Expulsion is Transfer:The Colonial Logic of Bush's Response to New Orleans

[buzzsaw_23]

Likewise, commentators from the big television networks showed spirited outrage that the American Red Cross was nowhere to be found. Against a visual backdrop of Black babies dying of dehydration as well as elderly folk, white and Black together, some of them seeming to be breathing their last breath, we saw impassioned correspondents demand an immediate explanation for the lack of relief. Yet if they had merely checked the American Red Cross web site, they might have chosen to pursue a completely different line of reporting. For the American Red Cross had already explained, in an official statement, that “Access to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders…. The state Homeland Security Department had requested – and continues to request – that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city” (http://www.redcross.org).

The cross-racial and-class outrage might have felt good at the moment, at least to those expressing it, considering that it rarely if ever gets voiced in the mass media, but all the venting of indignant emotion had the predictable effect of foreclosing a coherent narrative of the real story in the Gulf, as well as preempting the most logical kind of analysis of the great New Orleans catastrophe: the one highlighting the obviously intersecting patterns of the U.S. colonial occupation of Iraq and the government’s further restoration of white supremacy at home. From outside the U.S., these connections were made rather quickly.

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Hence, when people say that the New Orleans catastrophe has finally lifted the veil and shown that the Emperor has no clothes – that the Bushies are now at their most vulnerable politically – we need to qualify that with some sober realpolitik. And perhaps the best way to do this is to understand what the Bush regime was doing immediately before the week of Hurricane Katrina, and that which explains in large part Bush’s own description of the catastrophe, one day after New Orleans went completely under water, as “a temporary disturbance.” Indeed, from the standpoint of the racist U.S. imperialist social engineers in Iraq, any domestic crisis, from an earthquake or hurricane to a major airline workers’ strike or a collapse of the nation’s housing market, is minor compared to the task of writing Iraq’s new constitution.

In other words, it is inaccurate and politically weak to say that the Bush administration was unprepared for the catastrophe, because the Bush administration is unprepared for absolutely everything except seeing through to the end its neo-colonialist class project of remaking the former Arab nation of Iraq into an intentionally fragmented region of ethnically and religiously segregated Bantustans, governed militarily by the U.S. and in the political service of Israeli apartheid in occupied Palestine. Anyone surprised by the federal response to the New Orleans crisis has not been paying attention to Iraq nor do they seem to understand the crucial role Israel has played in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/150/150_scott_explusion_new_orleans.html