Jon Stewart Calls Out GOP Disaster Relief Hypocrisy & Klepper on Hegseth...

The California Fires; Reality

  

The California Fires.  View from California

 

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-great-fire

 

For all of those voters who have under funded local emergency services. 

New taxes needed for firefighting and schools

Even though residents in the foothills turned out to denounce health care reform, today they are benefitting from the work of a socialist project, state tax funded firefighters and equipment. Governor, tea baggers, are you listening? The Sacramento Bee on Sunday has an editorial on the positive aspects of the state economy. A problem with this analysis is that only part of the California and U.S. economy are showing signs of improving – the corporate finance sector. There is no evidence of a growth in jobs. So, we probably are headed for another job less recovery in which the well off will profit. What caused this economic crisis ? Major banks and corporations looted the economy creating an international meltdown. Now, they have been rewarded with bail out money. We have cuts in parks, nurses, libraries, .School children did not create this crisis. Foster care children did not create this crisis.

Meanwhile the anti tax crowd roars, - No 
New Taxes. I hope that they do not live in a fire zone.
This is not just another business cycle, this Great Recession is different. Read, “No Return to Normal”, by James Galbraith in the Washington Monthly.
Or his new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.

Federal Firefighting in California: Katrina part 2

The Collapse of Federal Firefighting in California

By Robert Cruickshank

As my recent articles have shown there is a shortage of firefighters to meet the unprecedented amount of fires burning across our state. As I began digging into this yesterday I came across the same report highlighted in today's Monterey Herald - that US Forest Service firefighting efforts have been cut to the bone and left the nation vulnerable to massive fires. Deliberate staffing shortages have left the USFS unable to do vital off-season brush clearance, and left them without the staffing to get a quick jump on fires in their crucial initial stages.

“The federal firefighting system is "imploding" in California, due to poor spending decisions and high job vacancy rates, as the region struggles to keep pace with what looks to be a historic fire season, a firefighters' advocacy group charges.

“As a result, the firefighters say, small fires have exploded into extended, multimillion-dollar conflagrations because the U.S. Forest Service has been unable to contain them during the early "initial attack" stage...

“As the "sheer number" of California wildfires pushed the nation to its worst measurable level of wildland-fire preparedness last week - Level 5 - a national multiagency coordinating group announced in a memo Monday that firefighter staffing levels in Northern California "cannot be maintained."

The report, by the FWFSA, has been around for a few months now. Wildland firefighters have been screaming about the issue to anyone who would listen, including Dianne Feinstein:
Read the rest of the report at California Progress Report.