Editorial Board
Wildfires sweep Los Angeles, tearing through some of the most expensive real-estate in the country leaving at least 10 dead and counting. Days of high winds have forced cinders to spread with no less than 8 fires raging simultaneously. A drought in effect since October has turned the city into a tinder box. Massive electricity loss to over 100,000 homes and businesses, smoke inhalation, and the depletion of the city’s water supply have spread devastation to all the surrounding lower-income areas.
The city of Los Angeles cut $17.5 million from the fire department only last month. As over 10,000 structures and hundreds of homes have burned, the people must come to grips with the fact that the Los Angeles Police budget has been increased by $126 million to a total of $2.14 billion. 15% of the city’s funds have been diverted to the police leaving only 6% available for the fire department. The police have arrested dozens on alleged “looting” offenses in dense smoke-filled areas, “protecting” soon to be burned private property and doing nothing to save the people. In California, prison labor is often used to fight wildfires, with prisoners risking their lives for less than a dollar an hour. Almost 400 men and women firefighters deployed to contain the fires in LA are in prison. There is a shortage of fire engines, breathing equipment, and firefighters, as well as neglect of maintenance which could prevent the risk of fires spreading as rapidly as they have. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, denied that such sweeping cuts and lack of necessary equipment and staff affected the city’s failure to contain the blazes.
On Thursday, the city mistakenly sent evacuation texts to over 10 million people in the city and surrounding area warning them that they were in imminent danger when they were not, creating panic and complicating the necessary evacuation procedures of those at risk. This text was followed by a correction to the embarrassing mistake which enraged many in the city.
While the monopoly media is content to focus on the extravagant wealth, the homes of celebrities, and iconic landmarks which have been lost in the blaze, they have ignored who really gets burned. The insurance companies have been forced to make insurance claims themselves, as one group of large finance capitalists bails out another, and for the rich who lost their homes the checks will eventually come. For the poor toiling without healthcare, renting crumbling buildings on the outskirts of these areas and working for low wages within them, no help or assistance is coming, as their jobs go up in flames and they suffer long-term health effects of their hazardous conditions.
While the city’s water supply runs dry, capitalists like the California-based agriculture monopoly Wonderful Company remain with their monopolization of the water supply in the state, gifted in part by the state itself, with Democrat Governor Newsom counting on Wonderful’s billionaire owners as among his top donors. Politicians beholden to the ruling class will, as always, issue their “thoughts and prayers” while they continue the same policies in the non-stop capitalist hunger for profits which makes every disaster worse.
On the one hand you have Los Angeles, a city run by the Democratic Mafia who have done everything they can to mismanage the crisis, who have bled the fire department to fatten up the police, who run their candidates on “law and order” platforms promising that if they arrest enough people they can force them to fight fires. Other California Democrat politicians like top cop Kamala Harris have built their careers on locking people up and extending their sentencing.
On the other hand, you have the Republican fanatics, who do everything in their power to fight and minimize regulations, gut infrastructure and privatize everything, who deny the detrimental effects that the capitalist mode of production is having on the environment outright.
These conditions manifest in veritable slave labor conducted by prisoners being thrust into duty in futile attempts at putting out fires in some of the most expensive houses in the world—a fit depiction of class reality, which spells out the worsening conditions that can only be confronted with greater organization and the audacity to fight back. All the forces of the old society collude to defeat the working people, and only a united working class can overcome this combined assault on life.
Photo: Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Credit: CAL FIRE, retrieved from Flickr.
