From New York to Los Angeles

When a town in northern California called Paradise burned to the ground in 2020, I thought the poetry of the climate catastrophe could not grow more poignant.

The past week proved me wrong.

Many voices will claim in the coming weeks and years that Donald Trump was the key force undermining democracy in America. Despite his overt support for authoritarianism, it was not Trump who drove a stake through the heart of our democracy. It died long before.

I’ve written at length about the Democratic Party’s unrelenting attacks on democracy, and consistent bipartisan support in Washington for imperial militarism stretching back 75 years. Setting aside those examples for now, few other issues demonstrate the unfortunate death of democracy in America as well as healthcare and Climate Justice.

An inferno well beyond Los Angeles

While the wildfires gripping global attention this week happened in Los Angeles, comparable disasters have unfolded with remarkable consistency across the world in recent years. The accelerating global climate catastrophe ensures that they will grow only more severe, more frequent, and more widespread.

The past year alone has witnessed catastrophic floods from Asheville, North Carolina to Spain, France and Brazil, as well as devastating wildfires from Canada and Australia to, most recently, Los Angeles. Each of these disasters wrecked the lives of not only individuals and families, but entire communities and regions.

Whether due to too much rain, not enough of it, or simply its unfortunate timing, climate disasters are becoming more common, and more intense. They are sadly also increasingly predictable—not in the sense that any particular disaster can be more accurately predicted, but rather in the sense that we can all predict with mounting certainty that each of our lives will be impacted (or ended) by some sort of preventable calamity.

Painful poetry

Los Angeles is not just any city, nor is it only the second most populous and prosperous city in the country.

Southern California has been the epicenter of a propaganda machine supporting America’s military industrial complex for decades. It has churned out thousands of films depicting America as an international hero, despite our history of global predation and plunder.

Combined with the power of mass media dedicated to justifying American imperialism, no empire in human history has ever boasted so powerful a propaganda machine. It would have made Hitler blush, and would probably have kept him in power had Goebbels the technology and prowess to rival the likes of Lucas (whose most popular films, to be fair, were allegories written to expose the barbarity of American empire) and Spielberg.

If any irony could surpass the jarring spectacle of a town called Paradise burning to the ground, it would be that the propaganda center of an empire largely responsible for destroying life on Earth would go up in flames at a bizarre time of year two weeks before an overt fascist returns to the White House. A center of global propaganda supporting American empire is now an inferno.

Coming in the wake of a U.S.-enabled genocide ignored for over a year—despite unfolding on global mass media for the first time—it’s almost like the Universe rubbing America’s face in our collective complicity and foolishness.

Just like healthcare

The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and national celebration of his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, reflect a deep seated illegitimacy pervading our institutions.

It’s not merely the case that Americans feel disempowered, ignored, and preyed upon. In the healthcare context, it’s particularly ironic: the very institutions to which we pay money in order to protect our health are the ones preying on us and driving people to early graves by denying them critical care that would be recognized as a right in any other industrialized country.

Aside from the many things about that set of events that I have been meaning to write (and struggling to find the time to address while working to survive in the mountains), the most jarring is its ultimate futility: despite an assassination; a frantic interstate manhunt; a manic and continuing national conversation about the crime, the alleged killer and his background; and the moral justification for an act that could be fairly described as collective self-defense responding to unrelenting economic violence, policymakers in Washington have done more or less nothing to respond to any of this.

There is no realistic possibility of a solution for even the medical debt crisis, let alone one for the crisis in healthcare access that continues to drive down life expectancy in the richest country the world has ever seen.

This is a result not of random or isolated events, but rather a sustained impediment on public debate enforced by two corporate political parties. Worse yet, both parties’ leaders have proven willing to sink to any depth in order to protect their careers by insulating their patrons on Wall Street from the American public.

Parallels

The fires in Los Angeles are no different in the sense that, despite drawing the attention of billions of people, wrecking the lives of millions, and revealing in painful relief the need to make dramatic changes at the social and political level, nothing will happen in Washington.

Aside from predictable right wing disinformation, Congress simply lacks the capacity to legislate on behalf of the American people. Our aging leaders are not only entrenched and unaccountable. Every one of Congress’ 535 members (with, at most, a handful of revealingly rare exceptions) were chosen on the basis of their allegiance to capital.

A thought experiment

Will the outcome be any different when another wildfire, or some other climate-fueled natural disaster, consumes Washington, DC or New York?

Don’t hold your breath. That happened 12 years ago, and Congress barely batted an eye.