Katrina: still an agenda club

---by Micheal

At this one year anniversary of hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, it is apparently still in vogue to use Katrina to push personal/political agenda.

On Monday, commentator/author Marcellus Andrews said, "Katrina's destruction of New Orleans is a symbol of our greatest collective sin. Our society ties the right to survival, even down to surviving a natural disaster, to the size of one's wallet. In the old New Orleans, people with money lived on high ground, while poor people lived way below sea-level. When the flood waters came, poor people drowned. They didn't have enough money to leave town."

Andrews is obviously angry that poor people died, but his socio-economic agenda just doesn't fit Katrina. There are many reasons people chose to live in New Orleans. Lack of money is not all there was to it.

No doubt Andrews favors programs to boost lower strata incomes, redistribute wealth so that the "poor" have enough money to do whatever rich people do. Equal wealth, however, would not necessarily have saved lowland dwelling people.

Andrews argues that public safety projects should equally protect the public. They cannot, however. Every design project has to strike a balance between strength vs cost. The public safety decision makers in New Orleans drew that balance line at Cat4. Up until Katrnia, a Cat5 hurricane, their design/cost decisions were right.

When a publicly funded levee fails, the low land will be flooded. Water doesn't care about wallets or a lack thereof, it just follows elevation.

In New Orleans, much of the land is below sea level. Only a fraction of higher ground remains. Even with equal wealth, someone would have been living in the low areas. Redistributing wealth would not raise New Orleans' lowlands. Why, does Andrews think that if everyone were wealthier, no one would live on the low ground. You really can't blame the entire US capitalist economic system for the fact that some people live in disaster-risk areas.

Andrews is beating us with Katrina to push his personal economic agenda, but it doesn't fit. We cannot buy complete safety from acts of God, even if with total wealth equality.