During my year living in Chile, the Andes Mountains were always a mere 20 miles away. On very, very few occasions did i ever see them. Santiago, at the time, had the 3rd filthiest air quality in the world.
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Greed coupled with the fact that they don’t even care about the world they leave to the own children.
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Books have been written on why and how the fossil fuel and other extractive industries gain control of and support from the people who live in the states they harm the most. The bottom line is people working in those extractive industries and in supporting businesses need the money. The regular people who die in alarming numbers can’t envision life without the extractive industry.
What makes the poisoning worse is the fact that the owners of the extractive industries generally don’t live in the places they pollute. They move as much money out of the state as quickly as possible and don’t support the state taxing them to pay to clean up their mess or to treat the damage they have done to their employees.
Remember the oil wells and coal mines provide regular people jobs and that is the reason the Republican politicians (including AGs) team up with the corporations raping their landscapes.
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These cases will lead to more Gorsuch majority opinions on the road to functionally eliminating the EPA. The GOP has no need to legislate now that they have installed a Supreme Court to do their work for them. Five Justices who cannot be removed is a much easier lift than 50% of the House and 60% of the Senate.
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An object in motion stays in motion.
An object at work uses up its energy.
An object at rest stays at rest until its spouse finds it.
Later. Back to work.
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True. It’s pick your honkie-ass representative. It’s just one side is a bunch of fascist inheritor-class nobodies with endless bile that has gamed the system since the pyramids, and the other relies on nobless oblige.
One is only hampered by inclusion, the other by exclusion. America is inclusion. I don’t go for the both-sides-are-just-as-bad bit. One side bends ever achingly towards justice, and that is the best of us.
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Clearly, attorneys general in the red states are dedicated to preserving or increasing the profits of industrial companies regardless of the effect on public health. This is of a piece with their efforts to delegitimize public-health recommendations to vaccinate against socially transmitted diseases and to advance measures that make it more difficult for many constituents to vote.
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Kinda no-brainer, TPM. They’re Republicans. End of story.
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“Sheep for Wolves, 2024”.
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A good friend of mine went to Cal Tech in the late 1960s, and it was several months before he knew the San Gabriel Mountains were just a handful of miles away, such was the air pollution then, before government regulations cleared the air of much of the dangerous particulate pollution.
And because mitigating pollution reduces corporate profits the GOP is doing all they can to get rid of government regulations altogether.
It’s a matter of priorities. Recall that Milton Friedman declared the overriding duty of corporations is to maximize shareholder value, all else is a very distant second.
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GOP DGAF about anyone but billionaires.
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EVs are still in the Model T phase of evolution. But, evolution has exponentially sped up since 1910 so it won’t last much longer.
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In Wisconsin, Gov. Evers once again vetoed the PFAS cleanup legislation, for which there is $125 million available since last year’s budget. Because the latest version of the bill removed the DNR’s ability to go after the polluter for remediation money.
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This piece is important and well-intentioned, but as with most stories touching upon some aspect of the GOP’s ever-more extreme embrace of deeply unpopular and harmful policies, it skates past the real dynamic at play here, and in national politics generally. The story says:
As tracked by the Center for Media and Democracy, AFPM donated $246,720 from 2014-2016, $60,625 in 2017, $220,725 from 2019-2020, $40,000 in 2021 and another $75,150 in 2023. In sum, over the last ten years, AFPM organizationally has funneled at least $643,220 to RAGA overall. Member groups have also funneled money to RAGA, including Valero ($225,000 in 2023,) Exxon ($100,000 in 2023,) Chevron ($25,000 in 2023), and more.
To understand what’s actually going on, three things must be understood about what is discussed in this paragraph.
First, these amounts, spread across multiple years and dozens of races, are, by current campaign standards, peanuts, chump change found under seat cushions. They represent donations that serve as symbolic affirmations of allegiance rather than amounts sufficient to create that allegiance.
Second, and this is the important part, all of these figures represent regulated cash, donations still subject to contribution limits and reporting requirements under the pieces of our campaign finance laws that the Alito Court has not (yet) bothered to eliminate.
Third, and following from the first two points, all of these politicians are acting in a way that, all things being equal, would create a political vulnerability by setting them at odds with the direct, and in many cases urgent, interests of their ostensible constituencies without providing them with enough money to run the kind of ad and PR campaigns that sufficiently spin “we are trying to kill you” into “we are saving your jobs” in the dozens of individual elections they are going to.
Yes, to a large extent they can rely on right wing media and the self-destructively contrarian, anti-science and anti-expertise mindset that have been pounded into Republican voters over the last couple of decades. But the limits of the utility of that mindset once actual poison starts flowing into white working and middle class Republican homes was demonstrated by the East Palestine derailment. When your party’s policies are actually and visibly hitting your voters at the lowest level of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, they still get angry at you and it’s going to take a lot more than five or ten grand in PAC money to conceal, deflect and redirect the anger to Democrats and minorities.
Indeed, a basic test of whether a democracy is healthy is whether elected officials are promoting policies that are brazenly contrary to the physiological and safety steps of the voters’ Mazlow pyramid.
Granted, politicians promoting harmful policies is nothing new. What is new is how that over the last decade and a half Republicans have ceased making any effort to conceal it beyond supplying the MSM with the transparently bad-faith pretexts necessary to enable them to pound the facts into the Bothsides narrative frame.
So what changed? Three things.
First, in 2008, Barak Obama’s campaign demonstrated that, thanks to the Internet and online payment systems, if your policies were popular, you could massively outraise your opponent in repeat small dollar donations. Even the “bundler” model where you got some affluent to rich activists to network with other affluent people and collect a bucket of checks that maxxed out their legal contribution limits and hand them over in one big python-lump of cash became secondary in Democratic campaigns. Bundler bucks are still important enough for Democrats to spend time and energy stroking them and their affluent pals, but they now usually raise far more money far more cheaply in terms of both money and candidate time just by sending people annoying automated email and text spams soliciting small dollar donations from regular people.
Second, Obama’s fundraising success in 2008 scared the absolute living shit out of the entire Republican establishment. FEC v. Citizens United on January 21, 2010 was the direct result of the wave of fear that swept through that establishment.
Third, the groundswell of rage that followed the 2008 financial crisis, penetrated their bubbles of impunity and put the nation’s richest people in personal fear of their lives and fortunes for the first time even as Democrats enraged them with displays of lese majeste.
And that, friends, is when the GOP began its rapid degeneration from being the party of corporations, big business, small business, and small government, to a front for a few hundred individual billionaires and centi-millionaires bent on stamping out the threat of middle class democracy and supplanting it with a Putinized sham-democracy oligarchy.
Maybe you think this is a distinction without a difference. What’s to choose between transnational corporations and Big Finance run by super-rich executives and the super-clique of billionaire cliques centered on the Kochs, Silicon Valley psychopaths and the Texas oil and real estate tycoons who were Karl Rove’s cash cows when he needed to stand up a smear campaign like the Swift Liars? Same difference, right?
No. Because the giant publicly traded corporations, however awful, destructive, self-interestedly incestuous, and stupidly rapacious they often are, are directly accountable to the shareholders who elect directors. And these days, the shareholders who matter the most are the index funds and the pension funds, both of which are broadly aligned with the interests of the middle class, financially if not ethically, ideologically or morally. And, just as important, the gigantic publicly traded corporations are mostly too big to be taken over or dominated by the individual weirdo billionaires who want to impose oligarchy–a fact that enrages them.
And yes, their shared culture of weirdness is also part of the danger. I use the term “weirdo” for lack of a better way of describing the class of hyper-wealthy people who emerged in the wake of the Reagan tax cuts (and the successive cuts that followed). People who take the sense of superiority that naturally attends wealth and privilege and dialed it up to 11, people convinced of their own mental, and often genetic, superiority. People made more weird and dangerous precisely because they’re wrapped in the bubble of sycophants and fawning opportunistic nuts like Curtis Yarvin, Leonard Leo and Steve Bannon attracted by their wealth and power like rats to food scraps. The people drawn into the political cliques associated with the likes of the Kochs, the Mercers, the DeVos clan, Peter Theil and his clique of Silicon Valley libertarian neo-monarchist assholes, and the older, still largely invisible Texas oil and real estate wing nuts like Harlan Crowe.
Yes, sure, some large public corporations can be dominated for years by individual weirdos like Jamie Dimon. But the S&P 500 are (mostly) too big to buy and take private and far more aligned with hoi-polloi shareholders than the weirdos want them to be. That’s not to say that the big transnationals are benign or that we wouldn’t be better off economically if many of them were broken up. And indeed, the mere fact that breaking up a monopoly invariably makes the shareholders-from the ones who dominate it to the small holders-much richer in very short order tells you that decisions at the top are being driven by the desire to wield political power rather than just to make more money or preserve what they have. But precisely because they are controlled by boards, layers of careerist management and CEO’s who (except for Dimon) are periodically axed and dropped out of the plane with a golden parachute when they fuck up, they are a manageable challenge to democracy.
While most of the weirdos’ wealth is also locked up in the stock of large corporations, those corporations are mostly privately held or controlled by the individual billionaires (and/or their families) the built them such as SpaceX/Tesla, Palantir, 21st Century Fox, and Koch Industries.
And that’s what changed. Faced in 2009 with a future that promised endless Democratic small donor fundraising and consequent political ass-kickings, the GOP had two choices. One of them was the normal homeostasis of a healthy democracy: advocate more popular policies and become the party of “yes, but” for a few years until the other side stumbled. The other was to abandon democracy and become a front for would-be oligarchs politicized by the anger and uppityness generated by the financial crisis.
And with Citizens United and its hell-spawn progeny opening the door to unlimited billionaire cash laundered through front organizations that help maintain anonymity, Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, sold the party to the would-be oligarchs, lock, stock and barrel. Now the weirdos own the party and they won’t be letting it go.
So, why are Republican politicians openly espousing policies that are facially, unambiguously dangerous to the physical safety, health and survival of their ostensible constituents? Not because they’ve gotten a few grand in regulated donations from trade association PAC’s. Rather, it’s because their actual constituents are a few hundred obscenely wealthy individuals waging class war on middle-class democracy. The new ownership doesn’t simply not give a shit if they kill people, but rather embraces it as a demonstration of power to any Republican politicians who might have qualms as well as to any Little People who get uppity. They want the deregulation, but as much proof they can use their vast wealth to redirect popular anger and discontent toward support for anti-democracy policies and politics as a desirable object in and of itself.
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“Polluter pays” is indeed a principle. However it is not one that is always applied.
Similarly, there is the “precautionary principle.” In many European countries, a chemical must be proven safe before use. In the US, a chemical often must be proven unsafe after use in order to reduce or eliminate exposure to it.
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I graduated from UCR in 1976, and worked on the Angeles National Forest near Wrightwood. My memories about air quality at that time are deeply imprinted. It is a shame, however, that US freshmen, unlike in Finland, don’t get a core course on climate change, cyclical economy and natural systems, just to calibrate their ability to discuss the slow-moving collapse with some factual context. It is a blessing for those of us old enough to remember the geochemical changes we’ve seen in our lifetime, and a duty to communicate that to the younger people. Our species is selfish, but also benevolent, and one of the more intelligent species. We are self-aware of our contribution to our destiny and can even deliberately ignore or magic-think it.
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“A wise old black f*ggot said to me years ago, ‘Some people are shits, darling.’ I was never able to forget it.”
–William S. Burroughs
What you’re not addressing here is the appeal of violent fascism, and being able to openly express racism, to GOP voters. Bending others to their idiotic will.
It’s not just that they dislike LGBTQ folks, Black people, Hispanics, women, people who trust science, (evil, baby killing, blood drinking) Democrats–and everyone else not a part of their brainless rural rube cult of MAGA–they HATE them and want to cause them harm and suffering.
There’s a HUGE constituency of fucking assholes in this country (around a third of the population, with most clustered in former Confederate states. Coincidence? Genetic?) that IS the modern GOP. The Venn diagram of fascists, morons, racists, QAnoner types, Potatobug people, etc, etc. looks like a single circle these days.
Sarah Palin was the one who opened the door to all of this low IQ buffoonery, then Trump walked in, dumped gasoline on the hatred, prejudice and racism and threw a lit match on the entire country.
If he gets back in, I’m moving back to California quick like.
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Werner Herzog reminded us that 1/3 of the country is willing to kill another third, while the remaining third watches.
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