Hurricane Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane that struck the east coast of the United States on August 29, 2005 and caused catastrophic damage, particularly along the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Most notably, levees that separated New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain were breached by surging waters, resulting in a devastating flood that engulfed about 80 percent of the city. All told, Katrina was responsible for more than 1,400 deaths and approximately $75 billion in damages, making it the costliest hurricane in American history.
The storm took on strong political undercurrents when leftwing critics of George W. Bush publicly impugned the President for having demonstrated poor leadership by failing to mobilize rescue operations quickly enough during the disaster. They attributed this purported failure to the alleged racism, misplaced priorities, and anti-environmental policies of the Bush administration.
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, for one, characterized Katrina as an example of “the devastation that [Bush’s] environmental policies and his killing policies have caused.” “Recovery,” she added, “would be easier and much quicker if almost half of the three states involved National Guard [i.e., the national Guard troops of the three affected states] were not in Iraq.”
Movie director Michael Moore posted an open letter to President Bush on his website, quipping sardonically: “It’s not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands has [sic] no transportation to get out of town. C’mon, they’re black! . . . Can you imagine leaving white people [trying to avoid the rising floodwaters] on their roofs for five days?”
Likewise referencing the storm’s many black victims, Jesse Jackson lamented that post-hurricane New Orleans looked like “the hull of a slave ship.” Al Sharpton opined, “I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have [acted] a lot quicker.” Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan reported, “I heard from a very reliable source, who saw a 25-foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry.” (It should be noted that post-storm analyses found that in actuality whites, not blacks, were statistically over-represented among Katrina’s victims.)
Ex-President Bill Clinton intimated that his administration did more than Bush’s to keep New Orleans safe from such catastrophes. DNC Chairman Howard Dean demeaned President Bush’s visit to the disaster area, calling it a “callous political move.” Congressional Black Caucus member Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) said: “We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died in this great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin color. . . . To the president of the United States, I simply say that God cannot be pleased with our response.” Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) favorably quoted former Black Panther Party member Malik Rahin as an authoritative source of information, reading into the Congressional Record Rahin’s allegation that law-enforcement authorities were allowing roving gangs of white vigilantes to roam the streets of New Orleans “unchecked” as they tried to foment a “race riot.” Added McKinney: “As I saw the African-Americans, mostly African-American families ripped apart, I could only think about slavery, families ripped apart, herded into what looked like concentration camps.
Rap singer Kanye West charged, “George Bush does not care about black people.” The government, West added, had “given [National Guardsmen] permission to go down and shoot us.” The socialist Princeton University professor Cornel West (no relation) agreed, “When Kanye West said the President does not care about black people, he was right.” Environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. saw things this way: “Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.”
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