Monster storms mainly kill the poor

November 5, 2012

In every country, the ravages of climate change fall overwhelming on the poor. The people who grow the world’s food are the ones who starve in the aftermath of hurricanes and typhoons.

While Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Caribbean and the US eastern seaboard, Typhoon Son-Tinh tore through the Philippines, China and Vietnam, killing more than 35 people. As expected from climate change predictions, floods were responsible for most of the damage to life and property. It should be noted however, that these ravages of climate change were, for the most part, unmitigated by social justice.

Those who perished from the mudslides, floods and violent waves were caught by surprise or lacked the wherewithal to move to higher ground. They were overwhelmingly poor.

The mainstream news reports have focused principally on the US and China, as if gross domestic product (GDP) matters most to tropical-cyclone damage. Thus far [by Nov. 2] Sandy’s death toll is: 97 in the US, 54 in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, 2 in Jamaica, 2 in the Bahamas, 2 in the Dominican Republic, one in Puerto Rico and one in Canada. Haiti and the US east coast were hit by a tropical storm, and their fatalities came mainly from the ranks of the poor. By contrast, Cuba was slammed with a category-two hurricane in a populous region including its second largest city of Santiago.

Cuba is still the only country that has named all its dead. Most of Sandy’s other victims have died as nameless as livestock.

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http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/11/05/monster-storms-mainly-kill-the-poor/

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"We have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom – not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy – not to eliminate democracy altogether."

"But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land, after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yes, dictatorship! "

"But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people."

Rosa Luxemburg