America First! Privatizing FEMA Will Kill Americans, But At Least the Hurricanes Will Have Patriotic Names.
On the nationalism deception.
If there’s one silver lining to the first week of Donald Trump’s second presidency, it’s that he’s made my job extremely easy.
The primary goal of my writing is to bring leftist theory and political analysis out of complex historical texts, refine them with modern language, and explain how they help solve our 21st-century problems. One such ageless critique voiced by everyone from Karl Marx to Hasan Piker is how the ruling class employs nationalism to distract and divide the working class so capitalist exploitation can continue unchallenged. By falsely claiming that American minimum wage workers have more in common with American billionaires than they do with Canadian, Mexican, or any foreign worker, capitalists can stave off collective labor actions that challenge their power.
“Nationalism is presented in the form of the slogan “national culture” for the purpose of deceiving simpletons.” — Vladimir Lenin, “Corrupting the Workers with Refined Nationalism”
Once the workers buy into this misconception, they will abandon not only international working-class solidarity but also broad labor movements within their own country. To put this in a modern American context, the rightist campaign to position unionizing Starbucks baristas as woke “un-American” workers has convinced far too many ordinary Americans to turn against Starbucks unionization efforts. Once that division is created, it’s easy for bosses to destroy mechanisms that help all workers, such as the ongoing push to eliminate the National Labor Relations Board. In this way, nationalism hurts every worker and helps every capitalist.
When I previously tried to illustrate this point, it required lengthy articles and in-depth analysis of modern events, such as an intra-MAGA Twitter fight and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But after one week of Trump 2.0 (and I can’t believe it’s only been a single week), it’s looking like my work will be a lot easier. After all, I don’t think there’s any way I could highlight the nationalism bait-and-switch better than the forty-seventh President.
For-Profit Disaster Relief Is A Historically Dumb Idea
Last week, between stops in hurricane-ravaged North Carolina and still-smoldering Los Angeles, Trump floated the particularly terrible idea of privatizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, commonly known as FEMA. It was odd timing, kind of like announcing you’re going to end Alcoholics Anonymous after visiting a rehab center. With the conservative ecosystem on board (see below), it didn’t take the president long to sign an executive order creating a task force to “review” FEMA and recommend changes.1 I’ll bet every dollar to my name that the “recommendation” is to privatize the agency and award the contract to one of Trump’s millionaire donors. After all, privatizing FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) were two proposals in the infamous Project 2025.
Not to be a woke coastal elite lib or anything, but I think the federal government should help Americans survive natural disasters. And that’s something FEMA does quite well. Over the past four years,2 the agency has:
Provided $12 billion directly to disaster survivors,
Distributed over 50.8 million liters of water, 31.4 million meals, and 2,225 generators to communities in need, and
Given more than $133 billion to states and local governments to rebuild destroyed infrastructure.
One startling fact about the relief agency is how active FEMA is. Over the last four years, FEMA personnel have been on the ground in a disaster area for eight hundred and eighty-five days. That means that 60.6% of the time, FEMA is actively working to save American lives. And, as data shows, more often than not, it is Trump’s own voters who receive the bulk of this assistance.
According to the Census Bureau, the states that receive the most money through FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program (IHP), which delivers money and resources to individual families hurt by natural disasters, are Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. Florida, which voted for Trump by 13 points, received $2,514,393,663 in 2021; Louisiana (+22 for Trump) received $2,440,034,579; and Texas (+13 for Trump) received $2,173,613,809.3 While these are the only three states to use more than a billion in FEMA funds, the strong blue states of New York and California, which are often derided for their “financial irresponsibility,” receive far less. California only took $300 million, about 12% of Florida’s total grant.
Were the privatization of FEMA to be implemented, it would hurt red-state Americans far more than their blue-state counterparts. While privatizing a disaster relief agency sounds like a dystopian horror ripped from The Boys, unfortunately, it is has real world precedent.
Following Hurricane Katrina, thousands of refugees were stranded in impromptu shelters while they waited for transportation. The government had promised buses would be coming to take them to safety, but after a week, they were still stuck in New Orleans. The year after Katrina, local journalists discovered the federal contract for relief vehicles was awarded to Landstar Express America, Inc., a company that doesn’t actually own any buses. The Landstar chairman was well-connected to the Bush family, serving as the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and being appointed by Florida Governor Jeb Bush to an advisory council. In October 2005, Landstar reported that the government contract had earned the company $129.8 million during the year’s third quarter (when Katrina hit New Orleans). But Landstar never delivered the buses. After a week without transportation, FEMA personnel and other first responders started calling tour bus guides throughout the South to transport victims to safety.4
If Trump does do what his big dollar donors tell him to, this is what red-state voters can look forward to the next time a hurricane washes away their entire lives. They’ll expect someone from the government to come and help pull their children out of the rubble. After all, that is a core function of government, and a reasonable person would expect as much. Instead, they’ll be forced to navigate a tangled web of faceless entities created only so Trump’s rich friends can take a cut of their tax dollars while offering little to no help. In a perfect world, these working-class voters would recognize either through data or geography that they are the most likely to need FEMA assistance and would seek political candidates that improve the program, not abolish it.
But as you know, America is not perfect. In fact, it’s as far from perfect as Melania’s bed is from her husband’s.
A few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, he pledged to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Everyone from Barstool Sports to sitting congressmen got really excited and made it their number one issue, because apparently this is the most pressing issue facing Americans. (41 million Americans are food insecure by the way.)
And here we see the true vitriol of nationalist deception. Given all signs point to Trump privatizing FEMA, the next time a hurricane blows through the gulf and devastates Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, there will be less money for the victims to rebuild their lives. Why? Because the conservative political establishment reintroduced the profit motive to disaster relief. That will turn the directive of disaster relief from a public agency asking, “How can we get the most resources to the most Americans in the shortest time?” to a private company asking “How can we maximize profit off of this mass-casualty event?” As the survivors of Katrina know, those are two very different questions with very different answers. A fully privatized FEMA will look like the Landstar failure on steroids. Food providers will use cheap ingredients that don’t give starving children enough calories, healthcare providers will deliver medicine based on whether or not it serves their bottom line, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see relief funds being to be distributed through Trump Coin. To add insult to injury, the vast majority of future climate refugees will have less money to begin with, given Trump’s plan to increase taxes on anyone making under $360,000 (but decrease them on higher earners, of course).
Returning to my original premise, I want to clarify I’m not saying Republican working-class voters should die horrifically in natural disasters. I don’t want anyone to suffer that fate, regardless of their politics. But what I am saying is that the rest of us need to make this message abundantly clear — Trump renamed the Gulf of America to distract his working class supporters with hollow patriotism while, behind the scenes, he was taking orders from Heritage Foundation freaks looking to get rich off national tragedies. As always, we must stress that this is not a unique Trump phenomenon. Most American politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, wave Old Glory with one hand while handing our tax dollars to capitalists with the other. Distracted by the stars, stripes, and hymns, it’s no wonder the apolitical public never sees the full picture. While Donald Trump is the most blatant offender of this practice, pretending he is the only one will let another conman repeat the get-rich-quick scheme once Trump is dead and buried. To cut this social chauvinism off at the knees, it’s time to ditch the jingoism, claims of “real patriotism,” and preach class-based politics that make people immune to such deceptions.
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/26/trump-fema-executive-order
https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20250121/fema-four-years-review
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-fema-red-state-recipients-2019816
https://www.facingsouth.org/2006/01/new-investigation-why-didnt-the-buses-come.html
Whenever Trump says he's going to "review" something, I always feel like he's only saying that to placate his base without actually doing it.
As always, we have to wait and see if he'll actually do this or if he's just speaking out of his ass again.
And if he is serious...fuck that's not going to be good as you pointed out.
The most frustrating part is that politicians reuse the same playbook over and over while the public ignores that this is the “same shit different day” and continues to vote the same capitalist in new clothing into office. But as another SubStacker wrote; “if voting actually worked, it would be made illegal”