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| How America looked the last time this much CO2 was in the atmosphere. |
Moral Equivalent of War. Remember that idea from Jimmy Carter's speech of 1977? As the decade ended along with his presidency, the reality of life in America without the oil necessary to run it, was becoming grim, because, by the end of the US's peak oil decade, oil's price had quintupled from a coupla bucks per barrel to $10/so, the same price it was when GW Bush took office almost 25 years later (to be precise, it was $11/bbl, but in Y2k dollars, that was considerably cheaper than when Carter left office).
Leave it to the United States' most outwardly Christian president to decide War was something to be held up as moral, even as the debt it amassed was the cause of the inflationary environment the Republicans handed over to JC, and that that debt was incurred in order to "fight Communism" by dropping more ordnance on a nation about the size of Florida than was dropped by/on all countries put together during all of WW2. But then, as now, there is no better way to get Americans on board with an idea than suggesting its similarities to War: the American pasttime we can all agree on: its Fun! It's Profitable! And, most importantly, it creates JOBS! USA!USA! = Murder, Inc, and that's not only a good thing, it's apparently a moral thing.
And the Green Deal is nothing more than a more robust, up-to-date version of that famous JC speech from decades past: no blueprint to the future, just a manifesto of wishful thinking that amounts to nothing more than the regurgitated blather of unattainable "if only's". Except the new one includes an extra ingredient, the one from that famous recipe for disaster known today as the Treaty of Versailles: reparations. The one, if there could be one, economic formula most responsible for the rise of Hitler and the ensuing cataclysmic worldwide conflagration we refer to as WW2. Reparations was the one hook that made the "two" in WW2 redundant, as it made the outcome of the armistice inevitably more War, so there was actually (like GW's GWOT, the centerpiece of which was Iraq, which was similarly merely a continuation of Daddy's War) one protracted War with a period of arms build-up by the Merchants of Death in between. This is the world we live in today, where there is no peacetime, a concept that has become ever so quaint. There is only War and preparation for War. Murder, Inc, ç'est à dire.
Now the US has more troops in foreign lands, more bases in other countries, a budget larger than the size of most Nations' economies (despite no other country in the world even pretending to challenge US hegemony), and burns such vast quantities of those very same fossil fuels the Green Deal supposedly wants eliminated from our energy menu that even the modern nation of Sweden can and does use less fossil fuels than the US military (and that does not include all the military's suzerainties, such as the DOE, the DOT (remember, the Interstate Highway system was brought to us courtesy of the Dept of Defense: mimicking Hitler's Autobahn), the NSA, CIA, DHS, etc, etc, all of which are adjuncts to, but not included in, the budget of the Pentagon). But despite that, the Green Manifesto breathes nary a word about the military in its verbiage.
But, of course, since everything now is swept into the tent of National Security as soon as its in peril of being regulated by the civilian sector (LOL: The US government is a Military Government, even it's Commander-in-Chief, Bill Clinton in the nineties, was quickly chastened when he tried to stop discrimination against gay soldiers: that the Pentagon tells the President what their forces should consist of, NOT the other way around, was made quite clear to him, and anyone else who was paying attention), none of the proposals are safe. They can all be overridden by the one aspect of the government The Deal fails to address, although it is the single biggest driver of the economy.
On this fact alone, the Manifesto is an absurdity: a purposely deceitful document as cynical and potentially destructive as the Neo-cons PNAC. Any economic document, which is what the Manifesto is, that doesn't include the major driver of the US economy and its untrammeled and unaudited energy usage, one that can arbitrarily sweep any program that is considered outside its purview right into its tent merely by declaring a State emergency or deciding that it's in the best interest of "National Security", makes the Manifesto a sham, or more'n-likely, a scam. And because the omission is deliberate, as it would have to be, it becomes just one more manifestation of the New Environment the US has created for itself. An environment in which any document produced by our Corponation is so construed as to obfuscate, confuse, and render inconsequential, any attempt to make it less so, as they are now designed to include the most important ingredient of post-2008 world: Plausible Deniability. Which brings us back to the immediate past; back to the GW Bush regime and its cornucopia of lies. Lies designed to turn over the entire economy to the War Machine, our own private Wehrmacht, our own AI-driven Wehrmacht Republik, as it were, and the Green Deal has no problem with that. Which means The Deal (it's neither green, nor new) has no substance whatsoever, and like Carter's document, is rife with obvious impossibilities and mythic pronouncements that either have no chance of being implemented, or, like ethanol from corn, are in direct contradiction to the ideals they espouse.
Do you want to see a few of Carter's? First, remember that he lost. And not only did he lose, but his "Get the Government off our backs" opponent, grew the government at a faster pace and on the backs of a future generation that is now coming of age straddled with that debt: only they call it "Student debt." But that's just another of the Republican lies Democratic Party leaders have fed to their own constituency because they don't' DARE, in the face of the Jewish lobby, AIPAC, that now more or less runs the country (so glad the same Democrats who are so adamant about the separation of Church and State eagerly embrace the Marriage of Synagogue and State: Yes, a democracy that's run by a minority is somehow still considered a democracy) label the slightest protest against increases in military spending "Anti-Semitic", thus reducing both parties to mere mouthpieces of the military. So all those student loans, would not have been necessary if the trillions of dollars spent to fight the GW's GWOT, would have been available to pay students' tuition, but that money was poured into the Wars of the PNAC's New Millennium, same as the old Millennium, and consequently, the students have been saddled with an unpayable burden of debt.
Know what the argument against this is? That without the War spending the US economy, the largest most successful Capitalistic government in the history of mankind, wouldn't have been able to pay for it, because it is only via War Profiteering that the economy has grown so robustly.
So, the centerpiece of the argument of the "Get-the-government-out-of-our-way" Capitalists is:
Debt-fueled Government Spending.
But because the US citizenry, thanks to the Reagan/Bush junta, doesn't consider the military as part of the government (how else to reconcile the sarcastic, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" with the unprecedented expansion of that very same Government by the very same person who made that statement by an assumption of (very expensive) debt in order to fund an ever-expanding military budget? There isn't any other explanation: Military spending: good, any other: Bad) they can extend taxpayers' unaudited funds to them with no complaint from that same citizenry against such spending as they blame the enormous deficits on "Socialism." (The deserved contempt with which the Republicans hold their constituency is made manifest by the justification of huge tax bonanzas to the ultra rich, "In order to stimulate the economy" all the while fulminating against "Entitlement Programs" that put money in the hands of people who will actually spend it within the US economy instead of siphoning it offshore to tax havens and investments in the infrastructure of competitive economies, weakening the US far more than Social Security liabilities ever will).
The same economy, now blighted by debt, was paying Reagan's rich friends and Bush Carlyle Group cronies, all of whom's mattresses are stuffed with Reagan-era-issued 30-year bonds paying 10-15 percent interest rates even as the Fed slashed what IT would pay (ie, what the real economy could afford, having by then been subjected to the chicanery of the Bush/Reagan financial boondoggle that crashed the markets in '87 to enrich their pals, via both the S&L debacle and the so called "Portfolio Insurance" scam of Wall St, allowing Greedspan to drop the interest rate the rest of us could be paid while the rich comfortably still collected their high-interest bonanzas for decades). In other words, the same people making a ruckus about deficit spending and the unsustainable growth of the national debt were raking in risk-free cash at a premium of more than 10% in some instances, from that very government debt. Yet while we will surely be subjected to months of Russiagate exoneration BS, the Democrats, as full partners in the Shearing of American, remain silent about the "Deficit Hawks" in Congress who constituted the Tea Party and wrung their hands over the "Deficit Cliff", and who demanded members sign a Grover Norquist "Taxpayer Protection Pledge", to oppose increases in marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses, as well as net reductions or eliminations of deductions and credits without a matching reduced tax rate, who were mere tools of the same Republican party that had forced those deficits down the throat of a yet-to-be-born generation who remain uninformed of the fact that it was the same person who issued all that debt that simultaneously railed against it.
If you can't beat them join them.
So now the Democrats have put forward their own New York Populist to issue false promises and high minded decrees that have "Failed" stamped all over them even before we've passed the first statement:
(A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions
through a fair and just transition for all communities
and workers;
Notwithstanding just who is to decide what's "fair and just" (is that like "Fair and Balanced?"), the statement is simply the modern version of Carter's statement that, "Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living." Exactly the opposite was true: only by using energy could we maintain our standard of living. And exactly how does one "Save Energy?" Is that like Saving the Planet?
By putting it in those terms the onus of finding a solution to the economy's excessive energy use is placed firmly on the shoulders of users, who, in a "Build it and they will come" dynamic that the economy was molded into, have no choice, instead of its being on the heads of those who built it and made its reliance on increasing uses of energy inevitable, no matter how courageous the efforts of those trapped in it may be: they have engineered systems that rely upon ever-growing stores of fossil fuels being burned for their operation.
Yes, the entire built environment that has been implemented since Carter's Moral Equivalent statement have been designed with just the opposite in mind: they've all assumed the continued and growing availability of ready supplies of Power. So maintaining our standard of living was never in the running. Judging by our current use of energy, it was never what we were after, as instead, we have become ever more reliant on energy from any source other than human-generated. This is so much the case, that even prisoners, men (they're usually predominantly male) found guilty of assault, robbery, and murder, have a larger carbon footprint than most of us did who were listening to Carter's cardigan-sweater-fireside-chat-like speech in 1977 (for the same reason that the Green New Deal is called that: the cheap propaganda gleaned from association with FDR). Heaven forbid that such miscreants should have even the opportunity of decreasing their prison time, or transitioning to a job via power-generation by treadmill. Remember, these are, at least in California, men who spend time hoisting weights, at great physical exertion to themselves, for hours at a time. Energy that could be contributing to the electric usage of the facilities that house them and time-off for good behavior, and carried forth to facilities outside the prison to which they could be paroled. Gyms are already doing it, so why not Prisons? Hard-working CNA's, mechanics, and a slew of private-sector jobs get none of the benefits of incarceration such as housing paid for by taxpayers (an entirely SOCIALIST enterprise, btw), medical care, with no medical insurance, food that has to meet at least some modicum of nutritional value while the people expected to pay for all these amenities for law-breakers, live in squalor, receive no medical insurance, which, on the outside of prison, means no medical care, as it's priced out of reach, even for the rich, and food is priced out of entire neighborhoods, as is being systematically done by Whole Foods, who, now that they're owned by Amazon, force all of its customers to subsidize Amazon Prime members if they wish to shop there, as savings on items are extended only to Prime members: meaning their other shoppers must pay more for them.
Instead, we get phrases like, "to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions". A nonsensical phrase.
One of the most powerful greenhouse gases is water vapor, so, since net-zero refers only to carbon, the phrase is intentionally designed to suggest it will eliminate or sequester all greenhouse gases, when in fact it won't, there being no carbon in H2O. And hundreds of millions of people are compelled to drive in order to earn a living to pay for the privilege of driving, none of whom have the slightest possibility of ever piloting a vehicle that has net-zero greenhouse gas emissions (in fact, the most common additive to the current fleet of automobiles, and over which none of the drivers have any control, is ethanol ... from corn no less, processed in a coal-fired plant to boot, and which causes each vehicle to INcreases gas emissions in the form of nitrous oxide and VOC's (volatile organic compounds) while simultaneously reducing their mpg's which INcreases the amount of fuel they burn on any given trip). And this solution was foisted on the American public with the same false science and false rhetoric: that it was Less polluting and renewable in the bargain, with the added bonus of making America Energy Independent. Wow. What's not to like? Lie to me some more ... pullleeeease?!
This is the same scenario The Deal represents because it uses the same strategy: dealing from the bottom of the deck. In order to assure you that they, and you, are "doing something for the environment" they make proposals that do exactly the opposite of what they claim, but sound oh-so altruistic on paper. But instead, you become active, even eager, partners in facilitating either irreversible damage to, or the outright destruction of, the very atmosphere we need for OUR existence. Not the Planet's, OURS. The planet has no need of topsoil, of plants, even of an atmosphere; it existed for eons with none of those things vital to Life: but WE haven't and can't survive, never mind thrive, without them. Missions to the moon or Mars are just more trumpery to distract us. Trumpery we will heed and believe even while we watch the living environment, our own food basket, being destroyed by an inundation the likes of which has never before been seen in modern times. As a result of the pell-mell, ill-considered fracking of America coupled with the above-mentioned, ongoing, federally-subsidized disaster of corn-into-ethanol we have created the modern version of the dust-bowl:
We have created the Toilet Bowl:
A flooded region of vast dimensions replete with organic matter and inorganic fertilizers, all being flushed down the Mississippi River in unprecedented amounts and dumped into the Gulf of Mexico in which it will extend even further the dead zone that already expands there every spring.
Yet even through disaster upon disaster, from Katrina to Fukushima, Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizons, California wildfires to Hurricane Michael, and now includes the transformation of our breadbasket into a toxic soup, barely a peep is uttered to connect our enormous energy addiction to the combustion of everything in sight to feed it. Instead, what's fed and stoked to a redhot heat is our desire for MORE energy, which this Deal does nothing to address. Instead it promises in the future, it'll be Free! Renewable! Any carbon it produces, Sequestered! Oh Brave New World that has such things in it! So we grab for this slimmest of straws promising us energy-production that doesn't ask for even the slightest modicum of reduction of actual energy usage; because it HAS to. We, the elected representatives of the people, legislated it so. Simultaneously we are pouring cash as though it grows on trees into developing cars that drive themselves, even though cars that drive themselves aren't even what but a small minority of us ever WANTED! How's THAT for market-driven capitalism, eh? It isn't. It's Corponation-driven/ AI-driven/ profit-driven Socialism.
The exact same drivers of the so-called Green New Deal.
We've built our own Mad Max 8's but didn't bother with the extras. Who needs them?
