LOS ANGELES—Apocalyptic scenes have unfolded with multiple fires scorching the greater Los Angeles County area. They have so far left thousands of acres burned and over a thousand structures destroyed—including schools, libraries, homes, shelters, and grocery stores—with at least five people dead.
Hundreds of firefighters and volunteers are racing to stop the spread. They are challenged by hurricane-force winds blowing embers and an unusually bone-dry winter. As many as 130,000 people are under evacuation orders, fearful of whether or not their homes will still be standing when the blazes are finally put out.
Rising temperatures and decreased rainfall, both linked to climate change, are causing California’s wildfire season to begin earlier and end later. The rains that typically bring an end to the fire season are delayed, resulting in fires burning into the winter months. Heavy Santa Ana winds and the threat of electrical equipment catching fire have left upwards of 450,000 residents without power.
Clearly, the climate crisis is worsening at an alarming rate. Extreme weather events, prolonged droughts, massive wildfires, intense hurricanes, and the rapid melting of permafrost and glaciers are all occurring more frequently. The impacts exceed the forecasts made just a few years ago.
Capitalism is to blame
The broader imbalance between humanity and the rest of the natural world is exemplified most prominently by climate change. Numerous environmental challenges exist, including contaminated water, air, and soil, as well as health problems affecting respiratory and reproductive systems. Continued threats like higher sea levels, more frequent and destructive weather events, and increased droughts persist with seemingly no end in sight.
The U.S. over its history has contributed far more to global emissions than any other country—including through the military, which is the single largest producer of greenhouse gasses. U.S. fossil fuel giants have been aware for at least 50 years that their intensive extraction would lead to a climate disaster, but chose to play down and misrepresent the evidence of climate change.
They carried out a long-term campaign against climate action, employing fake science, the harassment of scientists, and sowing “uncertainty” against scientific consensus through the corporate media and politicians alike.
If anything is clear by now, it’s that the system that prioritizes short-term profits and private accumulation, capitalism, is not equipped to either prevent or adequately deal with extreme weather events.
While not an exhaustive list, here are a few examples with the latest horrific Los Angeles area fires that demonstrate how capitalism undercuts and underserves people, and our environment, in the service of maximizing profits.
Billionaires loot the public’s water supply
Amid the apocalyptic fires, about 20% of fire-hydrants were running dry and access to water was scarcely found. Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that upwards of three million gallons of water were available when the fire started, but the demand was four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system” due to the scale of the blaze. There simply was not enough surplus in the water supply to meet the scale of the disaster.
An illustration of capitalist greed and private ownership of an important public resource, water, highlights how capitalism prioritizes private accumulation over human need, even in times of crisis. Instead of ensuring sufficient supplies for the public benefit, the profit motive trumps all. The results are a disaster for workers and the general public.
One billionaire couple, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, own a massive share of California’s water system—one that was largely paid for by the general public in the first place. The Resnicks are the biggest farm owners in California. They own 130,000 acres worth of farmland in the state and nearly half of Americans buy at least one of their products.
With a net-worth of at least $8 billion dollars, the Resnicks are raking in massive amounts of money as water prices are soaring in California. Their mega-corporation, Wonderful (how ironic), controls a whopping 57% of the Kern Water Bank, the most valuable water resource in a region so critical to America’s fresh food supply.
In the Central Valley where the Resnicks have banked water underground, working class communities, often made up of migrant farmworkers and immigrants, have little access to public water. Char Miller, the director of environmental analysis at Pomona College, told Forbes:
“The Resnicks are so dominant and the disempowered communities are at the other end of a scale that is tipped mightily against them. When we put the food on our plate, we rarely think about the hands that make it and the situation they are in. That’s an injustice of unparalleled proportion.”
In Texas, another area stricken by drought and accessible water, multi-billionaire Elon Musk is nearly finished constructing a lithium refinery for his Tesla corporation. This facility will demand up to 8 million gallons of water per day. It will be situated twenty miles from Corpus Christi, an area so dry the local water company distributes shower timers at high school football games.
The small Texas town is ringing alarm bells over the project. The residents are anxious about the availability of water for both their own needs and those of a large factory. Especially worrisome, the South Texas Water Authority recently approved an infrastructure deal that will enable Nueces Water Supply to sell Tesla the necessary water pipe rights.
In the cases of drought or rampant fires, both increasing due to climate change, private ownership of what should be public resources—such as fresh water supplies—certainly spells more disaster. Instead of allocating water appropriately, including maintaining a surplus in light of larger and more dangerous fires or increasing droughts, capitalism prioritizes the ownership and accumulation of water supplies for private profit.
While the overall impact of privatized water supplies with regard to the fires in Los Angeles County is not yet known, it is certain that the profit motive and privatization of what were once public water supplies in California do not at all help the cause.
Los Angeles cuts Fire Department budget
In June of last year, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass approved a budget that significantly reduced the funding for the fire department by $17.5 million dollars. Notably, this was the second-largest departmental cut from the city’s budget. While the majority of city departments faced funding reductions, the Los Angeles Police Department actually received a substantial funding boost of nearly $126 million dollars.
“The consistent defunding of other city programs in order to give the LAPD billions a year has consequences, and these elected officials do actually have blood on their hands,” Ricci Sergienko, a lawyer and organizer with People’s City Council LA told the Intercept. “The city is unprepared to handle this fire, and Los Angeles shouldn’t be in that position.”
Defunding the fire department along with other essential public services, while only boosting the budget for the police department, creates a dangerous situation as the climate crisis worsens the already devastating fires in the drought-stricken region.
Los Angeles Fire Chief, Kristin Crowley, said that the reductions in their operating budget have “adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.”
Underpaid and underfunded firefighters
In another damnation of the capitalist system and a government that operates in the interests of the wealthy first and foremost, thousands of federal firefighters are continuously threatened with a $20,000 pay cut—the next possibility happening in March of this year.
Federal firefighters have fought for years to establish permanent wage increases for a job in which some earn as little as $15 an hour for often dangerous, but essential work. Under the Biden Administration’s infrastructure law in 2021, 11,200 federal firefighters received a wage boost in 2021 of either $20,000 or 50% of their base pay. However, due to corporate lobbying and Republican obstruction, the wage increases were not made permanent by Congress.
“We will lose everybody,” if Congress fails to make the increases permanent and firefighters’ wages drop by $20,000, said Steve Gutierrez, a 15-year firefighter and union representative for the National Federation of Federal Employees. “These folks deserve a living wage. The future is going to be a tough road ahead.”
“There’s so many fire engines just sitting and collecting dust this summer,” he told More Perfect Union. “There’s no one to staff them.”
What’s more, many of the federal wildland firefighters aren’t even classified as firefighters to begin with. According to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, firefighters such as Hotshots, Smokejumpers, Rappellers, Helitack Crews, Fire Engine Crews and others are actually titled as “Forestry Technicians,” leading to a misclassification and lower wages compared to state firefighters.
Compounding matters, president Donald Trump has been no friend to firefighters or their unions. During his first term, he blamed the forest service for “mismanagement” as the cause of wildfires. In 2018, he suggested California should do a better job of “raking” its leaves.
The Republicans were the principal factor for why the wage increases have not been made permanent since the 2021 law passed, and instead rely on resolutions each time the Republicans threaten to shut down the government.
Capitalism’s drive for the private accumulation of profits over public services is exemplified by incoming Montana Senator-elect Tim Sheehy, a hardline Republican who was the CEO of an aerial firefighting company. In an op-ed for Fox, he said, “the private sector always has and always will produce new innovations and better results faster and cheaper than the government…The same holds true in wildfire response. We must embrace this truth.”
Prison labor exploited to fight fires
Nearly 400 prison inmates have been deployed by the California Department of Corrections to contain the on-going blazes.
Since World War II, inmates in California can enter a Conservation Camp Program, where they live in so-called “fire camps” and are led by personnel from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE). The program saves CAL FIRE roughly $80 million a year.
Initially, the prisoners are required to fulfill security criteria and participate in a two-week training session. They receive a daily wage of $5 to $10 depending on the payscale, and can earn more when fighting fires. They comprise roughly one third of the firefighters in California. California’s dependency on the “cost-effective labor” of inmate firefighters has caused prison reform activists to worry about delays in the adoption of necessary reforms to the criminal justice system.
Why the prison inmates are so keen on joining the program is illustrated by former-inmate firefighter and union electrician, Matthew Hahn.
“There is truth to the objections” of inmate firefighting, he wrote in an op-ed. Sending inmates to fight fires is abusive, he said. But, “the reality of why people would want to risk life and limb for a state that is caging them is that the conditions in California prisons are so terrible that fighting wildfires is a rational choice.”
However, at least four inmate firefighters in California have died in the line of duty in recent years as the state’s fires have grown more aggressive and deadlier due to climate change. It’s a dangerous line of work regardless, and the minimal training and lack of good wages and working conditions make it that much harder.
The inmate firefighters are four times more likely to be injured by objects than other firefighters and eight times more likely to suffer injuries related to smoke inhalation. When injured, the inmates do not receive traditional worker compensation, leaving many to face life-long health issues and complications as a result of firefighting.
Making matters worse, upon being released from prison, inmate firefighters are banned from obtaining Emergency Medical Technician licenses, which are required by most of California’s fire departments. This is even after completing a minimum of one week of classroom training, one week of field training, and four hours of advanced training per week in the Conservation Camp Program.
Climate issues are arenas of class struggle
Workers continue to encounter environmental deterioration in their workplaces and communities due to corporate profiteering and climate change. Many workers in various industries are exposed to toxic chemicals, poor ventilation, and unnecessary environmental accidents on the job. In fact, this is one of the principal reasons that battery workers at BOSK in Kentucky are organizing with the United Auto Workers.
Working class communities are often used as dumping grounds for industrial waste and access to water is increasingly more difficult—especially in light of the corporate privatization of water supplies. The costs to fix environmental crises almost always falls onto workers and their communities as the corporations that create them evade the responsibility through lobbying and legal loopholes.
Communities faced with powerful corporations dumping toxic waste into their drinking water sources, as well as privatizing them completely for their own profiteering, necessarily confront capitalism head-on. They come up against both the capitalist system and politicians influenced by corporate lobbying in their struggles.
Capitalism is both the major cause and obstacle to solving the pressing issues facing humanity when it comes to the climate. It serves as a hindrance to establishing a clean, sustainable, and healthy environment where workers and the general public can directly reap the rewards of nature and our labor. Private ownership and accumulation of vast sums of wealth and resources is simply incompatible with environmental sustainability.
Even the Paris Climate Accord commitments are insufficient in stopping the escalating levels of greenhouse gas emissions and effectively addressing climate change. What’s needed is a radical restructuring of our industry, agriculture, distribution, and legal system to confront the significant challenges that affect all of humanity.
The climate struggles, such as the devastating fires in Los Angeles happening right now, conflict with the current capitalist model of private ownership and the profit motive. Millions are realizing that our collective health and well-being is in direct contradiction to the billionaire class and their greed.
Fixing the challenges posed by increasing climate change disasters requires social decision making based on the needs of society as a whole and the environment on which we depend. Capitalism is incompatible with this and must be done away with.
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