The Fires and DSA-LA: Part Two
The first half of this piece was published in last month’s issue of California Red. There I discussed the background and initial responses to the Los Angeles fires, including from DSA-LA.
After the fires in Los Angeles had been extinguished, I took time to drive up Lake Avenue toward the San Gabriel Mountains and see the devastation of the Eaton Fire that had torn through Altadena. It’s one thing to see photographs, it’s another to drive past block after block of destruction. Places that I grew up visiting, where I’d share a meal with my family, the homes of friends and their parents reduced to nothing but chimneys and piles of black dust. We’re now more than a month out from the start of the disaster, and the causes, responses, and effects are all beginning to come into focus.
Origins
Though the causes of these calamities, and ones like them, vary in slight degrees, we know that they are unleashed by an economic system that prioritizes privatization, profit, and wealth over our safety and dignity.
The Eaton Fire was likely caused by a private utility company, Southern California Edison. For a long time, utilities have paid a lot of money to elect candidates and exploit our ballot measure system to pass laws enabling them to make even more money. Whether they’re charging us higher rates or failing to repair equipment that ends up burning down our homes and livelihoods, it’s always at our expense. They see the loss of wildlife, housing, and people merely as the cost of doing business. It wasn’t long ago when Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a private utility that has a near monopoly on energy for much of California, started the Camp Fire, destroying the town of Paradise and the surrounding area, killing 85 people. Six years later, the people of Paradise are still rebuilding. This story is becoming tragically common in our state.
Even when a private utility isn’t to blame for the precise origin of a fire, like the one in the Palisades, the lust for wealth in the US has been both the spark and fuel. With the reality of climate change, extreme weather events are becoming more and more frequent. This will not be the last time that Los Angeles experiences extraordinary amounts of rain followed by drought, and we know that billionaire greed certainly isn’t going to politely go away. As these events become more deadly, ruinous, and costly, it’s incumbent upon us to be serious, realistic, and strategic about our work moving forward.
The responses
As soon as the fires started, reactionary billionaires were already sowing the seeds of distrust for our government and reciting their common antidotal script for solving our problems: only the wealthy, a market economy, and charity can solve the problems we’re facing.
Landlords also wasted no time in taking advantage of the disaster by immediately raising rents and rushing to evict tenants who’d lost their jobs and income. In response, members of the community began compiling databases that included the listings of units for which the rent had increased more than the legal amount. These efforts caught the attention of elected officials from the local to statewide level.
Billionaires like Rick Caruso have used this tragedy to relaunch their failed political brands. Yes, the same man who hired private firefighters to steal our water in order to save his shopping center is claiming he actually gives a damn about you. Using a foundation that he started in the wake of the fire, he is partnering with one of the founders of AirBnb to “donate” prefab homes to around 100 victims. He is also likely to run for governor. Funny that a company like AirBnb, which has played a significant role in causing housing costs to rise in the United States, suddenly cares about making sure people have housing.
We are also looking at the first instance in US history where a federal government, led by Republicans eager to prove their cruelty has no bounds, may put conditions on disaster relief. Even where this relief has begun, much of the focus has been on the Palisades Fire (the only site Trump bothered to visit), where residents tend to be much wealthier than those affected by the Eaton Fire in Altadena. Of course, loss of belongings and homes is always tragic, but Altadena, a historically Black community in LA County, has already found itself falling behind in the official response.
Moving forward
These events have highlighted both the inequities that exist in our country and the interconnectedness of their effects. When people are forced out of their homes, the housing market becomes even more strained. The people who are left able to afford staying in Los Angeles are much more likely to be white and much less likely to be working class. When smoke fills the air for weeks, working class people are much more likely to work outside and suffer the health impacts of unhealthy air quality, if they haven’t lost their jobs altogether. Those health impacts mean people need to seek medical attention from our private healthcare system. If you can afford that, great. If you can’t, well, you can’t. Insurance companies, notorious for avoiding as much coverage as they can get away with, have spent years deciding to no longer cover fire damage.
DSA-LA’s socialists in office (SiOs) on the LA City Council moved quickly to propose tenant protections through an eviction moratorium and rent freeze. Shamefully, despite pressure from DSA-LA and the Keep LA Housed Coalition, a majority of the council has continued to delay the proposal, even as rent checks are due and eviction notices begin to pour in. Thankfully, the LA County Board of Supervisors stepped in with their own temporary protections for tenants where the city failed to do so. Their action, due to the emergency declaration, extends to all the cities within Los Angeles county, providing tenants with much needed relief.
The Long Term
While disaster relief and tenant protections are absolutely necessary at this moment, capitalism’s need for continual and more costly bailouts is not sustainable or just. We must replace our profit-centric policies with human-centric ones. In other words, though each disaster presents a new challenge, our mission is largely the same: replacing capitalism with democratic socialism.
Los Angeles’s Pacific Electric Railway was one of several that blanketed the county in the 20th century. Image courtesy of PBS SoCal
Los Angeles once had one of the largest transit systems in the country. The problem with that system was that it was all privately owned. As soon as it was no longer profitable to its few private owners, the rails and their charming cars were sold and dismantled. Los Angeles Metro, our public transportation system reviving our rail services since the 1990s, has come a long way, but it remains too dependent on profit-seeking private contractors as it slowly constructs its way around the county. We deserve a truly public transportation system that can get us to all the places where we need to go.
Californians also deserve publicly-owned utilities that provide renewable, affordable, and safe energy to the many rather than providing profits to the few who own them. Campaigns like the Build Public Power New York can serve as case studies for efforts here.
Eviction protections and rent control are steps that we can take in the short term, but beyond that, we deserve guaranteed housing that we can actually afford. This would require a major shift from our speculative housing market toward housing as a human right.
Disasters and emergencies are going to happen again, and when they do, people will inevitably need healthcare. We know, as democratic socialists, that we need a single-payer, guaranteed healthcare system in California.
Rather than donations from people like Rick Caruso, we deserve a tax system that forces billionaires to pay their fair share to fund our schools and services.
As we identify what we want, our next task is to figure out how we’re going to get it. This requires us to come together, both with our chapters and across California, to understand which levers we need to take control of and pull to achieve our goals. We know that even if city-level legislation begins to favor the working class, it will eventually run up against the limitations of the laws passed at the state level
What do you you think democratic socialists should be calling for in the wake of the climate crisis and face of disaster capitalism? What would your vision for the future of California be? What are some of the ways your chapter can begin working with other chapters to win the state power necessary to fight for the working class?
These are some of the questions we can address in California DSA as we face fascism in the federal government and the new uncertainty it brings to California state politics.
