By Richard Mellor in California
As of this morning, February 19, more than 14 million people in Texas have no access to safe drinking water, after record breaking cold weather hit the state. During the week, at the height of blackouts as the grid was crippled, more than four million had no power, according to the Wall Street Journal, and 320,000 were still without it this morning.
People were traveling huge distances to find water and others are boiling water to avoid disease, though even that was impossible for those without electricity. This morning, a cargo plane with pallets of water for residents, arrived in Galveston.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has granted the state a federal emergency relief disaster declaration at the request of the governor. FEMA is now distributing needed supplies from water to generators, and other disaster relief including financing. These right-wing pro-market politicians have no problem using taxpayer money or ‘the government’, as they refer to it, to cover bad times.
Texans froze to death
Former Texas governor, Rick Perry, declared during the third day without power, as Texans (those not privileged like him) froze to death, that “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,”.
The Texas grid is not linked to the federal grid, so it is outside federal jurisdiction. It is common for right-wing politicians to support states’ rights over federal, as it is easier to increase their political power through the states and also because of the undemocratic apportionment of two senators per state, which gives the smaller, rural more conservative states disproportionately more power. This also worked in favour of the southern racist states.
The fear is that if Republicans lose political power as a result of this crisis, Democrats will introduce some regulation of the utilities like we have in California, so they are blaming what is a market-driven crisis on wind turbines and green energy. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,”, the present governor Greg Abbot (who has asked for taxpayer assistance) told the right wing talk show host Sean Hannity.
Deepwater Horizon oil spill
These regulations, whether of utilizes or energy companies, don’t curb them much, but they do offer some minor restraint. In the case of the BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in which 13 workers died, “Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil”
For the past decades we have suffered one disaster after another in the US. Every hurricane appears to be stronger and more destructive than the last one. Katrina, the storm which left New Orleans looking like a war zone, killed thousands of people and destroyed homes and fishing communities along the gulf coast.
Bridges and dams have collapsed, gas lines have exploded and residents of major cities in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history have been forced to drink poisoned water. In the case of Flint, Michigan, it was simple: the water source changed in order to save money.
I have written about these disasters over the years and have made it very clear; these are not natural disasters or “acts of God” as the big business media claims; they are a product of the so-called free market, of the system in which we live and what we know as capitalism.
A system with laws of operation
We are not taught or encouraged to think of ourselves as living in a system of production. A system that has economic laws of motion and property relations, a class system. It’s just “society”. Yes, it is mentioned here and there, especially when the capitalist media needs to boast about how ‘efficient’ it is and how inefficient public services and public utilities are. Or when they want to tell us how bad socialism is or how communism failed, referring to the Stalinist states of the collapsed Soviet Union.
The terrorist attacks on September 11 2001 and the present global pandemic are also products of the free market, the former, a product of imperialist foreign policy and the latter the result of capitalist agriculture and food production, where everything that can be eaten will be eaten, as long as you can pay for it.
Breeding ground for pathogens
Food is a commodity and is produced for profit; people starve if they can’t pay for it, just like any other commodity. If it’s not profitable to produce it, it won’t be produced. This global integration is the breeding ground for more pathogens akin to, or worse than, the present coronavirus. Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace points out that:
“Expanding industrial production may push increasingly capitalized wild foods deeper into the last of the primary landscape, dredging out a wider variety of potentially protopandemic pathogens. Peri-urban loops of growing extent and population density may increase the interface (and spillover) between wild nonhuman populations and newly urbanized rurality.”
Wallace continues:
“Worldwide, even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag value chains: among them ostriches, porcupine, crocodiles, fruit bats, and the palm civet, whose partially digested berries now supply the world’s most expensive coffee bean. Some wild species are making it onto forks before they are even scientifically identified, including one new short-nosed dogfish found in a Taiwanese market. All are increasingly treated as food commodities. As nature is stripped place-by-place, species-by-species, what’s left over becomes that much more valuable.”
Countries plundered for centuries
During the four-year reign of the degenerate Donald Trump, we were subject day-in and day-out to nationalist and racist rhetoric from him and his regime. Countries plundered for centuries by colonial and then imperialist powers were “shithole” countries. Mexicans and other immigrants were “criminals” and “murderers”, and always stupid. This is how the people of Ireland, Britain’s first colony, were portrayed, and for hundreds of years it was shackled politically and economically to its more powerful neighbour to the East, much like Haiti is to the US.
The victims of floods, famine, poverty, environmental catastrophe, and those who live in underdeveloped urban centres or who suffer from poor agricultural management where water and electricity is sporadic are (and always have been even before Trump) portrayed as ethnically inferior and incapable of governing themselves. Victim blaming is common. Never is the system of production imposed on the world’s population the cause.
The auto workers are ‘greedy’ and ‘overpaid’ and that’s why the auto industry is constantly in trouble. The same with the building trades, workers are the ‘problem’. In any industry, whenever there’s a crisis, it’s always the people that actually do the work who are demonized.
Here in the US, there is massive poverty, and often it is the working poor that suffer the most. But not only have we had situations like the water crisis in Flint and the conditions that exist among the Native American population, perhaps the most abused section of US society, we have had wildfires in states like California that have done untold damage, as the planet heats up and destroys entire communities. It is impossible to gauge the cost to wildlife that these fires cause or the damage to fish, marine animals and the oceans as a result of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill.
Social crises as ‘God’s anger’
The situation has become so acute that many of those who believe in the spirit world see the end of the world around the corner and the environmental and social crises as God’s anger.
I was talking with a friend today and we were asking ourselves how long US workers and the middle class will tolerate the present situation and the direction the country is headed. How long will they allow themselves and their lives to be dominated by millionaires and billionaires in the two Wall Street Parties?
It is inevitable to me that there will be some massive explosions and class battles in the period ahead; the class conflict with Jeff Bezos and Amazon workers in Alabama is a glimpse of what we can expect in workplace struggles. The pandemic has changed US society and we are entering a new phase. As I have stated before, the end of the era in which the two parties of capitalism, Democrats and Republicans have dominated US political life is over.
Endless predatory wars
The failure of the market to handle the pandemic and responses like we see in Texas, not to mention the mass killings, murders, incarceration of two million people, lack of health care, decent housing and endless predatory wars on behalf of US corporations will bring the situation to a head.
The U.S. population is used to images in the mass media of disaster and social breakdowns in countries that have failed. And now Texas is our Bangladesh. We are heading into very volatile territory.
From the US socialist website Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
