What Do We Do When Our Own Government Becomes The Enemy?

Earlier today we looked at the interview Bill Moyers did with Adolph Reed, Jr. about how the American left has basically shriveled up and withered away. Reed made the point that Clinton and Obama both sold out entirely to Wall Street in the same way that the Republican Party has. The corporate agenda is their agenda. Yesterday Curtis Ellis of the American Jobs Alliance, wrote that the TransPacific Partnership, the latest manifestation of their trade policies, is the next step in a 50+ year plan to replace national governments with rule by multinational corporations.

The TransPacific Partnership is labelled as a "free trade" magic elixir that will cure all ills-- Jobs! Prosperity! World Peace!-- but in fact it's a toxic brew that weakens the American body politic and the Constitution. And when you look at how it came about you see that those are design features, not bugs.

The historical record is clear: what are misleadingly called "free trade agreements" were never really about trade. Their goal is to render independent nation states null and void, and hand power over to unaccountable, transnational corporatist authorities.

This sounds like a plot lifted from a Bond supervillain, yet it is precisely what a powerful State Department official told a Congressional hearing in 1967. And much of what he laid out nearly 50 years ago has come to pass under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

…TPP is not about trade, tariffs or quotas-- it's about creating 'supranational institutions' whose diktat trumps national governments, Congress and the courts.

Given this reality, why would anyone sworn to uphold the Constitution give President Obama the fast track power he and David Rockefeller want him to have?

There are no contemporary reports on Jesus Christ. Roman media and historians missed the most important occurrence of their century. Today's corporate media is missing the most important occurrence of ours: the slide towards the climate change tipping point. Wall Street huckster Joe Kernan was on CNBC this morning deriding climate science as "witchcraft." The man has been too stupid for the public forum for at least two decades. He should read this essay by author Tom Englehardt on how the media missed the story of the millennium.

The fact that 97% of scientists who have weighed in on the issue believe that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon is not a story. That only one of 9,137 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between November 2012 and December 2013 rejected human causation is not a story either, nor is the fact that only 24 out of 13,950 such articles did so over 21 years. That the anything-but-extreme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offers an at least 95% guarantee of human causation for global warming is not a story, nor is the recent revelation that IPCC experts believe we only have 15 years left to rein in carbon emissions or we’ll need new technologies not yet in existence which may never be effective. Nor is the recent poll showing that only 47% of Americans believe climate change is human-caused (a drop of 7% since 2012) or that the percentage who believe climate change is occurring for any reason has also declined since 2012 from 70% to 63%. Nor is the fact that, as the effects of climate change came ever closer to home, media coverage of the subject dropped between 2010 and 2012 and, though rising in 2013, was still well below coverage levels for 2007 to 2009. Nor is it a story that European nations, already light years ahead of the United States on phasing out fossil fuels, recently began considering cutbacks on some of their climate change goals, nor that U.S. carbon emissions actually rose in 2013, nor that the southern part of the much disputed Keystone XL pipeline, which is to bring particularly carbon-dirty tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, is now in operation, nor that 2013 will have been either the fourth or seventh hottest year on record, depending on how you do the numbers.

…What makes climate change so challenging is that the carbon dioxide (and methane) being generated by the extraction, production, and burning of fossil fuels supports the most profitable corporations in history, as well as energy states like Saudi Arabia and Russia that are, in essence, national versions of such corporations. The drive for profits has so far proven unstoppable. Those who run the big oil companies, like the tobacco companies before them, undoubtedly know what potential harm they are doing to us. They know what it will mean for humanity if resources (and profits) aren’t poured into alternative energy research and development. And like those cigarette companies, they go right on. They are indeed intent, for instance, on turning North America into “Saudi America,” and hunting down and extracting the last major reserves of fossil fuel in the most difficult spots on the planet. Their response to climate change has, in fact, been to put some of their vast profits into the funding of a campaign of climate-change denialism (and obfuscation) and into the coffers of chosen politicians and think tanks willing to lend a hand.

In fact, one of the grim wonders of climate change has been the ability of Big Energy and its lobbyists to politicize an issue that wouldn’t normally have a “left” or “right,” and to make bad science into an ongoing news story. In other words, an achievement that couldn’t be more criminal in nature has also been their great coup de théâtre.

In a world heading toward the brink, here’s the strange thing: most of the time that brink is nowhere in sight. And how can you get people together to solve a human-caused problem when it’s so seldom meaningfully in the news (and so regularly challenged by energy interests when it is)?

This is the road to hell and it has not been paved with good intentions. If we stay on it, we won’t even be able to say that future historians considered us both a wonder (for our ability to create world-ending scenarios and put them into effect) and a disgrace (for our inability to face what we had done). By then, humanity might have arrived at the end of history, and so of historians.

Today, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) penned a devastating OpEd for the NY Times, Obama's Pipeline.

The administration’s approach to the pipeline is a throwback to the time when endangered species were defenseless in the face of corporate moneymaking. It is a reminder that even though our environmental laws use science, not profits, as the basis of our environmental decisions, any company with bottomless pockets used to be able to game the system and get away with it.

That’s why Keystone is about more than one pipeline. It is about establishing once and for all whether we have moved on from the disastrous Bush-Cheney view of environmental policy. President Obama’s own Environmental Protection Agency has said in no uncertain terms that the pipeline will contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. That should be the end of the conversation. The fact that it isn’t-- that we’re left hanging and hoping-- is more than disappointing. It is a very troubling sign for the future.

Whether it's the neoliberal trade policies, the slide into feudalism, corporate mergers that rape consumers or the Keystone XL Pipeline that Obama will soon be approving… we are royally screwed. Let go of your parochial allegiance to the Democratic or Republican Party. The lesser of two evils is evil. Evil is bad. If you're voting for anyone who isn't an independent operator-- whether a Bernie Sanders or Marianne Williamson who are literally independents, or independent-minded Democrats like Alan Grayson and Raúl Grijalva, or even an independent-minded Republican like Justin Amash (ugghhh… I know, I know)-- you're voting for Evil, evil that will destroy our democracy, our families, our world… and all to further enrich the already obscenely rich. I didn't vote for Obama last year-- I broke free. It was the best election ever for me. Watch the video up top about the Keystone XL lies they're feeding us. These people are our enemies-- our mortal enemies.

By the way, progressive icon Dennis Kucinich (D) endorsed Marianne Williamson (I) for Congress (CA-33) this afternoon. Makes perfect sense to me.