As the World Burns

The Concrete Class Connections from California to Gaza

When Los Angeles started burning, the water ran out at the hydrants. Califonians started asking questions about the water supply and that inquiry led to the billionaire class, who are remaking our world for their personal interest. Since 1994, a billionaire couple—the Resnicks—have taken over the lion’s share of the public water infrastructure in Kern County, privatizing that resource to operate their agricultural business with the cringe-worthy name: the Wonderful Company. Owning over 130,000 acres of California’s prime stolen Indigenous land, the Resnicks turn our water into pesticide-laden pistachios and other agricultural products. Almost half of American households use Wonderful Company products which include Fiji Water, Pom pomegranate juice, and Halo mandarins to name a few.

The Resnick’s water is stored in Kern Water Bank, a public-private partnership in which the Resnicks own a 57% stake. The Kern Water Bank looks like a 32-square mile wetland and stores up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water (about 500 billion gallons) underground. Through their water hoarding, the Resnicks have been able to outcompete other local farmers—often poorer or immigrants—and put them out of business. Linda and Stewart Resnick also work hard to erode the rights of their own farmworkers. Their water-hungry pistachios make up the world’s largest market share. Wonderful Company’s crops use about 150 billion gallons of water a year, which would be enough water to cover the needs of the 875,000 people in San Francisco for a decade.

The privatization of water left the public going up in flames as Santa Ana winds whipped up an inferno that swallowed people’s homes and public infrastructure. But the people of Los Angeles are not the only humans on planet earth to be scorched by the Resnicks. Every year this billionaire couple sends money to support the occupation of Palestine, through tens of millions of dollars for Techion University in Haifa, which has been implicated in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people. Techion has developed the remote­ control capabilities for the Caterpillar D­9 armored bulldozer used by the Israeli military to demolish Palestinian homes, which is a violation under International Humanitarian Law. Techion has also created scholarships and partnerships with Elbit systems, makers of the drones that have been slicing up children, healthcare workers and patients in Gaza’s hospitals as well as killing World Central Kitchen aid workers. Elbit systems is also used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Like US police departments, ICE has been sharing training and technology with Israel’s military. Even their pistachios have been weaponized as they flood the market in the Middle East in an attempt to destabilize Iran’s pistachio market. The Resnicks have given millions to the Friends of the IDF, supporting the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. Their money has literally contributed to Israel’s fires set in Gaza, as we witness people burned alive in tents and in their hospital beds.

These connections are not theoretical. They are literal and lead to the loss of life and long term stability of people both here and around the world. And these connections do not happen in a vacuum. They happen with the willing participation of politicians and the police, to uphold “law and order” as the people face apocalyptic realities. As Los Angeleans fled the flames in Tongva territory, the state brought in the police, immigration officials and the National Guard, while they failed to provide N95 masks for the people now breathing in toxic doses of wildfire, which can have catastrophic impacts on the human body leading to premature death at the levels currently present in Los Angeles. In the logic of capitalism, guns prevail when masks are needed. City officials scrambled to find masks and were forced to reach out to anarchist mutual aid groups. These groups continue to provide free N95 masks since the start of the pandemic and they continue to do so for people who are vulnerable to the ongoing spread of Covid.

Why is the state leaning in on police patrols and ICE raids when the people need safe air, masks, food, clean water, medicine and shelter? Volunteer groups step in to fill the gaps–and are even being penalized for handing out food to hungry people in the midst of an emergency–but what is the purpose of paying taxes if the so-called “emergency services” are not available to help us as our city is burning? In fact, the City of Los Angeles defunded the LA Fire Department by $17.6 million dollars, in spite of clear warnings from the Fire Chief Kristin Crowley that emergency response would be severely hindered by the cuts, and we are seeing the impacts clearly now.

While the Fire Department’s budget was cut, the Los Angeles Police Department budget received a hefty $128 million increase, a bump of 7%. Additionally, Los Angeles sent $238 million dollars of their tax payers money to Israel. The horrific genocide in Gaza is being funded by people who drive our own slow social deterioration and health inequities here, which is made more stark in these moments of climate catastrophe. The hemorrhaging of our dollars to uphold violence instead of creating resiliency has left most Angelenos up a dry creek in their time of immense need.

In Northern California, we have other problematic billionaires who profit off our need for shelter, driving thousands of people into Bay Area streets. The Diller family owns the Prometheus Real Estate Group, the largest corporate landlord of residential units in the Bay Area. Unlike the mythical eponymous Prometheus who stole fire and gave it to humanity for the greater good, the Dillers steal affordable housing and collect the increasing rents for their own enrichment. Their ownership of the lion’s share of rental units allows them to set how the market moves, driving up the unaffordability of Bay Area housing, leaving working class people displaced and homeless. They buy politicians like California Senator Scott Wiener to greenlight their development projects and to frustrate moves by the state to secure protection for renters. In the past four years, homelessness in the United States has hit a record high.

Just like the Resnick’s the Dillers are avid funders Israel’s genocide and apartheid state. They donate their money to build hospitals in San Francisco while they send money to the Israeli military who continues to destroy hospitals in Gaza and abduct and healthcare workers, like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, to accelerate the annihilation of the Palestinian people. These flagrant violations of International Humanitarian Law must not become the new normal and are being decried by healthcare workers around the world. The Dillers have funded the Canary Mission, an online doxxing website that tries to silence US doctors who speak out about Israel targeting and attacking healthcare. And they fund Israeli organizations that prevent Palestinians from building homes in the West Bank, as Israel constructs whole neighborhoods to illegally occupy Palestinian land. The Dillers put people in tents from Frisco to Gaza. As the largest donor the University of California, their influence brought the violent repression of university faculty and students who have spoken up about the genocide.

Our speech, water, land, housing and healthcare are controlled by a billionaire class who is hell bent on annihilating the people in Palestine and who also controls the political machinery in the US to prevent us from having the things we need that are necessary for human thriving. The US has given over $300 billion to Israel, where Israelis enjoy universal public healthcare. Here the people in the US are forced into medical debt–the single leading cause of personal bankruptcy–through the financial abuse of healthcare insurance companies, whose profits land into the bank accounts of the billionaire class and whose durability in our society is protected by the same politicians who are sending billions more to Israel.

In both the US and Palestine, the people who are suffering are poor and working class–the everyday people. In Palestine, the genocide is violent and rapid and must be stopped immediately through arms embargo. Here it is slow but the impact on our lives is also seen through shortened lives that are wracked by chronic inflammatory disease. To wrest the power we need a to rapidly expand the mobilization of working class people who understand that our labor and participation is what drives the profits that the billionaire class uses to ultimately deny us healthcare and control us through surveillance, increased militarization of the police and increasingly repressive force–techniques that were tested in Gaza and imported here.

In the US, everything that is required for a life of health–food, medicine, water, housing and energy–has been privatized into the hands of billionaires who are squarely supporting the genocide in Gaza. In a much more immediately catastrophic and violent manner, Israel has cut off Gaza to these very needs in their complete siege and unbridled attacks on healthcare, housing and cultural institutions in Gaza since October 2023. This is how to rapidly kill a large number of people at once. But the slow killing of the working class and poor in the US is evident too. Becoming unhoused can shave years off of your life–people without housing die 20 years sooner. Exposure to wildfire smoke does the same. As does lacking access to clean air and water without fracking residue and organic food without pesticides. We see the health impacts of wealth accumulating into the billionaires hands in the United States–our life expectancy is falling while our health apartheid is firmly entrenched. Poor, Black, Indigenous and other marginalized people have worse health in the US than the elite who control every aspect of our life’s most immediate necessities. This is not an accident. It is how our system is engineered, and it must be reengineered to have different outcomes.

Instead of funding ecocide and genocide, our land, our water, our labor and our tax dollars could instead be used to secure food, water, shelter, education and healthcare for all. These are things that are critical for human health and used to belong in the commons before the dawn of capitalism–they belong to no one and they belong to all. Capitalism as a system works because it manufactures their scarcity to coerce the labor of the working class into jobs we hate, jobs that continue to concentrate wealth into the hands of those who abuse us. In a system built through settler colonial logic, we must recognize that we are all just one wildfire away from becoming homeless ourselves. It is past time for the people to manufacture abundance and resiliency instead, to wrest these crucial things we need to survive and thrive out of the hands of the billionaire class and into the commons for the benefit of all Californians. By focusing our resources here for our people instead of fighting wars of empire abroad that accelerate climate change and cause catastrophic harm to children, we can put our dollars and efforts in alignment with the value of promoting health for all.