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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 42 November 13, 2017
(front page)
Workers still face social crisis 5 years after Sandy
Capitalism, not ‘climate,’ caused catastrophe
AP/Charlie Neibergall
New Jersey protesters during Iowa speech by Gov. Chris Christie, March
2015. Thousands in N.Y. and N.J. still face crisis, and little has been
done by government to prevent future disasters.
BY SETH GALINSKY
NEW YORK — Five years after Hurricane Sandy ravaged New York and New
Jersey, thousands of workers — who the propertied rulers and their
government left to fend for themselves before, during and after the
storm — are still suffering the consequences. And they’re still waiting
for long-promised government aid.
“Public housing is still concentrated in the flood plains. Condemned
houses are still standing,” Patricia Kane, treasurer of the New York
State Nurses Association, told an Oct. 28 Brooklyn climate change
protest on the anniversary of Sandy. “New developments are still being
built in marsh areas and flood plains. If another super storm were to
take place today, we would be no better prepared.”
Kane was working as a nurse at Staten Island Hospital during the storm.
Twenty-four of the 43 dead in New York were on Staten Island.
In the face of government inaction, hospital workers took the initiative
to go door to door after the storm, Kane said, looking for people who
needed medical help.
The social catastrophe workers faced — and many still face — was the
product of the workings of the capitalist system, which puts profits
before human need.
At first city officials said no evacuations were needed since national
weather “experts” predicted that by the time Sandy arrived it would no
longer be a full-fledged hurricane, the Washington Post revealed Oct 27.
They argued that nursing homes near the water hadn’t flooded when
Hurricane Irene hit the year before, so why order a “costly” evacuation
now? It was worth taking a chance. For them.
The result — at least 29 nursing homes flooded in Queens and Brooklyn
leaving 4,000 nursing home and 1,500 adult home residents without
electricity, water, heat or food. It took three days to rescue them.
Like public housing, these facilities were built on low-lying land,
regardless of the danger, because it was cheaper.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo claim that even though it’s
five years since Sandy, “we’re” making progress. But nearly 20 percent
of the 12,713 families enrolled in the city’s Build It Back program are
still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt or raised up above flood
level, the New York Daily News reported. More than 11,000 other people
who had applied were disqualified or gave up in the face of bureaucratic
red tape and delays.
The billions of dollars allocated by government agencies supposedly to
be better prepared for future storms have enriched legions of
“consultants” and “planners,” as well as some construction bosses and
real estate moguls. With little to show for it.
Five years after Sandy, anniversary stories in the press are riddled
with reports of anti-flood projects still “in the planning stage” or
that “will begin” someday.
Out of 18 major projects to protect public housing that flooded during
Sandy — moving generators, electrical controls and heating equipment out
of flood-prone basements — only one has been completed.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joseph Lhota has been
boasting about advances in preventing a recurrence of the flooding that
disabled the subways. The progress? Flood-prevention devices have been
installed at less than half the station entrances that need them.
Five years later!
Press accounts point to a lot of talk about floodgates, berms and
seawalls to prevent coastal flooding, but few have gone beyond the
design stage. There is one that was completed by the Army Corps of
Engineers last year — a $28 million project to protect Brooklyn’s Sea
Gate, a wealthy gated community, from Coney Island beach erosion.
This social disaster for workers in New York caused by the for-profit
values of capitalism is being repeated today in Texas, Florida and in
the colonial and semicolonial territories in the Caribbean. Two months
after Hurricane Harvey tens of thousands who lost their homes and
apartments in Houston are still living in hotels and shelters.
And the catastrophe in Puerto Rico from hurricanes Irma and Maria is a
hundred times worse, because it’s a colony of U.S. imperialism. More
than a month after the storms, more than 70 percent of the island
remains without electricity.
The official death toll in Puerto Rico now stands at 51. But no one
really knows. The colonial regime recently admitted it has given
permission to funeral homes to cremate the bodies of hundreds who died
since the hurricanes hit, while refusing to count any of them as
storm-related.
In sharp contrast to the response to the hurricanes in the capitalist
U.S. — the richest country on earth — and its colonies, the
revolutionary government in Cuba organized working people through their
mass organizations to evacuate 1.8 million people in advance of
Hurricane Irma. They don’t gamble on people’s lives on the pretext that
protecting them is too “costly.”
They didn’t need “consultants” or face red tape from bureaucrats to
immediately begin rebuilding homes and repairing the electric grid.
Cuban President Raúl Castro explained that the revolution would not
“leave anyone on their own.”
Capitalism is to blame
The Oct. 28 “5 Years After Superstorm Sandy” demonstration drew some
1,000 people to march from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and focused its blame
for the social calamity resulting from the storm on climate change and
workers’ use of fossil fuels.
One marcher told me, “If we don’t stop global warming, it won’t matter
if you’re for capitalism or socialism, because it means death of the
entire world.”
As part of its broader program, the Socialist Workers Party calls for
Washington to unilaterally enforce controls on emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases by industry and agribusiness. But
hysterical cries that the world is ending or that “global warming” is
the cause of the social calamity for working people from recent
hurricanes are false and disorient working people.
The social catastrophe from hurricanes Sandy, Irma, Maria and other
storms is a result of the capitalist profit system, which is responsible
for building on flood plains, the refusal to protect or evacuate nursing
homes in low-lying areas, the lack of adequate food and water in
shelters and the inability to restore electricity in Puerto Rico.
These questions are addressed in a statement, “The Stewardship of Nature
Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor,” by SWP
leaders Jack Barnes, Steve Clark and Mary-Alice Waters, adopted by a
party convention in 2007 and published in New International magazine No.
14.
“So long as the extraction of surplus value in warlike competition for
profits dictates the production and distribution of wealth, land will
remain private property and rental housing for the toiling majority will
be built where the propertied classes don’t want to live. It will be
constructed where workers can ‘afford’ the rent, including often on
flood plains.”
“The capitalist system, and the propertied families who benefit from it
in imperialist centers and semicolonial countries alike, will inevitably
continue to ravage humanity and the planet we inhabit,” the SWP leaders
say. “It cannot be stopped without uprooting capitalism itself.”
And that’s exactly what workers and farmers in Cuba, led by Fidel Castro
and the July 26th Movement, did.
Related articles:
Disaster for working people in Puerto Rico continues to unfold
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