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Put Out the Fires and House the Homeless
It is now Day 4 of the Northern California Fires causing massive homelessness in Sonoma, Napa, Yolo and Mendocino Counties and choking the air of Northern California as far south as San Jose. This started on Monday, October 9, 2017, the day after the US military recruitment show in San Francisco appeared for 4 days for Columbus Genocide Week, Thursday through Sunday, with huge ships and strafing of our City with horribly polluting and deafeningly loud Navy's Blue Death jets. Where are tax dollars being used to serve our needs?
The theory is that the high winds caused the power lines to collapse, allowing sparks to hit the dry grass. Why are power lines above ground? In most cities, power lines are underground to prevent precisely this problem.
We need US Navy ships sitting off the Sonoma County coast, pumping water into trucks and planes to spray onto the fire. If the water must be desalinated, the Navy ships can do that too. We need US military tents that can withstand the heavy rain alternating with frost that the entire Northern California coast will experience in a month, to house the homeless until housing is built with our tax dollars affordable to all. With the tents, we need cots, blankets, portable toilets, showers, laundry facilities and all other amenities for decent, sanitary housing. We need the US military to build the housing and pay for it from their budget, a trillion dollars a year, instead of making war on the people of the world to maximize the profits of the oil companies and munitions companies, the only reason the military exists. We need the US military to provide free, hot, nutritious food to all of the homeless every single day, 3 times a day, until they have a home and can work at a job that provides enough pay for them to buy food and all other necessities. We need the US military to rebuild devastated Sonoma County and all other areas of Northern California. We need the US military to plant trees IMMEDIATELY to stop the inevitable mud slides that come with winter rains when there are no trees. We need the US military to provide medical care both on land and on hospital ships anchored off the Sonoma coast, free of charge upon demand, and that must include free birth control and abortion services. Kaiser Hospital and one Sutter hospital in Santa Rosa had to close because of the fire danger.
These fires are not only choking millions of people in Northern California with their smoke; they are destroying the economy of an entire region. Northern California had a multi-billion dollar wine industry that employed thousands of people and a growing marijuana industry which at the moment has suffered tremendous losses and marijuana farms cannot obtain crop insurance or FEMA relief funds.
It is long overdue that this country turn swords into plowshares. We face an economic catastrophe in Northern California that can only be averted with massive federal funding now, starting with massive water applied to all fire areas so that they are fully contained this week. It must be continued with immediate federal funding, grants not loans, for housing and rebuilding of the wineries and marijuana farms.
We need US Navy ships sitting off the Sonoma County coast, pumping water into trucks and planes to spray onto the fire. If the water must be desalinated, the Navy ships can do that too. We need US military tents that can withstand the heavy rain alternating with frost that the entire Northern California coast will experience in a month, to house the homeless until housing is built with our tax dollars affordable to all. With the tents, we need cots, blankets, portable toilets, showers, laundry facilities and all other amenities for decent, sanitary housing. We need the US military to build the housing and pay for it from their budget, a trillion dollars a year, instead of making war on the people of the world to maximize the profits of the oil companies and munitions companies, the only reason the military exists. We need the US military to provide free, hot, nutritious food to all of the homeless every single day, 3 times a day, until they have a home and can work at a job that provides enough pay for them to buy food and all other necessities. We need the US military to rebuild devastated Sonoma County and all other areas of Northern California. We need the US military to plant trees IMMEDIATELY to stop the inevitable mud slides that come with winter rains when there are no trees. We need the US military to provide medical care both on land and on hospital ships anchored off the Sonoma coast, free of charge upon demand, and that must include free birth control and abortion services. Kaiser Hospital and one Sutter hospital in Santa Rosa had to close because of the fire danger.
These fires are not only choking millions of people in Northern California with their smoke; they are destroying the economy of an entire region. Northern California had a multi-billion dollar wine industry that employed thousands of people and a growing marijuana industry which at the moment has suffered tremendous losses and marijuana farms cannot obtain crop insurance or FEMA relief funds.
It is long overdue that this country turn swords into plowshares. We face an economic catastrophe in Northern California that can only be averted with massive federal funding now, starting with massive water applied to all fire areas so that they are fully contained this week. It must be continued with immediate federal funding, grants not loans, for housing and rebuilding of the wineries and marijuana farms.
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Immigrants make up a majority of the 55,000 people employed by the wine industry and work in great numbers in the tourist destinations including restaurants and hotels. Those who are undocumented are not eligible for most disaster aid. Corporate media doesn't show this side of the disaster.
As reported by SF Gate and the Mercury News..PG&E involvement in this disaster likely as Lines tangling with branches can spark. An investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission after a 1994 wildfire was found PG&E guilty of diverting money from its tree-trimming program to boost profits, while managers received bonuses for cutting budgets.
Now, it’s my turn for a brief editorial, dear listeners. This is Bursts. I grew up in a part of so-called California known as Sonoma County, lands stolen from the Pomo and the Miwok peoples first by the Spanish, then by Mexico and Russia and then the U.S. I lived there from the mid-1980’s through 2009 and consider it my home in a way I could no other place. The rolling hills, the foggy mornings, the Coastal Live Oak groves, the nasty but 100 year old Eucalyptis groves, the early evening sky that turns a goldish orange into purple, the Manzanita, the people, the ocean breeze coming out from Bodega. These are things that I remember fondly from the deeply damaged yet still beautiful biome I called home for most (and definitely the more formative years) of my life.
This has been a year for spectacular disasters around this hemisphere, with a record 10th hurricane now appearing in the Carribean and southern U.S., 2 major earthquakes rocking Mexico and now the fires in Northern and Southern California. The fires in the north, which I’ve been paying more attention to because they QUITE literally bring home to me a sense of devastation I still haven’t been able to digest from this distance, have been whipped up by winds, a seasonal dryness out of the ordinary and fed by the aftermath of a wet winter that created a ton of easy-to-burn fuels. California has long been racked by fires, but never this many deaths and never have they consumed large parts of cities as they have with Santa Rosa. Thousands of homes have been turned to ash, monuments standing over a hundred years are cinders, human and non-human animals have been killed, damaged and displaced. California is yet another part of the world feeling the first hand effects of anthropogenic climate change, after years of over-taxing it’s water levels with large scale and animal and food agriculture, it’s manicured industrial lawns, the barely regulated weed industry booming, the building of human settlements in the middle of deserts and the idea promoted by high levels of industry and state that as the 6th largest economy in the world it could buy itself climate chaos. Day by day, year by year, this is proven more and more a delusion. But I digress.
I’d like to give a shout out to the brave folks doing search and rescue in my home away from home, the neighbors who look out for each other, that roused each other from sleep to escape the fire storms, who shelter and feed each other. Also to the fire professionals who are working to fight back the fires. An element of this that is under reported, of course, is the fact that over a thousand prisoners of the state of California and it’s included counties, are putting their lives on the line for $1 to $2.56 a day to train and then fight these blazes. That can be compared to the $31.85 an hour of the median hourly wage for non-inmate firefighters. I would like to bring this up because as the climate becomes more chaotic and the ever-tighter squeeze of austerity capitalism turns further and further away from more sustainable and stable incomes like unionized firefighters this continues a nasty trend.
Putting prisoners on the fire lines to fight the blazes, while more deadly for them than other modes of work, arguably offers them a potentially more meaningful and lucrative engagement with community service. This also fuels the profit motive of governments bent on incarcerating mostly poor communities of color, often people with chemical dependencies and neuro-divergencies the state can’t be bothered to treat but to stick them in a concrete and steel cage. More prisoners means more low-pay and expendable firefighters who’s crime was to be born the wrong color or class in the age of mass incarceration. I don’t bring this up to denigrate those risking themselves to save lives and homes, whether a prisoner or not, but to point out that this is not how a community organizes itself for it’s members, this is the logic of capital and thus streams value to the top of the pyramid.
My heart goes out to those who suffer at the hands of these fires. Let’s fight for futures where we are better prepared, where we don’t employ slave labor to fight them, and everyone has what they need to live in true community, which means true accountability to the impact of our survival on the non-human environment with which we share this awesome world.
If you’d like to help by sending some money to autonomous organizing for relief in Sonoma County, consider visiting https://generosity.com/emergencies-fundraising/northbay-iww-fire-relief-fund
This has been a year for spectacular disasters around this hemisphere, with a record 10th hurricane now appearing in the Carribean and southern U.S., 2 major earthquakes rocking Mexico and now the fires in Northern and Southern California. The fires in the north, which I’ve been paying more attention to because they QUITE literally bring home to me a sense of devastation I still haven’t been able to digest from this distance, have been whipped up by winds, a seasonal dryness out of the ordinary and fed by the aftermath of a wet winter that created a ton of easy-to-burn fuels. California has long been racked by fires, but never this many deaths and never have they consumed large parts of cities as they have with Santa Rosa. Thousands of homes have been turned to ash, monuments standing over a hundred years are cinders, human and non-human animals have been killed, damaged and displaced. California is yet another part of the world feeling the first hand effects of anthropogenic climate change, after years of over-taxing it’s water levels with large scale and animal and food agriculture, it’s manicured industrial lawns, the barely regulated weed industry booming, the building of human settlements in the middle of deserts and the idea promoted by high levels of industry and state that as the 6th largest economy in the world it could buy itself climate chaos. Day by day, year by year, this is proven more and more a delusion. But I digress.
I’d like to give a shout out to the brave folks doing search and rescue in my home away from home, the neighbors who look out for each other, that roused each other from sleep to escape the fire storms, who shelter and feed each other. Also to the fire professionals who are working to fight back the fires. An element of this that is under reported, of course, is the fact that over a thousand prisoners of the state of California and it’s included counties, are putting their lives on the line for $1 to $2.56 a day to train and then fight these blazes. That can be compared to the $31.85 an hour of the median hourly wage for non-inmate firefighters. I would like to bring this up because as the climate becomes more chaotic and the ever-tighter squeeze of austerity capitalism turns further and further away from more sustainable and stable incomes like unionized firefighters this continues a nasty trend.
Putting prisoners on the fire lines to fight the blazes, while more deadly for them than other modes of work, arguably offers them a potentially more meaningful and lucrative engagement with community service. This also fuels the profit motive of governments bent on incarcerating mostly poor communities of color, often people with chemical dependencies and neuro-divergencies the state can’t be bothered to treat but to stick them in a concrete and steel cage. More prisoners means more low-pay and expendable firefighters who’s crime was to be born the wrong color or class in the age of mass incarceration. I don’t bring this up to denigrate those risking themselves to save lives and homes, whether a prisoner or not, but to point out that this is not how a community organizes itself for it’s members, this is the logic of capital and thus streams value to the top of the pyramid.
My heart goes out to those who suffer at the hands of these fires. Let’s fight for futures where we are better prepared, where we don’t employ slave labor to fight them, and everyone has what they need to live in true community, which means true accountability to the impact of our survival on the non-human environment with which we share this awesome world.
If you’d like to help by sending some money to autonomous organizing for relief in Sonoma County, consider visiting https://generosity.com/emergencies-fundraising/northbay-iww-fire-relief-fund
For more information:
https://itsgoingdown.org/final-straw-suppo...
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