Damaged Dem Dames Distract From Climate Change

Two of the corporate Democratic Party's campaign narratives against Donald Trump have boomeranged right back at them this week.

First, their virtue-signaling about inclusive diversity turns out not to be so virtuous after all. Presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, like Julia Alvarez before her, fell smack dab into the identity politics trap when she revealed in a slickly-produced video that she does indeed have some remote aboriginal ancestry, dating back at least 10 generations.

 So not only did she fall into Donald Trump's race-baiting trap, she is, according to many critics, displaying her own colorblind racism by "appropriating" native lineage without informing or asking permission of the Cherokee Nation. And if that weren't bad enough, she is doing it right before the Midterm Elections and messing with her party's chances to win more congressional seats!

Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who later did the same job for David Cameron's conservatives in Great Britain, tweeted out:

  Jim Messina‏Verified account @Messina2012

Argue the substance all you want, but why 22 days before a crucial election where we MUST win house and senate to save America, why did @SenWarren have to do her announcement now? Why can’t Dems ever stay focused???

 Democrats cannot disown Elizabeth Warren fast enough. It's not so much her falling for Trump's trolling, it's the inconvenient timing of it, right at the end of their record-breaking season of fundraising. No matter that Warren herself has been a prolific fundraiser for the party. She has been declared non-presidential material.

My view is that her big announcement about her DNA results is more than a little bit passive-aggressive. Warren has been under pressure for years to run for president and for years she has resisted, until very recently. So perhaps her ham-handed video is her way of either deliberately or unconsciously sabotaging her own chances to ensure that she is pre-emptively forced out of the race so as to avoid criticism from refusing to run in the first place. She will be way more effective going after the corrupt financial system in the Senate, in my view. That is, if she even cares to remain in the Senate.

I once half-jokingly predicted (see the Salazar link above) that the Democrats are so into ethnologies and family histories that before long, candidates will be producing their DNA results along with their tax returns. The flaunting of one's genetic biology for the sole purpose of gaining political power is a kind of inverted fascism and hearkens back to the US eugenics craze of the early 20th century, which became the direct inspiration for Nazi race policies.  

So much for the inherent shallowness and cynicism of the Democrats' identity politics. Now we come to the Democrats' shallow, cynical, corporate version of feminism.

We all know, of course, that Hillary Clinton used her own Senate seat as a stepping-stone to her first presidential run, and her first presidential run as a stepping-stone to the State Department, and the State Department as a stepping-stone to her second presidential run, and her second presidential run as a stepping-stone to permanent martyrdom, big bucks in the speakers' and memoir circuits - and who knows, maybe even a third presidential run. Just think of the ratings and the billions of dollars in bucks for everybody concerned: churnalists, strategists, cable TV networks and corporate advertisers with all that hoarded untaxed money to burn.

Although the Democratic Party faithful became incensed during the 2016 campaign whenever Donald Trump's sexual predations were compared to Bill Clinton's sexual predations, and whenever critics noted that Hillary had hypocritically trashed her husband's female conquests and victims while standing by her man, even her erstwhile supporters can no longer ignore or stomach her hypocrisy.

Correction: they could stomach her hypocrisy extremely well, provided it was not on full display only weeks away from The Midterm Elections. Her grousing on national TV that Monica Lewinsky was not the victim of her husband's abuse of power, but a fully consenting adult, would be fine with them were it not so allegedly endangering Democratic fortunes. It kind of exposes the party's cynical appropriation of the #MeToo movement, and the party's campaign platform of "Donald Trump is a sexist pig" in all its shallowness and hypocrisy.

Shockingly, the very same liberals who so recently have been bending over backward for Hillary Clinton, and propping up her endless blame-game tour, and making her loss to Trump the prime focus of the Women's March movement, are now telling her to shut up and go away so that the party can "focus."

She has been relegated to that dreaded category of "distraction." I could almost feel very slightly sorry for her.

But, as the New York Times's Michelle Cottle puts it,

In these furious, final days before the midterms, Democratic candidates need to be laser focused on their message to voters. They need to be talking health care and jobs and other issues of intense, personal concern to their electorate. They do not need to be talking about impeachment, or about the results of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA testing. And they definitely do not need to get distracted by unnecessary drama generated by comments from one of the party’s most iconic, and most controversial, figures.

And yet, there was Mrs. Clinton, in an Oct. 9 interview with CNN, sharing her take on the need for Democrats to — as Michelle Obama might have put it — go low with today’s Republicans. As Mrs. Clinton sees it, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”

She's a great woman and a great leader, says Cottle, but speaking her mind this close to Election Day is "problematic" for the party, which, she insinuates, would otherwise be dreaming up all kinds of wonderful new programs to benefit ordinary people. 

The Democratic Party sounds like it needs medication for its attention deficit disorder, which in my opinion is simply crass malingering to distract us from the fact that they are beholden to the oligarchy.  

My published response:

 "...this close to Election Day, discussing hot-button issues in national interviews is nothing but problematic for her party...."

Bingo! It's her party and she'll kvetch if she wants to. She has to go on TV to raise her visibility so she and Bill can sell lots of high-priced tickets for their tour. These TV spots, in their own turn, generate even more free press, as in this column. So what if it's bad press? It generates more publicity! And don't forget the ad revenue.

As far as Hillary's "distractions" from Democratic messaging are concerned, most of the campaign rhetoric I've been hearing is of the "we're not Trump" genre. A recent survey by "The Hill" of the ranking House Democrats reveals that their top priority, if they win, will be hauling cabinet officials before their committees. Then, they'll be "shoring up" Obamacare and protecting the weak Dodd-Frank bill. Not one potential committee chair voiced support for Medicare For All. Nor will House Dems put our endangered planet's climate emergency on their to-do list -- because, they say, why even try? "Resistance" has replaced a proactive progressive agenda.

The few times they do talk tough, they end up apologizing for giving the impression that they're inciting violence. Never underestimate their capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of their victories.

Maybe if we ever get the $$$ out of politics, the media- political-oligarchic complex will stop treating elections like soap opera ratings bonanzas.

The Warren/Clinton hand-wringing is, of course, the corporate Democrats' way of saying how much they care about you. This pearl-clutching is in fact a distraction from the real scandal: that the party will do nothing to address the climate change catastrophe should they win back some power.  

While busily distracting us with the Dem dame duo who are doing so much damage to diversity, they're also very quietly damping down hopes for a climate agenda in the upcoming session. They are being very honest about it in the sneakiest way possible so as not to be accused of making promises they can't keep once they're sworn in. Maybe they figure that our immersion in the double boiler of propaganda and planet-death will keep us properly and rigidly fixated on Trump's latest tweet calling another woman a nasty name.

As The Hill reports,

With President Trump in the White House and Republicans favored to keep the Senate next year, climate legislation would face stiff headwinds, and pushing it could spark backlash from the right — both now and after the Nov. 6 midterm elections.
Considering those “constraints,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), Democrats should “focus on the practical and the opportunistic” to make short-term progress while fighting for bolder measures — “the aspirational goals” — over the longer term. 
“It’s going to be, I think, more of an opportunistic strategy, where, in various pieces of legislation, across the board, we’re going to insert measures that address climate change,” said Connolly, a leader in the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition.

"Aspiration Not Inspiration" might make a catchy campaign slogan for the 2020 horse-race, don't you think? It sure beats "Expiration Not Aspiration," which would be a real downer. It might put a real damper on firing up voters if they honestly just announced that all living things are going to die premature deaths because of their failure to address the climate emergency, as both corporate parties continue raking in all those polluting Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobil dollars and continue to exempt the trillion-dollar military machine from even the mild emissions rules that are attached like a flimsy bandage to a suppurating wound.

It's almost as bad as believing that Republican "headwinds" are more powerful that the Category Six hurricanes that climate scientists predict will blow the place apart and dampen the earth to epic flooding proportions sooner rather than later.

PBS Still Insists That Climate Change Is Debatable

No matter that the United States has been hit by four hurricanes in just a little over a month, or that northern California is burning up right before our very eyes. In the interest of fairness to the predatory polluters of unfettered capitalism, PBS gave a platform to the worst of the worst on its News Hour Tuesday night.

The occasion was the Trump administration's announcement that it will "scale back" the Obama administration's own largely aspirational and relatively weak rollback of carbon emissions from existing power plants by the year 2030. The modest goal was merely to reduce emissions to 66 percent of 2005 levels.

PBS had originally invited EPA Director Scott Pruitt to appear on its program to help sell asthma, emphysema, cancer, black lung disease and other maladies to the public in a balanced attempt to counter the science facts offered by former EPA Director Gina McCarthy. But since Pruitt was allegedly either on another private jet junket or holed up in his soundproof bunker, he couldn't make it. And since the prospect of appearing on any TV network containing the word "public" probably makes him feel like vomiting, his notorious coal baron pal Robert Murray appeared in his stead. You could tell that it was on very short notice by the way Murray stumbled all over the script of talking points he was handed at the very last minute.

Here's Thumb In Your Eye, Proles!

His funniest talking point of all was that since "poor moms on fixed incomes" can't afford clean energy (or anything else, for that matter), we should at least let them stay warm with his cheap, dirty coal-fired energy.

 Murray wheezed:

 My stand is that the endangerment finding needs to be repealed, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
I have 4,000 scientists that tell me that it is not a pollutant. A lot of people, John, have made money off of promoting the politics of climate change and the politics of the Democrat Party, in promoting their windmills, their solar panels, and all other restraints and alarmist restraints on low-cost reliable electricity. And they have. And so we’re trying to put it back now and put it right. I believe that there needs to be a lot of discussion as to what the effects are of any climate change on the society, on our standard of living. We have an energy poverty problem. We do not have a climate change problem.

His claim of "4,000 scientists" advising him was not challenged at all by PBS personality John Yang. Nor was Murray asked about much money he himself has made from dirty fuel. Nor was he asked to explain how there can be climate change without it being a climate change problem.

   JOHN YANG: You don’t see climate change as an issue or a problem at all, despite what other scientists say?

 BOB MURRAY: I do not. I do not, because I listen to 4,000 scientists, and who tell me that mankind is not affecting climate change.

 JOHN YANG: Robert Murray, the founder and chairman of Murray Energy, thank you very much for joining us.

Perhaps Yang and his PBS employer are afraid of the litigation-happy Murray, and censored themselves rather than practice anything remotely resembling adversarial journalism. Murray most recently sued comedian John Oliver for daring to make fun of him, not only for his greed and mendacity, but for "looking like a geriatric Dr. Evil." Even before the show aired, Murray had threatened a lawsuit. The coal baron, who might as well be named an official member of the Trump administration, did not want the story of nine of his employees dying in a Utah mine collapse mentioned, even though a government investigation concluded that Murray's company was to blame. Murray still insists that an earthquake was the cause of the disaster, despite no seismic activity being reported at the time. Maybe the 4,000 invisible scientists he has in his pocket told him what he wanted to hear.

As the ACLU warns broadcasters and other media outlets, "you'd better stick to Bob Murray's script unless you want to face him in court." So when Scott Pruitt sent Murray to PBS to fill in for him, it was an offer that PBS apparently could not refuse.

Bob Murray is the Harvey Weinstein of the pollution lobbying industry. One dirty old man is just like another dirty old man, especially when he's as filthy rich as sin and has the power to spook politicians and the media into a state of total and abject complicity.

$urvival of the Fittest

By Jay - Ottawa

Stiff fingers tap out the first sentence on my keyboard, but the spell checker redlines the word 'dystopia.'  Hmm…it IS a word and I DID spell it correctly.  Was the Microsoft programmer who worked on this feature clueless about Orwell's "1984," or was the programmer directed to send unpleasant concepts and their exemplars down the memory hole?

Cormac McCarthy is the next to get redlined.  Well, OK.  His first name is rare this side of Dublin.  Despite the laurels placed on McCarthy's brow late in life, few people other than English majors read his troubling novels "Blood Meridian" and "The Road."

Actually, "The Road" is not dystopian literature.  It is more often categorized as post-apocalyptic realism, a giant step beyond dystopia to where the entire globe has been despoiled.  You might, if you behave, be allowed an ice-cream sundae in a dystopia.  The best you can hope for in a post-apocalyptic world is rancid ice cream under stale whipped cream and a rotting cherry on top.

Chris Hedges, a very serious man, also writes about dystopias but under the category of nonfiction.  He describes realities so dismal and hopeless you wish they were fiction.

As if we didn't have enough gloom from the Dark School of fiction and nonfiction, we now discover their disciples multiplying like bats out of a cave.  The newest dystopian writers obtain better material just by looking around.  The latest dark spirit to connect the available dots of politics, economics, climate change and human nature is a French philosopher, Bruno Latour.

Latour writes as though he was able to plumb the minds of the super rich.  Forget their supposed attraction to capitalism and avarice.  Something else is afoot, a plot, an altruistic conspiracy.  It goes like this.  Billions of people are accustomed to a standard of living the globe cannot support.  Recycling and cutbacks in carbon use are absurdist diversions for the masses.  The Greens are kidding themselves, not to mention the rest of us, with their solar panels and low-flush toilets.  The Paris Agreement of last year, signed by 195 nations, is an empty gesture to assure their populations that something is being done to push climate change out of sight.  However, the elites know better; the globe is long past the tipping point of climate apocalypse.

Something several orders more severe than alternate energy development is needed, and immediately, to pull back hard from the Sixth Extinction.  The elites are fully aware of the stakes.  They also know that the billions of people who make up the modern world cannot be encouraged, or even forced, to scale down sharply to a lifestyle from the Middle Ages.

What's the alternative for elites who appreciate these facts and exercise power?  It is twofold: to become billionaires and to head for the hills after amassing everything needed for survival.  Big money––not asceticism, virtue and fairness for all––will buy the few tickets available for survival of the few.  Here's Latour explaining why we must have deregulation, welfare cutbacks, climate denial and income disparity:

"If this plausible fiction is correct, it enables us to grasp the 'deregulation' and the 'dismantling of the welfare state' of the 1980s, the 'climate change denial' of the 2000s, and, above all, the dizzying increase in inequality over the past forty years.  All these things are part of the same phenomenon: the elites were so thoroughly enlightened that they realized there would be no future for the world and that they needed to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible …; to construct a kind of golden fortress for the tiny percent of people who would manage to get on in life …; and, to hide the crass selfishness of this flight from the common world, to completely deny the existence of the threat [of] climate change."

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/the-new-climate/ 

It is we, the billions of nobodies, who are the grasshoppers in Aesop's fable.  We plague the earth with our great numbers and boundless appetites.  The monied elites are the farsighted ants.  There is a noble purpose behind the surface chaos over which they preside.  For the sake of the human gene pool, lifeboat ethics must prevail.  The elites are laboring to cull our species as efficiently as possible.  They must act fast and remain steadfast in their purpose.  Ultimately, the preservation of humanity depends on the billionaires, "the tiny percent," in their "golden fortresses."  Think of that next time you are tempted by selfishness to protest against their deconstruction of society as we know it.

* Those of you under 70 years of age are advised not to read this essay.

Russophobia Made Simple

Uniting a torn electorate of American citizen-consumers against a common enemy, and diverting our attention away from the class war, and disguising the true predatory purpose of the American Deep State: that's hard even in the best of times. And these, the end-times of late capitalism, are some of the hardest and worst of the worst of times.

It's especially hard when the Deep State -- or what is grotesquely called the "intelligence community" -- seems to be cracking up itself. The Clinton/Obama/CIA faction wants the enemy to be Russia, and the Trump/crony capitalist/anti-CIA faction is aiming its own beady sights on China. 

Thanks to the proto-fascist nature of American democracy itself, no candidate with a peace platform has ever been allowed anywhere near the exclusive electoral process. Jill Stein of the pacifist Green Party got some belated corporate press only because of her failed ballot recount campaign in aid of Hillary Clinton.

Just when we thought that the Neoliberal Death Match -- or what is grotesquely called a democratic presidential campaign -- was finally over, the curtain is now rising with a vengeance on Act Two of the Battle of the Oligarchs.

Pouncing on the undeniable fact that Hillary Clinton received 2.7 million more votes than Donald Trump, this whole democracy experiment is being relitigated in the court of public opinion. The arcane Electoral College has become such a "thing" that the Democrats and some GOP'ers are pressuring its members to disregard the votes of the Rust Belt states that barely nudged Trump over the finish line. The electors' mission, if they choose to accept it, is to become conscientious objectors to Trump's war on neoliberal decency.

The implicit message is that Donald Trump is a traitor. And if the electors do their sworn Constitutional duty and vote a traitor into office, then his Putinesque blood will be on their hands. It's the same gaslighting technique that was used on ordinary voters throughout the interminable campaign season. A vote for Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or None of the Above was an act of rank treason and a sure sign that you were a tool of Vladimir Putin.

The fact that the orchestrated campaign to subject the electors to top-secret intelligence briefings in an effort to guilt them into changing their votes is "bipartisan" should be the first clue that denying the presidency to Trump is not so much a matter of the public interest as it is of the corporate private interest. A cabal of Deep State centrist Democrats and Republican Neocons are joining forces in an attempt to, at the very least, wound Trump before his inauguration. They are seething that Hillary Clinton's imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria as an escalation in the war on Putin was thwarted by the very Pied Piper candidate they propped up as an easy target for the hawks.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) and  multimillionaire House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are finding common cause with Republican war hawks John McCain and Lindsay Graham in drumming up a new surge of Russophobia. It helps that Nancy's daughter Christine is herself an appointed elector.

To help sway public opinion toward overturning the vote, the elitist obsession with Russia as the enemy to end all enemies is everywhere you look.

If you're a reasonably sane person, you're probably scared to death that Trump's nomination of the Exxon-Mobil CEO to head the State Department will rev up the already turbo-charged destruction of the planet by fossil fuels. But the Anthropocene epoch and mass extinctions aren't what the New York Times wants you to be afraid of. The Times wants you to be afraid of those damned Russians.

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday officially selected Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, to be his secretary of state. In saying he will nominate Mr. Tillerson, the president-elect is dismissing bipartisan concerns that the globe-trotting leader of an energy giant has a too-cozy relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia.

(snip)

In the past several days, Republican and Democratic lawmakers had warned that Mr. Tillerson would face intense scrutiny over his two-decade relationship with Russia, which awarded him its Order of Friendship in 2013, and with Mr. Putin.

The hearings will also put a focus on Exxon Mobil’s business dealings with Moscow. The company has billions of dollars in oil contracts that can go forward only if the United States lifts sanctions against Russia, and Mr. Tillerson’s stake in Russia’s energy industry could create a very blurry line between his interests as an oilman and his role as America’s leading diplomat.

So it's not that you and I and our children and our grandchildren and all the animals and plants will be dying more quickly if an oil magnate is granted even more power to physically damage us. It's that one faction of obscenely wealthy people doesn't want another faction of obscenely wealthy people to beat them in the greed sweepstakes.

And never mind that the main purpose of the State Department is to grease the skids for and ensure the safety of multinational corporations and the banking mafia wanting to do business abroad. The Times doesn't mention that the State Department acts as the broker for the annual sales of billions of dollars' worth of arms and war materials to such autocratic regimes as Saudi Arabia. State is the international counterpart of the Health and Human Services Administration. It does corporate welfare on a grand, global scale. It makes plunder easier for the plunderers.

The world is already ruled by 62 billionaires who own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. So to tamp down the resulting domestic unrest, our rulers and their propagandists are singling out just one faraway oligarch in hopes of limiting the populist wrath here at home.

Donald Trump, for his part, is bringing the whole sordid pathocratic process out into the open. He is not showing due deference to the Intelligence Community family and to establishment media. And that is making the ruling class very, very nervous. Former acting CIA Director Mike Morell is even hysterically calling the alleged meddling of Russians "the political equivalent of 9/11." (Never mind the CIA's own seven decades of international political meddling and orchestrated coups.)

This bluster and disrespect from an autocratic president-elect makes it so much harder for the ruling class to manufacture public consent. No wonder that they are also freaking out about what we call independent investigatory journalism, and they call "fake news." Their control of "the narrative" is slipping, so they're reduced to conflating scurrilous internet rumor-mill sites with legitimate fact-based and free-thinking journalistic outlets with the chutzpah to be critical of the wrong things.

The New York Times is not, of course, the only site for all the corporate Russophobia that's fit to print. 

Here's a sampling of today's curiously similar headlines, which fear-monger not over climate change and pollution, but over the specter of TrumPutin:

"Moscow's Mule"; "Kremlin Rejoices"; "Bipartisan Alarm Over Ties to Moscow" -- Huffington Post.

"Rex Tillerson: An Appointment that Confirms Putin's Election Win" -- The Guardian

"Donald Trump's pick for secretary of state is a Putin-friendly Exxon CEO" -- Vox

"Graham Wants Tillerson's Russia Ties Front and Center" -- Politico.

"McCain Voices Concerns About Tillerson's Ties to Putin" -- The Hill

****

  It's only when its status as the world's sole Superpower is even mildly threatened that the United States Uniparty takes a stand against a multinational corporation like Exxon.

For when the oil behemoth wants to plunder and bribe in other autocracies, or wherever China has aimed its capitalistic sights, the smoky skies are the limit. The American ruling class usually has no problem with Tillerson and his ilk at all. Take the whole continent of Africa, for instance.

The Obamas and the Bushes met up in Tanzania in 2013 to help spread the oily Exxon goodness around. The wives of the presidents enthusiastically gave identity-politics cover to the extraction of that continent's rich natural reserves by the greedy oil conglomerate. They cast the plunder as the perfect trickle-down "women's opportunity" as they commiserated like desperate housewives over their First Lady status and their silly old hubbies.

The confab of wives was such a resounding P.R. success for the giant polluter that Michelle Obama and George and Laura Bush reunited in Washington the following year for a "Spousal Summit" orchestrated and funded, in large part, by Exxon-Mobil. They wanted to let us know that all the African first ladies were also totally on board with the plunder of their continent. It's all about the freedom of oligarchs to extract and exploit while donating a little medication and genetically modified seed and allowing entrepreneurial womenfolk the chance to learn and to read.... as they gasp for air and struggle to find a source of unpolluted drinking water for themselves and their families.

Under Obama, the American militarization of the continent known as Africom continues apace. How else to protect multinationals like Exxon-Mobil from "militants?" The conglomerate just recently "discovered" another billion barrels of oil off the Nigerian coast. Somebody (the US State Dept, the CIA and the Pentagon) has to protect their tender hides and grasping tentacles. Somebody has to hold them harmless for their serial destruction of soil, water and forests.

President Obama also never had a problem with Exxon-Mobil when it's wanted to destroy the environment in our own backyard, either. Just a few years after the worst oil explosion disaster in history continues to inflict ongoing damage in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama granted Putin-loving Tillerson's company new drilling leases in the Gulf for the proposed extraction of 172 million barrels of oil. 

The Democrats' and some Republicans' opposition to Tillerson as Secretary of State has nothing to do with concern for the environment and the obscene corporate welfare for polluters who dictate government policy. After all, Obama's own energy secretary, Sally Jewell, came through the revolving door from Exxon Mobil when it was still known as Mobil.

This is all about a tiny group of plutocrats grasping and grabbing for their share of the global pie. These bullies don't like to share, even with each other. And forget about the other 99.9% of the population. The rest of us are lucky get a few crumbs of oily political P.R. along with the foul water and the dirty air and the damaged lungs.

But never forget: the only thing we have to fear is Putin himself.

Man Versus World

A shocking new study released this week reveals that 67 percent of the world's wildlife could die off within the next couple of years.

Only days after this report came out, to little fanfare in the mass media, a group of freelance militants was acquitted by a nullifying jury of their white peers on charges of taking over and doing probably irreparable damage to a wildlife refuge in Oregon.

And for the past several months, another group of uniformed, state-sanctioned militants has been arresting and assaulting, with absolute impunity, the people protesting an oil pipeline on pristine land long protected for both environmental and cultural reasons.

This week's score: Man 3, Earth 0. 

First, let's mull over the frightening, yet much-ignored, news that wild vertebrates are dying at a rate about three times faster than had previously been believed. This die-off is an unexpected surge in the mass extinction being caused by climate change, wars, and pollution: a/k/a the cancer of unfettered capitalism.

From The Guardian: 

The creatures being lost range from mountains to forests to rivers and the seas and include well-known endangered species such as elephants and gorillas and lesser known creatures such as vultures and salamanders.
The collapse of wildlife is, with climate change, the most striking sign of the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era in which humans dominate the planet. “We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have reached a saturation point,” said Prof Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in a foreword for the report.

Much of the extinction is caused by the habitat destruction of farming and logging. Only 15 percent of the earth's surface is protected by law. Rivers and lakes are the hardest hit, with animal populations down by nearly 80 percent since the 1970s. The culprits are water extraction for industrial agriculture in dry areas like California, dam construction, and chemical pollution.

This accelerating (unprecedented since the dinosaurs) loss of wildlife will rapidly become part of a lethal closed feedback loop of human conflicts building upon each other. Human greed produces conflicts, which engender food and water insecurity, which engenders more competition for survival and more escalating conflicts.

Despite the grim statistics, the Living Planet report does contain some optimism. The Giant Panda is starting to recover, thanks to human protective efforts. And  more people are abstaining from the consumption of polluting meat, especially beef, which could also help slow down the environmental disaster.

But tell that to the Bundy Clan of Nevada, whose self-bestowed right to graze their cattle on protected public lands led to both a stand-off with Feds in that state, and their subsequent invasion of a federal wildlife sanctuary in Oregon. All seven of those charged with the armed insurrection were acquitted on Thursday. As reported by the New York Times,

The surprise acquittals of all seven defendants in Federal District Court were a blow to government prosecutors, who had argued that the Bundys and five of their followers used force and threats of violence to occupy the reserve. But the jury appeared swayed by the defendants’ contention that they were protesting government overreach and posed no threat to the public....

In a monthlong trial here, the defendants never denied that they had occupied and held the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters for nearly six weeks, demanding that the federal government surrender the 188,000-acre property to local control. But their lawyers argued that prosecutors did not prove that the group had engaged in an illegal conspiracy that kept federal workers — employees of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management — from doing their jobs.

The Bundy clan are, at least, still in federal custody as they await a separate trial on the Nevada charges, by another jury of their Wild West peers.

As famed author and Oregon resident Ursula K. LeGuin wrote during the Bundy siege, the Malheur occupation was never, as widely reported in the press, about defending their Constitutional rights or "freeing federal land."

It was probably because of the very remoteness of the venue from ruling class East Coast movers and shakers that the "occupation" was allowed to go on for so long - far longer in fact, than the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011. Le Guin blogged last winter,

If a federal property in New Jersey was occupied by armed outsiders calling themselves “militiamen,” justifying their occupation by a radical theocratic re-interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and calling for mass resistance to law enforcement, would four of them be allowed to continue the occupation indefinitely?

If important ongoing scientific studies and reclamation programs under federal auspices in a suburb of Chicago or Washington were being paralyzed and trashed by four hooligans carrying guns, how long would they be allowed to continue the irreparable destruction?

And that brings us to our third and final related story of the week: the siege at Standing Rock Sioux tribal lands of North Dakota, where uniformed officials, armed to the teeth with their high-tech surplus military grade weapons, are not showing quite the same patience with Native American protesters as they did, for such a long patient time, with the white nativist Bundy Clan.

(Reuters)

(Associated Press)

The latest escalation in the months-long standoff between protesters and police acting on behalf of the Dakota Access Pipeline came Thursday with more than a hundred new arrests. Some 200 local police officers in riot gear pushed the people off the land with armored tanks, and dispersed them with pepper spray.

As reported by The Guardian, Standing Rock Tribal Chairman David Archambault is requesting that the Obama administration send in federal troops to protect the people from the corporate state-sanctioned militants:

  DOJ can no longer ignore our requests. If harm comes to any who come here to stand in solidarity with us, it is on their watch. They must step in and hold the state of North Dakota and Morton County accountable for their acts of violence against innocent, prayerful people.
The Obama administration has asked DAPL to voluntarily halt construction until the review process has been completed, but DAPL has ignored these repeated requests. By deploying law enforcement to support DAPL construction, the State of North Dakota is collaborating with Energy Transfer Partners and escalating tensions.
We need our state and federal governments to bring justice and peace to our lands, not the force of armored vehicles.
We have repeatedly seen a disproportionate response from law enforcement to water protectors’ nonviolent exercise of their constitutional rights. Today we have witnessed people praying in peace, yet attacked with pepper spray, rubber bullets, sound and concussion cannons. We urge state and federal government agencies to give this tense situation their immediate and close attention. We also call on the thousands of water protectors who stand in solidarity with us against DAPL to remain in peace and prayer. Any act of violence hurts our cause and is not welcome here. We invite all supporters to join us in prayer that, ultimately, the right decision—the moral decision—is made to protect our people, our sacred places, our land and our resources.
We won’t step down from this fight. As peoples of this earth, we all need water. This is about our water, our rights, and our dignity as human beings.

The late ecologist Raymond Dasmann observed decades ago that World War III has already begun. And now there's no denying the fact that it's a war of late stage industrial human capitalists against the whole Earth and all its living things. The greedsters haven't gotten the message that there is only so much you can deplete out of the planet in the Bundyesque name of "freedom" before the whole thing collapses in upon itself.

What he called The First Law of the Environment goes like this: "No matter how bad you think things are, the total reality is much worse."

And that is probably why climate change and the environment have not been considered fit topics for discussion in the quadrennial winner-take-all electoral sweepstakes which I have dubbed, quite aptly I think, Neoliberal Death Match 2016.

Last Tango in Paris

 On second thought, maybe we should call it the Moonwalk. Or maybe even the Hustle.

In what's being described as a do-or-die moment, world leaders converged on Paris to dance around what to do aspirationally, sometime in the future maybe, about climate change and the death of the planet. It remains to be seen whether this Elite Urge-a-Thon will have any oxygen in it.

 President Obama, well-protected by a small security army, called the crucial United Nations summit "an act of defiance" against the recent terror attacks, and  called for cooperation.... among world leaders. He urged regular folks not to be cynical.

Meanwhile, out in the streets, police fired tear gas on regular folks in order to clear the air of voices and human bodies having the poor taste to demand action now. The climate may be changing, but police crackdowns on peaceful protests at international meetings of elites are certainly always in the global forecast. (Oops, my bad. I was told not to be cynical.)

Speaking of man-made pollution, China is cooperating in the Paris talks not a moment too soon. The atmosphere got so bad in Beijing today that life itself has had to be temporarily shut down. Factories and schools closed and residents advised to shelter in place indoors until a wind from the right direction kicks up and blows the terroristic threat into somebody else's neighborhood, or preferably way up into the stratosphere where nobody can actually see what's left of the ozone layer.

Elsewhere on the planet, where the air is still fairly breathable and peaceful protest is still allowed, millions of people came out to support climate change reversal. Sardonicky contributor "Jay-Ottawa" participated in this march in the Canadian capitol on Sunday:

Meanwhile, Prince Charles touched down in Paris to demand that governments stop fossil fuel subsidies. He should know. His mum, Queen Elizabeth, owns a fortune in uranium mines.

Meanwhile, philanthrocapitalist, education "reformer," and unelected world leader Bill Gates burned thousands of gallons of polluting private jet fuel to travel to the City of Light to announce his "initiative" for clean energy research and development. Investment opportunities for the well-connected will abound, all in the name of capitalistic concern-trolling the poor people of the world. Gates, whose Microsoft technology (and its detritus) outsourced to China helps to create the smog, is an opponent of fossil fuel divestment. Therefore, his billion-dollar pledge to "study" green energy will surely help influence the heads of state to speak softly and carry a big twig during their minuet of a talk-fest. No world leader will even think to protest the fact that the Chinese factory workers who help make Gates a gazillionaire live like prisoners while they're trying to breathe all that polluted air.

Eighty billionaires, with Gates in or near the lead, now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire world population. This is a guy who fancies himself a postmodern Citizen Kane, complete with the $125 million estate that he so 'umbly named Xanadu 2.0.

  Factoring in his 23-car garage, I think we can all rest assured that Bill Gates is absolutely sincere in combating climate change. Oops. There goes my cynicism again!

An Inconvenient Pope

Corporate media coverage of the Pope's visit to the USA is being framed around two main issues: how it will impact the artificial, wedge issue-based political gridlock in Washington, and how it will cause traffic gridlock in New York City.

News that the world's second largest car maker has engaged in an epic criminal conspiracy to bypass anti-pollution emissions laws is vying with news about how much cars themselves will be inconvenienced during this historic visit. For days on end, traffic and shopping will come to a screeching halt. The very atmosphere will be forced to take a breather. For one brief shining moment, the rights of humans to walk will take precedence over the rights of machines to drive.

I'm sure that all the rich irony surrounding his visit to El Norte is not being lost on Pope Francis.

His message that turbo-charged capitalism is destroying all living things on land, sea and air is being drowned in the American shallows of media spectacle for the sake of media spectacle. As he wrote in his recent encyclical:

The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called "rapidification." Although change is part of the working of complex systems, the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Moreover, the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development. Change is something desirable, yet it becomes a source of anxiety when it causes harm to the world and to the quality of life of much of humanity.

So, who did Barack and Michelle invite to their White House reception? Who will she be wearing? Will she "stun" as she greets the Pope at the airport? Will LGBT  activists and right-to-die reformers be given front row seats on the South Lawn just so that President Peace Prize can one-up the Pope in progressive bona fides? How will stocks react as the Pope shuts down entire miles of Big Apple asphalt?  What's the price of a scalped ticket to get close to him as he parades through Central Park? How many scents of Pope Soap-on-a-Rope are available at Macy's? Is the Pope Catholic?

Even when more enlightened media outlets dare to "go there" and write in-depth pieces about the Pope's environmental and social justice messages, unbridled capitalism still gets in the way. When I went to read an online article about his exhortation Laudato Si': On Care of Our Common Home at the New York Review of Books, the very first thing confronting me was an ad exhorting me to purchase a custom-framed cartoon drawing of Pope Francis for $150.

The reviewer, Yale climate economist William D. Nordhaus, is not only disappointed that Francis's core message is being ignored by the media, he is disappointed that the Pope himself is against market-based "cap and trade" and other gimmicks to supplement his anti-consumerism message of environmental conservation and care for the poor. The Pope is not neoliberal enough, apparently. All that the climate needs, according to Nordhaus, is a more "moral market"  -- an oxymoron if there ever was one. He writes:

But the growing peril of climate change and many other environmental problems arises primarily not from unethical individual behavior such as consumerism or cowardice, bad conscience or excessive profiteering. Rather, environmental degradation is the result of distorted market signals that put too low a price on harmful environmental effects.

I guess that Nordhaus missed the news that Volkswagen's altruism and beneficence caused it to deliberately tinker with the pollution-detecting device in at least half a million 11 million of its cars. Those market distortion signals will get you every time. Mistakes get made, but crimes against the biosphere are never committed.

"We have totally screwed up," the aptly named Michael Horn, CEO of Volkswagen of America, humble-bragged at a lavish event this week to introduce the company's latest model. He offered the standard explanation given by the rich and powerful and unaccountable whenever they get caught doing the nasty. The crime "was not consistent with our core values," he abjectly schmoozed.

After all, it pales in comparison to Volkswagen admitting decades after the fact that it had used Nazi concentration camp slaves to manufacture its cars for the Folk. Luckily for them, no car officials went to jail for that one. All they had to do was to make some token reparations to their mainly Jewish victims. So they probably hope that this latest scandal will be swept under the rug just as efficiently.

The real test of our political class's seriousness about reducing global warming and combating climate change is how it will treat the Volkswagen crimes. If the company gets the usual financial slap on the wrist, as General Motors recently did despite their officials being, at the very least, accessories to murder, our government officials will have proven themselves irredeemable hypocrites, once and for all.

As the Pope's late, great fellow Latin American leftist Eduardo Galeano put it, the United States is the Vatican of the Church of the Sacred Car. And the depraved religion has spread all over the globe. "The imported faith in the four-wheeled god and the confusion of democracy with consumption have been more devastating than any bombing campaign. Never have so many suffered so much for so few," he wrote in Upside Down.
 
In Nordhaus's neoliberal view, meanwhile, the problem is not that water is scarce. It's that it is underpriced. The problem is not the number of polluting particulates in the air that we breathe and the ensuing damage to our lungs. It is that the poisons are underpriced. What this planet, and the people and animals and plants residing on it need is not health and conservation of resources and clean-up. What it needs are plutocrats making more money by finding more efficient ways to use their poisons.

Pope Francis has his work cut out for him with such thinking from the allegedly enlightened side of the climate "debate." (Yes, the media conglomerate is still framing the death of the earth as a debate instead of a reality.)

As he puts it in his encyclical, "Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation, or blind confidence in technical solutions. We need a new and universal solidarity." 

Meanwhile, even though Laudato Si' is readily available free of charge all over the Internet, billionaire Jeff Bezos is charging people $5.95 to download a Kindle copy from his own Amazon website marketplace. Because the rich rentiers will always parasitize the poor. Commodified humanity is their main course.

We all have got our work cut out for us.

That Uppity Pope

The oil and gas industry thinks that Pope Francis is getting too big for his cassock. The Kochs, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP and their whole coterie of climate change-denying think tanks are tightening their collective sphincter in anticipatory dread of the Pope's upcoming major encyclical on the environment. His global warning to mankind will be followed this fall by his address to a joint session of congress.

 I wonder if the neoliberal pols will dare pull a police state union stunt and turn their backs on the Pope as he calls them out on their selfishness and capitalistic greed. I wonder if John Boehner will turn a brighter shade of orange as he is forced to take a public back seat directly behind a religious leader who accepts science as fact.

Environmentalists, stung by the recent betrayals of Barack Obama, the self-described environmental president (Atlantic and Arctic oil drilling now, tepid pollution reductions way down the road), are all excited by both the encyclical and the Pope's upcoming visit to the United States.

Despite the propaganda of so-called militant atheists, organized religion does not have a built-in anti-science bias. There is an organization called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment  which draws its membership from across the denominational spectrum to spread the message that environmental justice, social justice and economic justice are inextricably intertwined. Evangelicals love clean water and hate methane emissions as much as secular humanists do. Rationality and religion are not mutually exclusive.

This is making the God-fearing climate denialists' heads explode in paroxysms of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, like any fringe cultists worth their salt, they are tweaking their doctrine just enough to adjust to the changing times and a Pope who doesn't hail from the same right wing universe as they do. The heartless Heartland Institute, for example, now claims that he is not scientific enough to know whereof he speaks. Oil and gas magnates sent a group of their scientists-for-hire  all the way to the Vatican last month to issue a prebuttal to the Pope. Their main beef, though, is that he is teaming up with their other nemesis, the United Nations, in order to spread the scientific gospel. They're sounding the alarm against climate alarmism, and spending millions of tax-exempt dollars to do it. They get their tax-exempt 501 (C)3 "charity" money from the billionaire Koch Brothers, among others. They were recently outed in what's become known as ClimateGate: a group of scientists were exposed as deliberately lying for cash money. They're a nasty bunch, even going so far as to threaten to sue those who dare publicize their chicanery.

So now they think they have the Pope on the ropes? This ought to be good, coming as it does when the GOP Clown Car (which, due to rapid overcrowding, should probably be upgraded to the GOP Clown Recreational Vehicle) will be in full, grinding, dissonant gear.

The Heartland Institute has put its own financial backing into the presidential campaign of college dropout Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. They're calling it Operation Angry Badger. But although they might get their sadistic kicks out of badgering people and popes,  they're really nothing but a bunch of wretched weasels.