Climate and Health, Neoliberal-Style

To call the odiously-named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) a "watered-down" version of Joe Biden's original plan to fight climate change and expand the social safety net is actually doing unintended homage to such endangered bodies of water as Lake Mead, whose own declining levels are literally bringing up the bodies.

For despite the current hoopla,, there will be plenty of corpses arising from this "landmark legislation." Its very name is a dead giveaway that it is rife with debunked "trickle down" theory and tax breaks for the wealthy in lieu of cash aid to people. Despite a modest tax on corporations, stock buy-back schemes, and more money for IRS enforcement, the oligarchy will continue to profit at the expense of the rest of us. Wall Street's carried interest tax loophole, which Biden promised to close as a campaign stunt, survives and thrives. And the climate will continue to worsen.  The mere imposition of carbon offsets and the awarding of more carbon credits and threats of fines to polluters, while still allowing for the relentless destructive drilling for fossil fuels in the melting Arctic and the still-polluted Gulf of Mexico, is only one indication that this legislation is not serious. It is deeply and pathologically cynical. Joe Manchin's outrage-inducing perk of a new pipeline for West Virginia is a relatively miniscule part of it.

The establishment media is doing its damnedest, nevertheless, to cast the Senate passage of the IRA as a stunning victory for Democrats and a vindication for President Biden.  After all, any shallow body of water seems to take on volume in a storm. The froth and the frenzy that the headlines are whipping up makes this legislation seem more potent than it actually is. 

The media storm will die down soon enough, once people realize that there's nothing in the IRA. for them and they're still living in a cracked crater that used to be a reservoir.. There will be no debt relief, no subsidized child care, no paid family leave, no minimum wage increase, no reduction in drug prices if you're covered by private insurance or no insurance at all. The Democrats are banking on people not realizing how badly they've been screwed until after the mid-terms. The timing of Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema suddenly "caving" to the program at the last minute seems to be proof that the legislation is a self-serving grab for continued political power.

Granted, Medicare will finally be able to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. But that change won't go into effect until 2026, and it will be for only ten drugs, with incremental additions kicking in thereafter. That gives lobbyists and their bought politicians plenty of time to fiddle around and whittle away. Who knows, for example, which party will be in charge three or four years from now? If a Republican Congress doesn't repeal the measure outright, then a future director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services could magically spin through the revolving doors from the pharmaceutical industry itself. That way, even if the measure were left intact, the prospect of good faith negotiations would be rendered minimal to nonexistent. 

Even were the measure to go into effect tomorrow, it would be no guarantee, given that Biden named Liz Fowler, the former WellPoint and Johnson & Johnson executive and chief architect of the insurance industry-dictated Affordable Care Act, to head the payment policy division of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It also should come as no surprise that of all the health-centered provisions of the IRA, only the COVID-based enhanced subsidies to the insurance cartel will take effect immediately. (They'd been set to expire at the end of the year.)

But meanwhile, the New York Times is creating artificial waves in the equivalent of a kiddie pool:

The legislation, while falling far short of the ambitious $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act that the House passed in November, fulfills multiple longstanding Democratic goals, including countering the toll of climate change on a rapidly warming planet, taking steps to lower the cost of prescription drugs and to revamping portions of the tax code in a bid to make it more equitable.

It does not reverse. It merely counters. It does not give relief to consumers of the for-profit health care marketplace. It is merely taking steps. Its revamping of the tax code is only a "bid" to make it fair. In other words, it's pretty much aspirational. It's pretty much a P.R. gimmick. It's a descent into yet another simmering frog-pot, which they're marketing as a thrill-packed ride in a water park.

Wheeeeeeeeee!

The government's "$400 billion investment" in climate change reversal partly consists of tax credits to well-off consumers who can afford to buy $40,000 or $50,000 electric cars, and to privatized utilities who, it is optimistically assumed, can be "prodded" but never quite required under threat of prison for CEOs, to invest in wind and solar power. 

Nonetheless,  The Times hypes the legislation as totally avoiding the "pitfalls" that 50 years of previous environmental control laws were subjected to. By using such language as "we're on the cusp" of solving global warming, the Times cheerleaders seem to contradict themselves.

But the actual goalpost is not stopping pollution.  Despite the fact that global warming will continue with a vengeance, we should be consoled. According to the Times, as long as people "believe" the evidence that they see and feel all around them, the oil and gas industry's propaganda war at least is lost.  And thus we might delay catastrophe for another relative nano-second:

All said that the incontrovertible evidence that climate change has already arrived— in the form of frighteningly extreme wildfires, drought, storms and floods afflicting every corner of the United States — has helped build political support. Increasingly, the sheer volume of real-time data has overwhelmed the well-financed, multidecade strategy of oil, gas and coal companies to sow doubt about the severity of climate change.

There was no mention in the article of the bribery power of Big Oil over corrupt politicians in Washington and in state-houses, however. That would have been a real downer for a populace which must be rendered triumphant and optimistic in time for the next election.

For the nation's poor people, whom the Times just condescended to notice in a different small-font buried headline on Monday's homepage, there will be no relief.  Instead, the IRA will dedicate "$60 billion to help disadvantaged areas that are disproportionately affected by climate change, including $27 billion for the creation of what would be "the first national “green bank” to help drive investments in clean energy projects — particularly in poor communities."

In other words. this reeks of being just one more creative way  for the wealthy to get government welfare and cast it as a way to help the poor - who simply cannot be trusted to spend money on their own.

A little history on this old bipartisan "trickle-down" neoliberal gimmick:

Promise Zones are the latest iteration of an idea first promoted by Jack Kemp, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President George H.W. Bush. He called them enterprise zones; the Republican approach offered tax incentives and regulatory relief for businesses that would provide jobs and commerce in impoverished inner-city and rural areas. Several states adopted this idea, but no federal legislation succeeded until 1993, when President Bill Clinton relabeled them empowerment zones, with little substantive difference. Modest levels of funding were attached, the bulk of which went to private-sector and government entities with claims that it would trickle down in jobs for the impoverished inhabitants. Success was likewise modest and accountability lacking.

From Barack Obama's version of the anti-New Deal regimen marketing of "poverty gold" promise zones as the lifting-up of poor people who themselves must be granted no say ordirect benefits, to Donald Trump's more blatant grift of the "opportunity zones" that his own family and cronies have directly profited from, we have now proceeded to "green banks" which I somehow doubt will be operated by just plain neighborhood "folks." Given how much Joe Biden loves his banking buddies in Delaware and at the Bank of America, look for the behemoths of hyper-capitalism to start submitting their bids and braying about their expertise and concern about the climate before his ink on the bill is even dry.

Remember his zoned-out promise to his donors that "nothing will fundamentally change?" It will remain a Winner Take All climate on Biden's watch.

Not for nothing is Lake Mead, rapidly being destroyed by the global warming of the Capitalocene epoch, just another endangered remnant of FDR's New Deal. It was created by the sweat and paid labor of the Civilian Conservation Corps, not a bunch of bespoke suits in a "promise zone."

Lunacy of the Elites

Since unfettered capitalism is killing life on earth at an unprecedented pace, the insatiable lords of unfettered capital have come up with a brilliant and unique, but far from shocking, response. 

They and they alone will literally escape from the world they have destroyed. Or so they psychotically surmise.

Even as a United Nations report detailing the accelerated species-killing effects of our ongoing climate catastrophe is released, the creators of this global catastrophe already have their own exit strategies planned.

Some of them are buying up property in some of the last remaining pristine locales on earth, such as New Zealand. Others are planning mega-yacht cities on the rising oceans. A few are even planning to colonize the moon and planets. Unlike the migrants fleeing the subsistence farms and other lands destroyed by excessive heat and drought and floods, however, these elite refugees are not looking to merely survive. They are looking to continue their ecological plunder and their wars - even when they reach the Moon, Mars, and infinite space itself.

These are the same ruling class racketeers, remember, who keep urging the Have-Nots to get real, and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. These perennial colonizers scoff at Medicare For All as pie-in-the-sky and the Green New Deal as a pipe dream.

 Meanwhile, as they make their own plans for individual escape, they frantically erect their "smart" walls to keep some earthlings out and they build new prisons to keep other earthlings in. They deny tens of millions of people health coverage. They damage and kill as many people as they can get away with, with evictions and guns and drugs in poor communities at home and with bombs and drones and IMF loans in poor communities abroad. They call their victims collateral damage or "externalities" in order to salve their vestigial consciences. 

As philosopher-sociologist Bruno Latour explains in his brilliant Down to Earth, it's the predatory capitalists themselves who are terminally detached from reality. They are the lunatics posing as therapists who pit groups of desperate people against one another and laugh all the way to the bank.

Migrations, explosions of inequality and the New Climatic Regime: these are one and the same threat. Most of our fellow citizens underestimate or deny what is happening to the earth, but they understand perfectly well that the question of migrants puts their dreams of a secure identity in danger.

 For the time being, fully aroused and worked over by the so-called 'populist' parties, these citizens have grasped the ecological mutation in just one of its dimensions. The climate crisis is forcing people they do not welcome to cross their frontiers; hence the response: "Let's put up impenetrable borders and we'll escape the invasion!"

But it is the other dimension of this same mutation that they have not yet grasped: the New Climatic Regime has been sweeping across all our borders for a long time, exposing us to all the winds, and no walls we can build will keep those invaders out.

If we want to defend our affiliations, we shall have to identify these migrations also, migrations without form or nation that we know as climate, erosion, pollution, resource depletion. Even if you seal the frontiers against two-legged refugees, you cannot prevent others from crossing over.

This intellectual disconnect paired with the fine art of scapegoating are perfectly illustrated in the May 6th edition of the New York Times, which juxtaposes the alarming new U.N. report on accelerated species extinctions with an editorial urging Congress to give President Trump all the billions of dollars that he is demanding for "border security."

Not once does the Times editorial board mention the man-made climate catastrophe as the cause for the surge in migration from Latin America, or that the catastrophe is a direct result of the longstanding plunder of the region's agriculture and natural resources by US corporations - plunder and ensuing human displacement facilitated and financed by the regime-changing US military apparatus.

Instead, the newspaper of record simply urges Democrats to counter Trump's inhumane policies and vile anti-immigrant rhetoric with the  "humanitarian" response of providing more refugee prison beds and "shoring up" military border patrol operations.

Democrats have other, lower-level concerns as well, such as ensuring that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is not used as an enforcement agency or that the contractors and facilities used to care for children meet certain standards. As a condition of handing over additional billions, they are likely to push for at least modest increases in oversight. They should aim to keep such tinkering as narrow and targeted as possible. If the White House is serious about needing the money, it should be prepared to agree to a few conditions — and convey the need for flexibility to Senate Republicans.
As for the clash over detention beds: Knowing how toxic the matter is, the White House would have been wise to leave it out of a request it needs to advance quickly, postponing that battle for a another day. Both sides need to dial back the fighting words, resist the temptation to finger-point and find a creative way through this minefield.

Translation: tone down the rhetoric to make the imprisonment of refugees appear less cruel -  and ultimately, to cause their plights to be forgotten by the public as much and as soon as inhumanely possible. Very subtly buy into the reactionary propaganda of an outside invasion. Talk about migrants as though they are booby traps in a "minefield." Grotesquely suggest that what we really need are better "contractors"  to "care for" the caged children. It's not the horrible reality of "detention beds" for tots that so troubles the Times editorial board as it is the "toxic clash" between well-heeled Democrats and Republicans who are so invested in placing blame on everybody and anybody except the real culprits: deregulated greedy capitalists.

Meanwhile, some elites feel so entitled that they've actually taken to describing the still-unspoiled Moon as their own exclusive property. Since they can't yet establish second or third or fourth homes on its surface, they can at least be satisfied with shooting their loved ones' "cremains" up in a rocket to mingle with moon dust for a really spiffy and high-priced funeral service.  

Why worry about climate catastrophes and the extinction of millions of plant and animal species here on earth when a corporation called Moon Express can soothe nervous elites?

The Moon is Earth’s 8th continent, a new frontier for humanity with precious resources that can bring enormous benefits to life on Earth and our future in space. Expanding Earth’s economic and social sphere to the Moon is our first step in securing our future. Not long from now a new generation will look up and see lights on the Moon, and know that they are part of a multi-world species.

Wow. This sounds even better than Sarah Palin being able to see Russia from her front porch. The "old generation" may be gasping their last breaths and starving to death, but the drastically reduced, renamed and new improved species we shall call Homo oligarchus will surely survive somehow on their yachts. The earth supply of water may have been polluted beyond potability, but Moon-water can always be zoomed down to them at the same time endless supplies of it are reconstituted as the rocket fuel of the future.

Moon Express's biggest competitor is the world's richest man, Jeff Bezos, who has humanely invested some of his own billions in an outfit called BlueOrigin - because what better way to save Humanity than to plunder other nearby planets? He thinks he can literally "dig us out" from extinction by digging for natural resources elsewhere in the universe. Never mind that his vast fortune could literally end hunger and want on the Earth we already do inhabit today, rather than decades or centuries from now.

The big tell is how these billionaires and corporations describe human beings. When rich people talk about Saving Humanity, you can pretty much rest assured that actual people will continue to get screwed. This is especially true if they work for poverty wages at what are obscenely described as Amazon Fulfillment Centers.

Bruno Latour calls oligarchs like Bezos "obscurantic elites," because they do not want, or even pretend to want, to share the Earth with the rest of us. This selfishness is manifest in their public relations gimmick of wanting to share the Moon, Mars and all of Outer Space with the rest of the us. It is a way of keeping all the wealth for themselves while spewing the false hope that they alone can save us from the climate crisis that they themselves are simultaneously underwriting and tacitly denying:

Whereas until the 1990s one could (provided that one profited from it) associate the horizon of modernization with the notions of progress, emancipation, wealth, comfort, even luxury, and above all rationality, the rage to deregulate, the explosion of inequalities, the abandonment of solidarities have gradually associated that horizon with the notion of an arbitrary decision out of nowhere in favor of the sole profit of the few. The best of worlds has become the worst.

Looking down from the ship's rail, the lower classes, now fully awakened, see the lifeboats pulling farther and farther away. The orchestra continues to play "Nearer, my God, to Thee," but the music no longer suffices to drown out the cries of rage.

Now use your imagination, and superimpose the sneering face of Jeff Bezos (or any oligarch of your choice) over that of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners, and you'll get the picture:

The catch is that the modern version isn't funny, and there is no smooching and making up at the end.

And speaking of lunatics, did you know that the United States Senate voted unanimously in 2009 to officially strike the word "lunatic" from the federal code? They claimed it was to protect the mentally ill from abuse, but I suspect it was really to protect themselves and their donors from public criticism as they continue to conduct the official business of smacking ordinary humans right in the kisser.

To end on an optimistic note: the lifeboats might be sailing away, but we're still wearing our life vests in the alternate universe of the reality-based community, a/k/a Planet Earth. We refuse to drown.