Six Things I Think: Tomb-World Politics Edition
Editor’s Note: as explained recently, I’m back to writing regularly after a prolonged absence caused by burnout and stupefying horror. Unfortunately, our accelerated news cycle makes it impossible to take just shy of three months off writing without missing a staggering number of important stories – stories that will influence my future writing and continue to affect all of our lives long after they’ve left the mainstream news headlines.
In order to work my way through that backlog and properly frame the important issues we’ll continue to discuss going forward, I’ve settled on a posting format (Six Things I Think) consisting of a mixture of links and commentary; the first one, about Pig Empire militarism, was posted just over a week ago. For now on this website I’m going to focus heavily on these posts and publish overview discussions spread across the vast majority of issues I write about regularly. Obviously, this means we’re going to be looking at a mixture of new and “old” stories, but I promise to maintain a laser-like focus on issues that aren’t going away.
Finally, for those of you who miss my regular writing and find playing catch-up too tedious, please be reminded that I’m continuing along with my regular work on the various blogs I write – including “Can’t You Read” on Tumblr, “Media Madness” on Blogspot and my Patreon blog.
Why I’m Learning How To Learn Climate Science
It started with an innocent question during the course of a conversation with one of my readers:
“If you know that climate catastrophe is real, why don’t you write about it more on your website?”
At the time, I truthfully didn’t quite know how to answer, after all, just who the hell am I? I’m not a scientist, I’m not a medical expert or a meteorologist and it would certainly be fair to ask what I possibly had to contribute to the discussion. Eager to change the subject, I keyed out something to the effect of there only being so much time in the day and went on with my life, as we are all want to do when faced with uncomfortable accusations about ourselves.
Despite my best efforts however, the question continued to gnaw away at the back of my mind because deep down inside, I knew the answer I’d given had the distinct whiff of excuse-making. So, I did what I always do when I don’t understand my own feelings and ideas on a given subject; I started to read. Simultaneously, as I was gaining more knowledge, I began trying to work through some of the horrifying things I was reading in my regular writing, with wildly varying degrees of success. It wasn’t until I finally sat down to read Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate” that I ultimately reached an important personal epiphany – it’s absurd to believe I’m not qualified to write about climate catastrophe because climate catastrophe affects literally everything on Earth and as such, alters virtually every aspect of our public discourse in some way.
Climate catastrophe is about politics, it’s about capitalism, it’s about corporate malfeasance, it’s about imperialism, it’s about fascism, it’s about propaganda in the mass media, it’s about racism, it’s about gender, it’s about neoliberalism, it’s about class tensions – and these are all subjects I’m quite familiar with in my work. I may never know a goddamn thing about polar bears, historic rainfall patterns and solar energy, but I’m more than aware that rich people are prepared to grind up the poor and marginalized for pennies on the share; especially now that we’re largely becoming surplus to the labor requirements of capital.
So it is that today I bring you my first real climate crisis analysis piece and it’s about a subject I know all too well; the politics of a soon-to-be boiling Pig Empire – let’s look at the headlines:
Climate crisis more politically polarizing than abortion for US voters, study finds – I think one of the vilest “achievements” by reactionary billionaire capitalists in modern American history has been the successful (thus far) quest to graft climate crisis denial to the ongoing American culture war; while simultaneously, the elite “liberal” establishment’s willingness to capitulate in response to this framing (when it suits their purpose) represents one of our era’s greatest betrayals. Remarkably (as this survey demonstrates) the efforts of (largely) right wing plutocrats to politicize the discussion surrounding climate catastrophe, global warming, fossil fuels and carbon emissions has been so successful, that this politicization has somehow survived altered facts “on the ground” of the fight against impending climate crisis. Curiously, these facts include not only the neoliberal Democratic Party leadership repeatedly demonstrating that they don’t actually give a damn about climate change, but also significant changes in the shared Republican orthodoxy on climate as well. Even more perplexing, this politicization of the struggle has survived shifting attitudes of the GOP voting base itself; seventy-two percent of Americans (including 52% of Republicans) now consider global warming personally important, a matching seventy-two percent of polled Americans also said they feel personally morally obligated to reduce carbon emissions. Unfortunately, while all of that is eerily reminiscent of the conversation around Obamacare versus “the Affordable Care Act” on the right, things are only marginally better on the “liberal” side of the equation; Democratic Party voters may reflexively say they care about global warming, but that hasn’t stopped them from propelling an oil-soaked, climate crisis denier to the pole position in the 2020 Democratic nomination contest. Perhaps in the end, the key to separating all of this signal from noise is to remember that climate catastrophe is only a culture war issue because it was artificially inserted into the discussion by the Koch brothers – at its root, dealing with climate crisis is a generational struggle, rather than a two-party system political struggle. Politicians who expect young people to vote for them in 2020, would be certainly wise to take note of this trend, but there remains a pretty solid chance they won’t.
Trump’s Plans for Protecting Polluters Have Been a Devastating Success – all of which brings us to the Klepto Kaiser and the corrupt capitalist cronies who have been in and out of his cabinet. While it’s certainly true that ignoring climate catastrophe for fun and profit is a genuinely bipartisan issue, I think it’s also impossible to deny that the Trump administration is objectively a pack of evil super villains from a rejected season of Captain Planet when it comes to the environment. From coal lobbyists to a literal chicken shit coverup artist (with a healthy dose of corpse-farming donors on the side) the swine emperor’s administration seems hand-crafted for the purpose of enabling the profitable pillage of our environment – at a time when the planet itself cannot even remotely afford such nihilism and greed. Worse still, Herr Donald’s open flip-flopping between denial and resigned pillage has intertwined the preexisting zeitgeist of climate catastrophe denial with Trump’s fascist cult of personality, further reinforcing the falsified and harmful culture war structure of the climate discussion we looked at above. Look, I think it’s pretty absurd to pretend that Donald Trump is why we’re here; Trump didn’t preside over repeated GOP attacks on already-inadequate federal environmental regulations, Trump didn’t graft support for the fossil fuel agenda onto paleoconservatism or the Tea Party, Trump didn’t have anything to do with a Bush administration that fought planet-killing wars of aggression to secure the supply of planet-killing oil, and Trump certainly didn’t force the Obama government to betray virtually every election promise the President made and sell their voters out to the fossil fuel industry. No indeed, our collective climate reality check has been a long time coming. By that same measure however, the numbers simply don’t lie; electing Downmarket Mussolini has been a lot like slamming your foot on the gas in a car that’s already speeding towards the proverbial ecological cliff at ninety miles per hour. As with most of the horrifying shit rich people have unleashed on the rest of us, I think it’s still possible to make an unacceptably terrible situation, mindbogglingly worse – and when it comes to environmental climate crisis, the bloviating billionaire assclown in the White House has unquestionably done just that.
Biden’s Climate Adviser Earned $1 Million From Natural Gas Company – in a vacuum, you would think that having a President who might objectively be trying to get us all killed would be a great boon to the opposition party; experienced observers however know that the only vacuum Democratic Party leaders care about is the one that hoovers up all the campaign donation dollars. Overall, the Democratic Party’s messaging on climate catastrophe as we head into election season has been mixed at best, and outright hostile at worst; particularly among party loyalists in the corporate media and the old guard, neoliberal establishment leaders. Although there has certainly been some progress, mostly from the ascending “progressive” or democratic socialist wing of the party, many of the Party’s neoliberal mandarins have tried to convince young people they care about climate catastrophe without making any concrete promises, while continuing to signal to corporate America that they are not serious about fighting carbon emissions and they’re still open for business with the fossil fuel industry. How else do you explain the corporate “liberal” media’s elevation of presumed Democratic Party nomination “frontrunner” Palooka Joe Biden? We’re talking about a guy whose very first campaign promise on climate action was to forge a “middle ground” policy that “reduced greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining the oil and gas boom that began under President Barack Obama.” When confronted with the mind-numbing absurdity of that position, Biden deflected by first attempting to falsely take credit for starting the fight to prevent climate catastrophe, before accidentally revealing he hadn’t really given the matter much thought when he promised more specifics “in the coming weeks.” Clearly, Palooka Joe just doesn’t get it. Furthermore, the fact that Party leaders are fine with supporting a “grabby” slab of zombie roadkill like Biden, while simultaneously undermining Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” represents the kind of “fuck you” to young voters that you only deliver if you’re so far out of touch with your base, that you’re convinced merely being better than Downmarket Mussolini is good enough to get elected. Personally, I think that strategy is dogshit and may well hand Trump a second term in the fall of 2020 if Bernie Sanders doesn’t save the Democratic Party from itself.
Corporate America Is Terrified of the Green New Deal – of course, one needn’t look very far to figure out why the pro-corporate, neoliberal establishment in the Democratic Party is dead set on sabotaging any real action to prevent climate catastrophe, even if it costs them the upcoming election and endangers all life on earth. Both big business and elite Dem Party donors are so terrified of anything resembling “a Green New Deal” that they’re practically begging Congress to institute a carbon tax, in order to head all this environmental reform off at the pass. This is because any substantially transformative legislation with a hope of effectively fighting climate catastrophe will unquestionably require dismantling at least some aspects of globalized, deregulated capitalism. This in turn will likely involve not only fundamentally altering the relationship between the state and elite capital, but also ensuring a more equitable sharing of wealth and even a radical change in existing class dynamics; each of which are absolutely anathema to a plutocratic ruling elite who’re literally prepared to risk colonizing outer space, rather than share a goddamn penny with the labor class here on planet Earth. All of which isn’t to somehow suggest that maggot shithead billionaires who support the Republican Party are any better on climate catastrophe; in fact, they’re objectively worse than “liberal” plutocrats – but keeping them happy is unlikely to cost GOP candidates many votes.
House Democrats Voted for a Natural Gas Future, and Nobody Noticed – while fear of corporate masters clearly explains the mainstream Democratic Party’s misrepresentations, betrayals and obfuscations on the climate crisis, I think any impartial observer will honestly struggle to find an innocent explanation for Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to work against her own stated agenda by voting for a bill that will expand natural gas fracking infrastructure in Europe and Asia. In fairness to Ocasio-Cortez, she was only one of two hundred and twenty-four Democrats to vote in “yea” and the bill (as well as its Senate counterpart) was thinly-disguised as a measure to combat Russian influence in Eastern Europe, but at the end of the day this is a decision that helps ensure long term global reliance on fossil fuels and that’s an objectively terrible look for the Congressional architect of the Green New Deal and the very public face of the left’s climate crisis fight inside the Democratic Party. Is it time to be concerned about the fact that AOC’s vaunted Green New Deal has no prohibitions “on new natural gas development?“ I don’t know about you, but after eight years of climate lip-service from the Democratic Party during the Obama presidency, I think it’s safe to say I’m all out of trust myself.
Climate Chaos Is Coming and the Pinkertons Are Ready – finally, I think it’s pretty disturbing that almost nobody is discussing the way rich capitalists and security corporations keep openly admitting they plan to leave us to die or gun us down like dogs in the street during the post-climate crash apocalypse. Setting aside paranoid billionaire fantasies about space colonization and “Fortress New Zealand” and in light of recent examples, I personally suspect that by far the most likely result of a climate crisis induced societal breakdown will be the open outbreak of an already-brewing militant and nativist brand of eco-fascism that will almost certainly dovetail into the armed branch of the remaining capitalist state. Frankly, with fascist-friendly US authorities at virtually every level of government already acting as a conduit between reactionary, right wing paramilitary groups and an amoral, libertarian private sector determined to wring the last dollar out of a dying world even if it kills us all, it might not even take a climate collapse for this nightmare scenario to play out – at least not in America.
– Nina Illingworth
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