Why Louisiana doesn't matter.

• Author: Malone, Christopher
• Position: POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

FIVE YEARS AFTER Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, the region now faces the prospect of decades of environmental degradation due to the black plague released by British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil well. These two man-made tragedies, so closely on the heels of one another, have led me to an alarming conclusion: the citizens of my home state of Louisiana are not citizens of the U.S. in the same fundamental ways the people of other states are. Like many of my fellow southern Louisianans, I have spent countless days with friends fishing the fertile waters of Barataria Bay, the murky marsh around Grand Isle, and the deep purple expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. Like my fellow New Orleanians, I watched in horror as what amounted to a Category 2 hurricane drowned an entire city because of levee failures--and then the abandonment of tens of thousands by their government for five days.

Hurricanes are part of life in southern Louisiana; so, too, is the omnipresenee of the oil industry. To be sure, there is a certain calculated risk in choosing to populate this low-lying coastal region, but what happened with Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill goes well beyond any rational notion of calculated risk in a democracy. These disasters confirm that life in the state systematically operates on the periphery of American politics much the same way that life in a Third World country does.

In Third World nations, the powers associated with citizenship--broadly speaking, the right to self determination through the institutionalization of one's own political, social, and economic power--are undermined regularly, as well as overwhelmed by the realities of economic exploitation dictated by the developed world. Citizens of a Third World country may have the right to vote and collectively organize, but that right usually takes a back seat to the tender mercies of the market. The desire for the rights, privileges, and "voice" that come with full citizenship is replaced by the necessity of commoditization. Individuals, their labor, and the natural resources surrounding them all become products bought and sold on the open market to the lowest bidder.

The pathologies of this phenomenon are most acute during a crisis. Publics without any capacity for agency do not have the individual or institutional wherewithal to help themselves. The Haitian earthquake is the most recent case in point. What happens when a...