2025 – Already a Year of Reckoning
Barely a week into 2025, and the chickens have loudly come home to roost. If you catch my drift, you can take that in two ways, both figurative and literal. The interconnections between the LA fires, capitalism, colonization, and the climate crisis are all but screaming in our faces right now.
It’s insane that 2025 seems to be starting much like 2020. In addition to the threat of yet another possible pandemic beginning, five years ago, almost exactly to the day, I was so distraught over the brush fires in Australia, I had to take the day off work. Hearing the news that over a billion animals had perished in those fires and seeing the devastation of people’s lives, I had to completely decompress and disconnect from the internet. So I went outside, laid down in the dirt with my dog, and cried.
The difference here is that five years later, instead of *just* COVID, we’re looking at the threat of bird flu, which could potentially have even more devastating effects. And, the difference is that, as I see the most apocalyptic images and videos out of Los Angeles burning to the ground, I just have so little emotion left about the state of things. The emotions are there, buried deep under the surface in the caverns of my soul, but I don’t feel them.
I am devastated, yet I am also so numb at this point, and I disassociated from the devastation while this article poured out of me. I had to, otherwise, I would break down, and I had too much to say. All I can say is, “There it is again, that funny feeling.”
I am exhausted from seeing these catastrophes repeating again and again. How often can we repeat ourselves about the reality of things and have words fall on deaf ears?
Now, with even more knowledge than before, I’m mentally connecting all the dots. I can more clearly see the interconnections of our collective plights and the intersectionality of the issues that humanity faces.
Let’s review, shall we?
(*** If you are affected by the fires and in need of resources visit this live resource document: http://bit.ly/malan-fire ***)
The Effects of Capitalism and the Climate Crisis
Unfettered Destruction of the Planet
To be clear, what we are seeing in LA, and what we’ve seen the past few years and decades with extreme weather globally, is a direct result of capitalism, corporatization, and colonization. In particular, we are witnessing the consequences of these things being unregulated and unatoned for. As a result, we’re witnessing and living through the very collapse of these systems, and the natural progression of these things that are much like parasites or cancer – they’re destroying the host that is our planet and our bodies.
Exponential growth with finite resources is not sustainable. And so, the powers that be have made our planet unsustainable for us and continue to force these systems on us despite their lack of efficacy or benefit to humanity. All for a bottom line.
For too long, the rich and elite have been selling people and the planet for profit, at the expense of the lower classes. They’ve stripped the planet of its resources, destabilized its systems, and exploited people at home and abroad, for centuries. This isn’t new for us, but these exploitative, capitalist systems are new to humanity in the grand scheme of things.
Young, Dumb, and Broken – Modern Humanity Killing Itself at a Record Pace
Humanity has existed for a couple hundred thousand years, and our ancient hominid ancestors before them were around for a few million. Civilization has existed for over 10,000 years. Capitalism is an infant, just a couple hundred years old. Humanity thrived for a very long time before capitalism dug its claws into literally everything and every facet of our lives.
In history class, they kept telling us how communism killed millions through famine, yet ignored how in its short lifespan, the dominant system of capitalism has killed and exploited billions of people and has completely destabilized the entire planet. This goes hand in hand with the colonization of the world by Western nations, destroying everything it touches everywhere it goes. In just a short few centuries, we’ve brought about the sixth mass extinction and potentially humanity’s, in favor of short-term gains.
But I digress, this article isn’t meant to be an economic or a history lesson, or even an endorsement of communism. This is about capitalism’s destruction of our climate and planet for profit at the expense of everyone and everything that calls this magical floating rock home — our only home.
We leave nothing for our children or grandchildren. As a result, we are ultimately bad ancestors. Our descendants, if there are any, will look back on this period of history with disdain and disgust, especially if we do not act to change things.
To put it a different way, we are but greedy children in a candy store, without any adult supervision. We are snatching up everything we can get our hands on, pushing each other over scraps of sugar, and trying to climb to the top of piles that can’t possibly hold anyone up for long before collapsing and disintegrating beneath them. And when they collapse, we all get buried.
The planet will recover. We likely will not if we don’t reverse course immediately.
Acceleration of Destruction to Make the Rich Richer
Things are getting worse because the rich are accelerating their destruction of things in a circular fashion like a merry-go-round. The climate crisis worsens, the rich make things worse and destroy the environment more, and the climate crisis gets even worse than before. Faster and faster, round and round we go. Where it stops, nobody knows.
We are actively watching corporations abandoning their climate goals en masse. This is especially in favor of AI which uses astronomical amounts of water and electricity, from cooling data centers to the production of computer chips. In tandem, these corporations and the rich people at the helm continue to pillage the people and land especially in their pursuit of fake “green energy solutions” through electric vehicles in their mining of cobalt and lithium for batteries for personal vehicles. (This is not to say that all green energy is fake or a grift, but many of the commercial solutions they’re feeding us aren’t to save the planet, it’s to save their industries and profit. If they cared they’d invest in robust public transit, not just a shift from gas cars to EVs.)
Now they want to rip up the ocean floor over the discovery of nodules which not only contain some of the main metal resources supposedly needed to make the batteries and tech for “green energy,” but have been found to produce a great amount of the planet’s oxygen.
I say “supposedly needed” because while tech billionaires and CEOs claim we need to destroy the environment and exploit people at all costs to somehow save the environment by destructively mining these metals for “green” tech, China is building EV batteries made of sodium. This isn’t an endorsement of China or their economic system by any means, but the fact that they’ve found an alternative available in abundance sounds like a better option, if truly efficacious.
I’m not a scientist or engineer, but destroying something that produces oxygen and worsening the climate crisis in the process doesn’t sound like a solution to the climate emergency. Even if the nodules didn’t produce oxygen, destroying a pristine ocean habitat should not be something we do gleefully. And if sodium batteries are effective, then wouldn’t it make more sense to heavily invest in desalination plants to address both the need for fresh water and the need for salt to make the batteries? Maybe we wouldn’t have to rape and pillage the Congo and exploit the people there through the horrendous mining operations for cobalt and lithium. Maybe it’d even address the issue of rising ocean levels over time by finding a use for the excess ocean water. But what do I know?
Capitalism Cannot and Will Not Save Us
Now, as the climate crisis worsens daily, we see we are not equipped to meet this challenge head-on with our current systems in place. That’s because the corporations and people responsible for the crisis and the lack of response can’t stand to lose any profit. Yet they’re paying our government (which is also complicit and responsible) to ignore the problems they’re guilty of creating and leaving us to deal with the fallout while they build bunkers in Hawaii and elsewhere.
Billionaires would much rather find ways to benefit from the destruction wrought by their inaction and choices regarding the climate crisis. We’ve seen this play out in places like Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria ravaged the area and after the Maui fires. Property developers gleefully rubbed their hands together at the site of devalued beach-front property that just became available.
The same will happen with LA. People who had insurance policies canceled or otherwise couldn’t afford them won’t afford to rebuild. They will become climate refugees and be forced to move while developers come in and rebuild the area with shiny new hotels and other things that generate even more profit—the rich stand to benefit from these situations.
As such, capitalism is not equipped to save the planet because it always puts profit over people. And since people surviving and thriving isn’t perceived as profitable, it’s not in the interests of the rich to build a world where people and the planet thrive. While they kill us all, they’re building robots to pick up the slack and replace us.
Author Kurt Vonnegut once said, “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” This is wild when you consider the fact that we’ve already spent several times over the cost of mitigating the climate crisis just in recovery and rebuilding costs after repeated extreme weather events causing billions in damage multiple times a year. These fires in LA alone are already the most destructive in the county’s history, and it’s only been two days, with worsening winds on the way and no end or full containment in sight.
Even worse, these corporations are finding new ways to monetize and profit from their destruction of our planet. Because capitalism will always try to sell us solutions to the very problems it creates without taking any accountability, our plight will not end while this system lives. They’ll squeeze every penny out of people and spill every last drop of our blood just for their bottom line. And they’ll raze the earth until there’s nothing left to profit from, no one left to buy anything from them, and nothing left to sustain their insatiable appetites. They will starve of their own greed.
As the Cree proverb goes, “Once when the last tree died and the last river poisoned and the last fish caught, we will realize we cannot eat money.”
Capitalism’s Response to Climate Catastrophe: Make it Worse and Make Money While Doing It
Capitalism is collapsing and burning everything with it. It caused this mess, and now we are all expected to suffer along with it, while the rich try to buy their way out of the consequences of their own actions.
They will find that they cannot escape what they’ve wrought, but by then, what will be the point of their comprehension, regret, or recognition of their actions? There will be nothing left of the planet or humanity. Everything we’ve accomplished and created will be lost. Where is the justice in that? That isn’t ideal. Worse, people in general are so resistant to change, that we are more readily willing to accept this concept of the end of the world, rather than be willing to change the systems that bring out that end. We’d rather die than change. We’d rather destroy the planet and ourselves than address or dismantle capitalism.
This isn’t the end. We need to understand just how severe our situation is before it’s too late. While all hope seems lost, we cannot give up yet. And we need to recognize how things are interconnected.
The Privatization of Resources Like Water
Directly related to the climate crisis, let’s look at how corporations are accelerating the collapse for profit through privatization, starting with resources. You may have heard how the fire hydrants in LA are running dry. Meaning, there is no water left in some places to fight these fires.
According to Time, “The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was pumping from aqueducts and groundwater into the system, but demand was so high that it wasn’t enough to refill three 1-million gallon tanks in hilly Pacific Palisades that help pressurize hydrants for the neighborhood.”
As California suffers from severe drought, temperatures rise, the state becomes drier and wildfires worsen, should it be any surprise that corporate interests are worsening the situation?
Specific to California, is the fact that companies like Nestle are actively stealing water from public lands, and from Indigenous communities.
“Nestlé has maintained that its rights to California spring water dates back to 1865. But a 2017 investigation found that Nestlé was taking far more than its share. Last year the company drew out about 58 million gallons, far surpassing the 2.3 million gallons per year it could validly claim.” (High Country News)
It should come as no surprise that the former CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, believes that water should be privatized and that it is not a public right.
“In the 2005 documentary We Feed the World and while speaking on the subject of water, he said “It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.” (Wikipedia)
These are the people destroying the planet and destabilizing the climate, for profit. They destroy natural resources, hoard it all for themselves, and try to sell it back to us for more profit, while telling us it’s not a human right to have access to things like clean water or air.
Moreover, the California drought, caused by climate change resulting from corporate influence, turned the state into a massive tinderbox. With so little water available, is it really a surprise that the fire hydrants are running out of water? This was an inevitable outcome that was predicted way in advance. Climate scientists and others have warned about this for years. It wasn’t a matter of “if” – it was a matter of “when.”
AI’s Contributions to the Climate Crisis
You know what they likely won’t allow to run out of water though? The data centers in the state, and around the country. Those will be prioritized and receive all the water and electricity they need while regular people will be cut off. This isn’t even a theory, it has happened before.
Remember that during the Texas snowstorm a few years ago they shut off the power to the outskirts of major cities and prioritized the richer inner city neighborhoods and high rises. Some people froze to death as a result. The wealthy will always be prioritized.
Even before AI, data centers used massive amounts of water. Now, as tech companies and other corporations go all in on artificial intelligence at the expense of people and the planet, we’re accelerating this crisis even more.
“A.I. use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which A.I. runs. … In 2022, Ren says, Google’s data centers consumed about 5 billion gallons (nearly 20 billion liters) of fresh water for cooling.” (Yale School of the Environment)
Corporations like Google, Microsoft, and especially Elon Musk’s many tech ventures that use AI (like Twitter’s GROK), are building data centers as fast as possible, and using up public water and electricity resources at a discounted price. Some are even recomissioning old nuclear power plants for this purpose.
So it’s not only using up valuable resources the public needs, it’s hyper-accelerating the climate collapse. All while the public pays for it and suffers from it.
The Privatization of Essential Services
Let’s return to privatization aspects. As fire department budgets are cut (in favor of giving more money to police), rich people are now requesting private firefighters, saying they’ll pay anything to essentially prioritize their houses being saved over the poor. And with those budget cuts of public services like fire departments, we’re looking at the possibility of privatization of these public services like fire fighting.
If you don’t think that’s possible, I remind you that we’re on the verge of losing the United States Postal Service in favor of privatized mailing services that would cost much more for less service and quality. (It’s all giving Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ – and if you don’t get that reference you need to read that book immediately.)
As wildfires worsen in California, insurance companies are increasingly canceling policies and refusing to cover people for fire damage, just like how they’re denying coverage for other extreme weather events.
Insurance companies in places like Florida have started denying coverage for floods and hurricanes. So “tough luck” if your house gets burned down or swept away in a flood. Oh, and you probably will still owe property taxes, like the people in North Carolina who lost their entire homes in Hurricane Helene were just told. And remember, they’ll threaten to garnish your wages or even imprison you for evading taxes. If you’re homeless, you might also be incarcerated in the near future for the crime of not having a roof over your head.
Incarceration to Support Capitalism
This brings me to the next point: we’re staring down the barrel of the prison industrial complex’s gun. They are rabid with excitement over the increase in the number of people they’re about to incarcerate, all with the backing and funding of the government with our taxes.
In particular, this refers to the fact that due to California’s “slavery clause” (which CA voters chose not to repeal in the last election) more than 30% of California’s volunteer firefighters are incarcerated people. They either receive $0.16 to $0.74 an hour or a maximum day rate of $5.80 to $10.24. (Forbes). Some of these firefighters are incarcerated teens.
These are non-violent offenders, working as essential workers, and are treated as easily disposable. (What does that remind you of? *cough* The early pandemic where we called essential workers “heroes” but did nothing to support or protect them *cough*)
They get paid less than minimum wage to risk their lives saving others and fighting these fires for the state. Yet when they’re done serving their time, they’re barred from serving as a firefighter in an actual department, unless they hire a lawyer and petition the state to seal their record or otherwise clear their charges.
What does this have to do with the prison industrial complex? It adds to recidivism rates – that is, the tendency of a convicted person to reoffend. If you get out of prison, but can’t get a job and make an honest living, your likelihood of committing a crime to survive (like selling drugs or stealing food) means you’re likely to return to prison. Which means the prison gets to use you as enslaved labor again.
With the criminalization of homelessness, what do you think that means for the folks our government refuses to house aside from throwing them in jail? And, with the incoming administration talking about rounding up tens of millions of undocumented people who they cannot feasibly deport, where do you think they’re going to be sent while awaiting deportation?
These are the people who grow and harvest our food. We need them, rely on them heavily, yet treat them with such contempt. They do the jobs most Americans would refuse to do, and they do it for pennies an hour. All to build a better life. And we’re about to round them up and put them in concentration camps as enslaved labor. Remember, slavery never ended, it was just given a constitutional loophole.
Given the fact that prison stock is at an all-time high and they have publicly available calls discussing how much they’re going to profit off of the incoming mass incarceration this country is about to unleash, everyone should be fighting this, while we still can. Remember, you’re only one paycheck, accident, illness, or injury away from becoming homeless.
Or in the present case – you’re only one wildfire or hurricane away from losing everything. If you lose your home in a fire, the insurance company won’t reimburse you, and you still owe taxes on a property that doesn’t exist, how long before you’re rounded up and put in a camp and forced into labor for the rich? Do you think you’re safe from that scenario? Do you think the government won’t exploit you when it exploits people globally?
What they do elsewhere, they will do here. They do not care about any of us. We are but means to an end when it comes to capitalism and imperialism’s desire for exponential growth and control. None of us are safe.
P.S. There are reports that ICE is currently harassing people trying to escape the fire, and police are still conducting sweeps of homeless encampments.
This is America.
The Impacts of Our Growing Police State
In tandem with the growing push for mass incarceration, there is also the emphasis on protecting property over people, we are seeing cities overfunding their police forces. This is despite the insurmountable corruption and crime they commit at the cost to taxpayers when police overuse force, murder Black and brown people, and have to pay out millions to victims of their brutality and abuse.
As we increase police funding, police are increasingly protecting property, not people. We see this in cases where police protect corporations like the recent Amazon workers’ strike, the images of police blocking access to a grocery store in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and the likes of the LAPD are more concerned about looting during these devastating fires than actually protecting life. (And they’re being heavily racist as always while they’re at it.) People have lost everything, but their priority is guarding property. They do not protect and serve us – they protect and serve the ruling class and their property.
And as things get worse, the working class will suffer more at the hands of the growing police state. We are losing our rights to free speech and privacy every day as surveillance increases, especially with AI technology. How long before we can no longer even talk about the climate crisis because the rich don’t want us to wake up to the reality of who caused it? When that day comes, will they round us up and imprison us for speaking out?
States around the country are building “Cop Cities” – specialized training facilities where they’ll be training police forces to go against civilian populations and the civil unrest they anticipate as the collapse continues.
When you counter the fact that not only are these facilities based on military training facilities in Israel, but that the IDF sends people over here to train our police, this should be sounding alarm bells off.
And when you consider the fact that our country has sent police and military over to Israel to train, and in some cases are enlisted in the IDF, you need to consider that many of these people who enforce the law have committed genocide and war crimes in places like Palestine and Syria and Lebanon. Do you think you can reason with that level of evil and depravity?
What our government endorses, funds, and carries out overseas, will return home to our very doorstep. What they do over there, they will do here. They will do it to you.
A government that commits genocide elsewhere will commit genocide at home. And they’re training the police to prepare for that here, with the backing of AI surveillance technology and social media companies who’ve collected all our data and will gladly hand it over to the government in exchange for deregulation and government funding for their pet projects.
Do you see how things connect yet? I’m not even finished connecting the dots.
The Failures of Our Government
After the last section, it needs to be clear that it’s not just corporations responsible for what’s happening. Our government is directly responsible too, for its lack of action against the climate crisis and its specific complicity in the worsening of it.
Cutting Funding
On a local level, cities are defunding fire departments and other essential services, often while giving more funding to police departments in the same breath. This happened in LA with Mayor Karen Bass defunding the LAFD by $17.6M and giving $118M to the LAPD, despite wildfires increasing dramatically in recent years and crimes significantly decreasing simultaneously. Not to mention the obscene corruption in police departments, including the LAPD specifically.
On the state level, California has failed to hold PGE (Pacific Gas and Electric – a private utility company) accountable for it’s refusal to bury power lines which caused several of the states largest fires in recent history.
On a national level, we see how the government has cut funding for emergency services like FEMA and has begun rolling back regulations, especially those related to environmental policies. Thanks to Citizen’s United and legal bribery through lobbying, in the last decade corporations have completely overtaken our government and are paying to destroy the planet quicker than before.
Selling the Country to the Highest Bidders
These multi-billion dollar tech and other companies aren’t just lobbying our government anymore through legal bribery, they’ve all but bought our government officials. As Trump prepares to return to the presidency, he’s already tapped several billionaires for cabinet positions, many of whom are literally former executives of corporations who stand to benefit from deregulation and dismantling of government agencies that stand in their way. One very specific, very loud, very unstable individual especially comes to mind.
That is to say, a foreign billionaire has essentially bought the presidency and is sitting in on government meetings and having influence over Congress, even before Trump’s taken office. He’s one of the many directly complicit in all of this. But he’s not the only one responsible. He’s just one of the loudest. And he stands to benefit greatly from all this, with his many corporations.
Welcome to the oligarchy.
Military Industrial Complex and Funding Wars/Genocide
Additionally, our government directly contributes to the climate crisis in several other ways. I will focus on two main ones that are essentially the same: military/defense spending and foreign aid.
According to Al-Jazeera, “The US military is vast in scale, with a carbon footprint larger than any other institution on earth. But when it comes to disclosure of its emissions of greenhouse gases, it’s been kept off the books – and has been let off the hook. … The environmental impact of the US military machine was documented in two 2019 reports, which revealed it to be the world’s largest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons, belching out more emissions than industrialised nations like Portugal and Denmark.”
Moreover, “Damage wrought by the US armed forces goes beyond carbon emissions. Rampant military expansion has also affected air quality, ecosystems, biodiversity, and the health of local populations living around bases.”
With the report mentioned being from 2019, it’s important to remember that it’s only gotten worse since then. And that military/defense spending doesn’t even include foreign aid.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) between 1946 and 2024, “Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance.”
While the data from 2023 and 2024 is incomplete, the CFR noted that “Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas on October 7, 2023, the United States has enacted legislation providing at least $12.5 billion in direct military aid to Israel.”
As Biden is practically walking out the door and exiting his presidency, he just announced he’s sending another $8 billion to Israel. We don’t have money to fight fires, help people in crisis, house the homeless, feed starving children, or develop an actual healthcare system, but we sure have plenty to fund genocide and ethnic cleansing and destabilize entire countries.
The Impacts of War on the Climate
Moreover, when you account for the insurmountable bombing that Israel has done in Gaza, Lebanon, and now Syria, we have to remember that each explosive they drop not only poisons the land, air, and water – it adds emissions to the atmosphere. And thus further accelerates climate collapse.
By November 2, 2023 – less than a month after October 7, Israel [had hit the] Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs. (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor). In addition, “Israel dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, [and] London combined.” (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, via Anadolu Agency article)
It is now 2025. All of the ongoing bombing has continued to add up, not just in terms of death and destruction, but the amount of emissions and chemicals as well. All we’ve done is speed up our demise.
Connections of the Class War
Connections Between the Recent CEO Killing
What if I told you that there’s a connection between the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and these fires in LA?
It’s not a direct connection in that Thompson was somehow responsible for the fires, but rather a systemic connection. That is the connection between profiting off death and destruction, the obscene wealth of the elite, and systems like insurance.
Corporate executives and the elite like Thompson stand to benefit from these things. They aren’t setting the fires, and there isn’t some conspiracy like representative Marjorie Taylor Green’s insistence on spreading anti-semitic conspiracies about “Jewish space lasers” starting the fire in Maui, but the ruling class is conspiring nonetheless. They have known about the effects of climate change from fossil fuels for decades. In fact, it’s been known since the Industrial Revolution. None of this is new.
Instead of allowing any changes to the system or energy dependence, they’ve sold us lies and told us it was the consumer’s responsibility to address environmental problems. It’s not the corporations’ fault, you just need to recycle, lower your carbon footprint, and stop using plastic straws or bags. These are just a few ways they sold us to push accountability on us. Even worse, they’ve pretended it’s a hoax that humans can even affect the climate.
They’ve conspired to not only avoid accountability but to worsen the crisis because they stand to profit from it. Remember, they sell us the solutions to the problems they create.
What does this have to relate to the CEO killing? As part of his job, Brian Thompson was responsible for increasing shareholder value. This was done at the expense of people who had their claims denied for life-saving medications and procedures which resulted in the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in just a few short years of his tenure as CEO.
He might not have “pulled the trigger” so to speak, but he pushed policy to deny claims, including a policy that implemented an AI program with a 90% error rate when denying claims. (AI rears its ugly head once again, highlighting these connections further). He is complicit in people’s deaths. He was by all accounts, a murderer. He just did it legally. He was never going to be held accountable, let alone see a day in court or prison for killing people. Instead, he got bonuses for generating profit for the company.
Connections Between Insurance and the Climate Crisis
By proxy, remember that billion-dollar insurance companies countrywide are now canceling and denying coverage for extreme weather events like hurricanes and fires. They might not be going out and killing people, but if anyone ends up on the street because they lost their home and the insurance company refused to cover it or reject claims to rebuild, they’ve ultimately forced people into homelessness. This increases one’s likelihood of premature death, assuming the police state doesn’t get to them first and incarcerate them for being homeless, and then force them to fight the deadly fires the state set the stage for.
To add perspective, let’s look at one such insurance company – State Farm. According to Insurance Journal, the net worth of [State Farm] stood at nearly $135 billion at yearend 2022. This is despite a net loss of $6.3 billion last year due to a rise in catastrophe claims from homeowner policyholders. Per Repairer Driven News, State Farm reported a $3.5 billion increase in net worth for 2023.
Digging deeper, I found on the Wikipedia page for State Farm’s previous CEO, Michael Tipsord, State Farm invests billions of US dollars to finance fossil fuel companies.[24] Others place State Farm’s fossil fuel investments at US $22.4 billion.[25]
According to Statista, per a Repairer Driven article, “As an industry, insurance companies spent $157 million lobbying, pharmaceutical companies spent $378 million and electronic manufacturers spent $239 million.”
In other words, while our government accepts bribes and gives all our money to fund genocide, corporations like insurance, pharmaceutical, and tech companies are raking in record profits and directly funding the degradation of things like the healthcare system and the climate, which they’re in turn profiting from.
They’re going to deny you coverage on your home from climate catastrophes, deny your medical care should you sustain injuries from those catastrophes, and surveil you to see if you have something to say about it. All while they rake in billions of dollars and fund the destruction of the planet.
And through insurance premiums, taxes, and everything else we purchase or pay for, we’re all directly funding and paying for our own destruction and death.
Connections Between the Government, LA, and Israel’s Colonization of Palestine
The Republican party has denied the climate crisis for years. But Democrats have been little better. California’s governor is a Democrat, as is LA’s mayor – who approved the budget that cut $18M from LAFD while giving $120M to LAPD. They and others preach about the climate crisis while accepting lobbying money from fossil fuel industries and others. But it’s even more insidious than that.
Per Not Our Tax Dollars, “In the 2024 calendar year, the U.S. government sent Israel at least $17.9 billion in military funding to mass murder the Palestinian people.”
According to CAIR California, “Of the billions of dollars the U.S. sends to Israel every year, the State of California contributes a total of $609,845,124—the most out of any other state.” For LA’s part, they sent almost $51 million between October 7, 2023, and July 25, 2024. More has been sent since then, and more will be sent with the additional $8B Biden and Congress have just approved to send.
So while Israel has received billions from the US for decades to provide its citizens free health care, education, and economic prosperity, Americans have been suffering at home. While Israel literally gets billions to commit genocide and drop bombs on people and hospitals in Gaza, Americans are becoming climate refugees because our government absolutely refuses to support its own citizens.
They keep saying “American first” but have sold Americans out. This is a bipartisan effort. It is fascism alive and well at very much at home in our country. It’s not a left versus right issue, it’s a top-down, them versus us issue.
If we do not act now, we will all slowly succumb to the consequences of the ruling class’s actions. They want you to be more concerned about the fact that celebrities are losing their homes and being evacuated, or that the LAFD chief is a lesbian. They’re distracting us with culture wars over things with claims of “the woke mind virus” and claiming that DEI is responsible for the fires and destroying the country. They telling you not to believe what you’re seeing with your own eyes, while they wage class war on all of us.
They have sold us and our planet for profit, and they’ll burn us to ash before they give up any power or profit. They will bring about our extinction if it helps their bottom line.
The people burning our planet have names and addresses. However, I suspect that after these fires are finally extinguished, some of them might have new addresses.
What We Do In This Moment Is Defining
The climate catastrophe has been upon us for a long time. But never before has it felt so acute. As we send another $8 billion in taxes to fund a genocide and increase police funding, we cut funding to fire departments and other essential services. Amid the devastation and collapse, remember that everything is interconnected.
At some point, very soon, we need to face the reality that being civil and politely asking for the government or the ruling class to act to address this crisis is not working. I am not suggesting violence, but the reality is that what they’re doing to people and the planet is violence – legal systemic violence.
They are murdering us slowly and methodically. They’re making it illegal to protest and stripping us of our freedom of speech. They’re committing genocide and ecocide with our tax dollars. And they have abandoned us while taking everything from us – our money, our livelihoods, our homes, our families, and our future.
Remember beloveds, it’s never too late to act, speak up, and do something to protect people and the planet. We need each other. I’d say the planet needs us, but she will recover with or without us. So, will we liberate ourselves, or will we go down without a fight and lose everything and everyone we love? The decision over which one it’ll be is ours and ours alone. Don’t consent in advance to the ruling class or let them make that decision for us.
Everyone must wake up to the fact that none of us are free until we are ALL free. We all have a role to play in this long overdue social reckoning and we all have to fight like hell to build that world into a more just and equitable place. Act accordingly. What we do in this moment is defining.
I leave you with a slightly altered quote from a song from the movie Wicked, (which I’m honestly astounded the Empire even gave us that piece of radicalizing art on the big screen in the first place). I hope it gives you hope and inspiration:
“Something has changed within [us],
something is not the same,
[We’re] through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game.
Too late for second-guessing,
Too late to go back to sleep.
It’s time to trust [our] instricts, close [our] eyes, and leap.
It’s time to try defying gravity.”
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