Friend,
In 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto
Rico and sawed through the island. Millions were trapped by floods and
mudslides. Medical facilities were destroyed. Power was down across
the island and it would be 11 months before it
was fully restored.
When the initial death toll
was reported to be 64, we knew that was a lie.
It took a year of sustained pressure from
elected representatives, media, academics and even lawsuits before the
official death toll was finally corrected to over
3,000.
We are living through that outrage again,
right now, in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
The official death toll for Helene stands at
just over 230 – not a small number for natural disasters, but
suspiciously small for this one.
Helene dumped vast quantities of rain and
shocked Appalachia with what was widely described as “Biblical”
flooding and destruction. There were multiple dam failures and whole
towns wiped away. Early warning systems broke down and failed to
notify people to evacuate.
It’s been 20 days, and we are just now getting citizen reports
across social media about severely undercounted deaths. We’re seeing
accounts of people’s homes being swept away by the floods as they
clung, terrified, to their roof. We’re hearing of slow-moving recovery
efforts and people being told they won’t have power restored for
months.
Multibillion
dollar corporations like Walmart reportedly chose to let their food
rot instead of handing out their inventory to hungry people who just
lost everything. Police were called out to guard their stores from
“looting” – not to render assistance.
We don’t know yet what the real death toll
will be from Helene. What we do know is that Helene is just one of
many such devastating super-storms to come.
And we know
why.
Experts estimate that at least 3 million
Americans have already been internally, permanently displaced because
of the climate emergency. Forced to leave their homes and communities
behind and start over from scratch – without their support network and
certainly without adequate assistance from our
government.
Those
numbers will continue to climb, as storms and wildfires increase in
intensity and frequency.
Republicans are gleefully blaming Joe Biden for the destruction
caused by Helene and Milton (and trust me, I’ve got plenty to say
about Joe) – but these same Republicans deliberately blocked emergency
FEMA funding the day before Helene made landfall.
It’s a sick and twisted game where the
corporate uni-party has so thoroughly politicized the climate
emergency that it’s becoming impossible to respond to – let alone
prepare for – these super storms.
And yet, when it comes time to ship billions
of dollars and bombs to Israel to continue slaughtering Palestinians,
Lebanese, and whomever else, both parties rush to write the checks.
We need a
fundamental reordering of our priorities and our
society. We need to urgently
end fossil fuel extraction and begin aggressively developing our
infrastructure to better withstand the storms still to
come.
We need to take
decisions about emergency humanitarian aid out of the hands of
partisan ghouls. We need human-centered policies from
government agencies that are fully resourced and operate with trust
and transparency.
That’s
the kind of government we will build in my administration. And with
only 20 days left in this election I still need your help to reach a
critical mass of voters who haven’t yet decided who to vote
for. |
