By Will Swaim
Thursday, January 23, 2025
When wind-driven fires erupted across Los Angeles,
Governor Gavin Newsom drew outrage for posting a photo of himself against a
backdrop of burning homes. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass got a near-lethal dose
of the gammas, too — but because she was nowhere near the fire.
Ignoring warnings that Santa Ana winds were returning —
bringing with them greater fire risk — Bass flew to Africa to attend the
inauguration of Ghana’s new president. As fire erupted in Pacific Palisades,
she was photographed at a cocktail party in Accra. By the time she returned to
L.A., her city was aflame. At press time, fire has killed more than two dozen,
burned nearly 40,000 acres, incinerated more than 12,000 homes and businesses,
and forced nearly 200,000 evacuations. Estimates of property damage range
upward of $250 billion.
You might conclude that politicians can’t win — they’re
damned whether they’re too close to a disaster or too far from one. But there
is something powerfully symbolic about Bass’s Ghanaian adventure: these fires
have illuminated the extent to which California’s political class engages in
vanity projects rather than the serious work of running things.
Traveling to Africa, talking about climate change, and
establishing her city as “a sanctuary for immigrants and LGBTQ youth in advance
of Trump’s return to the White House” — these things thrill the mayor and her
allies. Symbolism is precisely why the Los Angeles Times endorsed Bass’s
2022 mayoral run. Waving off concerns that she had no executive experience —
her résumé featured only community activism and stints in the state assembly
and Congress — the editors applauded her “holistic vision.” Never mind the
dull, expert-led government work that was the genesis of the Progressive
movement. Look instead, the Times wrote, to the summer of 2020 when, as
a member of Congress, “Bass helped write the George Floyd Justice in Policing
Act, which was an important effort to address decades of racial inequity in
policing, despite” — despite! — “the federal government having little
authority over local police agencies.”
By contrast, pulsing with primal jealousies, the Times
editors dismissed Bass’s challenger Rick Caruso as a man who, “best known” for
building “luxury malls,” had “poured more than $60 million of his personal
fortune into his campaign.”
In August 2022, while she was still campaigning for
mayor, Newsom came to town. Surrounded by reporters, he helped clear a homeless
camp beneath the Santa Monica Freeway. Bass won the mayor’s office three months
later, was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris, and declared a “state of
emergency” to battle homelessness. Within a year, the city’s own census showed
that the homeless population had grown nearly 10 percent, to about 46,260. Some
of those people had reestablished a camp on the very site of Newsom’s televised
cleanup twelve months before. On November 11, 2023, a fire that may have been
started by heat-seeking campers there blazed through a nearby construction lot
and burned down and destroyed the interstate, among the nation’s busiest. It
remained closed for eleven days. Refuting the findings of her own
investigators, Bass denied that the homeless camp was the flash point. She
blamed the construction company.
Today, any honest count of L.A.’s homelessness should
include the 45,000 or so people whose homes just burned.
***
When she wasn’t failing on homelessness, Bass was
creating the conditions for another disaster, appointing people whose key
strengths appear to have been their “diversity.” She staffed her city’s fire
commission with teachers’ union activists and/or DEI specialists. That inexpert
Gang of Five did not resist Bass’s decision, twice in late 2024, to cut
millions from the city’s $800 million firefighting budget. Bass counters that
she gave the firefighters’ union a win in the form of higher pay. That made firefighting
more expensive but no more effective.
Kristin Crowley, Bass’s appointed city fire chief, said
as much in a December memo. The mayor’s budget undermined her department’s
“ability to maintain core operations,” including its “ability to mitigate
wildland fires and other hazards effectively,” Crowley wrote.
But Crowley’s memo was a prop: in a footnote, she
recommended no real action — only that Bass and her feckless commissioners
“receive and file” the memo.
Crowley hasn’t escaped criticism. Early reports suggest
that the Palisades fire of January 7 may have started days earlier, when kids
with fireworks sparked an eight-acre blaze on New Year’s Day. Firefighters
quickly extinguished it, but investigators say that Crowley, ignoring standard
practice, ordered her team to withdraw prematurely, allowing that fire to
smolder for a week before reigniting disastrously on January 7.
That breakdown and others have brought eyeballs to
Crowley’s official biography. It begins, significantly, not with her expertise
but with her gender and sexuality: “With her wife and children by her side,
Chief Crowley took the oath of office on March 25, 2022 — becoming the first
female and LGBTQ Fire Chief in the LAFD.”
Janisse Quiñones, Bass’s appointed head of the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power, has come in for similar scrutiny. When
fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran dry on Day One, Bass said it was
unreasonable to expect an urban water system to support wildfire suppression.
Perhaps. But we now know that, one year ago, the DWP drained the nearby
reservoir, the city’s largest, for repairs that never came. Many blame
Quiñones. But she took the job in May, well after Bass’s administration had
pulled the plug on the reservoir. And it’s hard to deliver water to the
nation’s second-largest city when you’re pumping it through the narrow pipe of
Bass’s fashionable demands — that Quiñones “prioritize” “vulnerable
communities” and commit to “the goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2035.”
***
Bass is not responsible for geographical features that
have sent dry Santa Ana winds through Southern California for millions of
years. She did not oversee the city’s expansion into canyons and foothills
cloaked in combustible manzanita, sage, and scrub oak. Nor is she uniquely
responsible for decades-old state regulations that make it difficult to clear
brush or manage forests through grazing, timber harvesting, and prescribed
burns. The result of those policies is historically dense forests in which more
trees compete for limited water and light. Bark beetles turn the weakened trees
into kindling. Lightning, arsonists, kids with fireworks, heat-seeking homeless
people, and the failures of equipment owned by minutely regulated utility
companies do the rest.
Newsom could do something about those policies. Instead,
after each disastrous wildfire, trailing reporters and cameras, the governor
stomps through the ashes of what used to be people’s bedrooms, blaming “climate
change” and “dog-eat-dog capitalism” for the destruction. Instead of clearing
brush, he has responded with policies to punish the oil industry and consumers.
California attorney general Rob Bonta is suing oil companies for their alleged
role in climate-driven wildfires.
Much of the cost of rebuilding will fall to insurance
companies. But the state’s insurance market is a picture of Soviet-style chaos.
Ricardo Lara, California’s elected insurance commissioner, has refused to allow
insurers to include the costs of reinsurance in their premiums. Paying out
claims that are 9 percent higher than their state-limited revenue has driven
many insurers to quit California. FAIR, the state’s fund for people who can’t
find insurance in the dysfunctional marketplace, has only $700 million in cash
on hand but $458 billion in exposure.
***
How have such incompetents taken over California? That
story begins with 1968’s Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, granting collective
bargaining rights to just one slice of government workers: state police. That
bill was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan, who figured that, because
its members tended to vote Republican, the new police union would become a
reliable money machine for Republican candidates. The unintended but utterly
predictable outcome was that, once unionized, police pushed for increases in pay
and benefits. Tightfisted Republicans in the statehouse resisted. Their
Democratic colleagues were more forthcoming. Soon, police were endorsing
Democratic candidates.
Reagan’s successor, Jerry Brown, grasped the lesson.
Beginning in 1976, he extended collective bargaining rights to all other
government employees, down to the level of cities and school districts. The
result was a windfall for Democrats — and political dysfunction for everyone.
Though weakened by the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME,
California’s government unions remain the state’s most powerful political
financiers, raising and spending about $1.5 billion per election cycle and
deploying armies of campaign volunteers. They give a wide berth to the
extremist political impulses of elected officials on all other issues —
including the promotion of environmental regulations that create the conditions
for wildfires — so long as those officials deliver on benefits, pay, and
expanded union power.
***
Newsom is already working to change the conversation from
catastrophe to the prospect of a federal Marshall Plan for California recovery.
He breathlessly describes the opportunity to “reimagine” Los Angeles and to
build that Tomorrowland before the city hosts the World Cup next year and the
Summer Olympic Games in 2028.
Citing the moral hazard of a federal bailout, the Trump
transition team and congressional Republicans said aid should be linked to
changes in state policies. Newsom, Bass, and their allies immediately denounced
this “politicization” of the fires. And then Newsom (what’s the word?)
politicized the fires.
Weeks before the disaster, Newsom called state lawmakers
into special session to approve an emergency $50 million campaign to
“Trump-proof” California; that money would go to Attorney General Bonta and to
leftist nonprofits. When Republican lawmakers rebelled, L.A.’s fires presented
Newsom with an opportunity. Tying the anti-Trump package to $2.5 billion in
wildfire relief forced Republicans into a dilemma: spend millions funding
leftist organizations that will haunt California for decades or appear to coldheartedly
oppose aid to fire victims.
These wildfires may challenge even the preternaturally
clever Newsom. Previous wildfires burned largely rural, generally conservative
parts of the state. This time there’s 24-hour media coverage of a horror
visited upon a major city; this time the victims include reliable Democrats and
big donors.
Even before all this, on November 5, Angelenos seemed to
have rediscovered their public-safety sensibilities. They tossed George Gascón,
the progressive district attorney, in favor of Nathan Hochman, a Republican,
and voted overwhelmingly to stiffen punishments for serious crimes. Today,
handwritten cardboard signs have blossomed amid the ashes: “We Shoot Looters.”
And then we recall that Louisiana governor Kathleen
Blanco didn’t bother to run for reelection after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. She
was replaced by Republican Bobby Jindal; the Louisiana state legislature turned
red for the first time since Reconstruction.
God never closes one door without opening another, the
old saying goes. But the hallways are hell. In Los Angeles that now seems far
too literal.
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