Seeing through the Smoke: The San Diego Fires

Watch Mike Davis speak on how the right is spinning the tragedy as a triumph of Republican values:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D3B56D76FA080815

Celebrated historian Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians, Planet of Slums, Ecology of Fear, and many other influential books. In this provocative talk, he shows that as soon as the San Diego fires started, right-wing politicians began to apply spin.

The real tragedy of the fires occurred on Otay Mountain, east of San Diego, where six immigrants were found dead and eleven more were horribly burned. When San Diego's mainstream media finally got to this story, they argued that it shows how American taxpayers are being forced to provide free health care to "illegal aliens."

At the same time, they glorified the "heroic" Republican leaders of San Diego, contrasting them to "corrupt & ineffective" Black Democrats
in New Orleans. But these are the same corporate-owned politicians who pushed through pro-sprawl policies that site subdivisions in the
middle of natural fire zones. They've also starved fire departments of equipment and personnel.

Instead of acknowledging that they set the stage for an unnatural disaster, San Diego's leaders have hammered the theme of homeland security, even implying that undocumented immigrants might be
responsible for the fires.

Half the county has burnt to the ground but the politicians and news anchors haven't stopped grinning for a minute. They're trying to spin
this disaster as a triumph of Republican values. But it's really a bonfire of right-wing vanities.

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