Subject: 'Katrina & the Poverty of Development' (Kenyan Columnist) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:21:16 -0500 Message-ID: <376546015E56D640AB10F112B8127DDF02405E29@PEPSI.uwec.edu> From: "Wahome, Kimamo" <WAHOMEK@uwec.edu>
COMMENTARY
Katrina and the poverty of development
Story by PHILIP OCHIENG /Fifth Columnist
Publication Date: 09/11/2005
Nature is punitive. But, in New Orleans, was nature consciously reacting
against some human injury upon it? No. There is a standard alibi by our
social managers whenever such a calamity strikes: "We could not do
anything about such vagaries of weather". Africa's statesmen are
particularly notorious for it.
After a Noachian deluge swallows thousands of his people, the president
thinks he has done his level best just by appealing for "international
relief". He means to do exactly nothing to prevent its recurrence.
There is, of course, an element of truth in it. Some natural upheavals
are completely ineluctable. What can we do about San Andreas, the
geological fault which keeps San Francisco in permanent fear of the "Big
One"?
The earthquake is coming as surely as a Katrina. And when it strikes,
not even high-tech Silicon Valley will be spared.
The only thing official America can do is to shield its people from its
consequences. That is, indeed, the difference between development and
underdevelopment.
Nature is inexorable. All countries are subject to its destructiveness.
The difference lies only in how they cope in The Morning After.
A country is "developed", not because it has abolished nature's laws,
but only because it has discovered those laws and can put them to
harmless use.
It can transform them into techniques with which to minimise the
destructive potential of all environmental necessities. It can yoke
nature's inevitability into a "beast of burden".
A country is developed because it can imitate its natural environment by
making tools out of that environment with which to protect itself from
that same environment in the way of providential needs.
The "haths" - the states which have in this way acquired relative
abundance from nature - also, as a rule, acquire decisive military power
and often use it to rob the "hath-nots".
But it is expensive. Both the US and the Netherlands "hath". But, by
investing much more in diplomacy, Amsterdam can save a lot more
resources to defend Holland against its "vagaries of nature".
Both Amsterdam and New Orleans are below sea level. But, while
Amsterdam's dykes are continually modernised, New Orleans's have decayed
ever since they were built centuries ago.
The US has little money to fortify its environmental security because it
has poured it into its "defence department". It has frittered it away in
destroying Iraq et al to ingratiate itself with their oil.
The richest country in the world
This is also the difference between Europe and America. The European
capitalist knows that to make money, you must spend money to make your
money-making machines evermore shipshape.
But the American capitalist is a product of Harvard Business School. His
greed for overnight profit is flaming. He seeks to milk especially his
human machine until it is dry.
Thus a Katrina can reduce to Third World rubble the country best placed,
in terms of science, engineering and money, to tame that very phenomenon
and channel it into a defence technique.
How can seaports totter in the most developed country? How can labourers
live in animal conditions in the richest society?
That blacks suffer most is natural in a country with an ignominious race
history. But it is dangerous to see it all in black-and-white terms.
US capitalism's human neglect cuts across all races. President Bush
seems more striking by his contempt for the poor than as a racist.
What New Orleans exposes is not racism so much as a crying poverty of
"development". US scientists know better than all others the perils to
which US industry exposes mankind.
They show, too, that humanity is biologically one and that only in unity
can it tackle effectively all these new technological dilemmas.
The contradiction is: How can a society with such knowledge be the one
pushing humanity to extinction? How can it be the one harbouring most
deeply the vitiating ideology of racism?
Yet it is completely self-defeating. From Katrina, corporate property
has suffered equally. And when this irresponsible pursuit after wealth
has ruined our weather patterns beyond repair, Miami, New York and
Boston could be the next cities to be annihilated.
That is why we hope Katrina may at last have injected some sense into US
industry.
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