chapotraphouse

Even if the imperial government tried to put in more money towards maintaining infrastructure, the actual physical ability to fix it all doesn't exist (chronic lack of trained labor and good equipment, not to mention the organisational structures and institutional knowledge has been degraded).

The backlog for changes that need to be made is also huge. You might as well try to fight a forest fire with a bucket (that has a hole in the bottom). And I am being literal here, since someone posted a news article about how the fire fighters literally ran out of water.

Basically, you can't budget your way out of societal and ecological collapse. So if you are a bourgeois mayor, might as well just save your own hide (physically and politically) by ramping up police spending. Get the gangsters your political power is based on some new treats and toys.

Yes cops in America are a warrior caste and you cannot understand this country without realizing the warlordism and gangsterism that forms the actual structure of violent state enforcement

cops are the new Praetorian guard

I suspect that people are always the biggest danger to capitalism, more than fires or other natural disasters. So I get that as it decays you need to pay off cops more, both to take care of normal, petty criminals resulting from more poverty and such, but also to shut down any more upstarts, whether it's organized leftists or lone Luigis. The violent arm of the state is the main thing standing between the rich and the people taking all their stuff back.

Eh I think it should be pointed out that most of these fires happen in out-lying areas. Either mildly wealthy people (but generally not super-wealthy bourgeoisie who often have their own private firefighting contracts and have 6 homes anyways) or working class tend to live in those places. It's mostly homes and low-value structures that are destroyed, cheap infrastructure that can be pretty easily replaced type of stuff like equipment sheds and which is usually insured or else stuff owned by petite bourgeois small business types who the bourgeoisie themselves have no problem screwing over in this way.

Most valuable warehouses, factories, railyards, means of production, etc tend to be either in denser areas that don't see fires like this more than singe the edges or else they're on their own plots of well cleared land that fire struggles to get near and do damage to because it's hundreds, a thousand yards from the edge of their clearing to the low flammability materials used in commercial construction such as steel, concrete, stone, etc. And they are as mentioned also insured and it presents the bourgeoisie with the delectable choice of taking the insurance money and not rebuilding, pocketing it or choosing to rebuild and being covered for it.

Mostly it just functions to fuck over a bunch of working class people, takes all their possessions so they have to buy new ones if they're insured (consoom is good) and punishes those not paying the insurance money with a total loss of everything and plunge into economic desperation which of course benefits the bourgeoisie.

This is we must recall a situation where they've decided it's profitable for the world as a whole to burn and get more dangerous and expensive to operate in because of climate change which they're not only not doing anything about but with AI actively advocating reversing the limited progress made and going full hog double down on it. So occasional losses are a part of doing business already in their calculations.

Remember it's also class interests not interests of individual bourgeoisie. Individual bourgeoisie can be fucked over by the interests of their class as a whole. So much of the wealth and interests these days are with the financial bourgeoisie who aren't really impacted by small events like a loss of one factory most of the time (of course industrial bourgeoisie has pretty firm grip on the levers of foreign policy in the US but they're simply greedy and have class interests opposed to services that also help the poor as well and if it comes down to it they might even favor public failures of public services so they can push the idea of privatized ones).

https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/cops-are-gangsters/

It's okay all the ammunition the police are getting they can shoot the fire

The police chief did infact say they had arrested three looters already and warned criminals not to try to steal [from the soon to be destroyed houses]

Maybe we can shoot the fire

not before the 2026 world cup does!

Palisades is the new Pompeii