The flooding in the US Midwest, which has caused billions of dollars in damage and left tens of thousands homeless, has exposed the neglect and incompetence of the state and federal authorities charged with protecting lives and property along US waterways.
More than 20 levees have failed, topped or breached by floodwaters, with cities and towns along the upper Mississippi and its tributaries inundated and hundreds of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land underwater.
Damage to agriculture is still being assessed. One official with the US Department of Agriculture estimated that 160,000 acres of cropland in Illinois alone have been affected. Previous estimates indicated that 9 percent of Iowa’s corn crop and 8 percent of its soybean crop were flooded. The impact on already spiraling food prices is expected to be significant.
The wholesale failure of the flood protection system in the upper Midwest points to deep systemic problems that highlight the chaos and irrationality endemic to capitalism. There have been a number of media reports pointing out that the failure of the flood protection system had been long predicted.
The human impact of the floods has been severe. The paltry amounts of money doled out by federal disaster relief programs will not begin to compensate for the damage suffered by thousands of homeowners and small businesses. According to a report in the Associated Press, when the town of Gulfport, Illinois on the Mississippi flooded, only 28 homeowners had flood insurance. They were told by FEMA they didn’t need it because the levees were secure against a 100-year flood.
According to a report carried by AP “some FEMA floodplain maps are 20 years old and seriously outdated, based on old evaluations of levees and river conditions.” Nationally, only a tiny percentage of homeowners carry flood insurance, which is often exorbitantly expensive.
Now that floodwaters are subsiding, the attention of the big business politicians and the media is shifting away from the flood-devastated regions, leaving tens of thousands of ordinary people to try to put their lives together as best they can.
The wholesale breakdown of the flood protection system is not simply the result of policy failures of this or that administration. The capitalist system and its political representatives are incapable of implementing the kind of systematic response that is needed which would include upgrading levees, wetland restoration, diversion channels and a range of other measures.
The Midwest floods again demonstrate that the complex needs of mass society are incompatible with a system that subordinates production and economic development to private profit. The stranglehold of private wealth over all facets of economic and political life in the United States insures that no appropriate lessons will be drawn from this round of catastrophic flooding—any more than they were from 1993 and Katrina—and that future and even worse disasters are inevitable.