At least 511 dead in Brazilian floods: Brazil's deadliest natural disaster in history

[malaise]

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1727
<snip>
Torrential rains inundated a heavily populated, steep-sloped area about 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday and Wednesday, triggering flash floods and mudslides that have claimed at least 511 lives. Rainfall amounts of approximately 300 mm (12 inches) fell in just a few hours in the hardest-hit regions, Teresopolis and Nova Friburgo. Many more people are missing, and the death toll is expected to go much higher once rescuers reach remote villages that have been cut off from communications. The death toll makes the January 2011 floods Brazil's worst single-day natural disaster in its history. Brazil suffers hundreds of deaths each year due to flooding and mudslides, but the past 12 months have been particularly devastating. Flooding and landslides near Rio in April last year killed 246 people and did about $13 billion in damage, and at least 85 people perished last January during a similar event.

[blindpig]

1. Poverty, ecological devastation, capitalism....

all of a piece.

[social_critic]

2. Communism caused some of the worst environmental disasters on Earth

Blaming capitalism for floods in Brazil is indeed bizarre. When one thinks of Chernobyl, the Aral Sea, and other enormous environmental disasters we found in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it's beyond bizarre, it's just funny.

[blindpig]

3. Bad things, indeed, and largely the result of following...

capitalist industrial practice too closely. What good is history if we do not learn from it? Consider Cuba, now the most sustainable nation on the planet.

The ecological destruction of Capitalism, spread across the breath of the Earth, does not in any one place match the disaster of the Aral Sea, but it's a work in progress. In Amazonia and the Mato Grosso, in all of the forests of Southeast Asia, the utter destruction of the watershed of the Marcellus Shale, the mutilation of the Gulf of Mexico, the extensive brown fields of the NE US, the Mississippi as a massive sewer, and on and on and on we can see the result of the priority of profits.

Is that funny?