As I'm writing this my house is full of smoke, for the third time in as many years. A fire is raging in Sonoma, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, and the smoke is spreading throughout the Bay Area, forcing people indoors and covering everything with a fine layer of ash. The sky is hazy, darkening everything and giving the world an apocalyptic glow. Entire towns in Sonoma County have been evacuated.
Adding insult to injury, the local electric utility, PG&E, has been threatening to turn off power all over Northern California. A week or so ago, the word came down that they were looking to shut off sections of Palo Alto, among other cities, though details on when, what parts and how long these outages would last, were all impossible to get. PG&E put up a website telling users what areas would be hit, but because they mismanaged the information, the websites crashed due to traffic. In the end my town wasn't affected, but loads of other towns were - including hospitals and other medical facilities.
This is all because PG&E couldn't be bothered to maintain its network, which caused last year's fire, the Camp Fire. That fire, the deadliest in our state's history, killed 85 people in Northern California, people who in some cases barely had time to get out of their homes before the flames overtook them. Not only did shitty electricity infrastructure cause this tragedy, but the aftermath caused PG&E to go bankrupt, citing wildfire liabilities of $30 billion. But because they're the monopoly provider of large parts of the region, that doesn't leave consumers many options if the power goes out. Coincidentally, PG&E also has some of the highest electricity rates in California, because their energy generating infrastructure is old and decrepit, requiring further maintenance - maintenance they don't provide because they're too busy giving their executives inordinately large bonuses.
And yet the right-wing loves bashing California. They say we're ungovernable, that our cities are crumbling and dirty and full of homeless. They disdain our huge homeless population and high gas prices, and when idiot elected Republicans befoul the air with this litany of untruth, right-wing voters here and in the rest of the country lap it all up. All of this ignoring the fact that all these problems - massive wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, high energy prices and corporate malfeasance, among others - are all basically down to right-wing policies.
And at the root of those policies, which aim to punish the poor and middle-class for not being rich and which aim to destroy our environment, is the stripping of the public sector in favor of the private sector, all in service of the completely idiotic idea that if we give more money to rich people they'll share the wealth with everybody else. So we strip our natural resources, let our physical and energy infrastructure crumble to pieces, and build planes that are so smart that when they take off they assume the air flying past their nose means they're pointed too high and they crash straight into the ground.
We're suffering the crapification of America at the hands of unfettered capitalism, where companies focus only on maximizing profit without actually making product that customers need or want, or that work as they should. Cars that are meant to be safe navigate straight into highway dividers and burst into flame, because the manufacturer decides to call one of its functions Autopilot; bridges fall down because nobody's bothered to maintain them since they were built; and energy utilities let trees grow next to their power lines because they don't want to spend the money to hire and train engineers to make sure that these very power lines don't have combustible materials growing next to them.
And again, somehow it's my fault because I voted for Obama twice, and because I believe that the fruits of the economy should be shared more widely than just the two or three assholes who've managed to convince investors to let them undermine our democracy by taking our data and monetizing it.
It's frustrating seeing my home turn uninhabitable, first through epochal droughts and then through apocalyptic fires every autumn, and knowing that my life is being shortened by the stupidity and greed and corporate malfeasance of people hundreds or even thousands of miles away, who are pissed off that we allow gay and transgender people to live their lives here in this state.
At some point even the Republicans are going to accept that global warming is irreversible and more complex than they can imagine, and somehow it'll still be California's fault for being too liberal. Well, fuck them, and if you vote for them, fuck you too.
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