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Note: RAN refers to this website, Reality Analysis Notes. Numbered citations are included in the References section at the end of this document.

Horrific mass disasters provide marvelously lucrative photo-ops for politicians. Capitalist political executives (such as governors, prime ministers, military generals, presidents) can portray themselves as populist “superheroes”, trudging into the misery of the survivors to meet with local officials (photo-ops all round), to mouth platitudes and spout nebulous promises of amelioration (a kind of “bandaid bombast”). Thus, when it became clear that Hurricane Harvey had metastasized into a disaster that could not be ignored, somebody (perhaps realizing that good photo-ops must not be squandered) obviously managed to persuade Donald Trump that he had to pry himself out of his comfortable retreat at Camp David and show some modicum of presence at least near the destruction in Texas.

Trump’s first foray was itself an embarrassing fiasco – a brisk roadshow of self-congratulatory grandstanding, huddles with state (and a few local) officials, and gushers of praise for the “response” of the extremist-right regime of Texas GOP Governor Greg Abbott. (In reality, the state response had been pathetic – e.g., 200 buses reserved to supposedly transport millions of evacuees – in a dangerous weather event made far more destructive by the policies of the Abbott regime itself as well as many decades of similar capitalist policies, both Republican and Democratic, that had permitted the eradication of flood-absorbent wetlands, tolerated dangerous construction practices, and basically ignored adequate disaster preparation for the Texas population.)

In a late August video commentary sponsored by the GQ.com website, venerable liberal TV political analyst Keith Olbermann unleashed a torrent of disgust at Donald Trump for largely ignoring the horror of the hurricane’s destruction and its impact on its victims, and instead twisting the natural disaster into a “self-serving, wasteful, exploitational, resource-draining, ill-conceived plan to travel to Texas in the middle of the nightmare there ….” It was, pronounced Olbermann, “beneath contempt.”

(In this regard, it is worth keeping in mind – per decades of news reportage – that Donald Trump’s racism, bigotry, disdain for the masses, and self-adulatory arrogance are commonly characteristic of his peer moguls in the upper strata of the ruling class.)

Perhaps stung by this and other scornful criticism in this mode, and likely goaded by his new – and much savvier – chief of staff, former U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, Trump dragged his Stepford-like wife Melania back to Texas a few days later to engage in a damage-control-instigated replay, this time with a pretense of “serving” food and supplies to storm victims and actually setting foot in an auditorium converted into a shelter, there to hold a few well-staged photo-ops with actual victims.

For Trump, his brief shallow wade into the deluge of human misery seemed foremost an opportunity for abundant self-aggrandizement, and he treated it with bizarre levity, telling reporters he was seeing “a lot of happiness”, as aptly reported by Talking Points Memo:

In a visit to one of Houston’s designated emergency refuge areas, the NRG Center, Trump told reporters he is seeing “a lot of happiness.” “It’s been really nice,” he said, according to the traveling press pool. “It’s been a wonderful thing. As tough as this was, it’s been a wonderful thing, I think even for the country to watch it and for the world to watch. It’s been beautiful.”

…

When asked about the devastating flooding still covering much of the region, he replied: “The flooding? Oh, yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of water, but it’s leaving pretty quickly. But there’s a lot of water, a lot of water, but it’s moving out.”

…

Leaving the shelter, Trump told the survivors and gathered reporters to “have a good time.”

Visiting a Houston-area church, “Trump reminded flood survivors that he had declared Sunday a national day of prayer.” Then, in line with his “dispensing happiness” theme, he advised: “So go to your church and pray and enjoy the day …” This, noted the TPM post, was bizarrely out of sync: “Trump’s light-hearted tone contrasted sharply with reports from the ground, where the death toll continues to climb.”

After Hurricane Irma ripped another path of destruction through Florida, another Trump visit was clearly in order. So, once again dragging Melania along, plus his oleaginous, obsequious, and sinisterly deferential crony-in-chief, Vice-President Mike Pence, Trump made another obligatory and self-aggrandizing photo-op blitz to the battered and semi-submerged Sunshine State – first to a politically expedient mini-confab with state and local officials in Fort Myers, then to the predominantly conservative enclave of Naples to perfunctorily hand out Hoagies to flood survivors.

Making a pretense of “concern” following a massive disaster is a familiar shtick of every U.S. “commander-in-chief” in recent times. Posing as “caregiver-in-chief” usually yields a political dividend in public perception – and indeed, Trump’s Harvey and Irma performance managed to nudge a Gallup tracking poll popular approval rating uptick to the 36-38% range. [1]

But Donald Trump, a flim-flam master with a despotic yen, clearly aims to function as his own kind of social-political hurricane, laying waste to established conventions and protocols, government social-benefit programs, and whatever he perceives as “politically correct”. [2] While this means endeavoring to devastate his perceived enemies, it also means seeking to bolster his own fortunes, those of whomever he recognizes as an ally, and, of course, the nation’s capitalist ruling class as a whole.

Yet Trump’s “caregiver-in-chief” theatrics (lucrative though they seem to have been) represented merely outer-band low-pressure waves in contrast to the malicious force of the extremist-right political hurricane for which his regime is serving as the central “eye”. Using, as a would-be cover, the frightening news of Hurricane Harvey’s devastation as it struck Texas’s Gulf Coast, Trump issued his gratuitous Aug. 25th pardon of vicious racist bigot Joe Arpaio. [3] This ex-sheriff of Maricopa County (i.e., Metro Phoenix), controversial for his hatred of immigrants and appalling cruelty to prisoners, had been prosecuted for harassing Latinos, including U.S. citizens, in violation of constitutional rights.

In late July, as summarized in an Arizona Republic article July 31st, the court handling the case had “ruled that Arpaio is guilty of criminal contempt for failing to follow court orders to stop ‘crime suppression sweeps’ that racially profiled Latinos in the name of immigration enforcement.” Despite Trump’s efforts to keep his own malfeasance overshadowed by the hurricane disaster, the pardon quickly received widespread public attention and condemnation.

But the Arpaio pardon was just one outrage amidst a blitz of shadowy and precipitous White House actions and related events – as summarized in an Aug. 26th Time Magazine news report with the apt title «White House Buries Controversial News Under Hurricane Harvey Watch»:

In the span of three hours, as Hurricane Harvey barreled toward landfall in Texas last night, the White House dropped three controversial stories – taking the classic tactic of burying news on a Friday night to new heights. As the nation watched and worried about one of the strongest hurricanes to strike the U.S. in more than a decade, the White House announced a ban on new transgender recruits in the military and the pardon of convicted Arizona county sheriff Joe Arpaio. At the same time, news leaked that a contentious far-right aide to the president, Sebastian Gorka, has left his job. Word of a North Korean missile launch [apparently goaded by Trump’s own threats and taunts – RAN] added to the sense of drama. Some hours earlier, the administration had unveiled more sanctions against Venezuela.

However, in the scheme of things, Trump’s shenanigans have amounted to little more than a minor storm on the periphery of recent events that reveal even more dire realities of modern capitalism. Let’s zoom out to get the far larger context – the Bigger Picture – of this recent confluence of disasters, which have involved not only devastating hurricanes smashing through the Caribbean and many of its densely populated islands, as well as battering and flooding U.S. coastal areas and major cities, but also a devil’s handful of other overwhelmingly destructive cataclysms.

Just in recent months, major floods have devastated parts of Africa, India and South Asia; Typhoon Hata has pounded southeastern China, including Hong Kong, Macao, plus Guangdong and several other provinces; wild and forest fires have torched a path of destruction throughout the U.S. West and Portugal; earthquakes in Mexico have wreaked appalling death, injury, and destruction in Mexico City and other communities. And to that you can add dozens of other worldwide destructive events such as more flooding, landslides, cyclonic activity, and similar disruptions. [4]

Like man-made disasters such as wars and global economic crashes, massive natural disasters expose the most glaring deficiencies of the capitalist system, prevalent within today’s human civilization. These deficiencies encompass a wide range, starting with a reluctant, conflicted, basically ineffective response to the man-made fueling of global warming (“climate change”), to policies that in several ways have worsened the consequences of increasingly more severe weather events as well as other catastrophic phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

For economically struggling and impoverished countries, almost all with corrupt, authoritarian oligarchic-capitalist (and typically kleptocratic) governments beholden to dominant large imperialist powers such as the USA, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and others (individually or in combination) these overwhelming disasters are often extraordinarily damaging. But it’s particularly instructive to examine the circumstances of a major advanced imperialist nation like the USA, as it experiences its own massive catastrophic event or series of events such as these recent powerful storms – in the course of which the fundamental fault lines of the nation’s capitalist socio-economic-political system are glaringly punctuated.

Land-use and development mayhem

Private ownership of economically significant property – real estate (land and buildings), infrastructure, industrial facilities, and almost all the other means of production, distribution, and major necessities to sustain human civilization – is of course a mainstay of the capitalist system. In the USA, where private ownership is especially exalted – as well as the prerogatives of profit-frenzied capitalists helpfully bolstered by the capitalist state – this has provided a strikingly robust environment for unfettered and aggressive private real estate development … frequently with quite deleterious results, ranging from suburban sprawl to landscapes littered with toxic waste sites and other harmful conditions.

As the spate of wildfires, forest fires, flooding, violent storms, and other dangerous events in recent years is now revealing, rampantly profit-focused land use and property development have dramatically increased human vulnerability to these dangers. Yet, in response to this vulnerability, the rulers of U.S. capitalism and those in the top echelons of their state apparatus have basically adhered to a haughty attitude of YOYO (You’re On Your Own).

«The real villains in Harvey flood: urban sprawl and the politicians who allowed it» – such was the on-point headline of an August 31st Guardian analysis of Hurricane Harvey, focusing particularly on the impacts for Houston. “The swamps and wetlands that once characterized Houston’s hinterland have been replaced with strip malls and suburban tract homes” noted the report.

Houston’s unfettered sprawl into the marshland of southeast Texas was a conscious choice by policymakers. So was building a global city on a slowly submerging swamp. Both were decisions that led to disaster.

The analysis further observed that “Coastal infrastructure is incredibly expensive to build and nearly impossible to maintain, especially when you realize that the maintenance is borne entirely by local governments – none of which have the financial or technical capacity to do so effectively.” Because of this, emphasized the Guardian report, “the world’s most predictable disaster before Harvey made landfall.”.

The consequences of rampant, profit-driven urban-area development (to the near-exclusion of crucial environmental considerations) were devastatingly exposed in the crisis involving two of Houston’s critical flood-control reservoirs – as detailed in an Aug. 28th Slate analysis titled «What Happened to the Two Reservoirs That Were Supposed to Protect Downtown Houston?». As the article explains,

These are the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, evidence of how Houston’s planning has been overwhelmed by unregulated urban growth and a storm no one thought possible.

…

When Addicks and Barker were completed, just after the second world war, Houston had recently endured two cataclysmic downtown floods, in 1929 and 1935. The reservoirs – mostly dry, wooded areas with creeks running through them – could be plugged up to stall whole swaths of the watershed from reaching Buffalo Bayou. But as development has sprawled west along the Katy Freeway, more and more water is being funneled into the region’s creeks, filling the reservoirs faster.

…

Meanwhile, developers swooped in and built tract houses up to the very brink of the reservoirs, which appear in dry times to be forests. It’s probably a very pleasant place to live, except when it isn’t. During last year’s Tax Day floods, those subdivisions on the reservoirs’ western edges flooded. Now they are flooding again. None are in the 100-year floodplain. Most are in the 500-year floodplain, areas that FEMA predicts will flood once every 500 years.

Swollen with overflows (particularly from previous wetlands and other rainfall-absorbent areas now covered with real estate development and impervious pavement), the reservoirs came close to failing. When their dams had to be opened to prevent collapse, a wide swath of developed suburban neighborhoods that had until then escaped the worst of the watery wrath of the hurricane were suddenly flooded, long after Hurricane Harvey had moved away.

While the ferocity of Hurricane Harvey was unforeseen, the vulnerability of Houston and other areas along the Texas coast had long been recognized, and warnings publicized for decades. One of the more recent – and pertinent – examples is an extensive Texas Tribune analysis of 7 December 2016, a joint project of the Tribune together with ProPublica. Focusing on Houston, the report carried the provocative title «Boomtown, Flood Town». It predicted:

Climate change will bring more frequent and fierce rainstorms to cities like Houston. But unchecked development remains a priority in the famously un-zoned city, creating short-term economic gains for some while increasing flood risks for everyone.

As the article went on to explain,

Scientists, other experts and federal officials say Houston’s explosive growth is largely to blame. As millions have flocked to the metropolitan area in recent decades, local officials have largely snubbed stricter building regulations, allowing developers to pave over crucial acres of prairie land that once absorbed huge amounts of rainwater. That has led to an excess of floodwater during storms that chokes the city’s vast bayou network, drainage systems and two huge federally owned reservoirs, endangering many nearby homes …

The broader background and implications of Houston’s flood catastrophe were analyzed in an incisive Aug. 29th report posted on the Qz.com website, trenchantly titled «Houston’s flooding shows what happens when you ignore science and let developers run rampant». It warns that

The Harvey-wrought devastation is just the latest example of the consequences of Houston’s gung-ho approach to development. The city, the largest in the US with no zoning laws, is a case study in limiting government regulations and favoring growth – often at the expense of the environment. As water swamps many of its neighborhoods, it’s now also a cautionary tale of sidelining science and plain common sense. Given the Trump administration’s assault on environmental protections, it’s one that Americans elsewhere should pay attention to.

The scale of this process – what amounts to a prolonged, massive assault on the safety and security of human habitation – is further elaborated by the article’s authors:

Largely unobstructed either by rules or by natural features such as mountains, the Houston area sprawled. Between 1992 and 2010 alone nearly 25,000 acres (about 10,000 hectares) of natural wetland infrastructure was wiped out, the Texas A&M research shows. Most of the losses were in Harris County, where almost 30% of wetlands disappeared.

Altogether, the region lost the ability to handle nearly four billion gallons (15 billion liters) of storm water. That’s equivalent to $600 million worth of flood water detention capacity, according to the university researchers’ calculations.

The authors note that such a volume is merely “a drop in the bucket” compared to what Harvey was at that time expected to eventually unleash. Within just “a couple of days” after the hurricane’s landfall, it was already estimated to have poured some nine trillion gallons onto the impacted terrain.

In an apparent effort to “tame” rampant capitalist rapacity (perhaps with an aim to moderating excesses and securing an environment for smoothly functioning exploitation), liberal policies turn to an array of rules, mandates, restrictions,and regulations. Conversely, as ample evidence shows, powerful capitalist interests seek diligently to avoid, waive, flout, or eliminate these kinds of regulatory systems..Such is the case of Houston and other areas devastated by Hurricane Harvey, and subsequently by Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

In a section titled “A distaste for regulation”, the Qz.com analysis underscores that “Wetland loss is one of the many effects of lax rules”, as well as the “construction of flood-prone buildings in flood plains”.

As an example, the report cites La Vita Bella, a nursing home in Dickinson, a small exurb east of Houston. With the facility having been constructed within FEMA’s designated flood zone, the elderly residents found themselves “up to their waists in water before they got rescued.”

Yet another consequence, warns the Qz.com analysis, “is that too few people have flood insurance.”

Although federal rules require certain homeowners to carry it, those rules are based on outdated flood data. Only a little over a quarter of the homes in “high risk” areas in Harris County, where Houston sits, have flood insurance. The share is even lower, 15%, in many other areas that will also no doubt suffer water damage from Harvey.

And it was that dubious, exception-ridden and frequently flouted regulatory “safety net” that prevailed “before Trump came into office”, notes the report, and before his administration “… started removing layers of regulation.”

Just 10 days before Harvey struck, the president signed an executive order that rescinded federal flood protection standards put in place by his predecessor, Barack Obama. FEMA and the US Housing and Urban Development Department, the two federal agencies that will handle most of the huge pile of cash expected for the rebuilding of Houston, would have been forced to require any rebuilding to confirm to new, safer codes. Now, they won’t. “What’s likely to happen is we’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars rebuilding Houston exactly like it is now, and then wait for the next one,” says Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst on water issues for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Liberal social-benefit policies (including many regulatory measures), in apparent deference to the needs of capitalist enterprises and the ruling elites of the capitalist structure, almost invariably amount to compromises between general societal needs and private profitmaking convenience. Yet even eminently sensible measures, albeit often too minimalist, are opposed and resisted by sectors of the bourgeoisie, often reflected in the actions of the federal administration or other components of the state apparatus.

In the Houston case, various news reports have referred to corrupt practices and the flaunting of what minimalist safety regulations exist. One example offered by the Qz.com article involves the fate of the liberal Obama administration’s significant expansion of wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act:

This federal law requires developers who destroy wetlands to mitigate the ecological effects, for instance by creating new wetlands elsewhere. In February, the Trump administration said it would repeal … Obama’s decision, meaning a lot more wetlands would lose that protection. (The repeal process is still unfolding.)

But cyclonic destruction, wind damage, and flooding have not been the only dangers released by Harvey and other hurricanes (in conditions of increased vulnerability facilitated by the capitalist state). Flood-associated damage from toxic chemical pollutants – emitted by both toxic waste sites and petrochemical processing installations – has been another consequence of reckless actions by both private-profit industries and their allies among governmental policymakers.

For example, urban waste-treatment facilities are typically vulnerable to overflows and breaches during massive flood events. Possibly even more dangerous are deposits of highly toxic chemical waste (many categorized under the federal designation of Superfund sites), which can release the equivalent of veritable rivers and lakes of destructive contaminants upon populations in their path.

Precisely this aspect of Houston’s Hurricane Harvey disaster – with the revealing headline «Hurricane Harvey floods toxic waste sites – and the EPA is missing in action» – was reported by the Associated Press and published in Business Insider on Sep. 2nd:

Long a center of the nation’s petrochemical industry, the Houston metro area has more than a dozen such Superfund sites, designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being among America’s most intensely contaminated places. Many are now flooded, with the risk that waters were stirring dangerous sediment.

Flaccid management and regulation of volatile and potentially explosive chemicals have also increased risk and compounded the disastrous impact of major hurricanes such as Harvey. In the latter case, explosions and fires at the Arkema chemical processing facility in Crosby, Texas received widespread news attention.

For example, a Sep. 2nd Dallas Morning News story headlined «Huge fire burns at Houston-area chemical plant flooded by Harvey» reported that “Floodwater from Harvey engulfed the plant’s backup generators, preventing the chemical compounds from being refrigerated at a temperature to keep them from degrading and catching fire” – resulting in “A large fire sending plumes of black smoke into the air ….”

The paper reported that “Aerial video showed a towering fire and smoke” coming from plant, which had “lost power after Harvey struck the area.” According to company officials, said the report, two containers had caught fire.

The News proceeded to elaborate on the circumstances:

On Thursday morning, a container of organic peroxides caught fire and exploded. The Environmental Protection Agency said there was no cause for alarm after it analyzed the smoke from that explosion.

The plant’s owners said they had to let 500,000 pounds of the peroxides continue to burn as they have no way to cool the chemical to prevent it from igniting again.

The EPA was monitoring Friday’s fire and planned to have information available soon about any airborne toxic chemicals.

Arkema officials have said the six remaining containers could also catch fire. They added that the safest course of action is to “let these fires happen and let them burn out.”

…

Popping sounds were heard at the plant earlier in the day as pressure valves on the trailers released.

Arkema spokesman Jeff Carr told a Houston Chronicle reporter that “You could call this a warning sign that more explosions or fires could be coming soon.” Fortunately, within two days “officials at the plant said the fire was extinguished” according to a report from KPRC-TV. “But there are still concerns that more fires could ignite” warned the Dallas Morning News.

Perennial preparation debacle

In an Aug. 29th commentary on the radical-liberal Counterpunch website, scrutinizing the Harvey disaster and admonishingly headlined «It is a Human-Caused Disaster and It is Avoidable», author Wim Laven asked: “how many busloads do you imagine are needed to evacuate those without cars in the 4th largest U.S. city?”

The Texas Tribune reported the State had “41,000 shelter beds available for evacuees and more than 200 buses available to transport Texans out of coastal areas such as Corpus Christi.” With 2.3 million people in Houston alone, that almost helps 2 percent of the population – that isn’t even enough to help the unemployed families. It is clear and willful neglect.

But not only was the Trump administration failing to prepare appropriately for the clearly imminent hurricane, it was preparing to fail. An Aug. 25th New York Times report highlighted Trump’s proposed budget cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

The administration has recommended slashing FEMA programs and grants that help cities and states prepare for natural disasters to the tune of $667 million. That includes cuts to the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program, which provides funding states and cities to better withstand the impact of hurricanes and coastal storms. At NOAA, recommendations included a 16 percent cut to the overall budget and a 32 percent cut to the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the agency’s main ocean, weather and climate research office.

As a result of a cavalier disregard of essential disaster preparedness, particularly as reflected in consistent underfunding, local governments in Houston and throughout the impacted coastal areas (and later, in the impact areas of subsequent hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Nate) found themselves utterly overwhelmed. Even while government officials exhorted the public to “evacuate”, there was conflict among both political and emergency officials, with the underlying realization that proper and safe evacuation – even of just the population in the most vulnerable areas – was, in actuality, hopelessly unachievable.

In such situations, large swaths of the less affluent segments of the population cannot afford personal motor vehicles, and in any case the cost of leaving their homes and trying to survive without lodging, living essentials, and jobs is daunting. With little to no higher-capacity rail mass transportation available – particularly for intercity evacuation – existing highways typically prove ridiculously deficient in capacity to handle a sudden outflow of evacuees, a situation leading to staggering and often dangerous congestion.

This was highlighted by the unusually candid acknowledgement, on the part of Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, that adequate evacuation was impossible. “You literally cannot put 6.5 million people on the road …” Turner insisted: “If you think the situation right now is bad, you give an order to evacuate, you are creating a nightmare.” [5]

It is repeatedly becoming clear that, in the absence of proper emergency facilities and large-scale coordination well beyond individual cities, effective massive evacuation is realistically an exercise in futility and possibly worse. “You issue an evacuation order and put everyone on the highway …” Turner warned, “you are really asking for a major calamity.” In contrast to the “evacuate now” mantra promulgated by the extremist-right administration of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, given the dangers of the alternatives, Turner calculated that it was best for the public to remain sheltered in their own homes – certainly, an appallingly frightening dilemma for a population facing such a threat.

Increasingly, amidst such calamities, local authorities are find themselves engulfed by desperate calls for help from a critically endangered and terrified population, many or even most of whom are effectively beyond assistance. This is exemplified in the Harvey disaster, especially in the Houston area, where emergency 911 systems quickly failed, “evacuation” highways became hopelessly clogged, and it rapidly became obvious that the meager numbers available of firefighters and other “first responders” could not possibly contend with the tsunami of entire neighborhoods and suburbs of humanity now in mortal danger.

The headline of a Sep, 2nd Washington Post article reveals the ultimate response: «Texans’ do-it-ourselves rescue effort defines Hurricane Harvey». As the article recounts, “Texas officials … repeatedly emphasized the importance of personal responsibility.” Translation: YOYO (You’re On Your Own) – in effect, a defining motto of much of today’s capitalist society (whereby the masses of the population are condemned to a YOYO struggle for subsistence and survival, while their wealthy ruling overlords, secure in their heights of affluence and power, remain largely uninvolved).

Government officials, according to the report,

… warned people not to call 911 unless their life was in immediate peril. The top elected official in Tyler County, northeast of Houston, told people not to expect a rescue if they defied evacuation orders. His subtle-as-buckshot words on Facebook: “GET OUT OR DIE!”

The collapse of governmental emergency systems, say the reporters, led to “an unprecedented do-it-yourself relief effort”:

After the storm blew into Houston, a remarkable network of boat owners with smartphones, worried neighbors with laptops and digital wizards with mapping software popped up to summon and support an army of Good Samaritans who motored, rowed and waded into dangerous waters to save family, friends and total strangers.

This included even out-of-state volunteers, such as the Cajun Navy Relief, a volunteer rescue operation that arrived from as far away as Lake Charles, Louisiana.

For an example of the helplessness of official emergency services in contrast to this citizen relief activity, the article focuses on the Houston suburb of Westchase, where

… emergency services were stretched so thin that police didn’t arrive to take control of the rescue operation in Westchase until [days into the flooding]. Even then, they had no boats, so they had to hitch rides with the citizen navy ….

Impoverished victims extra-victimized

In his earlier-cited Counterpunch commentary «It is a Human-Caused Disaster and It is Avoidable», Wim Laven posits as a “persistent truth” that “disasters disproportionately impact the poor”, referencing major catastrophic events such as New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina (2005), Atlanta’s 2014 winter storm, and Houston’s recent Hurricane Harvey.

This echoes my personal experience and observations of disasters in Sri Lanka and Haiti, but you’d expect better from a superpower than a third world country. We place large, poor, populations in flood plains and tornado alleys without effective building practices. This is true in many U.S. cities. It is predictable, the property values are lower. Dams and other features of infrastructure do not receive the same allocations in poor areas and infrastructure is generally failing. This is entirely human error.

(From a radical perspective, one might question Laven’s use of the pronoun “we” in the context of policies and actions by America’s powerful and aloof capitalist class. And should such policies be considered merely “human error” or actually malicious neglect?)

Laven’s assessment is corroborated in an analysis by Tanvi Misra, published Aug. 27th on The Atlantic magazine website with the title «A Catastrophe for Houston’s Most Vulnerable People». This points out that “Like in the case of previous disasters like Katrina and Sandy, the heaviest cost of Harvey’s destruction is likely going to be borne by the most vulnerable communities in its path.”

Within cities, poor communities of color often live in segregated neighborhoods that are most vulnerable to flooding, or near petrochemical plants of superfund sites that can overflow during the storm. This is especially true for Houston – a sprawling metropolis, where new development has long been spreading thinly across prairie lands that help absorb excess rainwater.

A research study from the Brookings Institution revealingly titled «Hurricanes hit the poor the hardest» underscores that “natural disasters are not ‘great equalizers’”, and provides additional corroboration of this skewed impact. Posted Sep. 18th on the Brookings website, the report points out that

… lower income Americans are more likely to live in neighborhoods or buildings more susceptible to storm shocks. Substandard infrastructure in affordable housing units and low-income communities place residents at greater risk to the effects of a severe storm. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, low-income neighborhoods were more affected than wealthier ones, as poor families were more concentrated in flood-prone parts of Houston. Low-income and minority families are also more likely to live closer to noxious industrial facilities and are thus more at-risk to chemical spills and toxic leaks resulting from storm damage.

The Atlantic article also notes that Harvey’s victims included …

Residents of many “colonias” – small, poverty-stricken neighborhoods near the U.S.-Mexico border – [which were] directly in the path of the storm. Their homes are often built on flood zones and lack wastewater infrastructure. More than 70 percent of colonia inhabitants are U.S. citizens.

This analysis further highlights how recommendations to “Evacuate Now” are difficult-to-impossible remedies for many segments of the population, particularly at lower income levels:

While many South Texans evacuated North per the recommendation of Governor Greg Abbott, poorer or disabled residents may not have had the resources or the capability to follow that advice. Many undocumented immigrants, as well, may have chosen to stay behind because Border Patrol refused to suspend its checkpoints during the storm.

According to the Brookings study, the longer-lasting impacts of huge disasters such as Harvey are compounded in the conditions of lower-income populations. As the report explains,

… poorer families are less well insulated against the economic shock that often accompanies the physical one. In the eight counties most severely-affected by Hurricane Harvey, only 17 percent of homeowners held flood insurance policies, which are more commonly held by wealthier households. Even with FEMA assistance, poor households affected by storm damage will likely confront the consequences for years to come. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, residents whose homes flooded during the storm had lower credit scores and rates of home ownership than their neighbors who were spared the worst.

Misra’s Atlantic article points a reprehending finger at Texas’s lack of preparation:

Texas is among the states that are particularly vulnerable to climate change, and it’s well-acquainted with the devastation floods can cause. But it was particularly ill-equipped to deal with a storm of this magnitude: the state has devoted little money and effort towards flood-control planning.

Eyeing the ongoing havoc at the time of reporting, Misra predicted that “it’s clear that the most vulnerable Texans are going to pay the price.”

Racist neocolonial oppression in “relief” of Puerto Rico

The disdain, indifference, and arrogance of the capitalist ruling elite toward victims of great misery, including disasters, have usually been shielded by a kind of pseudo-sympatico cover dance of “concern” and “empathy” on the part of presidents and other top capitalist officials, both liberal (or leftish) and conservative (or rightish). But Donald Trump clearly is a member of a section of that elite who are eager to dispense with the facade of “politically correct” attitudes in favor of a far more brazenly and aggressively arrogant authenticity. And, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, his contempt (as a representative of U.S. capitalism’s “Masters of the World”) for its Puerto Rican victims could hardly have been more vividly displayed.

While American capitalism’s indigent, neglected and abused, neocolonial island stepchild is inhabited by over three million people with nominal U.S. citizenship, conditions of poverty and underdevelopment resemble those of an impoverished Third World country. The key background to Puerto Rico’s ongoing distress has been trenchantly described by an Oct. 6th article in the revolutionary Marxist paper Workers Vanguard (WV), titled «Puerto Rico Plundered by U.S. Colonialism»:

Long before Hurricane Maria made landfall, U.S. colonial domination had bled Puerto Rico to the point of collapse. The island of three and a half million people, today in more than $70 billion debt bondage to Wall Street vultures, was deprived of infrastructure and resources, left destitute, vulnerable and unable to cope with the mighty storms that tear through the Caribbean.

This brief background has been corroborated and enriched in a commentary by Frances Negrón-Muntaner posted on the website of Pacific Standard magazine with the title «Puerto Rico Was Undergoing a Humanitarian Crisis Long Before Hurricane Maria». Th author points out that “For decades, Puerto Rico had been suffering the slow but certain violence of modern colonial capitalism.”

With furious winds and howling breath, the deadliest storm to hit the region in a century made evident what before had been difficult to see: For decades, Puerto Rico had been suffering the slow but certain violence of modern colonial capitalism. Maria’s wrath cut easily through decrepit [dams], tin roofs, poorly made buildings, and outdated communication lines. In doing so, it exposed a deteriorated infrastructure, the product of layers of structural inequality that includes substantially less federal funding than any of the 50 states, and stems from Puerto Rico’s political subordination as an unincorporated territory without the right to vote for president or have a voting representation in Congress. Even further, Maria laid bare three ills at the root of contemporary Puerto Rico’s very foundation: an economy exclusively catering to U.S. interests, a tax structure that sharply reduces the burden on American companies, and a local elite that takes what it can, even if that means leaving insufficient revenue for community needs.

Rad-lib writer Vijay Prashad, in his Oct. 16th article «A Tale of Two Islands» posted on Counterpunch, recounts that the territory was especially vulnerable to power system failure since July. At that time, “the government-owned power company [had] declared bankruptcy when it could no longer service its debt of $9 billion” – leaving no financial resources to protect the supply of electric service. This liability proved especially serious, explains Prashad, when Hurricane Irma struck a glancing blow on Puerto Rico, knocking out its entire power network, and inflicting approximately one billion dollars’ worth of damage shortly before Maria.

More than a million customers lost access to power and half of the island’s hospitals went offline. This happened without any rainfall on the island and without a direct hit from Irma.

With the power utility in financial crisis, no funding was available to maintain the power grid, “… nor was there money to hastily get it back on its feet. Irma’s strike on Puerto Rico was a warning of what was to come.”

Prashad vividly describes the situation upon the arrival of Hurricane Maria:

Ten days later, with the power grid still in distress, Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm, struck Puerto Rico. Power went out across the island. Drinking water was no longer available and fuel vanished. The 3.4 million U.S. citizens of the island found themselves stranded in an apocalyptic nightmare. The official death toll was given as 16, although the Centre for Investigative Journalism (School of Law at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico) says that there are already dozens of confirmed deaths, with the toll likely to rise to the hundreds. [The number of fatalities as of mid-October has been reported as nearly 50.] As hospitals are unable to function, the infirm are under danger of death. Dialysis has been halted; oxygen is not available. The Demographic Registry that certifies deaths has no power. It cannot do its work.

Without power, reports Prashad, Puerto Rico “went dark” in another way. “Communications collapsed and information about the damage was not easily available.” Prashad, other commentators, and weeks of on-site news reporting have conveyed the scene of an apocalyptic nightmare for the population of the territory (as well as of other stricken islands in the region). For relatively densely populated Puerto Rico, it has meant a virtual descent from civilization into a raw, basic, primitive struggle for survival, for such elementary necessities as drinkable water, food, fuel, shelter in a landscape of devastated structures ruined by hurricane-force winds and flood waters. (According to a spokesman for the governor, “80 or 90 percent of the homes are a complete disaster …. They are totally lost.” [6]

As the scale and severity of the devastation and desperate plight of the population became fully apparent, it was accurately recognized as a humanitarian crisis.

«Puerto Rico is facing a humanitarian crisis in the wake of Hurricane Maria» headlined a Sep. 25th article by Andrew Freedman posted on the Mashable.com news website. “It was a worst-case scenario storm for the island, enveloping the entire U.S. territory in hurricane-force winds, and dumping upwards of 40 inches of rain in just one to two days in some areas …” reported Freedman, noting that Puerto Rico “has a population larger than 20 U.S. states.”

In its wake, Puerto Rico lies in ruins. Cut off from the mainland U.S. by a lack of power and phone service, as well as damaged seaports and air fields, help has been slow to arrive. Reports indicate that up to 80 percent of the island’s crops have been ruined, raising the possibility of food shortages. Estimates for when power can be fully restored to the island extend as long as 6 months or more.

A frenetic summary of conditions in the aftermath of Maria was posted Sep. 26th by reporter Eric Chaney on the Weather.com website. “All across the island, a feeling of helplessness and desperation is beginning to grip residents …” Chaney warned. He quoted San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz:

It’s life or death … People are starting to die already. We need to get our shit together because people are dying. People are really dying. I’ve put them in the ambulances when they’re gasping for air.

Gov. Ricardo Rosselló warned that the island was “essentially devastated. Complete destruction of the power infrastructure, severe destruction of the housing infrastructure, food and water are needed.”

In searing heat, the lack of electric power meant no air conditioning and, with the loss of pumping capability, no running water for the broad mass of the population. Federal agencies as well as relief organizations eventually managed to transport food, water, fuel, and other essentials to the territory. But staggering mismanagement and lack of coordination, as has been widely and repeatedly reported in news media, meant that very little of these direly needed supplies were being delivered to the suffering population.

The near-total collapse of the healthcare system became one of the most dangerous points of crisis. In a Sep. 28th Washington Post report headlined «Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis nowhere more obvious than at hospitals» Samantha Schmidt and Daniel Cassady grimly described this aspect of the crisis:

It has been more than a week since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and the humanitarian crisis that has ensued is nowhere more obvious than in the health-care facilities that often are without electricity and always are overwhelmed. About half of the island’s hospitals – 33 – are functioning. Those that are accepting patients have intermittent power and have to pray that the diesel fuel running their generators will last until the next truck arrives. Forced to take people from hospitals that have closed, hospitals outside San Juan are over capacity and overwhelmed by patients. Some hospitals have become more akin to community centers, with people lining up to use the cafeterias, and relatives of patients trying to use the showers and bathrooms because they don’t have water at home. Doctors across Puerto Rico say that many patients, particularly elderly ones, are arriving at hospitals in deteriorating condition because they waited too long to seek treatment, in many cases because they couldn’t find the gas to drive. Others worry that since so many people are without water and electricity, infections and diseases will spread more easily.

In a number of past disasters, while America’s capitalist “commander-in-chiefs” at least have demonstrated some interest in the “optics” of appearing appropriately concerned, Trump’s reaction to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico in contrast has been a combination of nonchalance, delay, bored disinterest, occasional pretenses of “concern”, self-congratulatory bombast, misinformation or outright lies, and viciously combative responses to appeals for help and admonitory criticism. It may be prudent to interpret this as a reflection of typically raw and undisguised attitudes of at least a major segment of the nation’s ruling class as a whole – and, in turn, much of the bureaucracy of the U.S. capitalist state.

The interaction between the deepening Puerto Rican crisis and Donald Trump and his administration has emerged via numerous reports and analyses in the media. Some of these have been summarized in a useful “timeline” compiled by reporter Robinson Meyer and published Oct. 4th under the title «What’s Happening With the Relief Effort in Puerto Rico?» on the Atlantic magazine website. Similarly, Alison Durkee summarized «Trump and Puerto Rico: A timeline of the president’s response to the Hurricane Maria devastation», posted Oct. 1st on the Mic.com news and analysis website. From such reports, a perspective emerges of Trump and his bureaucracy focused on justifying and exaggerating his own role, and more concerned with the federal budget impact of the disaster, than on the plight of the territory’s population.

On September 21, one day following Maria’s landfall on the main island, Trump (after meetings with the president of Ukraine and other foreign officials) casually remarked to reporters that Puerto Rico had been “obliterated”. Rebuilding, he boasts, will begin “with great gusto”.

“Their electrical grid is destroyed …” Trump intones. Then, perhaps in an attempt to deflect any responsibility for action from his administration to Puerto Rico, he adds: “It wasn’t in good shape to start off with. But their electrical grid is totally destroyed. And so many other things.” Trump later issues a state of emergency for Puerto Rico, calls local officials on the island with promises to help, and then “travels to his golf club in New Jersey for the weekend” (according to Meyer’s summary).

From there, Trump’s involvement in the Puerto Rico crisis has mainly exhibited casual interest, with much of his primary attention focused elsewhere, such as on his attempt to impose a revised selective ban on immigration, his denunciations of the growing anti-racial protests among leading sports figures in the National Football League, his praise for the NASCAR stockcar racing association, his intervention in a GOP primary fight in Alabama, and other issues. As for aid to the beleaguered island territory, delays continued, evoking widespread criticism.

For an entire weekend, with news reports warning (as summarized by Meyer) that “restoring power to the island could take six to eight months” and “the island’s entire communications infrastructure has been knocked out”, plus the territorial government warning that Guajataca Dam, in northwest Puerto Rico, “could fail at any moment”, Trump administration contact was strikingly minimal. On Sep. 24th, as Meyer reports,

Vice President Mike Pence talks on the phone with Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in the House of Representatives. It is the only reported communication between a Puerto Rican leader and the president or vice president during the weekend.

Durkee also notes Trump’s detachment:

… after his initial response, it then took the president another five days to again tweet about the hurricane. It wasn’t until Sept. 25 – after the president had spent time on Twitter, calling for an NFL boycott and inadvertently declaring war on North Korea – that Trump finally addressed the ongoing devastation in Puerto Rico.

On Sep. 25th, five days after Maria’s landfall, the first Trump administration officials finally make a day trip to Puerto Rico “to survey the damage” (Meyer summary). The delegation, which includes Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), return to Washington that night. That same evening, just returning from dinner with conservative leaders in Congress, Trump finally issues his first Twitter message about the crisis since Maria hit Puerto Rico:

“Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble,” he says in a series of posts. “It’s [sic] old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water and medical are top priorities – and doing well.”

As what was now being called a “humanitarian crisis” continued to worsen, news reports were starting to emphasize the apparent botchup in management, coordination, and distribution of the federal and private aid that was beginning to trickle in, much of it stacking up uselessly in San Juan’s port facilities. As Meyer relates, two Florida senators (Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Bill Nelson) urge Trump to provide “additional federal assistance” for Puerto Rico. “This is a life-threatening situation …” they emphasize, warning of “millions without power, communications, and water.” At last (continues Meyer’s summary) “Trump holds his first coordinating meeting in the Situation Room about the response in Puerto Rico ….”

The scale of the devastation at this point has been further described by a posting to Counterpunch of Oct. 2nd, with the title «The Cruelest Storm: A Statement for Puerto Rico», signed by nearly 200 activists:

Six days after the event, hundreds of communities are still flooded, isolated without any food or drinking water, as highways and roads are blocked or destroyed, making communication between towns, neighborhoods and cities impossible. Telephone, Internet, drinking water and electricity services have not been re-established in most communities. The weather radar was destroyed as well as the surveillance towers at the San Juan International Airport. There is a public health crisis due to the precarious conditions in hospitals and the threat of epidemics stemming from contaminated water. Cities, towns and neighborhoods outside the metropolitan area have been abandoned, and efforts are concentrated in the San Juan metro area.

…

The destruction brought by Hurricane Maria has exposed the profound colonial condition of Puerto Rico, as millions of human beings are faced with a life or death situation.

As desperate pleas for help were mounting from Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló and other local officials, criticism of Trump’s negligible involvement evoked his response in a Sep. 26th appearance in the White House Rose Garden, where (as related by Durkee), facing reporters,

Trump addressed criticism that he had been too preoccupied with the NFL protests to focus on Puerto Rico …. “I’ve heard that before: ‘Was I preoccupied?’ Not at all, not at all. I have plenty of time on my hands. All I do is work.”

Reporter Mark Landler, in a Sep. 26th New York Times report («Trump Rates His Hurricane Relief: ‘Great.’ ‘Amazing.’ ‘Tremendous.’»)

commenting mainly on Trump’s Rose Garden self-praise, notes that

… the hurricanes are yet another reminder of this president’s rare capacity for self-congratulation – a trait that seems particularly ill-suited to the aftermath of deadly disasters, when the plight of people who lost homes or even family members would seem to take precedence over testimonials to FEMA.

As Landler further reports,

“We are doing a great job,” he declared on Tuesday in the Rose Garden. “We did a great job in Texas, a great job in Florida, a great job in Louisiana. We hit little pieces of Georgia and Alabama. And frankly,” he added, “we’re doing – ” Then he stopped himself to gild the lily even further. Puerto Rico, Mr. Trump pointed out, posed a special challenge to disaster relief efforts. “It’s on an island in the middle of the ocean,” he observed to a reporter who asked him whether he had been too consumed by his feud with the National Football League to give it proper attention. “You can’t just drive your trucks there from other states.”

Trump also used praise from Puerto Rico’s Gov. Rosselló to validate his own boasting:

“We have been really treated very, very nicely by the governor,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Rosselló, whose island is without power, water or fuel – putting it, the governor said on Monday, on the brink of a humanitarian crisis.

Criticism was also rising over Trump’s reluctance to suspend the Jones Act – a 1920 law mandating that only U.S. ships could carry goods between U.S. ports. The prohibition was suppressing the flow of urgently needed supplies from the mainland to the island. On Sep. 27th, when finally questioned on this by the media, Trump indicated that the needs of Puerto Rico were being weighed against the business interests of the shipping industry; as Meyer relates:

“We’re thinking about that,” he tells reporters. “But we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people that work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted, and we have a lot of ships out there right now.”

However, the following day Trump finally waived the Jones Act restrictions. But only for a ten-day period. Despite this brief respite, reports Meyer (relaying a CNN story),

More than 10,000 shipping containers full of food and supplies lay stranded in the Port of San Juan …. They can’t be shipped to the island’s interior due to a lack of fuel, labor, and working roads. Governor Roselló says that only about 20 percent of Puerto Rico’s truckers have been able to work.

Meanwhile, as the territory’s death toll continued to rise, says Meyer, citing the Miami Herald: “Seventy percent of Puerto Rico’s hospitals are not functioning …. Official death tolls do not account for patients who have already died from not receiving dialysis or oxygen.”

But Trump and his underlings maintained a relentlessly upbeat public relations outflow. On the same day as the reports of the rising death toll, collapsing healthcare, and the massive port snafu, notes Meyer, acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Elaine Duke, speaking at the White House, assures reporters she is “very satisfied” with the administration’s Puerto Rico response: “I know it is really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place in such a devastating hurricane.”

Per Meyer’s summary, on the next day (Sep. 29th), FEMA officials promulgated a much rosier assessment of the hospital situation. Of Puerto Rico’s 69 hospitals, said a FEMA statement, “One is fully operational, 55 are partially operational, five are closed, and the status of eight is as yet unknown.” The Department of Defense also announced it was operating ten regional supply-distribution centers across the territory, supplying “food, water, and other commodities.”

That same Friday evening, noted a New York Times report, “… Mr. Trump again repeatedly praised his government’s response to the Puerto Rico hurricane during remarks to reporters before leaving for his New Jersey club for the weekend.”

“It’s going really well, considering,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “We’ve made tremendous strides. Very tough situation.” Later, he said, “People can’t believe how successful it’s been.”

These attempts to enhance and glorify the character of the Trump administration’s role provoked a blistering response from San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, familiar to U.S. TV viewers as she had appeared in news videos for days, often waist-deep in floodwater, vigorously assisting in relief efforts. As the Times article described the reaction, “… the disconnect between what officials in Washington were saying and the situation on the ground in Puerto Rico was captured on live television by the response of the mayor of San Juan when she was played a clip of the Homeland Security secretary, Elaine Duke, saying that she was ‘very satisfied’ with the government’s response.” Mayor Cruz seemed especially angered by Duke’s reference to her administration’s involvement as “a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place.”

When shown a video clip of Duke’s claims, Mayor Cruz responded with a retort that instantly became historically iconic:

“This is, damn it, this is not a good news story. This is a ‘people are dying’ story. This is a ‘life or death’ story. This is ‘there’s a truckload of stuff that cannot be taken to people’ story. This is a story of a devastation that continues to worsen.”

Cruz seized TV news opportunities to emphasize that the Trump administration’s rosy claims conflicted with realities on the ground. Meyer cites a CNN interview where the mayor again responded to acting DHS secretary Duke’s “good news story” self-praise:

“Well maybe from where she’s standing, it’s a good news story …. When you’re drinking from a creek, it’s not a good news story. When you don’t have food for a baby, it’s not a good news story. When you have to pull people down from buildings – I’m sorry, that really upsets me and frustrates me.”

Cruz, reported Meyer,

adds that Duke’s comments were not in line with the support the White House has otherwise offered. Then, later that same day, speaking at a press conference, Cruz warned: “We are dying here. If we don’t get the food and the water into the people’s hands, we are going to see something close to a genocide.”

The battle between the Trump administration (and particularly Trump himself, in Twitter messages and news media statements) and the mayor of the territory’s capital city was quickly turning the public focus on Puerto Rica into a scrutiny of Trump’s federal response and bombast versus on-site media reports and the mayor’s impassioned warnings. The Hurricane Maria debacle was rapidly morphing into Trump’s “Katrina”.

Clearly stung by Mayor Cruz’s passionate criticism and appeals for aid, Trump lights into her with a barrage of Twitter messages, initiating a feud that will last for weeks. But his comments patently express an arrogant disdain not just for the female mayor, but for the masses of the Puerto Rican population as a whole. In one message (cited by Meyer) he seemingly avers that the island’s workers are lazy moochers:

Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

In another message, Trump attacked “politically motivated ingrates” who, he claimed, were failing to properly recognize his administration’s relief efforts. [7]

Meanwhile, the massive federal relief supply snafu continues, and even seems to worsen. In a Sep. 29th report headlined «Puerto Rico supply failure stops food and water reaching desperate residents» the Guardian reports:

Nine days after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, thousands of containers of food, water and medicine are stuck in ports and warehouses on the island, as logistical problems continue to stop desperately needed supplies from reaching millions of Americans. In many parts of the US territory, food, medicine and drinking water are scarce, and amid a growing humanitarian crisis, local researchers have suggested the death toll could be much higher than the 16 deaths reported so far.

As TV news reports and video images continue to highlight a population still suffering largely without electric power, communications, or fuel, engaged in a horrific and dangerous struggle for bare necessities such as clean water, food, and secure housing facilities. Yet Trump continues to stream boasts of his own valor, illustrated in an Oct. 1st Twitter barrage summarized by Meyer:

President Trump continues tweeting about the success of the recovery effort. “We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico. Outside of the Fake News or politically motivated ingrates, people are now starting to recognize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great Military,” he says in two posts. He also seems to imply that all buildings across the island have now been “inspected for safety,” a claim repeated by no other federal agency.

In a Sep. 30th commentary titled «A True Moment of National Disgrace» Talking Points Memo publisher and editor Josh Marshall provided some perspective on “how this all unfolded”:

For a critical three or four days after Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, President Trump was away at his New Jersey golf resort, ranting about the NFL and generally not paying attention. It now seems that wasn’t merely a matter of optics and presidential statements. Critical time was lost and things didn’t happen. Once the scope of catastrophe began to become clear, Trump’s inaction began to generate criticism. Once that happened Trump proceeded to fold Puerto Rico into his comfort zone politics of grievance and narcissism. The focus shifted to Puerto Rico’s debt, ingratitude and – finally this morning [Sep. 30th] – laziness and disorganization.

Finally, on Oct. 3rd, almost exactly two weeks after Maria had struck, Trump visited the island, staging it as the familiar kind of photo-op “celebrity” styled event that he’d already tried out in South Texas and Florida following Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. This time, in one of his earliest comments {summarized in a report by Meyer), he lodged a complaint about the problems that Puerto Rico’s distress was inflicting upon his federal budget:

“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” he says at a news conference with the territory’s leaders. “That’s fine. We saved a lot of lives.”

Then, in an apparent attempt to take the heat off his own negligence and mismanagement, he began downplaying the severity of Puerto Rico’s devastation, starting with feigned “praise” for having a lower death toll than New Orleans after Katrina:

“Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here and what is your death count? Sixteen people, versus in the thousands,” he says. “You can be very proud.”

As has been now widely noted, the death toll figure (of which Puerto Ricans should be “very proud”?) used by Trump was preliminary and in flux. By mid-October, it had risen to nearly 50, and is continuing to increase.

But by far the most iconic images from Trump’s “caregiver-in-chief” appearance on Puerto Rico are captured when (as Meyer describes in his summary) “he tosses relief supplies, including paper towels and toilet paper, into a crowd of onlookers.” This gesture by Trump at a disaster relief distribution center in San Juan provided a basis for a tidal wave of contempt and ridicule, and will likely endure in historical infamy.

«Donald Trump Helps Suffering Puerto Ricans By Throwing Paper Towels At Them» headlined an Oct. 3rd article on the event posted in the Huffington Post, with the added subhead: “We never thought we’d write this headline.” As the article relates, “A small number of the more than 3 million residents in Puerto Rico still without power were gifted paper towels, which Trump apparently thought was the most pressing need for those in the crowd …” adding that “Video of the event shows him tossing the paper towels like a child trying to play basketball.”

In a commentary published Oct. 4th in the Guardian with the headline «Trump came to Puerto Rico like an emperor: with pomp and little sympathy» freelance journalist Susanne Ramirez de Arellano excoriated Trump and his antics bitterly, noting “The president’s visit to the hurricane-stricken island – in which he threw paper towels and bags of rice into a crowd – seemed to be an exercise of self-congratulation”. Her trenchant comments target Trump’s imperial arrogance:

President Donald Trump arrived in Puerto Rico like an emperor, coming to scold his uncooperative subjects. “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” he said during a visit to the island on Tuesday. He might as well have blamed us for throwing ourselves in the path of a hurricane. Apart from the cost, the worst part about this catastrophe for Trump seems to be how damn ungrateful these Puerto Ricans are. The president called the mayor of San Juan, the capital, a “politically motivated ingrate” over the weekend. Then, on Tuesday, he suggested the island was exaggerating its woes. Puerto Rico isn’t facing “a real catastrophe like Katrina” the president said. Just grow up and stop all your whining, in other words.

Her commentary poignantly contrasts Trump’s self-serving braggadocio with the painful realities actually being experienced by the population:

Trump arrived on the island more than two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit. Despite what he claims, the situation is still devastating. Only 5% of the electrical grid has been repaired; only 17% of the cellphone towers are working and more than half the island has no running water. Most of Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million citizens have to stand every day in hellish lines for food, water, gas and medicines. This is the new normal for us and our families. Yet, the president spent much of his time on the island patting his administration on the back for how well it is handling everything. “You can be very proud. Everybody around this table and everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s been taking place in Puerto Rico,” he said. During a “press conference” at the Luis Muñiz air national guard base in San Juan – in which he took no questions from the press – Trump praised the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, military commanders and a half-dozen members of his cabinet, who accompanied him to Puerto Rico. He reserved nothing, not one word of encouragement and empathy for the Puerto Rican people, who are the ones that have shouldered the brunt of this tragedy all by themselves. Many don’t agree at all with Trump’s rosy self-assessment. On Tuesday, Oxfam America released a rare statement criticizing the administration for its response to the disaster: “The US has more than enough resources to mobilize an emergency response but has failed to do so in a swift and robust manner.”

Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman later (Oct. 12th) captured the meme with the story headline «Let Them Eat Paper Towels». “From the beginning,” wrote Krugman, “Donald Trump – who literally seems to think that he deserves praise for throwing a few rolls of paper towels into a crowd – has suggested that Puerto Rico is responsible for its own disaster, and he has systematically denigrated the efforts of its people to take care of one another. In Krugman’s view,

It’s hard to make an accurate assessment of the initial emergency response to Hurricane Maria, although there are a number of indications that it was woefully inadequate, falling far short of the response to natural disasters in other parts of the United States. What is clear, however, is that recovery has been painfully slow, and that life is actually getting worse for many residents as the cumulative effects of shortages of power, water and food take their toll. And the Trump administration seems increasingly to see this tragedy as a public relations issue, something to be spun – partly by blaming the victims – rather than as an urgent problem to be solved.

The pattern of Trump’s self-congratulations vs. the island’s deteriorating realities continued. On Oct. 12th, in an editorial headlined «A Disaster in the White House for Puerto Rico» the New York Times commented that “Mr. Trump’s salvo of tweets on Thursday as the island struggled with devastation – suggesting people were ingrates responsible for much of their suffering – set a new low, even meaner than his usual harangues and self-aggrandizement.” The editorial went on to underscore that

Three weeks after the hurricanes, Puerto Rico remained devastated, with at least 45 dead, 84 percent of the island still without electricity, most cellphone towers down, and less than 10 percent of the 5,000 miles of roads open. The shortage of potable water is so severe that officials fear residents might be tapping toxic Superfund sites.

Subsequently the water crisis apparently continued to worsen. On Oct. 17th, NBC News reported that “The Environmental Protection Agency says people are getting desperate and breaking into potentially contaminated water wells, while several people have already died from bacterial infections.”

Apparently peeved and disgusted with the criticism he was receiving over his administration’s fumbled “recovery” activities and his own self-congratulatory boasting, on Oct. 12th Trump began threatening to pull the plug on relief efforts altogether. As the Washington Post that da reported his threat, in a story by Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe headlined «Trump threatens to abandon Puerto Rico recovery effort»,

President Trump served notice Thursday that he may pull back federal relief workers from Puerto Rico, effectively threatening to abandon the U.S. territory amid a staggering humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Declaring the U.S. territory’s electrical grid and infrastructure to have been a “disaster before hurricanes,” Trump wrote Thursday that it will be up to Congress how much federal money to appropriate to the island for its recovery efforts and that relief workers will not stay “forever.” Three weeks after Maria made landfall, much of Puerto Rico, an island of 3.4 million people, remains without power. Residents struggle to find clean water, hospitals are running short on medicine, and commerce is slow, with many businesses closed. Trump on Thursday sought to shame the territory for its own plight. He tweeted, “Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes.” … He also wrote: “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!”

Trump’s threats and disparaging comments were provoking increasingly angry and forceful pushback from a wide spectrum of Puerto Ricans, including capitalist political leaders such as Mayor Cruz. In an interview published Oct. 16th in the Huffington Post, the mayor’s remarks were becoming increasingly candid. “I have learned in this disaster of a situation many things …” she told the reporter. “One is that we will no longer be able to hide our poverty and our inequality with palm trees and piña coladas; and two, that the dialogue, the discourse and what you’re seeing have to go hand in hand.” (Apparently she meant that official pronouncements about the recovery effort needed to match the reality of the crisis that was obvious to those seeing and experiencing it.)

Why did she think the federal government’s response to Puerto Rico’s distress had been so insufficient? According to the report, “she does have at least one theory ….”

“It may be easy to try to disregard us,” Cruz Soto said. “It may be easy because we’re a U.S. territory and a colony of the United States. But we are people dammit and I don’t care what the political status is.”

Despite Trump’s “great”, “amazing” emergency relief gestures, Puerto Rico’s electric power crisis has, if anything, gotten worse, As of mid-October, 83% of the territory still lacked electricity, and the prospect for timely improvement was poor. Prashad relates that “Power company officials said it would take at least four, if not six, months for the power to be fully restored to Puerto Rico.” He emphasizes: “This is on territory that is under U.S. government control ….”

(By late October, a new squabble was brewing over a relatively huge $300 million power restoration project contract awarded by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to Whitefish Energy, a tiny, little-known Montana firm with some links to the Trump administration, and particularly Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The New York Post cited unusual aspects about the contract and suggested hanky-panky in an Oct. 24th article with a headline that captured the essence of the controversy: «No-name firm with Zinke ties lands $300M Puerto Rico power contract».)

As news reports and videos have made evident, the U.S. military – to the especially enthusiastic applause of liberal pundits and activists, and Democratic Party politicians – has been deeply involved in the federal “relief” activity for Puerto Rico. But, warns the revolutionary Marxist biweekly Workers Vanguard (in the Oct. 6th issue previously cited), the military occupation may be more about maintaining control over the population than providing actual aid:

Presented with deep-going suffering and desperation, Washington responded how it knows best: with gunboats and a military occupation. … With shelters running out of supplies and long lines for what little there is, the armed forces were mobilized primarily to assert control over the island and to contain any social outburst.

As the article details, as of early October,

A three-star general, Jeffrey Buchanan, has been placed in charge of the “relief” efforts. By the end of the first week, over 7,000 U.S. troops had arrived in Puerto Rico, including over 1,000 marines and sailors on two amphibious assault ships off the island’s coast. National Guardsmen were patrolling urban streets, while other soldiers engaged in clearing operations. The 101st Airborne Division, elite killers known for suppressing major civil unrest, like in 1967 black Detroit, are flying Blackhawk helicopters over San Juan.

WV also raises doubt about the purity of FEMA’s “humanitarian” intentions, and casts a limelight on its role in Trump’s “caregiver” charade:

Paving the way for military rule is what the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is all about. When FEMA, now part of Homeland Security, was in its infancy, Reagan administration officials made plans for it to set up the infrastructure for military dictatorship in the event of a “national emergency.” True to form, days passed before FEMA bothered to contact some mayors of Puerto Rican cities, and even then 10,000 shipping containers full of food and other aid continued to sit undistributed at the Port of San Juan. When the capital city’s mayor sharply criticized FEMA for perpetuating suffering, Trump shot back with racist arrogance typical of the U.S. rulers, lambasting the victims as “politically motivated ingrates” who “want everything to be done for them.” The federal government’s criminal indifference toward the lives of U.S. imperialism’s Spanish-speaking, dark-skinned colonial subjects recalls the rulers’ treatment of black people in post-Katrina New Orleans.

WV’s cautions about the dubious mission of FEMA are bolstered by other analyses. For example, in a 2006 report «Civil Defense and Homeland Security: A Short History of National Preparedness Efforts», the Bush administration’s Homeland Security National Preparedness Task Force documents the original military mission envisioned for FEMA. Similarly, in «FEMA and Disaster – a Look at What Worked and What Didn’t From a FEMA Insider», posted 3 Aug. 2011 in Truthout, former FEMA employee Leo Bosner revealed: “FEMA’s real mission? Prepare for ‘The Big One,’ the nuclear war with the Soviets.”

More recently, a Sep. 3rd Wired article by Garrett M. Graff titled «The Secret History of FEMA» notes that FEMA’s “primary mission” was originally focused on the possibility of nuclear war – “coordinating the nation’s post-apocalypse efforts”. Thus “the majority of its funding and a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation’s classified black budget. “.

And in «Contingency Plans», published 9 Nov. 2014 in Jacobin magazine, Matthew Cunningham-Cook provides some corroboration to the report of FEMA’s plans for prison camps to contain unrest (particularly on the part of America’s black population), revealing that “In a never-before-released thesis, [former President] Reagan’s FEMA director discussed the potential internment of millions of blacks in concentration camps.”

Sharply criticizing leading Democrats for raising calls for more military intervention (to suppress supposed “looting and crime”), WV warns:

While U.S. troops have participated in “search and rescue” and have distributed some food and supplies, their main function is not to help the island’s population but to impose reactionary “law and order.” They are to hunt down “looters,” in reality survivors foraging for life’s necessities, especially those who go out after dark. An extended nighttime curfew, a precursor of martial law, was imposed from the first by right-wing Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló. That flunky of the imperialists has also pleaded for a greater U.S. military presence in order to head off “a mass exodus” to the mainland. Washington could not agree more with that objective and has stationed military personnel at the commercial airports.

In any case, as noted previously, Trump has been hinting that he’s basically fed up with the controversy over his Puerto Rican policy, and is ready to pull the plug on the federal aid effort. In a Twitter message, Trump warned: “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!” [8]

Cuba: How collectivized economy can battle disaster

As this analysis has demonstrated – even in the USA, certainly one of the most industrially advanced capitalist societies on the planet – capitalism’s private-profit-based social-economic system not only is increasingly unable to adequately cope with natural disasters, it actually exacerbates their destruction and impairs the protection of the population in at least three ways:

• Capitalism worsens destructive impacts through harmful and potentially dangerous land uses, inadequate construction regulations, and similar measures favorable to short-term private profit generation.

• Capitalism fails to adequately prepare for major destructive events, even when they are known to be imminent.

• Capitalism fails to provide adequate mobilizations for relief and recovery of impacted populations. Lower-income segments of the population in particular are most adversely affected, and on the whole may never fully recover from such events.

These deficiencies have been evident during the hegemony of previous federal administrations, both Democratic (liberal) and Republican (conservative-reactionary). And government assistance to victims is consistently riddled with policy holes and exceptions. In regions that have suffered massive disasters – wildfires, earthquakes, floods, mudslides, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other events – large masses of the population still have never fully recovered. [9] Basically, what cumulative evidence strongly suggests is that in any capitalist society, with virtually all resources concentrated in the possession of and controlled by a powerfully affluent ruling elite, no matter which political faction controls the state, the system itself will have a role in worsening the impact of any natural disaster, and will never have sufficient resources to adequately replace what is lost.

But the policies and actions of Donald Trump and his “Nazi Circus” administration, representing an escalation of class warfare by America’s capitalist ruling elite, have demonstrated a willingness to advance an implementation of policies that are significantly more brazen, crass, cavalier, and vicious compared to previous recent modern federal regimes. In RAN’s view, this reflects the ongoing degeneration of modern capitalism, and its deteriorating ability to adequately sustain a modern civilized society. (This degeneration is also reflected in a greater trend toward such phenomena as state repression, imperialist competition, and ever more devastating military conflicts.)

In terms of disaster preparation and response, is there an alternative to the capitalist model? Cuba’s collectivized economic system – a basically workingclass economic and property form – offers a possible example. Despite the control of the Cuban state by a fundamentally anti-revolutionary, authoritarian, potentially treacherous bureaucracy, Cuba’s collectivized workingclass-type economy has enabled it to survive tremendous disadvantages and the prevalent hostility of a country (the USA) roughly 29 times its size.

Cuba has also excelled at surviving hurricanes. Thus a comparison with Puerto Rico in this regard would be instructive. In its Oct. 6th analysis focused on Puerto Rico, Workers Vanguard does hint at such a comparison:

One indication of the advantages of the collectivized economy over the capitalist system of production for private profit is the success the Cuban workers state has had in protecting its population from hurricanes. As a matter of course, the government provides early forecasting, educates and mobilizes the population and has arrangements in place for shelters, transport, food and medical backup. Often, hurricanes rake the island without any fatalities at all. This year, Hurricane Irma slammed Cuba and killed ten people, but even so, the island is in far better shape than Puerto Rico and others in the Caribbean that were ravaged by storms. Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Rogelio Sierra Diaz, even offered to send electricity workers and medics to assist Puerto Rico.

Vijay Prashad’s previously cited Oct. 16th Counterpunch analysis «A Tale of Two Islands» is actually a more extended comparison of how the two islands, with counterposed social-economic systems, fared in their respective encounters with hurricanes. As he relates,

Irma, a Category 5 hurricane – the strongest possible – struck Cuba with immense force in early September. The storm came fast and hard. The devastation was severe. … Ten people died, the majority of them in Havana.”

As in Puerto Rico, flooding was a massive problem. In one small town, over 95% of homes were destroyed. “Havana, with its old buildings, suffered from flooding and power cuts …” reports Prashad.

Nevertheless, Cuba had been able to prepare for the hurricane, and had been highly mobilized. As WV relates, in the face of disaster threats, “Cuba’s high level of preparedness is maintained despite the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and the country’s relative poverty, which has been deepened by over five decades of U.S. economic embargo.”

Prashad discusses Cuba’s preparations further, noting that

… the island’s preparation for the hurricane and the general community spirit that prevails there saved it from total devastation. Tens of thousands of people had been evacuated from Havana in anticipation of the storm, and over a million people from across the island went into shelters. One such shelter was at the Karl Marx Vocational Pre-University in Matanzas, where volunteers gathered food, water and medical supplies for the evacuees. The country’s pharmaceutical industry halted production of medicines a week before the storm in order to build up the stock of hydration salts, which were then distributed across the island. Electricity and gas supplies were cut before the storm came to the island, and measures were taken to protect the lines and transformers from the impact of the winds and the flooding. The government made sure to dispatch flour to state bakeries, which worked overtime to produce stocks of bread for the aftermath of the storm. Agricultural workers from Santiago de Cuba harvested their crops before they ripened in the field and distributed the produce.

Cuba was also prepared to mobilize a vigorous post-storm relief and reconstruction effort. As Prashad relates,

… brigades and defence councils began to conduct search-and-rescue operations across the areas most affected by the hurricane. But rebuilding was not left to later. Radio Cadena Agramonte in Camaguey reported during the storm that electric workers had begun to restore power in the area. Within weeks, such workers restored the electric grid, which is not anyway in the best shape. The electric providers reported that the storm destroyed two high-tension pylons, downed 3,616 poles and 2,176 kilometres of power lines, and damaged 1,379 transformers and several substations. Today, almost the entire island has electrical power.

The glaring contrast between disaster preparations and recovery efforts in collectivized Cuba vs. the bizarre mayhem in capitalist America’s neocolonial stepchild of Puerto Rico leads WV to draw a larger lesson:

What has happened to Puerto Rico is a stark indictment of the barbarous, irrational capitalist-imperialist system and its insatiable drive for profit. Even as the U.S. ruling class amasses ill-gotten gains by exploiting workers at home, it retards the development of the colonial and neocolonial world to the same end. As long as capitalism remains, it will reproduce catastrophe over and over.

Summing it up: an object lesson that suggests a path to action.

References

[1] See: Are Trump’s Poll Numbers Ticking Up?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/are-trumps-poll-numbers-ticking-up

[2] See RAN’s analysis of 21 June 2017: «American capitalism enters a darker new era»

2017/06/21/american-capitalism-enters-a-darker-new-era/

[3] See, for example:

White House Buries Controversial News Under Hurricane Harvey Watch

http://time.com/4917040/white-house-buries-controversial-news-under-hurricane-harvey/

[4 See, for example:

• Disasters

https://reliefweb.int/disasters?date=20170101-20180101#content

• Wildfires Rage Across the American West

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/09/wildfires-rage-across-the-american-west/538977/

• Hurricane Harvey is a billion-dollar disaster – America’s 10th in 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/01/hurricane-harvey-us-billion-dollar-weather-disasters-2017

• Hurricane Harvey, Climate Change Denialists and the Wrath of the Right

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/31/hurricane-harvey-climate-change-denialists-and-the-wrath-of-the-right/

[5] See, for example: Houston knew it was at risk of flooding, so why didn’t the city evacuate?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/27/us/houston-evacuation-hurricane-harvey/index.html

[6] See 10 Numbers That Explain Hurricane Maria’s Devastating Toll On Puerto Rico

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-by-numbers_us_59c541bde4b01cc57ff1fcb5

[7] See, for example:

‘Out Of Whack’: The Most Jaw-Dropping Remarks From Trump’s Puerto Rico Trip

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-jaw-dropping-remarks-puerto-rico-trip

[8] Also see: Trump Attacks Puerto Rico, Threatens to Pull Emergency Responders

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-attacks-puerto-rico-threatens-pull-emergency-responders-n810036

[9] See, for example:

• On New Jersey’s Bayshore, Waiting For A Post-Sandy Recovery That Never Came

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/money-island-superstorm-sandy-recovery_us_59f3a2c7e4b077d8dfc9bc97

• The Rebuilding Years, Post-Sandy

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-5-years-rebuilding.html

• Five Years After Sandy, Are We Better Prepared?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/nyregion/five-years-after-sandy-are-we-better-prepared.html

Some content has been edited slightly since it was first posted on 29 October 2017.

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