By Flood or by Bullets, RACISM KILLS

The flash flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, home to the July rebellion following the racist police murder of Alton Sterling, is a capitalist disaster. The floods expose both the bosses’ rotten profit system and the working class’s potential to run society without exploitation.
More than 7,000 have been made homeless and are trapped in over-crowded shelters. Thirteen have died and 100,000 homes were damaged. Altogether, 400,000 people were devastated by the floods. Every one of them is a victim of capitalism.
“Natural” Disasters are Preventable
Nature may create massive downpours, but capitalism—a system run by and for the bosses—creates the disasters. After a historic 1983 flood of the Baton Rouge area, the result of an improperly built highway bridge, politicians and government agencies made promises to prevent future problems. But since the capitalist bosses don’t view infrastructure for the working class as a lucrative source of profits, nothing happened. “Local officials began taking steps to improve flood protection systems such as raising highway bridges, upgrading levees and even approving a tax to fund a portion of the project by 2000. However, those efforts were not sustained” (veoci.com, 8/25).
The Comite River Diversion Canal could have protected people and homes, but the project—despite funding by workers’ taxes since 2001—has been delayed for more than 30 years. This isn’t new technology. The human species has been cutting canals since  Mesopotamia around 520 BC.  
Media Blackout, Government Disregard
To avoid distractions from the patriotic zeal of the Rio Olympics, the capitalist media has mostly ignored the worst U.S. disaster since Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As the New York Times’ public editor admitted, “No doubt this is a busy news period….But a news organization like the Times…surely can find a way to cover a storm that has ravaged such a wide stretch of the country’s Gulf Coast.”
The local bosses in Baton Rouge were no better. One resident. Linda Smith, said there were no effective warnings: “We got no calls, no texts, no nothing.” No one was evacuated from the area before the most serious rainfall began.
This disregard is blatantly racist. Black workers in Louisiana have an official unemployment rate of 9.5 percent, more than twice the rate for white workers. Baton Rouge, the state capital and a majority Black city, ranked first in the U.S. for HIV and AIDS case rates in 2013. The vast majority of these cases are in the segregated Black working-class neighborhood of north Baton Rouge, where one-third of Black workers live below the poverty line, and only 46 percent of Black men have graduated from high school (New York Times, 7/11).
Eleven days after the flooding began, President Barack Obama praised the notoriously negligent Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2005, during deadly Hurricane Katrina, FEMA stopped rescue missions and food from reaching families and put people in trailer homes with toxic levels of formaldehyde. More than a decade later, people are still living in these poisonous tin cans!
Learning From Katrina
Some flood victims in Baton Rouge may have already suffered from the racism during Katrina; the city provided refuge for displaced families from New Orleans. Katrina exposed the racist core of capitalism, and how the bosses use disasters for the working class as an opportunity to develop fascist policies for the not-so-distant future. Understanding Katrina can prepare the working class for what to expect and fight today.
The capitalist class and their politicians turned the unnatural disaster Katrina into the mass murder of more than 1,400 mostly Black workers. New Orleans was treated as a war zone. Liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic presidential candidate, called for expanding FEMA’s powers and withdrawing troops from Iraq for deployment in New Orleans. Military units were brought in to protect private property and join the police in harassing what was left of the city’s Black population.
But Black workers and youth took matters into their own hands. They provided water, food, diapers and rescue efforts for families and neighbors. This was working-class collectivity at its best. Meanwhile, the racist capitalist media condemned the workers as looters and violent criminals.
In solidarity with workers in New Orleans, Progressive Labor Party led a summer-long project with political actions, cleanup, and communist ideas, all while the city was still under military occupation. In other cities, PLP organized relief efforts and spread communist politics among refugees in Texas and the Midwest. We mobilized hundreds of workers to attack the liberal bosses’ plan to expand the military occupation. Our slogan: “From New Orleans to Iraq, the working class must fight back!”
Our work in New Orleans taught us how to strengthen solidarity with our working-class sisters and brothers in Baton Rouge. We are following the leadership of these workers, whose instinct for collectivity is apparent as they organize food, shelter and support for each other. As education workers and students head back to school in cities where our Party has concentrations, we can expose the racism of capitalism by making Baton Rouge a center of fightback.
Black Workers’ Revolutionary Leadership
In July, thousands of workers and youth in Baton Rouge rebelled against the local police murder of Alton Sterling. Sterling’s murder was no accident. As one Black worker told PL, “The police who shot him knew him. Knew who he was. These were the same police that always patrol the neighborhood. They knew what they were doing.”
The task of Progressive Labor Party is to help open the floodgates of working-class revolt and channel it toward communist revolution. Baton Rouge is yet another example of Black workers playing the lead role in our multiracial fight for an egalitarian world.