Published: January 18, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
The Eve of Destruction: Rational Pessimism in the Wake of Katrina
by Lloyd Williams
Given Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's recent belated appeal to Congress for some sort of fiscal stimulus to help avert an economic recession, I have decided to resubmit the perhaps prescient op-ed below on the same subject, written way back in 2005, while witnessing FEMA's irresponsible mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. At the time, it was easy to see so many glaring similarities between that failure and the Federal government's equally-woeful response in the wake of the Great 1927 Flood of the Gulf Region.
Historians suggest that indifference to the dire needs of hundreds of thousands displaced poor folks led inexorably to the Great Depression just a couple of years later. Today, with Bernanke fiddling while New Orleans gentrifies, it still looks like philosopher George Santayana’s sage insight still holds, for “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
"History tells us that civilizations are fragile, impermanent. Collapse is a recurrent feature of human societies. These collapses occurred quite suddenly.
Contemporary thinkers foresee collapse from such catastrophes as nuclear war, resource depletion, economic decline, ecological crises, or sociopolitical disintegration. In such a gloomy scenario, humankind will enter a severe recession fed by the slow death of its host (the Earth).
Scientists have gone as far as comparing the human species with cancer. The sum of human activities exhibits all four major characteristics of a malignant process: rapid uncontrolled growth, invasion and destruction of adjacent tissues (ecosystems), metastasis (colonization), and dedifferentiation (loss of distinctiveness in individual communities throughout the planet).
Excerpted from the book "Why Stock Markets Crash"
Though it was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, it was caused by a combination of incompetence and greed. An inept President had ignored repeated requests from experts that the Army Corps of Engineers address the pressing issue of the Mississippi Gulf region's inadequate levee system. Torrential rains eventually came, and with the tide still rising, New Orleans' political leaders callously decided to save the city by deliberately dynamiting a levee which flooded two predominantly-black parishes.
The Niagara Falls-like deluge killed about a thousand people and left hundreds of thousands stranded, virtually all African-Americans. For days, the federal government failed to respond to the crisis at all, exhibiting a breathtaking indifference to the unfolding tragedy, leaving it entirely up to the Red Cross to provide food, water, clothing, medical supplies and shelter for the 667,000 who were suddenly homeless.
In case you're wondering, no, I'm not talking about Hurricane Katrina, but about The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which then exposed America as an increasingly divided nation of haves and have-nots, rampant with unchecked racism, cowardice, cruelty, and lust for more money and power. The reason we need to revisit the ugly aftermath of what transpired almost 80 years ago is because history has a way of repeating itself, and we ignore its lessons only at our own peril.
Calvin Coolidge, a do-nothing President who actually prided himself on his inactivity and commitment to the status quo, put cabinet member Herbert Hoover, another hands-off Republican, in charge of overseeing the Mississippi relief effort. Not only did this cold-hearted Secretary of Commerce subsequently refuse to spend a single federal dollar on the catastrophe, but he had the temerity to demand reimbursement from the Red Cross for its use of tents, field kitchens, and other military hardware.
The ambitious Hoover then had the arrogance to take credit for the rescue work of the charities and volunteers who did pitch-in, next leveraging his high visibility into a successful run for the White House. Ostensibly oblivious to the nation's crumbling economic infrastructure, he accepted the Republican Party nomination on August 11th, 1928, proclaiming, "Unemployment, in the sense of distress, is widely disappearing. We, in America today, are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land."
After winning the election, Hoover continued to encourage an irrational exuberance, based on the bubble of the record highs of skyrocketing prices of pieces of paper, namely, stocks and bonds. Meanwhile, all the suffering of the marginalized populace and the other palpable signposts of the impending, wholesale societal collapse into The Great Depression went unheeded.
Fair warning: Katrina might just be the tell-tale tip of a cataclysmic, cultural iceberg.
Attorney Lloyd Williams is a graduate of the Wharton School and a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.
* The views of Opinion writers do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsBlaze
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