CA Wild Fires: Fire Fighting in Bush's Conservative Utopia

Comedian Bill Maher once quipped, "The Republicans have got such a scam going... they get elected by saying that big government is the problem and doesn’t work. Once elected though, they screw everything up and when we complain they say, "See we told you it doesn’t work."

While this is good for a laugh, because better to laugh than cry after what we have witnessed over the last seven years, there is something far more insidious and destructive going on... a deliberate re-engineering of the US that has been well thought out by conservative think tanks like Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.

I have often wondered how so many of the red state’s middle class and lower economic voters could be so duped by the "wedge political issues" not to be able to see the big picture of what is going on with the loss of jobs, soaring costs in health care and education, and simply the whole sale destruction of the middle class.

In short... it amazes me how they have been so easily duped by these wedge issues, with their roots in racial and religious bigotry, into slitting their own economic throats! While the last ABC poll showed that 74% of the nation thinks that the nation is seriously headed in the wrong direction, it can be argued that the destruction that they see is the product of the evil in their own hearts... for the leaders who are doing this are elected, albeit with many suspect occurrences during the election process.

Under their waving banner first lofted by Ronald Reagan, "government is not the solution, it is the problem" and their secondary creedo, "privatized organizations are cheaper and more efficient" we are see the whole sale destruction of the America that most of us grew up in.

So what does this "conservative" utopia look like? Well we know that having 18,000 Americans die needless deaths every year because of the lack of access health care and 47 million Americans with out health insurance is just fine with them. Americans paying double what any other nation on the planet pays for health care and half the personal bankruptcies in the US are do to a medical crisis in the family and of those 440,000 each year... 75% of them had health insurance!

We also know that private armies of contractors have sprung up, working next to US troops being paid $30,000 per year (if they are lucky), while the contractors doing the same jobs are paid salaries into the six figure category. Now there is cost efficiency for you!

Well the latest addition to the emerging conservative utopian picture is emerging in the area of fire fighting... Some thing again the most Americans take for granted having grown up with the local fire hall a few blocks away. What you take for granted though, oft times has a habit of disappearing before you knew it.

This was published on Raw story today as deserves an in-depth look

Excerpts:

Under Bush's watch, decay of public firefighting has spawned billion dollar private industry

Miriam Raftery
Published: Monday December 10, 2007

Trade group founded in 2000 now represents 10,000 private firefighters
SAN DIEGO - After the Great Fire of London in 1666, insurance companies started issuing plaques to show private fire brigades which homes to save--and which to let burn. Insurers organized their own firefighting companies. Not having a plaque didn’t mean your home went totally ignored, but it certainly didn’t help.

Today, a decline in public funding for firefighting services has sparked explosive growth in the private sector. The world’s largest insurance company – American Insurance Group – now has "Wildfire Protection Units" in 150 US zip codes. During the 2007 California wildfires, AIG’s firefighters saved homes in wealthy areas, while less fortunate neighbors were left with rubble. A trade group for private firefighters founded in 2000 now represents 10,000 private firemen.

SNIP!

Private firefighting spreads nationally

Fighting fires has become big business. The National Wildfire Suppression Association (NWSA), a trade organization founded in 2000, now represents over 200 private companies and 10,000 wild land firefighters. The private firefighting industry is estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

Some cities and counties are now hiring private contractors to replace public services provided by unionized firefighters. According to the Heartland Institute, a conservative pro-privatization think tank, Lakewood, Illinois has contracted with American Emergency Service Corporation to provide fire protection. The company’s employees are non-union; Heartland asserts that "wage and benefits costs are lower than those incurred by fire districts that hire their own firefighters and paramedics."

SNIP!

According to an audit report on Forest Service firefighting contract crews conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General, private crews used in the 2002 Biscuit Fire in Oregon, insufficiently trained and inexperienced crews negatively impacted firefighting efforts.

"We had crew performance problems on the fire line. We also had issues of falsified training records," Rod Nichols, information officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, told RAW STORY. Some companies hired undocumented immigrants and sent non-English speaking crews out with supervisors who did not speak Spanish, he added.
"Since then, we believe we’ve overcome a lot of those problems," Nichols said. He cited changes in procedures, discipline and dismissal of some offending companies and a reduction in private crews among the improvements made.

"In the past 10 years, wild-land firefighting has transformed from a federal government responsibility to a massive, extremely lucrative, private enterprise," Slate Magazine wrote in a 2002 article sharply critical of the practice. "Privatizing firefighting was supposed to cut costs. But it has done nothing of the sort. Last summer, which was an "average" fire season, was the most costly on record."

The 2001 fire season cost an average of $1,340 per acre to fight fires in national forests—270 percent more than it did in 2000, the magazine said.

SNIP!

The politics of private-firefighting

Some private firefighting firms or their owners have made hefty donations to the Republican Party and prominent elected officials. Mike Wheelock, owner of Greyback Forestry Inc. in Oregon, one of the largest and most elite private firefighting contractors with substantial federal contracts, gave a whopping $25,000 to the Republican National Congressional Committee in 2006, as well as large donations to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign and other prominent GOP leaders.

Privatization of government services is a key plank promoted by prominent Republican leaders including conservative strategist Grover Norquist – the Washington maven famously quoted for his desire to shrink government to be small enough to "drown it in a bathtub." In 2005, a media strategist for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s told campaign donors of a plan to promote a `phenomenon of anger’ aimed at turning California voters against firefighters and other public employee union members to help pass ballot initiatives aimed at breaking up public unions and, perhaps, support privatization of firefighting and other public services.

"What we’re going to hear more of is sort of blaming the victims of these natural disasters who don’t pay the higher premiums to get this special service," author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein said on Democracy Now! Radio in July. "You're starting to hear the language of personal responsibility...`It’s up to you to protect you and your family. You can’t look to the government.’"

http://rawstory.com/...

For more on the subject:

Naomi Klein On The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

"If the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose," writes Naomi Klein in the cover story of this week’s Nation. "If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering."

http://www.democracynow.org/...