Emperor George has no clothes. Hurricane Katrina has exposed his administration and its ruthless indifference to the needs of a population exploited by class, race and poverty.
The government has lost its credibility because of the too-little, too-late response to the colossal catastrophe in New Orleans and the Gulf states. The hurricane has brought home death and destruction, hun ger and disease such as wars of imperialist conquest have brought to the world’s peoples—Iraq and Afghanistan, foremost.
Statistics have now taken on a human face. The contrast—stark and indisput able—is between a government indistinguishable from the empire of high finance and a Black community dispossessed and poor, now more than ever homeless and jobless. The tragic events in the Gulf states are a brutal reflection of a racist and class virus, institutionalized and national.
