The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Flooding:
Don’t Blame Mother Nature

Jun 11, 2018

Ellicott City, Maryland, a few miles south of Baltimore, faced its second “thousand-year flood” in just two years, when Maryland was hit with record amounts of rain at the end of May.

Millions have viewed the Ellicott City photos and videos that showed rushing waters, cars floating like toys in a bath tub. One person died there. And sadly, the merchants on the main street had not yet recovered or rebuilt from the same kind of flooding that also rushed in two summers earlier.

The county where Ellicott City is located estimated a price tag of more than 100 million dollars to try to get the overflowing streams and rivers under control, the ones that will continue to flood the area. The floods will continue because the politicians decided they could not afford to spend that amount.

The storms, hurricanes, floods we’re now seeing may be part of global warming, but it is the free rein given to developers that really damaged Ellicott City, and many other places.

The ones who can really afford to pay, since they are the ones behind these problems, are the developers, the banks that lend them money, and Wall Street that encourages them to grow at all costs. They are the ones who should pay for such damage all over the country.

Of course nature can be a problem, but in a rational society, we would control growth and infra-structure for the benefit of the entire population, not for the profits of the capitalist class.