The worst flooding in three-quarters of a century is threatening the lives and property of hundreds of thousands of Americans along the Mississippi River. Dozens of small towns and millions of acres of farmland have already flooded as the crest of the Mississippi moves south toward the river’s confluence with the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.
The political establishment and the media will label the devastation as a “natural disaster” and an “act of God.” This has become their preferred method for obscuring the social context within which such tragedies play out.
But, while the record levels of rainfall might be the product of natural forces, the inadequate levee system and crippling poverty of the areas affected are not. Those are man-made conditions, which are the product of a definite social system: capitalism.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the threatened Mississippi Delta region – the area between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers – has a population of approximately 465,000. Despite having some of the richest soil for cotton, rice and corn, nine of the 11 counties bordering the Mississippi River in Mississippi have poverty rates at least double the national average of 13.5 percent.
More than five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and inundated New Orleans after its levees failed, hundreds of thousands of Americans are once again facing catastrophe from the failure of decayed infrastructure.
Just two years ago in its 2009 Infrastructure Report Card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. levee system a grade of “D-.” In the report, the ASCE noted “more than 85 percent of the nation’s estimated 100,000 miles of levees are locally owned and maintained. The reliability of many of these levees is unknown. Many are more than 50 years old and were originally built to protect crops from flooding.”
The ASCE warned there exists “no definitive record of how many levees there are in the U.S., nor is there an assessment of the current condition and performance of those levees” even as FEMA estimated in 2006 that 43 percent of the U.S. population lives in counties with levees.
By all accounts the resources do exist but are squandered on militarism and tax breaks for the richest Americans. The ASCE concluded in 2009 it would take around $100 billion to repair and rehabilitate the nation’s levees – the cost of less than one year of fighting in Afghanistan.
