Thread by @sunrisemvmt

Right now, fires are raging across the west coast. Simultaneously, there is a shortage of firefighters.

This is the paradox of our modern economy: extremely efficient at fulfilling all sorts of consumer demand, awful at funding necessary public services.

It's worst in a crisis.

Solving a crisis is rarely profitable! But it is necessary.

What does the free market do in a crisis? It exploits. It squeezes every penny, at the expense of people.

California usually deals with fire season by exploiting prisoners, conscripting them for little pay.

Crisis firefighters are often prisoners, paid $1/hour via incarceration (so much for the 13th amendment abolishing slavery😬)

But currently, those prisoners are in the midst of a COVID outbreak.

Why does the state not employ enough firefighters year-round to handle fire season?

They don't want to *pay* them year-round. Problem is, SOCIETY needs them.

The free market is always looking to cut corners (and austerity applies the constraints of the free market to our public services)

A few extra firefighters in reserve for fire season is a wise investment.

And full-time firefighters are well-paid. The average firefighter in California makes $75k a year. That's over TRIPLE the $12/hr minimum wage in California.

Short-term costs might not justify having reserve firefighters, trained and paid year-round. But it's good for society.

This is why of all the Green New Deal provisions, a jobs guarantee is the most critical.

There is so much necessary but unprofitable work to be done, that as long as we only focus on short-term costs we will never fully fund.

Nowhere is this more clear than climate change.

When it comes to climate change, for-profit industries have failed us. Year after year we hear "we need the right incentives" or "the free-market will innovate us out of this situation". It hasn't and it won't. There's too much money in digging fossil fuels up out of the ground.

That's why the government should create the jobs we NEED.

We need to overhaul our crumbling infrastructure from transit to housing to energy.

We need a public disaster response force trained to tackle fires on the west coast, hurricanes in the South, and flooding in the midwest

Are those things always profitable? Hell no.

But profit is short-sighted. It doesn't take into account human suffering or happiness. It rarely plans well for the future.

Profit analysis doesn't account for people whose homes and lives are lost to climate disasters.

Profit analysis doesn't account for homes and lives lost to hurricanes, fires, and floods, rising seas and drought-induced famines.

It only cares about dollars in and dollars out. It's sociopathic.

As a society, we SHOULD care about those things. We should account for them.

We care too much about the solvency of our public resources: the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare.

The government should step in and say "we are creating these jobs. We will print money to pay for them, because we NEED them."

That's a federal jobs guarantee.

It's the basic underpinning of a Green New Deal. We have so much work in the coming decades, averting worse climate change while we weather the climate crisis as it already is.

Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, funding FEMA to handle climate disasters, and paying well.