SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 1.14.2025

The mainstream media and the political world is blazing with scorn.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who happened to be in Ghana when the fiery conflagration broke out, is being politically burned at the stake for the deadly disaster engulfing Southern California.

A typical headline.

“Stone-faced LA Mayor Karen Bass refuses to answer questions about absence as wildfires rage across her city“-New York Post headline – 1.8.2025

Of course the mainstream media, corporate world and their bought politicians are picking on the softest target. Why?

The real culprits are the corporations. They have ruled California for decades and are responsible for the area’s water supply and fire prevention infrastructure.

More properly stated, criminal lack of it.

Don’t expect the billionaire class to be pilloired in the media or raked over the coals in any legislative investigation.

The luckless Mayor will be driven from office and the ruling class will breathe easier. If that’s possible in the toxic air of Los Angeles.

Excerpted from The People’s World 1.14.2025

LOS ANGELES—Remember the movie Chinatown?

That 1974 epic starring Jack Nicholson told how politics and greed, mixed with more than a little violence, led to a fortunate few early in the last century seizing control of the Los Angeles water supply at the time when the city was starting the sudden and phenomenal growth that has made it the nation’s second largest.

“People are gonna be mad when they find out they’re paying for water they’re not gonna get,” an undercover source tells the Nicholson character in one of the movie’s key scenes.

Which pretty much sums up the situation Angelenos—and, indirectly, the rest of us—now face: Despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars over decades to construct one of the world’s most-extensive infrastructure projects to transfer water from naturally rainy Northern California to naturally parched Southern California, there’s not enough available water to fight the monster fires now ravaging L.A.

The lack of the water needed to provide fire hydrants that provide water rather than fail has nothing to do with Mayor Karen Bass, as the new York Times and much of the corporate media claims but has much to do with corporate greed instead.

And climate change only makes things worse, scientists report. It’s fueling the out-of-control winds that have made The City of Angels a flaming hell on earth.

The fires have left federal, state and local Fire Fighters dazed, frustrated, short-staffed and exhausted, at least 23 people dead so far and sent billions of dollars’ worth of homes and businesses literally up in smoke.

The only things missing now that were in the movie are its violence, the ultimate identity of some of the biggest beneficiaries–Corporate farmers and, Greenpeace says, fossil fuel firms—and the downwind impact as dangerous smoke from the monster fires drifts eastward over the continental U.S.

Top photo: The fire this time in Los Angeles