Day: March 31, 2007

Hollywood Hills Blaze Caused by Kids Playing with Fire

Jon Ponder


On our way out of town to see friends up the coast in Ventura yesterday, Page and I were more than a little rattled when we saw what looked like a giant mushroom cloud rising 5,000 feet above Hollywood.

Visitors to California over the next six months need to know that if they toss a cigarette out of a car, or hike up a hill perhaps to smoke pot, they could easily start a fire that could cause major damage, maybe even loss of life.

We found an AM all-news station where we learned that an empty lot behind the Oakwood Apartments on Barham Avenue was on fire. Oakwood is a 1970s-style apartment complex that offers temporary long-term housing. It is famous in town because its proximity to Burbank and Hollywood makes it a frequent short-term home for entertainment types. If you know LA, it is sited on a west-facing hillside within a mile or so west of Griffith Park and the Hollywood Sign.

Famous Oakwood residents have included the Jose Menendez family, who lived there when they moved here from New Jersey, five years or so before Jose’s sons, Lyle and Erik, murdered him and their mother, Kitty, in their Beverly Hills mansion in 1989. Funk superstar Rick James died here on August 6, 2004.

Today we learned that a couple of teenaged boys from Illinois who were staying at Oakwood set the fire. They were reportedly in the field behind the complex playing with lighters — a game I remember well from my misspent youth. Back then, we called it “Fire Up That Doobie, Man.”

What these boys did not know is that the Los Angeles area received less rain this winter than in any other year on record — under two inches the last time I checked. There is a miniscule chance we’ll get more rain before the season ends in a few weeks. Otherwise, it won’t rain again until Halloween.

By September, this place is going to be one giant tinderbox. The Barham fire yesterday is a just a precursor. The last time the scrub on that hill burned was 1961. The 41-year-old kindling erupted in seconds and burned for hours. Thanks to the property owner’s adherence to strict fire-management rules, however, the fire department quickly got things under control.

Here’s the point: Visitors to California over the next six months need to know that if they toss a cigarette out of a car, or hike up a hill perhaps to smoke pot, they could easily start a fire that could cause major damage, maybe even loss of life.

And like these teenagers, they could very well face time in jail.

War Funding Bill Benchmark Helps Big Oil Companies Gain Control of Iraq’s Reserves

Jon Ponder

The emergency war funding bills passed by the Democrats in the House and the Senate could pave the way to handing over Iraq’s oil reserves to big oil companies. Bush took us to war to gain control of the oil. Will he veto the bill anyway?

The supplemental appropriation package requires the Iraqi government to meet a series of “benchmarks” President Bush established in his speech to the nation on January 10 (in which he made his case for the “surge”). Most of Mr. Bush’s benchmarks are designed to blame the victim, forcing the Iraqis to solve the problems George Bush himself created.

One of the President’s benchmarks, however, stands apart. This is how the President described it: “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” A seemingly decent, even noble concession. That’s all Mr. Bush said about that benchmark, but his brevity was gravely misleading, and it had to be intentional.

The Iraqi Parliament has before it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only “benchmark” that truly matters to his Administration.

Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex, it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry.

If passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration, and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it.

The legislation pending now in Washington requires the President to certify to Congress by next October that the benchmarks have been met-specifically that the Iraqi hydrocarbon law has been passed. That’s the land mine: he will certify the American and British oil companies have access to Iraqi oil. This is not likely what Congress intended, but it is precisely what Mr. Bush has sought for the better part of six years.

It is why we went to war.