Another capitalist Infrastructure crisis as Michigan Dams Fail.

10,000 displaced. Another catastrophe of the so called free market. Source

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The pundits and politicians rarely, if ever, make an issue of the 100 million or so registered voters in the US who didn’t bother to vote in 2016. If they do bring this up it is generally to admonish the electoral absentees for their “apathy” or to shame them for their failure to take their democratic responsibilities seriously.  The real reason such a large section of the U.S. population have abandoned electoral politics is that they have decided it really accomplishes nothing of major significance. This situation has been maturing for a long time and a negative side affect is that there is a strong mood among the US population that nothing can be done short of revolution. They are not completely wrong.

If we pay attention to events, the present mood among the US working class is easy to understand. It is a reflection of the objective situation, a response to the material world around us.

In 2017 we had a couple of major infrastructure scares. One of them was the near collapse of the 770 -foot Oroville dam, the tallest in the US. Due to heavy rains, the lake behind the dam was overflowing and the water began to erode a part of the hillside that was a natural (unpaved) spillway. Thousands had to be evacuated.  It turned out that twelve years prior, in 2005, environmental groups and some local government officials warned that the dam’s integrity could be jeopardized and “catastrophic flooding” could result if the natural hillside spillway wasn’t reinforced with concrete or huge boulders that we sometime see at these dam sites. Naturally this was ignored.

Seven years earlier in 2010, 11 workers died when a deep-water drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded spilling millions of gallons of oil in to the gulf. We will never know the effects of this catastrophe spilling so much poison in to the spawning grounds of Bluefin Tuna. After the fact, the New York Times reported that: “Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week.

Yes, this is not a joke. The inspection reports for safety and other aspects of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico were given by government regulators to the employees of the energy companies who wrote them in pencil.

And here we are a decade later, and a couple of years after the near miss with the Oroville dam and countless other market driven disasters and we have two dams in Michigan that have been overwhelmed by rising floodwaters. Both of these dams are privately operated by Boyce Hydro Power LLC.  

One of the dams, the Edenvale, was breached and its spillway capacity was not sufficient to handle the load. We know that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) revoked Edenvale’s license in 2018 because of Boyce Hydro’s refusal to “increase the projects spillway capacity to safely pass flood flows.”, and the failure to comply with regulations. This has led to the present situation where the dam has “outright eroded” and that water would, “continue to inundate the city” of Midland, according to the Wall Street Journal. The dam is in Midland County Michigan.

Another dam, the Sanford dam, was also breached with water flowing over it and some of this water, according to reports in the media, “affected” the village of Sanford and a Dow Chemical plant. Dow admitted that floodwaters were, “comingling with containment ponds” (what these ponds contain can be anyone’s guess but my guess is we can’t drink it) but, that there were no “reported product releases” and that the comingling was not “..a threat to residents and wouldn’t damage the environment.”.

Let that sink in for a minute folks. Dow Chemical Corp unchallenged by the Wall Street Journal owned by the Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox News assures us all is well.

Meanwhile, after the little bit of history I touch on here reminding us of the complete failure of regulation when in the hands of agents of a capitalist state and a body politic dominated by two parties owned and controlled by the likes of Dow Chemical and Wall Street, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission “directed” Boyce Hydro Power LLC to “…form an independent investigative team to analyze the cause of the damage to the Sanford facility.” The fox will save the chickens.  Knock me down with a feather.

I now have the answer as to why there is what some claim an apathy among millions of Americans in the US. An apathy reflected in the abandonment of the electoral process which amounts to a rejection of bourgeois (capitalist) democracy. It’s not because US workers are stupid, apathetic, uneducated, selfish and so on. It’s that the vast majority of US workers have been paying attention to the world around them, after all how could you not notice a collapsed dam, a leaking gas main that blows up a neighborhood, a poisoned river that kills every living thing in it for 60 miles and other happenings and not draw some conclusions.

Along with this, It has not passed people by that they can’t get medical care and if they do it bankrupts them. Millions just happen to notice that the public schools are failing their children and that they need two maybe three jobs to make ends meet. And while that’s bad enough, if the conditions that exist among the black working class and their communities prevailed among whites, the country would be said to be in a state of extreme depression outpacing the 1930’s.

The truth is that the material conditions among the European/white working class have also deteriorated over the past 40 years to the point that the life expectancy of white Americans has declined. This makes it harder for the white racist ruling class to convince this section of society that their interests and the white workers are the same. The positive aspect of this development is that it weakens this divide and rule strategy making working class unity easier.

The era of the dominance of the two parties of capitalism over US economic and political life is over. The “apathetic” are not apathetic at all. They just don’t see a way forward. This has delayed the mass movement and resistance to the savagery of the market and has caused more suffering than necessary. In addition, the lack of leadership, even a reformist one, has prolonged this process. Movements cannot be manufactured but the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything and the revolutionary potential of the US working class will begin to lift its head from under the heel of the arrogant, violent and grossly overconfident US ruling class.