Devastation of Hurricane Helene: Capitalists and their Governments are the Blame
Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in Florida’s Big Bend region at about 11:10 p.m. ET on Thursday, September 26. The hurricane proves the vulnerability of the states of the South East which were affected. It is now the second deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland in the last 50 years. The deadliest was Katrina in 2005 which killed thousands.
The death toll has risen over 200 with hopes quickly fading for the nearly 600 missing across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee.
The flood victims and now homeless are estimated at thousands, while millions of households and businesses have been left without electricity and telecommunications in the areas hit by the hurricane. The total damage and economic loss from Helene is between $95 billion and $110 billion.
The situation has drawn many people of our country to see how the apparatuses of the state leave us to die in the face of natural disasters. Many have pointed to the culpability of the energy monopolies which have ignored their continued role in the intensification of natural disasters. Still others point to the great contradiction of massive military spending without sufficient infrastructure and other preparedness factors for natural disasters. This demonstrates a rising consciousness of the direct responsibility of private interests, of the monopolies and imperialist capitalism for the environmental destruction which is the main factor in the destruction now facing the people in the South East.
The National Guard has undertaken rescue and relief work in cooperation with local authorities in 19 states, along with personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. Faced with the grim reality, US President Joe Biden assured that he would help those who survived, calling on Congress to help the government respond to the needs of the world. In an attempt to deny responsibility for the massive disaster, Biden attributed it to the well-known “alien” of the climate crisis and called Hurricane Helene “a storm that made history.” Rescue teams in North Carolina are racing against time to reach people who have been missing.
Hurricane Helene demonstrates again that people are left to fend for themselves, not only because of the absence of meaningful measures and infrastructure to protect them, but because they cannot afford even to cover the cost of buying fuel and food to move to safer areas.
Capitalist development is the source of our changing climate. The absence of planning leads to our people paying with their lives. Characteristic are shameful and barbaric actions of the employer Impact Plastics in Tennessee which denied employees the right to evacuation leading to multiple fatalities. For the bourgeois state, the life of the people is only analyzed from the framework of a “cost-benefit analysis.” This framework is why local and state governments work to minimize expenses in the budget for emergency management. These budgets consolidate the criminal underfunding of emergency services and hoist all responsibility on the individual.
Just as with Katrina and subsequent natural disasters, the bourgeoisie and its governments are the culprits. We cannot consider this anything other than social murder.