The Los Angeles Fires and Death of the Liberal Class

A Fitting Comment on the LA Fires

My Personal Interest in the LA Fires, Even Though I Don’t Live There

The recent horrific fire that’s occurred in the Los Angeles area has some significance for me personally because of my cousin, whom I grew up with, we’re talking about 70 years ago. She was my childhood playmate, who is one year older than me.

She grew up, she got married. She and her husband had a successful careers, they raised two kids, and they lived basically the American dream.  She retired from her job, he sold his business, and they moved to Southern California because her son was living there with his wife and child.

It’s a nice climate, it’s a nice place to live. They had a great life. Who would have thought that, after several years of enjoyable retirement, that this terrible fire would have occurred.  I heard news reports of this, I contacted her by email, and she affirmed that her neighborhood had basically been wiped out. She says it’s catastrophic, and I’m sure she’s really traumatized by it.

It’s just a terrible situation. But in everything there is a lesson.

 

Seeing Things in Context

 

I always see things in context. I see things as not independent events, separate from other events.

And what I thought about was the fact that this neighborhood is in the Hollywood area, the Los Angeles area, so these are people who are on the the liberal end of the spectrum as far as I understand it.  Now, there are very conservative elements in Southern California also. But the area that we’re talking about here, many of these are people in the film industry and so on.

And these are almost certainly ardent Democrats. So I was reminded of a book that was written by Chris Hedges in 2011 called The Death of the Liberal Class.  What he talks about is the fact that the Democratic Party traditionally had been the party of the people. And it had, –at least you could expect– some kind of progressive thought in it.  The people who led the anti-war movement in the Vietnam War, these were more on the left-hand side of the political spectrum.

 

Role of the Democratic Party from the 1930’s-1960’s

 

The Democratic Party, of course, had its historic 1968 Convention in Chicago. I actually went to Chicago in 1968 for the convention. Gene McCarthy, the senator from Minnesota, was running on a strictly anti-war platform.  The future President Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.

Well, his secret plan was he was threatening to nuke North Vietnam if they didn’t do what he said, which is kind of reminiscent of what Trump’s negotiating strategy is. (Peace through Threats). But that’s another topic.

In any case, here we are in January 2024. That book was written in 2011, and he talks about, basically, the liberal intelligentsia class, as exemplified by the New York Times and the Washington Post, these are what is considered–falsely– to be “Left” aspects of U.S. society.

While those outlets were hardly leaders of the anti war and civil rights movements, many who read them were the ones who led the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement and so on.

You might have thought that issues like Gaza or the Ukraine war, would be more fully understood by them. But what has happened  from what I can tell, is that, as I’ve written in a previous article, their minds have basically been captured through years and years of both Zionist and Russophobic propaganda, to buy into a narrative which is completely the opposite of what their presumed values are.

 

Two Horrible Wars–What Do They Have in Common?

 

You have this situation with two wars going on, one in Ukraine and the other in Palestine, or Israel-Palestine.  The Democratic Party has insisted that that they’re going to support Ukraine to the hilt and they’re going to support Israel to the hilt.

Well, you know, according to my research, the problem with Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, is the result of the coup, the illegal coup, that Joe Biden specifically himself initiated in 2014.  You know, of course, Obama was okay with it, (“We brokered the transition”–as if what happens in a socalled sovereign country is his business), but Biden gave the ‘attaboy’, according to Victoria Nuland, to proceed with this coup, which overthrew a democratically elected government.

And then, with their extremely hostile attitude towards ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, the coup regime started bombing those who opposed the coup. They rebelled.  A civil war broke out, and Russia, created something called the Minsk Agreements in order to stop the fighting.  But it turns out that the Kiev coup government and Francois Hollande of France and Angela Merkel, who were co-guarantors of two Minsk Agreements, had no intention of doing that.

 

Russophobia, a Common Feature of American Political Discourse

 

They want to bring down Russia. And why do they want to do that?  It’s because Russia’s got a lot of resources, minerals, gas, oil, and so on, which Wall Street needs because the US is in such deep debt that they need to have hard assets to recapitalize the West’s balance sheet.

In fact, during the 1990s, that’s pretty much what happened. There was a stock market crash in 1987.  And there was pretty serious dislocation of the economy. But when the Soviet Union fell and the Eastern European countries also dropped their socialist program, basically Western capitalists went in and stole, hundreds of billions of dollars of assets.  That was one of the reasons why the US economy in the 1990s had been propped up–because it had this influx of cheap assets. I remember the euphoria about the new privatized assets suddenly for sale in US mutual funds. which propped up the stock market during the 1990s.

That was under a fake liberal Bill Clinton, who was anything but liberal. In fact, he was a Reagan-type person in liberal clothing.

They also hate Russia for standing up to that takeover, and for supporting countries suffering from Western imperialism.

 

Karma Strikes Back

 

So here we are in 2025. This is 14 years after that book, The Death of the Liberal Class, was written. And this terrible fire has broken out. You have whole neighborhoods burning to the ground. And yet, it turns out that the city of Los Angeles, in its wisdom–NOT!–, sent fire equipment to Ukraine, cut the number of firefighters, cut the budget of the fire department. An emergency reservoir wasn’t filled. Fire hydrants went dry. All of which made that whole area very vulnerable to fires. Even though the authorities know all too well, about serious fires there in the past.

But nothing like this catastrophe that has occurred.  So here we are, and people’s houses have burned to the ground. Top: Pacific Palisades, California. Source AP

It has occurred to me that if you look at photos of Gaza, where apparently at least 80% of the buildings have been completely destroyed, there are vast areas where it’s just nothing but rubble.  There’s nothing standing. And then I looked at pictures of some of these neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  There’s nothing standing.  So the irony of this is just, you know, it’s overwhelming.

British Commentator, George Galloway and US Journalist, Garland Nixon discuss the painful parallels of two cities in two countries.

 

The liberal class, which is personified by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, decided to back two terrible wars against people who are resisting being exterminated, literally.  Clearly, the International Criminal Court of Justice has said that, the Israeli leadership itself says, we want to starve and bomb and kill Palestinians and get rid of them.  Either force them off the land which they consider, the Bible gave them the right to do.

And in the case of Ukraine, you have a very similar mindset of these Ukrainian nationalists who have this idea of superiority to anybody who isn’t a Ukrainian, and you have to speak the Ukrainian language or you’re beaten up or treated to legal restrictions and punishment.  So this is what’s going on in Ukraine.  They’d killed several thousand in eastern Ukraine, and planned a massive ethnic cleansing, until Russia preempted it.

 

A Tale of Two Countries

You’ve got two parallel situations of a part of a country being demonized and persecuted, and the United States is funding that endeavor. $175 billion has been sent to Ukraine, several, probably tens of billions of dollars have been sent to Israel. And certainly since Israel’s inception, countless billions of dollars have been sent to Israel.

And they’ve been using it to persecute and make life completely untenable for the Palestinian population. And yet, we have a huge homeless population in the United States, and particularly in California, and now you’ve got a bunch of new homeless people, people who were actually doing pretty well financially, and then they find that their houses burned down.  What’s worse than that is the fact that shortly before this fire broke out, a number of the insurance companies, that is the homeowners’ insurance companies, decided to quit the market.

They told people, sorry, ‘we’re not renewing your coverage….we’re dropping your coverage…..Good luck’.

And so their house has burned to the ground, and they have no financial recourse to rebuild. It’s really just unbelievable.  And this is the state of California, which is an absolutely Democratic Party state.  You’d think that the Democratic Party cared about the people.  That was what the Democrats were supposed to be about. FDR created Social Security so that people who retire would not die in poverty.

And even Richard Nixon was enhancing Social Security, allowing for inflation increases, and LBJ created Medicare so that people who are retired have some kind of health insurance.

Now, of course, Bernie Sanders and others have said that there should be Medicare for all.  Like most modern industrial countries, they recognize the fact that health, the population’s health, is fundamental to the health of the whole society. But because the United States just doesn’t have that philosophy, everything is for profit, the health of the population has been going down. People are living less long than they used to.  Morbidity rates, obesity are through the roof.

So the whole society is really not in good shape because the people aren’t being taken care of, instead, all the money is being shipped overseas, especially to wars, and it’s like over a trillion dollars is spent on the U.S. military while students have no way to have a life for themselves because they have to go deep in debt just to go to school.

 

The Homeless Crisis in ‘the World’s Richest Country’

When you see pictures and encampments of people who are homeless in many of the big cities, including Los Angeles, you may think, ‘oh, those people, they’re ne’er-do-wells and tough luck for them, too bad that that happened to them,’ even though you know many of these people actually do work and they try to work or they have mental health problems or things like that which they don’t get enough care for.

Back in the day, the government built a lot of affordable housing for people. No more, money towards going bombing, not building houses.

Falling life circumstances also result in deteriorating mental health and you have the drug crisis all because the society is just basically disintegrating while all the revenue that should be going back into the society to build infrastructure, to build a better health care system, to give people stronger financial security is all going to war.  It’s really just crazy.

Plus. Wall Street has bought up the housing stock, driving up prices to make buying a house unaffordable. And driving up rent resulting in people are paying 50% of their income just to get a roof over their head. Normally rent or mortgage cost should only be at most 30%.

But here’s the thing:  The liberal class doesn’t see that.  They have not made the connection because they’ve been lied to so many times about endless wars that the U.S. has been involved in.  They hear this lie. They buy into it.  They acquiesce.  The wars go on, and then they find out some years later that they were lied to and they realize ‘Oh, I shouldn’t trust the media’ and then the media tells them another lie all based of course on what the CIA tells the media what to print.

Or lobbyists with the weapons manufacturers, they’re all in bed together. The people are sold another lie, like, “Russia invaded Ukraine unprovoked, or Hamas out of the blue attacked Israel, neglecting, in both cases, 70 years of preparation for this chaos that both of those countries are suffering from.

In the case of Ukraine, as I’ve mentioned in the past, the CIA was collaborating with Nazi collaborators in Western Ukraine.  And in the case of Israel, again, in 1948, Einstein and 20 other prominent Jews sent a letter to the New York Times saying that the new regime and the new state of Israel is dominated by people who are literal fascists, who both persecuted Palestinians, but they’re also suppressed Israelis, who wanted to get along with the Palestinians.

In many cases, they didn’t even want a separate state of Israel.  Einstein and many Jews knew that a separate state of Israel would cause problems, which they were completely right about.  So circling back, you have this crisis of the liberal class where they’ve just completely lost sight of their original values.  For me personally, I’ve watched this trend for my whole adult life, and it’s just been shocking to me that the American public has just been led into endless wars.

They believe what they’re told.  I don’t believe any of it because I know that the government just has a record of lying to the people all the time.  I’ve written about where there was a case of a government official had a press conference.  He said, “If you believe anything the government tells you, you’re stupid.” 

 

So this is the issue. I don’t know what the answer is, because I keep thinking after each outrage, the liberal class, that is, the people that I hung out with as a younger person, are going to think, “What is the situation with Ukraine?  How did this war start?” They hear what the government tells them and they wave a blue and yellow flag of Ukraine, not realizing that they’re actually supporting a coup government, which is basically dominated by Nazis. When I try to explain, they do not want to hear it.

The information is out there.

It’s readily available.  When the coup first happened, the BBC was even reporting, saying there’s these far-right nationalists who are coming into power.  And maybe we should think about that.  And at a certain point, even Congress said that they weren’t going to supply groups like the Azov Battalion, these far-right organizations that were persecuting Russian speakers.  We shouldn’t supply them with weapons.  But lo and behold, a couple of years later, Congress changed their mind and they arm Ukraine anyway.

So did Trump, who as of January, 2024 says the war would not have started if he had been president in 2022. How is arming Nazis in Ukraine preventing the Ukraine War, Mr. Trump?  Of course, the weapons were ending up with these far-right Ukrainian nationalist violent factions, or they would just sell it on the open market and in the black market.

So the whole thing just reeks of corruption and unconsciousness and willingness to accept narratives which are simply not true.  And what is the result?  Whole neighborhoods are burning to the ground.  Health care is deteriorating.  Homeless is increasing as is division in the society.  There’s no sense of solidarity in the society.  And it looks to me like the future is pretty bleak for this country until people, figure out what the hell is going on.

I’m talking about this because earlier, I guess about a week or so ago, Bernie Sanders who is kind of like the mouthpiece of liberal thought in the United States. And there’s obviously a lot of residual sympathy for his ideas.  So he posted something on YouTube, talking about the fact that we have an oligarchy, that we’re not living in a democracy.  And yet, when I posted that on Facebook, someone responded and said, ‘yeah, but Russia invaded Ukraine.’

These are educated people. They simply have not been able to make the connection between oligarchs and the Ukraine War. So that’s how we got to this dreadful place.

 

Do Your Own Research

 

Do your own research.  Find alternative sources.  There are many YouTube channels, actually.

• Judge Andrew Napolitano, he’s a staunch libertarian, and yet he has people like Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, who are leftists.
• Brian Berletic, who’s an excellent military analyst.
• You have the Duran with Alexander Mercurius and Alex Cristoforo.  They have their YouTube channels.  They’re on other venues as well. and you can watch them and listen to their commentary.
• You don’t have to read the New York Times, which is lying to you most of the time anyway.  You just have to remember Saddam’s aluminum tubes and yellow cake and all the lies and the weapons of mass destruction and the babies thrown out of the incubators. Or Russia invaded unprovoked. Or Israel is the innocent party in the conflict with Palestine, bombing Lebanon, invading Syria, threatening Iran.

 

It’s all parroted by the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.  And yet people think, ‘oh, I’m a smart person, so I’m going to get my news from the New York Times because I’m a smart liberal person and I have possession of the truth.  So I don’t have to even fact check the New York Times.

Another thing you can do, is to go on your computer, go to www.yandex.com, Y-A-N-D-E-X.com. It is a search engine which is not in the Google universe.  And you’d be amazed.  You can ask the same question of Yandex.com as you would ask of  Google, and you’ll get some very different answers.  You’ll find that the answers that you get from Yandex are often a lot closer to the truth than what you get from Google.

 

Conclusion

So that’s just a little bit of advice in ending this discussion, my cousin just lost her house.  And she probably didn’t realize that she  voted for war material to go to these two wars.  I don’t know for sure, but I think there’s a good possibility that many of these people who lost their houses voted to send weapons to Ukraine and weapons to Israel, but there’s no money to protect themselves from fires.  There it is.

Ignorance is not bliss.