Kim Kardashian's Private Firefighters Expose America's Fault Lines

[BeckyDem]

(So maybe the wealthy believe, at least some of them, their money will help them fight the consequences of climate change.)

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”
Alexis C. Madrigal
Nov 14, 2018

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

The TMZ story feels uniquely 2018—financial capitalism, inequality, KimYe, the fires of Armageddon—and it is, for Americans at least.

“If the idea of private firefighting strikes us as an oddity nowadays, it should,” Benjamin Carp, a historian at Brooklyn College CUNY, told me. “While other societies throughout history have relied on private firefighting companies to protect the property of the upper classes … for the most part, we … have accepted the idea that fighting fire ought to be a public good.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-history-private-firefighting/575887/?fbclid=IwAR3kAByn3-VQ-7Q7Zup262js8KnVsd_4ROdfBHPfXOdUi2rEaMo2W7T0Xh4

[jberryhill]

1. Instead of fighting fire, why don't we try negotiating with it?

[BeckyDem]

2. lol +1

[dlk]

3. More Evidence We've Become an Oligarchy

[GemDigger]

4. This bothers me.

On so many levels that I wouldn't even know where to start.

[BeckyDem]

9. Me too.

Upside down world.

[handmade34]

5. not much different

than rich people getting better doctors, better security, better ______...…. what's new?

[Adrahil]

6. Private fire insurance firefighters used to be common.

My dad had a collection of placards from them.

There is a reason we moved away from that model.

[uncle ray]

7. i'm fine if they hire their own.

it can help keep firefighting resources available for the rest of us who cannot afford a private firefighting team. now if the talk turns to cutting their taxes so that we can cut the socialized firefighting crews, then we have a problem.

[Doremus]

8. I know you're referring to local taxes.

Cause their fed taxes were cut, and considerably so. But not the taxing authority that pays for firefighters, at least not that I know of.

For-profit fire protection. Laissez faire economics at work. Gotta love that neoliberalism.

[keithbvadu2]

10. As long as they do not take resources away from public firefighting capabilities.

As long as they do not take resources away from public firefighting capabilities.

[Ilsa]

11. What if they set fires to backburn, and it destroys

Someone else's property? I suppose that isn't likely, but possible.

[keithbvadu2]

12. Excellent point... probably some others

Excellent point... probably some others

Heckuva lawsuit.

Might they be expected to fight that fire?

[Ilsa]

13. Of course, the reason firefighting became part of "the commons"

was even those who had private firefighting contracts got their houses burned down by neighbors that didn't. It simply makes sense, because of the nature of fire, that everyone have coverage.

[marlakay]

14. I am ok with it because of insurance rates

They divide out all claims of the whole U.S. for national insurance companies. So the more my company can save the less my rates go up.

Last year I was told rates went up because of the hurricanes.

I am with Farmers.