Guest Post by *Eric A. Anderson* Guest Post
I have a little boy. He is my first, and most likely, only child — and he is everything to me.
I once thought that I knew what love is. I am still learning that I had no idea I could love anyone so deeply. I would lay my life down for him in a heartbeat, and will viciously attack any who dare threaten it.
There are those that threaten it every day.
Those that, in the past, I have professed to love and who, in turn, profess to love my son:
They are my parents.
They are my older sisters.
They are my Aunt, and my Uncle.
They move their mouths as they profess their love for my son, but I know in my heart that it’s not true. They are lying to both him and themselves.
They are lying because they are climate change deniers.
Because they vote for people, parties, policies and platforms that are actively contributing to the destruction of the planet my son depends on for his future survival. Or, they don’t vote at all.
When I confront them on this fact, they argue with me. They cajole and threaten. They scoff at the precautionary principle. Throughout, I am left dumbfounded. I ask them, “If there were even the tiniest chance you could be wrong, why would you risk the future of your family?” To which, they consistently reply in some manner of, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m so old I’ll be long gone.” And so, their words of love are hollow. They are selfish. They are hypocrites. They are killers.
They care more about their ideology, than they care for my son. I have to call them what they are.
Therefore, if I continue to profess my love for both them, and my son, what does that make me? What does that make the man who professes that he is willing to go to any lengths to try and ensure that his son has a future that doesn’t read like a dystopian novel? A future wherein, my son doesn’t look at me and say “Daddy, why didn’t you do something???”
To do both makes me the hypocrite. But I’m not a hypocrite.
Which is why I have made the decision to shun them all.
They need to feel the repercussions of their actions.
Everyone one of them do. Immediately. There is simply no time to lose.
I would be lying if I told you this isn’t the most difficult decision of my life.
However, I believe this drastic act of protest is the only thing that will bring them to their senses about how deadly serious I am about the risk that their climate change denying poses to my son’s future.
We live in desperate times. And desperate times, call for desperate measures.
I’ve told them all that they are welcome to join my family again upon photographic proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies.
I exhort you to do the same, if indeed, the love you profess for your children is true.
We all must shun the climate change denying hypocrites that profess to love us from one side of their face, while they sell our future down the road with the other. Enough is enough.
Please think hard about joining me in shunning them all.
Once more. Climate change is settled science. Climate change is past the point of no return. (If you believe that nations are even going to keep the Paris agreement targets, you’re such a fool you’ll be sold all the world’s bridges.)
These numbers are catastrophic, and the IPCC reports are always over-optimistic. Always.
There are quite a number of scenarios where this stuff happens faster. You’ll notice that this chart has straight line assumptions. That’s—almost certainly wrong. What will actually happen is that we’ll get some feedback loop like arctic or permafrost methane release and that will lead to parabolic increases. When it breaks, it will break hard.
At that point a lot of other problems could also blow up, the most serious of which would be the Oceans losing their ability produce oxygen. If that happens, well, we’re dead.
Even if it doesn’t, things like the thermohaline currents flipping or shutting off are possible. Europe could, in the middle of everyone else getting hot, have a mini-ice age.
People don’t realize how far north Europe is. If it didn’t have warm currents, it would be like parts of Canada that are, well, almost uninhabited, and for damn good reasons.
This will also, certainly, screw with weather systems. Imagine Indian monsoons failing for even three years in a row. Can you say hundreds of millions of deaths. Move your lips.
And it isn’t that we are decelerating, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who will likely win election, has essentially promised to chop down what remains of the Amazon jungle as fast as possible (and also, to commit genocide on the remaining indigenous tribes. No, don’t pretend, that’s what he means.)
We are so far up shit creek we are never seeing clear waters again.
Be very clear on this, and if you want to survive (deciding to not bother is a legitimate decision and if you’re old you may die before the worst of it) start doing what you can for yourself.
We are long past (a good 10 years past, at a minimum) any possibility of stopping this.
This is triage time. Are you going to survive? Your family, friends and loved ones?
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There is a meme in the resistance that Trump is Putin’s “puppet.”
This meme’s explanatory power is—weak.
Take Trump’s announcement that he will pull the US out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—this isn’t something Russia, or Putin, wants.
Trump admires Putin, and Putin provided some support for Trump’s election, hoping that would lead to reduction or removal of sanctions (spoiler: it didn’t), but Trump doesn’t do everything Putin wants, or not do everything Putin doesn’t want.
What Russia wants, simply put, is a sphere of influence and to feel secure within that sphere of influence. This desire isn’t a particularly comfy desire if you’re near Russia (and weak, Europe is not weak). But it is no worse than America’s desire to have a sphere, as any Caribbean, Latin American, South American, many Asian, European, African, Middle Eastern nations have learned.
In fact, it’s a lot less scary unless you’re close by.
Russia doesn’t have 800 bases around the world. It has invaded, sanctioned and overthrown less countries than the US in the last 30 years, and so on.
That doesn’t mean Putin is a good guy, or Russia is a “good” nation, but it’s certainly less evil, in terms of external body count and, heck, even internal numbers of people locked up, than the United States.
Lesser evil isn’t much of a rallying cry, as the Democrats refuse to learn, but it does mean that treating Russia as the horrible evil enemy, when done by the United States, falls flat.
The US is in what looks like serious decline. Rather than interfering in every one else’s business, it should mind its own business. If there is a formal defensive alliance: live up to it. Otherwise, butt out. A great deal of evil in the world would be weakened and likely defeated, if the US would simply stop propping it up. This is true of Saudi Arabia and Israeli apartheid (and yeah, it is now formally apartheid whatever pretense otherwise) as well as many other evils.
A “good” country in the world helps other nations, doesn’t injure other nations and doesn’t support evil nations, but does not, as Adams said, go looking for monsters to slay.
Grant to others the right of self-determination. Do not support evil. Do not interfere in internal affairs. Do defend actual allies. That is all.
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Yet another. If you wish to discuss off-topic issues or events, please do it here.
Back around Trump’s election, I said that there would be a collision between him and the Federal Reserve. At the time, it was run by Yellen.
The fact is that the people who elected Trump aren’t feeling good. To make them feel good, Trump is going to have get the official unemployment rate lower than it is now, at least under four percent, and hopefully to three percent or lower and hold it there for some time, at least two or three years.
This stuff takes time to ripple through the economy, and it takes time for a tight labor market to push employers to both raise wages and to hire people who they consider marginal.
If the Federal Reserve raises rates if/when Trump’s policies (“fiscal,” in the above) start to work, they will be making sure he can’t deliver to his constituency.
This is a direct collision course.
Now let me say something simple. The Federal Reserve, for over 30 years, has deliberately crushed wages. This was policy. Policy.
So, Trump hired Powell, and Powell is doing what Yellen would have done. Trump, on October 11th, said that he wouldn’t fire Powell, but was only disappointed.
It’s unclear whether or not Trump can fire Powell, however he can fire all other members of the Federal Reserve board for non-performance of duties. The case isn’t as clear as back in, say, 2009, but the economy still isn’t good for large parts of America, so it can certainly be made.
More to the point, Trump should.
Yes, Trump is the source of all evil and anything and everything he does should be opposed, I know, but bear with me: the Federal Reserve should not be insulated from pressure from elected officials.
I know that orthodoxy says it should, but the fact is that since 1979 the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates whenever it looked like wages were going to rise faster than inflation. The Federal Reserve, in other words, has crushed wages.
This is bad. It is at the heart of why we have the rise of the right, and so many other problems. Vast inequality, in democracies, always leads to political instability, and in democracies the purpose of the economy should be to create a good life for everyone anyway.
Trump ain’t a good guy, but wages aren’t increasing for ordinary people. That means that whatever the nominal unemployment rate is, the US isn’t actually at full employment. If it was, there would be rising wages. It is that simple. To raise interest rates before there are even significant wage increases is malpractice, even by the usual standards of monetary policy—and the usual standards are malpractice.
Just because one despises Trump, one should not allow the major part of economic management be run by people who despise ordinary people having wage increases, or, indeed, by “independent bodies.” Democracy means elected officials having control over real policy.
So I hope Trump fires a bunch of Federal reserve members, I hope it goes to the Supreme Court, and I hope that those firings are upheld.
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Since the last open thread has filled up, please use this one..
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. — Joseph Stalin”
So, one man, Jamal Khashoggi, gets tortured and killed, but he happens to be a man elites know and like, and suddenly…
Who in the Senate would vote against this? Very few. #SaudiArabia in trouble. No matter who is in MBS pocket in White House. https://t.co/aSPcpIAkyv
— Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) October 12, 2018
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is engaged in a genocide in Yemen. Of course, the US has been aiding that genocide…
It’s not that Kashoggi’s death isn’t a crime, but that any number of nameless people can be killed, raped, and tortured, and elites don’t care. It’s only when it’s one of them that they care.
Normal people are nothing–less than nothing–to our elites.
But they take care of their own.
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You may have heard that Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi recently went to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and hasn’t been seen since. The Turkish government claims that he was killed, cut into pieces, and those pieces were smuggled out of the country.
The BBC has published a short, off-the-record interview with Jamil Khashoggi, which is worth listening to.
According to Jamil, the country’s internal environment of fear is much greater than it has been in the past. People are arrested for what they say, for example, at a private dinner party; people who aren’t even dissidents, they may criticize privately, but not publicly.
He also mentions an economist who was arrested who was close to the royal family.
The result is an environment of fear: Khashoggi said that he didn’t expect to be able to go back to Saudi Arabia. It is also, and this tracks with everything else we’ve seen, an environment where only one man is making all the decisions: The Crown Prince.
Disagree with him, even in private, and you risk arrest, and possibly much worse.
Mohammad Bin Salman wants, it is clear, to be a dictator. He wishes to be the only center of power in the country. This was clear when he did his sweeping hotel arrests last year, which included important officials and even family members. The richer members are reputed to have had to pay ransom to leave. Others are said to have been tortured to death.
Of course, such accounts have not been corroborated, but I find them credible.
So Khashoggi, in this clip, complains that every couple of months there is an announcement of a multi-billion dollar project and it’s never been discussed by anyone except the Crown Prince.
One-man rule.
I don’t have a mandate for Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t run well before this, in my opinion (sitting on that much oil meant it didn’t have to be), but the actions Bin Salman is taking, quite irrespective of his despotism, don’t appear to be very smart. He’s selling off income producing crown-jewel state organizations, he failed to bring Qatar to heel with his siege and pushed it into the Turkish and Iranian camps, and his Yememi war is a bleeding ulcer and terrible war crime which has accomplished little to nothing.
The Saudis know there is a transition off oil coming, and they’re trying to deal with it, and frankly, Bin Salman appears to be fumbling it. He is even less competent than the people who came before him, but wants all the power.
I said some time back that I expected Saudi Arabia to collapse within 15 to 20 years. I see no reason to change that forecast.
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