Crisis in California: Everything Touched by Capital Turns Toxic

California has the world’s 9th largest economy – just ahead of Canada. It has the planet’s most productive farmland, but based on chemical-intensive industrialized agribusiness that has yielded the country's most polluted air and worst toxic contamination. Fresno has the highest concentration of poverty of any U.S. city; the 2009 BBC documentary The City Addicted to Crystal Meth shows the social decay of the drug epidemic in Fresno. Vast tracts of homes sit vacant alongside the squalor of the newly homeless filling to overflowing burgeoning tent cities and shantytowns. 11 of the top 13 cities for unemployment are in California (12 in the Central Valley); 6 of the top 10 cities for foreclosures are in the state (5 in the Central Valley). California has become ground-zero for the toxic effects of the global economic crisis, despoiling entire ecosystems and destroying lives. The ruling class is using this to further the class war, dismantling the public sector and attacking working class wages, benefits and living conditions; it is here that the fight back must begin.