black in Mississippi and elsewhere — had no car. It was the end of the month, when money runs short.

Many could not afford gas, train or bus. Some were too sick to travel. In New Orleans, the affluent tended to live on the high ground ; the poor in the bottoms. The affluent generally got out. Disproportionately, the poor, the old, the sick, the vulnerable were left behind.

Many went where they were told to go — to the Superdome or the convention center. There they found ... chaos. Food and water exhausted. Medical care inadequate. Bathrooms not working. And worse, no military or police to keep order.

Katrina veered off at the last minute and didn’t hit New Orleans directly as was feared. But even so, the levees didn’t hold and, as many feared, the city was flooded.

The weakness and inadequacy of the levees were not secrets. A hurricane hitting New Orleans was one of the top three priorities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the plans to strengthen the levees — to rebuild the natural delta and barrier reefs that protected the city for decades — were postponed and delayed by inadequate budgets. The White House has been squeezing budgets for infrastructure work and the Army Corps of Engineers. The Republican Congress has appropriated to them more than the president asked for, but far less than what was needed. Where was the money ? The first Bush priority was tax cuts, which went generally to the wealthy, not to the poor who suffered the brunt of the storm. The second priority has been Iraq, a war the president’s men promised would pay for itself. Now its cost is $200 billion and counting.

National Guard troops didn’t arrive until Thursday, with a promise of deploying 1,300 or so troops a day. In the meantime, lawlessness reigned in New Orleans, as the desperate now had to fend with the violent.

Where were the troops ? One third of the National Guard of Louisiana and Mississippi is deployed in Iraq. These soldiers often come from fire and police departments, sapping the local Guard and the local emergency forces. There are enough Guard members in other states to make up the difference, but it takes time to get them there — and they don’t know their way around. In the wake of Katrina, time is everything.

A natural catastrophe exposes us. It reveals heroism, generosity, thuggery, incompetence. Katrina showed New Orleans to be a city not of glitter but of impoverished and abandoned people. It exposed a society in which the most vulnerable are left to fend for themselves. It exposed an administration that is spending billions on vainglorious wars of its own choosing abroad while failing to invest in even basic infrastructure and emergency public health measures at home.

And it exposed a president who is asking Congress to cut taxes on the wealthiest estates in America even as he insists that the thousands of poor people you see abandoned in New Orleans lose their health care, as Medicaid and Medicare are cut.

The response of the Bush administration to Katrina is widely seen as an "embarrassment." But the priorities of the president and his administration are worse than embarrassing. They are costly and increasingly dangerous.