This is a Failed System
From Palisades to Palestine, we must fight to destroy capitalism and imperialism before they destroy us.
From Assal Rad: This is a Failed System
I usually don’t share long, emotional posts. But as I sit helplessly watching more family and friends evacuate and lose everything, wondering how far the fires will spread, I feel compelled to say something.
This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, this is a failed system.
A system that prioritizes profit over people impacts every part of our society and how we live.
A system that prioritizes the power of a few over the needs of a community ensures that the community—the masses—will suffer.
We live in a country that, regardless of which party holds office, is always prepared to kill people, bomb and invade other nations, continue forever wars and never asks, “How will we pay for it?”
All while our elected officials personally gain from companies that profit from war.
Regardless of who is in office, billionaires get richer, while working class Americans are expected to work and continually afford less.
They’ve made you believe it’s normal—in the richest country in the world—to have a full-time job but struggle to pay for rent or healthcare.
They ignore the climate crisis even as catastrophes get worse, while people have to make sure to have wind, fire and earthquake insurance—in addition to their existing insurance—only for those companies to cancel their coverage when they like. Because their profits matter more.
They make people’s health a for-profit industry, so being sick is better business than a healthy society. But healthcare is so ridiculously expensive that medical debt is the number one reason why Americans go bankrupt. And Americans avoid calling ambulances because of the cost.
We live in a country with 4% of the world’s population but 22% percent of its prisoners, whose (basically slave) labor we use to fight the fires that get worse because of the climate crisis they ignored, and if people get sick or hurt they may or may not be able to see a doctor.
I haven’t even mentioned the genocide we’re aiding with bipartisan support.
As Americans struggle with basic needs and climate catastrophes, the government has used billions of tax-payer dollars to unapologetically kill Palestinians and defend the slaughter of children in Gaza.
A system that fails its people over and over again is not flawed, it’s broken.
From the Institute for Middle East Understanding: US Weapons are Burning People Alive
Billions of dollars of US weapons are burning people alive in Gaza while firefighting services face budget cuts.
On September 16, 2024, US Forest Service (USFS) Chief Roger Moore announced an external hiring freeze due to an anticipated half billion dollar budget cut to the federal agency responsible for combating wildfires.
For years, USFS has seen an exodus of experienced firefighters due to low pay, and “2,417 nationwide requests for crucial fire resources—everything from radio operators to task force leaders—had gone unfilled” through July 26, 2024, according to ProPublica.
In August 2024, Secretary Blinken notified Congress of an $8.7 billion weapons package to Isreal. Since then, the White House has notified Congress of an additional $680 million weapons package in November 2024 and $8 billion weapons package in January 2025. The New York Times reported that Israel is using US taxpayer dollars to acquire these weapons.
Weapons paid for by our tax dollars are burning people alive in Gaza while our government fails to fully fund firefighting services to combat the wildfires raging in California.
This is not how American people want our tax dollars spent.
From Gaza to California: The Flames that Connect Us All
The fires burning in Palestine and Los Angeles today are symptoms of the same disease: a system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people, and expansion over existence.
Fire Weather
The wildfires in California replicate the massive fire storms in the boreal forest in Canada and Siberia, the lungs of the earth. Our addiction to fossil fuel has ignited an age of fire.
From Palisades to Palestine, we must fight to destroy capitalism and imperialism before they destroy us.
Capitalism has provided more people with a higher standard of living than any other economic system ever in history. Communism/socialism has killed more people than any other economic system ever, estimated to be roughly 100,000,000 people in the 20th century alone.
It is a failed system but it was not capitalism that failed. Rather federalism has failed. Largely via the exploitation and manipulation of capitalism by elected leadership at the federal level. And yes that is ideological. Democrats, and some Republicans, have for years lamented trickle down economics while they embraced raking in huge sums of money from their only source of income - taxpayers - and trickling it back down in a wide, wide variety of mostly unaccountable ways. A Pentagon that cannot pass an audit. An FDA that is a revolving door upward and onward to the halls of the regulated for the regulators. Ostensibly funding to protect the environment that either never occur (charging stations) or outright fail (subsidies for alternative energy). I could go on and on and on. And the individual US citizen has nothing to combat it but a single vote. Local governments and state governments fare not much better.