Days after the big unveiling of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure budget resolution, Senate Democrats are elated.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1381348
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1381348
Here’s a suggestion to add some voting rights protections to this bill. To curtail Gerrymandering, provide a tax incentive for States to implement independent commissions to draw up district boundaries and curtail funding for states that don’t do so.
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Those brainiac Crooked Media youngsters were describing this legislation in very serious terms as a transformative thing like the New Deal. So that’s kind of cool.
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For years scientists have warned politicians to protect their citizens from extreme weather events such as the floods in northern Europe and the US heat dome. They have been predicting for years that summer rainfall and heatwaves would become more intense due to human-induced climate change. And there sits Senator Manchin crying about WV’s obsolete coal business. Let’s rehab those workers into sustainable industries, and get the hell on to saving our environmentally dependent asses.
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Hell. First thing the GOP’s going to do if they ever get back in is force cars to run on coal and then buy out every affluent family’s soon-to-be-worthless beach house.
I saw a documentary about dying coal towns. One guy said, I’m sure accurately, that a lot of the unemployed coal workers basically don’t want to take those classes on installing solar panels or what have you. They want you to kiss the boo-boo and make it better, because they’ve been told that’s a thing when it’s not. I don’t entirely blame them. I saw the market for my own periodical-publishing field inexorably shrinking twenty years ago and started doing something about it, and at this point what I did is only just maybe starting to work for me. And many people who did what I used to do just sat and watched it happen and complained. I heard a famous newspaper columnist yelling on NPR years ago, “You’re going to miss us when we’re gone!” Well, news flash, famous columnist, that was 10 or 15 years ago and they don’t miss you yet. Entire newsrooms would just sit and watch as huge layoffs came through like a plague. It’s as if modern life made everything so easy and secure that we lost our ability to imagine things happening that we needed to adapt to and to be quick about it. Shaking my head.
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An idea that may fit into reconciliation - assess the market value of all the coal companies, and buy them, nationalize them. Then operate the companies. The workers week to consist of 2.5 days mining, 2.5 days in class getting educated. Coal production is immediately cut in half, and a route to zero production is created as workers graduate or are moved on to retire or “flunk out” of their job.
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If they’re happy, then that means they would have settled for less.
And that’s gonna give R’s nightmares…
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All of which accomplishes another of the wealth sociopaths’ pipe dreams of “thinning the herd.” Well sure, they have hideaway compounds stocked with survival gear so they can come out a year later and start over. Sadly, they are not going to like having to hide out for the next 80,000 years while Earth restabilizes.
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I honestly wonder how they plan to avoid the inconveniences, shall we say, the rest of us will have to endure. They may imagine pockets of relative bearability to which they’ll have access and we won’t, like a number of climate Aspens or something. I just don’t know what they’re thinking. What do they imagine will happen to the economy? They’re concerned enough about the energy-stock portfolios to destroy the world, and they don’t imagine a destroyed world might not be worse than some bad quarters for ExxonMobil?
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“I’m concerned also about the energy independence…”
Manchin’s lips were moving but ExxonMobil was speaking.
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The Age of the Introvert! Love it!
CLI-mate Change! CLI-mate Change!
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Seriously, Discobot? Still?
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According to Godwin’s Law of Nazi analogies as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler becomes more likely.
A similar law likely applies in public infrastructure discussions that the likelihood of some idiot politician ultimately invoking the term “public-private partnership” will occur. It is the public debate equivalent of a stroke. Perhaps the discussion returns to normal in a few years, but it is just as likely as the whole thing was permanently hobbled.
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Unfortunately, for those of us who sincerely love those places, the western mountain towns are the very first places that are going to get torched. Probably the whole of the American people will eventually end up huddled around the Great Lakes.
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A few years ago there was a segment on NPR about retraining coal workers to do coding. It was a lot of “I suppose it’s ok but my grand pappy mined coal and by god the anthracite is in our blood”.
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I meant Aspen metaphorically, as a place most of us can’t afford to be. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the west and know all about the fires. Friend of mine in California lost her house in one.
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Yeah. My impression from the guy talking about it was that it wasn’t a flat refusal, but somehow they just couldn’t see it. You get people who just won’t try something new, even if it would make them far better off. 
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In a bizarre way Ivanka was on to something with her career retraining PR campaign: “Try something new!”
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The Insuring the Integrity of the Continental Shelf Act.
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Things won’t be rosy for anyone when climate change starts interfering with the food supply.
Perhaps the .1% imagine they can stockpile enough Spam to tide them through, until the whole thing blows over.
Cue up Monty Python.
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