KATRINA, CORPORATIZATION: Water, Water Everywhere........

“

The time was early September 2005. I was in South Mpls and my toilet was not working. I began saving used water to flush it. As I contemplated my water issues, I thought about what was happening in places I have been and places in the news, where water was a primary issue. 4000 miles away in Nicaragua, over 90% of the people had no hot running water. In fact, forty percent of Nicaraguans spent the day without potable water. Meanwhile the United States continued building a monstrous new embassy in Managua atop a hill overlooking the city. This new embassy will cost more than it would to provide potable water for the entire country. The new embassy represents future plans for increased U.S. political and economic intervention, but not to address such basic human needs as drinking water. The U.S. is instead getting ready to enforce the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to reluctant Nicaraguans. CAFTA makes local environmental and labor regulations illegal. Nicaraguans can expect more toxic waste polluting their local water supply. Far from the capital, thousands of rural Nicaraguans, unable to grow crops on parched soil, and unable to find a market for their produce due to the flood of cheap foreign goods made possible by neo-liberal trade policies that CAFTA will codify, spent the day collecting timber to sell in the city where even middle class people use wood to cook their gallo pinto. This led to further deforestation, which led to more desertification, and soil erosion, which meant less water for crops and animals and people. • • • One hundred and fifty miles north, is a City built around the great waterway that connects East with West. Like all other port cities Duluth thrives on its ability to attract visitors, be they ships on the way to market or tourists hungry for Lake Superior’s mysterious beauty. Today it is full of refugees from closed mines and bankrupt family farms, victims of the same neo-liberal economic policies oppressing rural and urban workers in Central America. They are joined by hundreds of urban unemployed, under-employed and underpaid full time workers who moved from public space to public space, perhaps sharing a controlled substance and their sad stories, while tourists flocked to the water front of Lake Superior enchanted by seagulls, chocolates, and ocean liners. The poverty of Duluth’s inner city was not immediately obvious to vacationers to the Northland in early September, focused on swimming, fishing and drinking water in from plastic bottles. Yet you only needed to take a public bus from the Downtown to the West Side to see the erosion of hope. In this homogenous city the poor were predominantly white. The growing class divisions in Duluth and the universal destructiveness of poverty in the United States were obvious to those willing to look. • • • 2500 miles south at the other end of Mississippi, tens of thousands of people in New Orleans stood up to their necks in toxic water, throats burning with thirst. The vast majority were African American. The people without cars who could not flee Hurricane Katrina were almost all black. They were victims of a government that, before, during and after the storm, did not provide the most basic services. No public transportation, no jobs, no tax dollars for infrastructure, just military recruiters to convince parents that the best option for their youth is to join the Marines or Guard. So Louisiana National Guard were sent across the ocean to destroy bridges and water treatment plants in Iraq instead of fixing levees at home. After the storm, the convergence of race and class in this corner of the United States, where an African American population lives in “Third World” conditions, was laid bare for all the world to see. Seven thousand miles to the east, one thousand people in Iraq, struggling to escape what they thought was a suicide bomber, fell into the historic waters of the Tigris River and drowned. Out of this converging flood of human crises and inhuman conditions in early September, 2005, I struggled to find a way to hope I took heart in the lessons that Katrina was teaching. As funds and troops overseas were not available to aid victims of Katrina, it had never been more obvious to the U.S. public, especially those victimized by the storm, that we need money for human needs not war.” (One MPR journalist interviewing victims of Hurricane Katrina reported with a tone of incredulity. “they are talking about the war in Iraq!”) When George Bush’s asserted that ‘no- one expected the levees to break’; when Laura Bush’s commented that relief services at the Astrodome were a acceptable for poor people, who have never had anything to begin with; when FEMA representatives claimed they had delivered adequate provisions to thousands of people in the New Orleans convention center, who were in reality suffering from three days without food or water; It was clear to millions of people that “when this government lies people die”. And for the first time in my life I heard millions of people asking a more fundamental question - what is this government good for? Why did they allow so many people to die from Katrina? In Cuba when they had a category five hurricane last year, only a handful of people died! With extremely limited resources, the Cuban government took responsibility for every life, making sure everyone was evacuated. They took all available measures to secure homes and provide security for people’s possessions. Their medical doctors were trained to assist Hurricane victims, and with socialized medicine everyone was accounted for. (Cuba offered to share its medical expertise with U.S. victims of Katrina, by sending 1,586 doctors equipped with hurricane relief material to the Louisiana. Although doctors on the ground begged the United States to accept this aid, the government refused.) In contrast, the United States, the richest country in the world, was unwilling to put the needs of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens first. The disabled, people in nursing homes, babies, people who live without cars or access to mass transit, these were the groups who suffered the highest causalities in the Gulf region. People began to ask: who needs a government like that? In Nicaragua and Duluth, as in much of the world, there was no dramatic event on the par with the Louisiana Sunami, just ongoing economic crises, the kinds that simmer until something brings them to a full boil. In September 2005 we lived in one world, with one water supply, one oil supply, one global economic system that favors corporate profits over human needs. The struggles for peace and justice were on many fronts, each with its own level of intensity, but it was becoming more and more obvious that they all required the same first step. Anne Winkler Morey traveled to Nicaragua and Duluth and Cuba this year. She is back in Minneapolis, listening to her radio, dreaming of revolution . . . and a good plumber.