Opinion | Mei W
At least 23 people have been found dead so far in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, which devastated Florida with 19 tornadoes and 20 inches of rain overnight last week on Wednesday. The region was hit less than 2 weeks after it was slammed by Hurricane Helene, the second deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland US in over 50 years, whose aftermath led to over 250 deaths across 6 states.
The Biden-Harris administration has boasted of their hurricane relief efforts, with Biden claiming that “[their] team has done everything possible to prepare for this storm,” approving $441 million in emergency assistance for those who have been impacted by the hurricanes. Yet many of the 1.2 million people who are out of electricity or clean water have been denied financial aid for food, water, and other basic needs, the reason being that their homes were not severely flooded or destroyed by the wind. Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration approved $3.5 billion in military aid to Israel a month prior to the hurricanes, bringing US spending on the genocide of Palestinians to $22.76 billion since October 2023.
The brunt of maintaining imperialism’s profits and cleaning up after the hurricanes has been placed on workers. Tens of thousands of power line workers have been working 16 to 18 hours a day to restore electricity in conditions with high risks of electrocution and exposure to toxins. Workers in Tennessee were killed in a flooded Impact Plastics factory where they remained due to managements’ threats of termination if they evacuated. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis deployed the National Guard to disrupt the longshoreman strike following Hurricane Helene, blaming striking workers for the delays in disaster relief, an accusation denied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Jeff Zients, the Chief of Staff under the Biden administration, urged the union bureaucracy to end the strike so that “a man-made strike wouldn’t worsen a natural disaster.” Following the end of the strike, Biden commended negotiators for “acting patriotically to reopen our ports and ensure the availability of critical supplies for Hurricane Helene recovery and rebuilding.”
With all this, imperialism’s political representatives obscure the fact that it is the man-made causes of the imperialists’ drive for domination and profits—not the struggles of workers who are exploited by imperialism—that are producing deadly natural disasters of this scale. First they lie and say the disasters are “natural”, then they lie and say the disasters are caused by workers and the poor.
The 273 deaths from the hurricanes are casualties of imperialism: 80% of greenhouse gas emissions since 2016 have been produced by 57 monopolies alone, and the US military is the number one polluter in the world, producing more greenhouse gas emissions than most other countries. Global warming has increased downpours which flood not only the coasts, but also inlands—massive inland flooding was one of the main reasons for Hurricane Helene’s death tolls. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina the rise in sea temperatures caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene. With these increased temperatures, wind speeds have become more intense, and storms with wind speeds of Hurricane Milton have become 40% more frequent. On top of this, real estate monopolies maximize profits at the expense of environmental and safety regulations, facilitating faster and cheaper construction projects and contributing to the death toll, according to a recent New York Times report.
Natural disasters that have become increasingly deadly and commonplace around the world are products of imperialism’s environmental destruction. The imperialists’ solution to global warming has been to continuously plunder the Third World for metals needed to increase the production of electric vehicles, solar power, and batteries. They superexploit miners in lethal conditions, exporting capital to dominate these countries with strategic resources for “green industries”, as part of—and exacerbating—their growing economic crisis of overproduction. The imperialists’ profit-driven equation is this: plunder and death abroad, and death and blame on the poor at home.
What is this adding up to? Trump and the far right claim that FEMA is the “deep state” giving aid to migrants instead of to “our own” hurricane victims, drumming up chauvinism; there are stories in the monopoly media of militias roaming around looking to attack federal aid workers. Meanwhile, the federal aid is meager, and FEMA has a massive budget deficit, exposing the farce that is the imperialist representatives’ blame game rhetoric. In short, the natural disasters reveal the social crisis, the crisis of imperialism developing: misery accumulating, reaction deepening, and the crumbling of the social edifice of the bourgeoisie and of bourgeois democratic rights.
