As the World Burns .... Trumplestiltskin Yearns.

Build, Destroy, Repeat ...

The world has barely digested the news that the Copout21 talks were just a waste of time, having become, like Davos, merely another excuse for members of the world's Supraclass to climb into a jet and junket to another fabulous destination and stay at well-appointed hotels on the dime of various NGO's while pretending to "do something" about the climate crisis even while most of the people in a position to actually make a difference remain in full denial mode about anything being wrong with the current state of affairs.

So, as though in order to drive home that point, the OPEC and non-OPEC countries alike are in a fierce, very open, pitched (and I do mean pitched, as in black tar) battle, to extract every drop from the earth's crust, and make its CO2 content available for dispersion into its atmosphere, even as it floods the world market, plunges the price to levels that don't even pay for the extraction let alone transportation and storage, and, with Iran as a prime example, despite the estimated surplus of a million barrels a day of production in excess of demand, scurry to pull even more of it out of the ground and dump it onto the already-flooded market.

All this occurring just in time for what's still referred to in the USA as the "Driving Season". So it is heralded as good news that the gasoline inventories in Cushing, OK, have been dented by the surge in demand for refined fuels.  Just as there will be a surge in demand for jet fuels as the well-heeled, following the example of the oh-so environmentally concerned attendees of Copout21, clamber onto planes to ride to far off destinations in search of Paradise, or just to visit Nana or go to someone's birthday, wedding or funeral. The more the world undergoes diaspora of its burgeoning populations from overcrowded metropolises to better climes for better times, the demand for air travel will remain high for exactly that reason: family affairs that require/demand the attendance of far flung family members.

Meanwhile the glut in oil production has a mirror image that nobody wishes to reflect on which is the over capacity in automobile production. This is overcapacity on a country-by-country basis that can only be resolved in the way a capitalist system knows, by switching that capacity over to war production. War Production being the sine qua non of a capitalist economy the way it never is for a communist economy. Because, since a communist economy is so terribly inefficient, it can never produce the necessities, never mind anything beyond. But a capitalist economy efficiently squeezes out all costs from the production process. So efficiently that the cost of labor comes under constant downsizing pressure and is diminished further and further until the workers are either made redundant by robotics or LBO's until there is no further need of the product they produce, thus the demand is diminished, because there is nobody left with the wherewithal to buy anything, resulting in even more overcapacity.

War solves that problem. You can have production slaves laboring away to produce that which they will never have a chance to own because it will be exploded into fragments thereby requiring more of them be manufactured. It is this point of absolute saturation that the rigged economies of the OECD nations have reached and which is the reason for the insanity of US foreign policy whereby trillions of US tax dollars have been atomized, but, in a never-ending cycle, demand for the products of the US WehrMacht, referred to as US "Defense", continues to escalate and provide the lion's share of profits in a world with such a surfeit of cars and computers and i-phones and televisions that the only way manufacturers can move them off shop floors is to offer them at such low prices they can't afford to do anything but lay off more workers, and begin the cycle anew.

 Hence, the sanctions against Russia. NATO, having tried to sucker Putin into a conflict with Ukraine, one he can't win and so won't fight, instead, sent his flying aces to Syria to engage there. This is a much better ploy, one the US knew was coming, as per the sarin gas intervention that stopped Obama's planned invasion, leaving it up to the Russkies to provide not only air power, but, intelligence services, so that Turkey could be exposed for the agent provocateur it is. Seriously ... who did you think was providing a transit route for all that ISIS oil that they were siphoning from Iraqi and Syrian oilfields? What did  you think was the reason for the plummeting oil prices (they could sell it at rock-bottom price, not having to pay investors, or taxes) and the concomitant deluge of black gold, that when a million barrels/day over the global economy's needs are produced becomes just black goo that just sits around waiting for an accident to happen, which becomes, if nothing else,  a target for terrorist bombs?

 It seems perfectly apparent  that it is the Russian intervention in the Syrian uncivil War that has goosed oil prices back up toward $40/bbl. Isis supply lines through Turkey having been decimated as well as their unimpeded access to stolen technology and infrastructure are bound to have exactly that effect. Wonder why none of the Republican candidates are using this to bash Obama. Maybe because you'd have to actually have some knowledge of how well the US and the other industrial economies in general are greased by the addition of millions of barrels of WD-40. But that 's not the kind of constituent they attract.

With the Rube-io telling them Obama knows exactly what he's doing and that "I'm no scientist" when asked about climate change (How'dcha like to be HIS daughter asking if you should bring an umbrella ? "I'm no weatherman!" Don't ask me to assess anything). I was surprised the other day to see an almost exact quote from Balzac in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" to the effect that "Of all the forms of stupidity, cleverness is the worst", and these two remarks from The Rube are too clever by half. Yet they're perfectly illustrative of most of his pithy rejoinders. The other candidate, Ted Cruz Missile, is intent on incinerating the middles east, and thinks this is a fine thing to brag about during a Presidential candidacy. He also promises to take away your healthcare as his first official act upon ascension to what he apparently considers the peacock throne.

And we're supposed to be upset because the electorate is opting for The Donald? It's the healthiest sign I've seen since the turn of the century. For all his bluster and inane braggadocio, he is not intent on War War and More War, like all the other candidate are biting at the bit to deliver to us and the rest of the world, and he believes in the simple proposition that if one uses it in the US, or locally, (but he won't put it in those terms, it sounds too "progressivey"), then make it in the USA for Crissakes. National economies should be geared to provide for national markets, not global markets, and if The Donald could change just that one aspect of the economy, he will have done more for a reduction in CO2 output, than all the grand plans of liberal darlings such as Egon Musk or Bozo Bezos, both of whose business models require trillions of dollars in investment, government subsidies and energy usage (ie, MASSIVE CO2 production) to make them function, none of which their own enterprises will provide, but will (do) freely use what the taxpayer investment in infrastructure provides them, while avoiding paying any of their revenue toward the taxation that provides the funding necessary to maintain it.

It is Neo-liberal free trade policies and the Neo-con War-mongering, American Exceptionalism, Full Spectrum Domination mentality that are hand-in-hand bleeding the working class dry. And until Trump got on the stump, the two major parties were perfectly content with the prospect of presenting the electorate in November with a choice between the criminal Bush family or the feckless Clintons. Back to the future of 1992. Thanks a fuckin'  lot. I mean I don't want Trump either, I was appalled at the very idea that a f**'ng Birther, a birther, fer crissakes, and Donald Trump to boot, was in the race at all. But after seeing his routine, which is what it seemed, especially at first; he was like an Alice Through the Looking Glass version of Rodney Dangerfield doing a stand-up act on the Ed Sullivan Show. Only better, because he started lambasting that pathetic roster of the tired and the fired that constituted the slate of other Republican candidates as though he were channeling Don Rickles, and, if nothing else, overnight made the race for the Presidency interesting ... entertaining, even:

"Lindsey Graham? Who's he? He said I met him once, I don't remember. I think even Dick Perry is smarter than Lindsey Graham". "Rubio? He's a lightweight. everyone in Florida hates him." Now you may be appalled at a candidate talking like this, but after the 2012 selection of Republican candidates presented as though they were fit for election, we were being presented with an even worse slate this time (although thankfully missing that candidate-for-life, Newt the Rich Gringo). A much bigger affront to the intelligence and prospects of the US citizenry could not be imagined. So what, I ask you, is the big deal about Trump?

And what has that to do with climate change? Well, it seems that the less talked about, the more might actually get done, because, until now, the talk has not been cheap, it has had a very high cost as the rate at which CO2 has been pouring into the atmosphere, and that of methane, which brings forward the warming effect by decades, are accelerating, not diminishing, all the while with a president who fully acknowledges the danger. So what's the point? Since knowing about the problem in no way leads to actually doing anything about it, except, of course, to make it worse, So bring on the Trump. He's a far less scary candidate than any of the other Republican polemicists he's running against. Unless, of course, he were to actually get elected.