HURRICANE MATTHEW—CAPITALIST DISASTER

Haiti, October 8—Hurricane Matthew has struck Haiti with a vengeance this week, and the working class and the masses are the main victims. According to the latest reports, over 900 are known dead, and more than 500,000 affected by the collapse of tens of thousands poorly built “little box” houses, totally uprooted crops, and untold thousands of farm animals in mainly three departments, South, Southeast and Grand’Anse. With a wholly inadequate infrastructure to begin with, now smashed bridges, washed out roads and mudslides are making recovery of people from rural at-risk areas even more difficult. This disaster is not “natural” as the bosses want us to believe but rather the result of the systematic impoverishment of the Haitian working class by the racist capitalist system. Why it is they who are the victims of the disaster?

Workers and peasants cannot build houses to adequate standards, earning less than $5 a day minimum wage, with which they must feed, dress, pay school fees for their children, etc. How could they not be vulnerable? In communist society everyone will live in a protected place in well-built houses, for the lives of all will be equal.

Workers along the coast who could evacuate moved to higher ground; however, they weren’t safe from rains, winds and mudslides. They didn’t have the safety of concrete houses of the bourgeois. The masses were left to the mercy of the storm and were left largely unprotected. They certainly didn’t have an efficient disaster preparedness system, such as in the U.S. or Cuba, for that matter, where there were well-organized responses and very few fatalities.

To add to the burdens of our class, there has already been a resurgence of cholera. In the last year alone, 26,000 people have become ill. As a result of Matthew, in one town alone, there have been over a dozen deaths and several dozen people sick. Cholera was imported to Haiti in 2010, 10 months after the earthquake, by UN occupation forces (MINUSTAH) from Nepal, where there was an active cholera epidemic. The UN did nothing to test their soldiers as carriers of the disease, but did let them dump their waste into a river in the Artibonite Valley that Haitian workers use for bathing and drinking water. To date, 842,304 have become ill and 10,624 have died from cholera (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/haiti-cholera-counter). A few months ago, the racist UN finally admitted what we all knew and scientists confirmed, that they were guilty of bringing cholera, but so far can’t come up with a plan to do anything to repair the damage. In fact, almost all of the cholera treatment centers have been closed despite the ongoing epidemic. One year’s budget for the UN’s occupying army would pay for a modern and adequate sanitation and clean water infrastructure throughout Haiti. We say , MINUSTAH out of Haiti now!

A hospital in the South visited during this hurricane was horror; no doctors, water flooding all rooms, patients left alone without electricity, nothing. Instead of protecting the masses, capitalist institutions consider themselves a source of their own wealth: NGOs (mainly charities), traditional leaders and politicians are now fighting among themselves for control of projects and funds in the post-storm period. Instead of taking action to prevent the effects of storms, they prepare to exploit and take advantage of the masses’ woes. In a communist society, no one will benefit from the misfortunes of others, workers will build homes, schools, roads, bridges, etc. that serve their needs under all kinds of conditions. When there are no more classes, racial or gender inequality, humanity will be protected.

Moreover, it is the consequences of excessive exploitations of capitalist bosses that the working classes are now paying. Climate change is the result of greed of the exploiters. Water levels are rising, coastlines becoming shallower, and storms will become more dangerous to human populations. Communist society will exploit nature without abusing it, only to meet the needs and ensure the well-being of all.

Join us, workers and peasants everywhere, fake projects and illusions of the leaders in this system will not bring any solution to the problems of our class. They will result in even more to enjoy. Building together a communist world, under the red flag of the PLP!