This sign at a recent demonstration against Genocide in Gaza correctly links the deaths and power outages during Hurricanes Helene and Milton and FEMA’s slow response and underfunding to the $billions the US is spending for weapons to Israel to commit genocide. The imperialists attack US workers to attack the Palestinian masses ! The sign calls for “Free Palestine,” a goal that can only be met with communist revolution.
ERWIN, TENNESSEE (US), October 3 — “Why did they make us come to work that day? Why didn’t they let us leave? It all comes down to greed if you ask me. It broke my heart that they didn’t make it. Every one of them was good people.” said a worker from Impact Plastics in Erwin, Tennessee.
He was talking about six co-workers, white workers, and Latino/a immigrant workers (including two women) who were killed because, even though water was already up to the doors and covering their cars, the bosses wouldn’t let them leave work.
When the bosses finally let them leave, a full 15 minutes after the plant lost power, flood water was sweeping through the area. Many families are furious at the plastics factory owners whose greed turned Hurricane Helene into a tragic human disaster.
An Impact Plastics worker, Jacob Ingram, said lives could have been saved had workers been allowed to leave the facility sooner. When the flooding started, the managers only told the workers to move their cars.
“We should have evacuated then, but they wouldn’t let us,” he said. “I didn’t hear anyone say ‘leave’ or nothing like that. I asked one of the higher ups. They told me ‘No, not yet,’ even though the water was already above the doors and the cars and everything else.
Ingram was swept away by floodwaters. He had to struggle to climb on top of a semi-truck to get to higher ground. The driver of the truck, with only few minutes to spare, rescued Ingram and some of his co-workers by backing up his truck into the flood waters to save them.
Erwin is in eastern Tennessee. This is in Appalachia, a mountain region whose environment has been devastated by the unchecked greed of the logging and coal industries. It has little-to-no infrastructure to withstand devastating storms.
Historically, the poorest workers, mostly, but not all, white, have lived in company towns in this area, with extreme exploitation and poverty. These workers, especially the miners, have been the most consistently militant white US-born workers. They have waged armed class struggle against the mine owners and the US government for over a hundred years.
Now, as at Impact Plastics, they are joined by Latino immigrant workers, who also come from areas with a long history of class struggle and armed insurrections against capitalism and imperialism. This creates the material basis for their unity and solidarity.
Over one thousand people are reported still missing in the Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina and Tennessee areas. The official death toll now stands at over two hundred. Local residents fear it will be over two thousand. They claim whole towns and many isolated individual houses were swept away by the raging waters. Many roads are still impassable because many bridges were swept away.
The flooding has continued. The crumbling US infrastructure isn’t capable of protecting workers in the face of climate change devastation caused by capitalism. In fact, FEMA, created to give aid in disasters like this, says it won’t have the money to cover the hurricane season.
Some in the bosses’ media claim that FEMA has no money to help hurricane victims because it used all its funding to help migrants. “That is pure racism. They are looking for a scapegoat to get US workers to blame migrant workers for these deaths,” said a FedEx worker when a couple of ICWP members discussed these events with him.
“You are right,” responded the comrades. “US rulers super exploit migrant workers in their industries to maximize their profits and are now scapegoating them to cover up that they have no money for disaster relief but billions for Israel’s genocidal war and for Ukraine.”
Hurricane Helene’s strength was a result of the extremely warm water in the Gulf of Mexico due to capitalist caused global warming. The communist masses will eliminate production for profit and organize production and all life in harmony with the environment to reverse and end the devastation caused by global warming.
Capitalism is deadly in every way! The unity and anger shown by Erwin workers need to and will become a revolutionary communist tidal wave as we build ICWP and spread Red Flag.