As Trump stages photo-ops in the Carolinas
Hurricane flooding exposes mass poverty, class oppression in America
By Ed Hightower and Barry Grey
20 September 2018
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump toured portions of North and South Carolina still reeling from the record-setting floods spawned by Hurricane Florence.
Trump carefully avoided the scenes of intense human suffering and destruction in the region, including thousands of homeless residents in impoverished areas still waiting for desperately needed aid. He avoided any mention of the hundreds of thousands still without power five days after the storm made landfall. He said nothing of the lack of flood insurance for the vast majority of devastated homeowners, or the failure of the government to make any preparations for a new storm following the catastrophic flooding unleashed just two years ago by Hurricane Matthew.
Instead, he staged a press event at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point near New Bern, North Carolina, a town ravaged by flood waters of the Neuse River, where he reprised the litany of empty promises and lies he gave out last year in a similar public relations visit to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Alongside Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Brock Long, various military and police officers and other notables, Trump boasted of the “incredible” response to the hurricane by his administration and state and local authorities. Hailing the “planning that went into this” as “beyond belief,” he promised the victims of the storm: “We will never forget your loss. We will never leave your side. We’re with you all the way.”
Trump will have forgotten the workers whose lives have been turned upside down even before Air Force One takes off for Washington, and the corporate media and politicians will drop the issue soon after. No less than in Puerto Rico, Houston and Florida last year—and New Orleans 13 years ago—the victims of the storm will be left to fend for themselves with only token assistance from the government.
Following the mutual backslapping at the Marine air base, the press recorded Trump handing out box lunches to residents of a New Bern neighborhood that had been flooded. His real priorities emerged when he stopped to ask the CEO of Duke Energy about the conditions around Lake Norman, where the Trump National Golf Club-Charlotte is located.
As of this writing, 37 people have lost their lives. Many hundreds more are homeless. A quarter of a million people have no electricity. More than 10,000 remain in shelters as several rivers have not yet crested. Long sections of major roadways remain impassable. Fourteen rivers in North Carolina have overflowed their banks; some of which are pouring livestock waste and coal ash downstream. Over one million poultry birds and five thousand hogs have drowned.
With each passing day, the storm reveals more clearly before the eyes of the world the rotten core of American capitalist society. Once again, a natural disaster—compounded by official negligence, callous indifference and the systematic downgrading of basic infrastructure—has revealed the reality of pervasive poverty and class oppression in the United States.
Trump is only the most grotesque expression of the moral depravity, backwardness and criminality of the ruling class as a whole. Its stranglehold over the economic levers of society at every point blocks the rational and humane mobilization of the resources—which exist in abundance—to mitigate the impact of natural disasters and make whole those who are victimized by them.
In Fayetteville, a large city on the Cape Fear River in central-eastern North Carolina, hundreds of residents remain in shelters and county officials have confirmed two deaths. The city has a poverty rate of 18.4 percent. One in four children lives in poverty.
In a statement to National Public Radio, Fayetteville resident Adrienne Murphy, 38, recalled the widespread displacement and food shortages after Hurricane Matthew and issued a message to Trump: “Next week is a long time—you have to act now!”
To the south is the flood-soaked city of Lumberton, where Interstate 95 remains partially closed. Robeson County, where the city is located, has a poverty rate of 27.8 percent, or double the national average. A staggering 70 percent of children in the county live below the poverty line. The Lumber River flooded severely in Hurricane Matthew, leaving over 1,500 residents displaced for months.
Robeson County drafted a “Resilient Redevelopment Plan” after Matthew, which included upgrades to the Lumber River levee and the construction of a floodgate where the levee opens for a railroad crossing controlled by the CSX railroad corporation. The aim was to avoid a repeat of the 2016 storm, when the river broke the levee and destroyed low-income neighborhoods of south and west Lumberton.
CSX refused to cooperate with county planners, and Governor Roy Cooper refused to acquire the property by declaring eminent domain.
In nearby Pembroke, also inundated by flood waters, 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. After Hurricane Matthew, the mayor sought to clear the area’s swamps and canals of fallen trees and debris to improve drainage, but the Army Corps of Engineers refused to take on the project.
In Wilmington’s Northside, a predominantly African-American neighborhood, the power remains out and residents are struggling to clean up and salvage what they can from the flood. Median income in the neighborhood is between $14,000 and $17,000 a year.
In South Carolina, a press release Wednesday from the state’s Emergency Management Division advised residents near the Big Pee Dee, Waccamaw, Little Pee Dee and Lynches rivers that flood waters would continue to crest over the weekend and into early next week. The state fire marshal had already assisted in 518 evacuations over the preceding 24 hours.
Two women died Tuesday night in rural South Carolina when a Horry County Sheriff’s van drove off of a flooded road. The victims were being transported pursuant to a court-ordered evacuation of facilities for the mentally ill. They were handcuffed and chained inside the van.
In a statement published September 2, 2005, entitled “Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath: From natural disaster to national humiliation,” the World Socialist Web Site editorial board wrote:
Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the awful truths of contemporary America—a country torn by the most intense class divisions, ruled by a corrupt plutocracy that possesses no sense of either social reality or public responsibility, in which millions of its citizens are deemed expendable and cannot depend on any social safety net or public assistance if disaster, in whatever form, strikes…The storm that breached the levees of New Orleans has revealed all of the horrific implications of 25 years’ worth of uninterrupted social and political reaction.The real results of the destruction of essential social services, the dismantling of government agencies entrusted with alleviating poverty and coping with disasters, and the ceaseless nostrums about the “free market” magically resolving the problems of modern society have been exposed before millions.
This was written before the 2008 Wall Street crash and Great Recession, which destroyed millions of jobs, led to the foreclosure and eviction of 9 million homeowners, and wiped out the life savings of millions of workers. Since then, the plundering of society by the financial oligarchy has intensified, first under Obama and now under Trump. The decay of infrastructure and levels of social desperation have only grown worse, alongside the record rise in stock prices and the fortunes of the top 5 percent.
What emerges from the unfolding disaster in the Carolinas is the failure of the capitalist system and the need for the working class to replace it with a system based on common ownership of the banks, corporations and natural resources, the expropriation of the wealth of the oligarchy, and the satisfaction of social need rather than private profit—that is, socialism.
By Ed Hightower
While large portions of these states face saturation with carcinogenic neurotoxins and fecal matter, two individuals who have both fostered this political environment and profited handsomely from it are Charles and David Koch, whose estimated combined fortune stands at over $100 billion dollars. By contrast, the entire 2018-2019 budget for the state of North Carolina is $23.9 billion. South Carolina’s legislature is discussing a budget of around $8 billion.
Tropical Storm Florence inundates toxic manure ponds, coal ash dumps in the Carolinas
By Ed Hightower
19 September 2018
In the several days since hurricane Florence made landfall near the border between North and South Carolina, the storm’s floodwaters have set one record after another. The storm’s official death toll now stands at 32 and is expected to rise with entire cities inundated by flood waters.
The Cape Fear River in southeastern North Carolina was predicted to crest Wednesday at 62 feet in Fayetteville, several inches higher than the previous record following Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Elizabethtown, another city along the river, has seen 36 inches of rainfall from Florence, and many nearby cities have seen 30 inches.
The Little River, which flows into the Cape Fear in Fayetteville, also exceeded its previous record from Matthew of 32 feet, reaching 36 feet. Most of downtown Fayetteville remains underwater as of this writing. Further west, the Lumber River is expected to crest Wednesday, also at record levels.
One of the largest poultry farm operators in North Carolina, reported that 1.7 million chickens have drowned in Florence’s deluge and 6 million more are at risk of starving to death after being cut off by flood waters. An as yet unknown number of hogs have also drowned. Some thousands were killed by flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
In addition to the immediate toll on human and animal life, flooding from Florence presents widespread danger to public health as hundreds of manure ponds—open-air septic tanks used in pork and poultry farming—are beginning to overflow from heavy rainfall. The manure ponds, or hog lagoons, hold animal waste while it decomposes, slowly turning it into fertilizer which is eventually pumped onto fields for nearby crops.
North Carolina is the second largest hog farming state—behind only Iowa—with over 9 million hogs and 2,300 hog farms. Hog and poultry waste pits occupy 6,848 acres of land in the state. Smithfield Farms and parent company WH Group own the largest hog operations, generating nearly $1 billion in profits last year.
Animal excrement spilling into rivers could contaminate drinking water with dangerous bacteria like salmonella and E. coli, both of which can be lethal. This danger is most acute in rural areas where residents draw water from private wells.
In larger spills, livestock waste can fill affected waters with enough nitrate and phosphate-rich matter to cause algae blooms in swamps and rivers. This process starves aquatic life of oxygen, creating “fish kills” in rivers, estuaries and even coastal waters where seafood production could suffer for years.
On Sunday the Associated Press published images of a hog farm outside Trenton with a waste pit overrun with floodwaters. The N.C. Pork Council, an industry trade group, initially denied there had been any reports of spills and subsequently tried to assure reporters that all spills were minimal.
North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan told a press conference Monday that the earthen dam at one hog waste lagoon in Duplin County had failed. He acknowledged reports of seven lagoons overflowing in Jones and Pender counties and four others that were inundated.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) largely allows hog farms to self-regulate, with only an estimated 33 percent of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, operating with a point source pollution permit pursuant to the Clean Water Act. Likewise, North Carolina state regulations generally require waste lagoons be able to withstand 25-year floods, which have proven insufficient since 1999 when Hurricane Floyd swamped 50 such installations. Flooding from Florence now approaches 1,000-year levels.
Sixteen lagoons flooded during Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and environmentalists estimate that 62 industrial hog farms lie within North Carolina’s 100-year floodplain.
In addition to the hazards of livestock waste, the region’s main electrical power company, and the nation’s largest, Duke Energy, has several coal ash sites in the coastal area affected by Florence. By Saturday, one coal ash landfill collapsed at the Sutton Power Station near Wilmington, spilling 2,000 cubic yards of pollution—enough to fill 180 dump trucks—into nearby Sutton Lake, which is surrounded on three sides by the Cape Fear River.
Coal ash contains high levels of toxic elements such as mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic. Exposure to coal ash can cause cancer, heart disease and neurological damage in children. Duke Energy owns all 31 coal ash disposal pits and ponds in North Carolina. In 2014, a broken stormwater pipe flooded a Duke Energy pit in Eden, North Carolina, dumping 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. The company pleaded guilty to criminal negligence under provisions of the Clean Water Act and accepted obligations to overhaul drinking water piping in parts of North Carolina.
In January, Duke Energy agreed to pay a mere $84,000 in fines for leaky coal ash sites polluting the Catawba and Broad Rivers.
At the HF Lee power plant in Goldsboro, where more than 20 inches of rain fell, the Neuse River has flooded three older coal ash disposal sites which are now overgrown with trees. The company makes the specious claim that the overgrowth will prevent spillage into the river.
In Conway, South Carolina, National Guard crews rushed on Monday to bolster a coal ash containment pit near the Waccamaw River, placing giant sand bags and other material around the site. South Carolina’s rivers are expected to crest later in the week as storm waters flow toward the coast. A spill in the Waccamaw river could have a catastrophic impact on the critical estuaries of Winyah Bay, a major spawning area for a number of aquatic species including shrimp.
In total, the EPA’s Priorities List has more than 70 sites in the Carolinas, including former chemical plants, pesticide dumps and at least one former smelting operation near the coast.
The devastating impact of Florence in North and South Carolina—two of the most “business friendly” states in the country—demonstrates the immense costs of deregulation on the one hand and the need for socialist planning and public ownership of industry on the other. For years, the states’ governments have courted business investment with the promise of low wages, low taxes and a virtually non-existent regulatory environment.
While large portions of these states face saturation with carcinogenic neurotoxins and fecal matter, two individuals who have both fostered this political environment and profited handsomely from it are Charles and David Koch, whose estimated combined fortune stands at over $100 billion dollars. By contrast, the entire 2018-2019 budget for the state of North Carolina is $23.9 billion. South Carolina’s legislature is discussing a budget of around $8 billion.
No comments:
Post a Comment