In August and September 2005, New Orleans was reduced to barbaric conditions. Nearly 2,000 people died, and 1.5 million lost their homes. Was an unpredictable natural disaster or an “act of God” to blame? No, it was a result of the criminal negligence of the ruling class.

In a historic, major city in the richest country on earth, Hurricane Katrina exposed just how unprepared the capitalist system is for climate catastrophe. Twenty years later, New Orleans is even less prepared.

Hell on earth

Faced with Katrina’s impending landfall, New Orleans’s Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a “mandatory” evacuation on August 28. However, there was no public system in place to implement it. Individuals were expected to fend for themselves. Around a million residents sat for hours in standstill traffic, while over 100,000 people who didn’t own private vehicles were stranded in the city.

When the hurricane hit the coast the next day, the city’s levees broke. Sewage-filled water flooded 80% of New Orleans. In some places it was 20 feet deep.

The city became a hellscape. Thirty thousand refugees sought shelter in the Superdome and convention center, which soon ran out of food and working toilets—leaving excrement everywhere. Others tried to survive in attics or on rooftops. Soon, dead bodies were piling up on streets or floating through the fetid water.

The city became a hellscape. / Image: Wikimedia Commons

The stranded searched for food wherever they could, including by breaking into abandoned grocery stores. Playing on racist stereotypes, the capitalist media painted a picture of mostly Black “thugs” and “looters” running rampant. News channels spread sensationalized rumors of widespread rape and murder in the Superdome and roving gangs of looters robbing gun stores—shrouding the crippled city in fear.

New Orleans Chief of Police, Eddie Compass, helped spread these lies. Later, it was revealed that many cops themselves looted stores—not for food, but for toys and electronics. Some murdered unarmed civilians trying to flee flooded areas.

On the Gretna Bridge, police set up a roadblock and fired on a group of mostly Black refugees trying to escape the city. On the Danziger Bridge, officers killed two unarmed civilians and wounded four others. Another cop murdered a man pleading for help dealing with wounds. The NOPD tried to cover up all three murders.

The capitalists are the criminals

The capitalist state turned a natural disaster into a living nightmare. The Bush administration and multiple agencies of the federal government—including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)—knew in advance that the levees would be unable to withstand the storm.

Due to the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush slashed the budgets of both USACE and FEMA. Between 2001 and 2005, USACE—the agency responsible for managing levees and flood control—had its budget cut by $71.2 million, nearly half. Just one year before the storm, a city official said, “It appears that the money [for hurricane protection] has been moved in the President’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq … Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished.”

Over half of the Louisiana National Guard was deployed in the Middle East when Katrina struck. When National Guard units did arrive in the city, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, made clear their duty: “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot to kill, and I expect they will.”

There was never a plan to house the million people who evacuated the region. Tens of thousands were stranded in stadiums like the Houston Astrodome. Others were taken in by volunteers. Initially, FEMA paid for the hotel stays of many refugees, but this money dried up by November, leaving thousands homeless.

All of this negligence was personified by George W. Bush. As New Orleanians suffered, he remained on vacation, and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, went shoe shopping in New York City. / Image: X.com

All of this negligence was personified by George W. Bush. As New Orleanians suffered, he remained on vacation, and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, went shoe shopping in New York City. Barbara Bush, George’s mother, said while visiting a refugee camp in Houston, “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so … this is working very well for them.” This is how the class enemy sees us: we’re already “underprivileged,” so why bother?

New Orleans 20 years later

From the capitalists’ perspective, the destruction of New Orleans was a gift, allowing them to socially cleanse the city and make huge profits from rebuilding. Richard H. Baker, a Louisiana congressman put it bluntly: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

The federal government couldn’t find money for the levees before the storm, but afterwards federal relief dollars fueled a booming disaster profiteering industry. The crisis was a bonanza for real estate speculators and construction companies. The Bush administration contracted rebuilding to multinationals like Bechtel and Halliburton—the same corporations that were pillaging Iraq. Two decades later, the city is less Black, more gentrified, and its population still hasn’t returned to pre-Katrina levels.

One reason Katrina hit so hard is capitalism’s systematic assault on the delta swamp ecosystem. Logging of soil-retaining cypress forests combined with massive oil and natural gas extraction annihilated wetlands—the coast’s hurricane buffer shield. This process is still ongoing. Louisiana loses hundreds of square miles of coastline each year, and the state accounts for 80% of the nation’s annual coastal wetlands loss.

The Mississippi River has been poisoned too. It’s the watershed for the majority of US agriculture. As a result, the Louisiana gulf is now afflicted by a “dead zone” void of oxygen and life as industrial agricultural chemicals flow to the sea. The stretch of river between the state’s two largest cities, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, is known as “Cancer Alley” because its residents suffer from the highest cancer rates in the nation.

As capitalist-caused climate change makes intense storms more likely, New Orleans is even less prepared for a hurricane today. In 2017, a report on the city’s pump system found that three out of five turbines were out of service. The city can only pump out 40% of the influx necessary to prevent another catastrophic flood.

Only a worker’s government can coordinate the immense resources needed to protect coastal populations in a world of rising sea levels and worsening storms. What happened to New Orleans twenty years ago is a warning of things to come if we do not overthrow the destructive capitalist system.