Russian Money May Explain Republican Attack on Americans' Access to Affordable Healthcare

1. REPUBLICANS TOOK IN MILLIONS FROM MOSCOW

From that very Texan and very middle American newspaper, the Dallas Morning News...

"Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.
"During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org."


SUMMARY: THE RUSSIANS BOUGHT REPUBLICANS DURING 2015 AND 2016. TOTAL RUSSIAN INVESTMENT (THAT WE KNOW ABOUT): $7.35 MILLION.

(This is separate from the millions which were paid by the Russians to Trump’s campaign manager and national security advisor and millions more laundered through his Commerce Secretary’s Cypriot bank.)

2. RUSSIANS ARE INVESTING MILLIONS IN AMERICAN HEALTHCARE CORPORATIONS

Bloomberg is reporting that Russian billionaire oligarchs (and there are no oligarchs in Russia who are not close to Putin) have invested heavily in corporate healthcare and Big Pharma in the U.S.

(Essentially, Russians are confident that for-profit healthcare and Big Pharma will very soon see a big growth in profits. How do they know this? Maybe they have the Republican Congress and the Republican White House in their pocket.)

SUMMARY: THE RUSSIANS BACKING THE REPUBLICANS ARE BETTING THEY WILL REWEAPONIZE AMERICAN HEALTHCARE

3. REPUBLICANS DO WHAT THEIR BILLIONAIRE BACKERS TELL THEM TO DO

The Russians who gave this big money will expect their Republican congressmen and senators to deliver, why else would they have given them the money? The Guardian is reporting that the Koch Brothers who give millions to Republicans every election cycle have signaled that the money will dry up if the Republicans don’t repeal Obamacare and cut billionaires’ taxes. Republicans are listening because they are afraid. They do what their billionaire donors tell them.

SUMMARY: THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ISN’T AN AMERICAN PARTY, IT IS A MONEY PARTY.

IT ALSO LOOKS AND SOUNDS AND ACTS VERY MUCH LIKE IT’S A RUSSIAN PARTY.

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

FOLLOW THE RUBLES.

Republicans Again Targeting The Poor And The Sick On Healthcare Access

Lawrence O’Donnell played the Kimmel monologue a bit early last night so prime time audiences could hear Kimmel tell how Cassidy (of Graham-Cassidy) "lied right to my face.” Kimmel then urges everyone to phone Republicans in the Senate to tell them how evil this bill is.

202 224 3121

Again, the swing Republicans on this issue are Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John McCain of Arizona, and Susan Collins of Maine. Try to explain to them why this bill is so hard on the most vulnerable Americans, and why it is so damned unfair and cruel. Because they have a hard time comprehending it.

Earlier, Cassidy went on Kimmel’s show and smiled and promised his Obamacare repeal would not target the poor and the sick. It does target the poor and the sick. It cuts funding for the poor and the sick more aggressively than the previous Republican bills did.

Republican Senator Cassidy quickly responded to Kimmel's charges by saying Kimmel "just doesn't understand..." Saying his plan does indeed cover people with pre-existing conditions.

Reported in The Hill newspaper

Sure it does––but it allows insurers to jack their premiums sky high to punish them for being sick. What a cynical liar. Just as all Americans have the right to live in million dollar homes all Americans do have the right to buy decent health insurance––but they can’t afford it. Obamacare forced health insurers to stop offering junk coverage and also forced them to stop penalizing the people with preexisting conditions. The Republicans keep trying to push the poor back onto junk coverage that doesn’t really cover anything serious, and their plans keep punishing the sick for being sick.

The Republicans are rich. The Republicans represent the rich. The Republicans, like all members of Congress, have paid guaranteed Cadillac healthcare coverage for life and don’t give a damn about anyone else because they don’t comprehend what everyone else faces.

Here is President Trump’s healthcare advisor’s reasoning on the issue (via John Harwood): Trump adviser Moore on unfairness of the healthy subsidizing the sick: “People want insurance for their own families, not other peoples’ "

Which misses the entire point of health insurance, that the many who are healthy help support the few who are sick or in fear of their life. The Republican excuse is similar to their refusal to vote for hurricane relief because their districts weren't hit by the hurricane. (Until they were hit and then they demanded it.) The whole reason for covering everyone is the cost advantage of economies of scale.

It’s the familiar Republican refrain “I got mine. Fuck you.” Which they usually phrase more delicately.

So we need to flood the Senate with phone calls again: 202 224 3121

Because as long as they control the Congress they will keep trying to screw the poor and the sick.

It seems more likely the Republicans will kill our much improved healthcare system this time because they are being bribed/blackmailed by the giant money teats, the Koch Brothers, who have threatened to withhold cash from Republican candidates in 2018 unless they deliver on healthcare (removing millions from it) and tax “reform” (tax cuts for billionaires).

Koch blackmail on healthcare vote reported in The Guardian

Here is a discussion with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut earlier on Ari Melber's program

The Republicans are also attacking access to healthcare in another way, by drastically defunding the assistance poor Americans need to afford it: Analysis of how the GOP Reinsurance Plan would end up screwing the poor and the sick, from the StarTribune

Need more evidence that there’s something sinister about the Republicans’ healthcare strategy? News that a Russian oligarch (read mobster and Putin ally) is working with Washington insiders to invest millions of rubles in American healthcare.

Russian mob money targeting American healthcare reported by Bloomberg

Why? Because Republican healthcare is what’s known as a Killer Business Model.

The Republicans want to re-weaponize our healthcare system against us for profit.

The Sinister Idea called Public Choice Theory

From the Guardian's George Monbiot, this article explains the Big Idea of the Paul Ryan Republicans. An inhuman philosophy wrapped around contempt for human beings and a worship of property. The evil genius is a professor from George Mason University, James McGill Buchanan. The philosophy is called Public Choice Theory. The contradictions begin there, because the freedom of choice is taken away from the public and vested solely with men of great wealth. The Koch brothers were major funders of this sinister idea.

The only right recognized by the money men of the GOP and the New Right is the right to property.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is not something they recognize.

The only legitimate rights are those associated with property, which means rights that only exist by depriving others of those rights.

A right is not real unless you take it from someone else. This is the rights movement shaped around the impulses of the people who cut you off in traffic. Its newest expression is the legislation we are seeing in various states not to raise minimum wages but lower them or eliminate them.

Rights not attached to property or wealth are contemptible. Rights attached to individuality or humanity or talent or work are beneath contempt, hence the sacred right to own people and abuse them like cattle.

"Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism [sic] of Hayek and von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

“[Professor James McGill Buchanan] brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of “differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital."

Climate Change May End Civilization But The GOP Has Decided They Don't Care

VOX posted a disturbing video history of how the climate change consensus devolved into a partisan football game pitting the stupid people who distrust science against the rational people who trust science.

There was scientific consensus early on, then there was political consensus. Then people who disliked the consensus decided to sabotage it and destroy it. Why? For reasons of profit.

But the main visible reason that consensus seems to have broken down is because Americans elected a black man president. Republicans didn’t like having a black president and decided that everything he proposed needed to be blocked.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Fossil fuel billionaires poured billions into the PR campaign to derail the rational response to the climate change threat. Their profits drove the whole propaganda machine. But the unifying principle behind the opposition and its absolute team unity was racism.

FoxNews enforced this opposition with dangerously misleading and prejudicial reporting and the Republican Party turned the future of civilization into a team sport. They decided they were on the team that didn’t believe the scientists. A Republican senator said on the floor of the Senate that climate change was a hoax because he had a snowball in his hand.

We know what the problem is. We know which companies are causing the problem. (You'll find a list here at Science Magazine.) We know our behavior is making the problem worse and we have the ability to choose. But the most powerful media force available to Americans, the most watched news network, FoxNews, is dead set against a rational response. Why? Because they are the network of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is dedicated to the rational scientific response, so they are opposed to it. It’s a binary response. Whatever the other side is proposing, they’re against it.

For eight years this obstruction remained unified because the leader of the Democrats was black. They hated being told by a black man that something needed to be done. Following the leadership of a black man was against 500 years of tradition.

The new obstruction that will begin in 2017 will dictate that all Republicans must oppose everything President Hillary Clinton proposes because they dislike having a woman president. This opposition will be built on thousands of years of male dominant tradition.

Deep racism and sexism and the sacred profits of oil and coal companies have energized half of America into an irrational mob. They refuse to believe anything except what they are told by their masters. This has turned a danger into an existential threat to civilization.

This seems attractive to some on the right who believe if they screw up the world badly enough Jesus will come.

What people need to understand is simple enough. Civilization is built upon a predictable and reliable climate––reliable rainfall and reliable growing seasons. Climate change will end that. It took thousands of years of reliable rain and growing seasons to lay down the soil that grows the crops we live on. We built our infrastructure around these reliable growing regions. People need to understand what will happen when our farming infrastructure and our fertile soil is located where crops will no longer grow. When the oceans rise we will have difficulty shipping food because our port infrastructure will be flooded.

A recent president who was faced with his failure said he didn’t mind how history judged him because he’d be dead. This appears to be the reasoning of the wealthy and stupid forces organized to oppose responsible action to slow and halt climate change. By the time the world knows the Koch Brothers helped doom our civilization they will be dead.

At some point people with enormous wealth stopped behaving responsibly as people, as citizens, and began playing wealth as a game in which nothing mattered but the score they could rack up before they died, at which point the game was over.

What We Worry? The Big Shrug Over Climate Change.

As climate change denial ramped up I began to wonder where the prudent worriers in our economy had gone. Foremost among this doleful and boring but responsible fraternity are the insurers. Where were they? Why weren’t they siding with the climate change scientists and giving economic muscle to the scientific warnings? It appears there was some translation of risk warnings into dollar terms, but the message was very muted. It seldom reached the public conversation, if ever.

The insurance industry has been slow to warn. Here's an article about this.

The Guardian did report as early as 2011 that Lloyds had begun warning about climate change risks, but 2011 was hardly early. In 2014 they warned again.

In this 2013 article Smithsonian described the insurance pivot as an adjustment, a subtle turn of the dial. This was before they were purchased by the fossil fuel billionaires, the Koch Brothers.

In 2014 MotherJones wrote about how the insurance industry was largely ignoring or downplaying climate change.

I suspected this broad diffidence was because the insurance giants had been bought up by financial giants who were not insurers. An investment company is inclined to think fossil fuel profits are sexier than climate change warnings. They are likelier to tell the killjoy divisions to shut up and quit spoiling the party.

I think it was another case of Moneythink overriding our rational mind. If you are a large financial company your fiduciary responsibility (I call it a fiduciary excuse) to earn maximum profits overrides your responsibility as a citizen, your responsibility as a member of society and a comfortable beneficiary of that society.

I’ve read more since I posted about insurers' climate change denialism, and learned more about the evasions and muted warnings from insurers. Insurance policyholders are as likely to be deaf to warnings as insurers are to be dumb about the risks.

Which is where the media’s deafness comes in. (The news media's denialism has had a neat bag of tricks, as reported recently in a CNN opinion piece––why does critical thinking get relegated to the opinion pages anyway?) The sad habit of evenhanded coverage hasn’t helped. There is a habit among news divisions to “play it safe” by giving both sides of an argument equal weight, regardless of the merits of the opposing arguments. It's a bit like warning people that "There may or may not be a tornado coming. You decide." Some risks are too large to play that way, and climate change is one of them. It has been described by scientists as an existential risk for decades and the pussyfooting of media has enabled fossil fuel companies’ PR departments to sow doubt and paralyze our response. I compare this to the appeasers and America Firsters of the 1930s. We will need a WW2 scale mobilization to confront climate change, where a decade or two ago we might have confronted it without as much disruption.

Or maybe disruption is something the corporate class has anticipated and planned for. Disruption gives greater opportunity for control to those who have the resources and the positioning. For example, have corporations been buying options on lands that climate change would suddenly make viable, and buying up technologies we would desperately need (enabling certain fossil fuel villains to hop on a white horse and rescue us all once they’d reaped the maximum profit from the long con of climate change denial. Is this the kind of calculation that the sharper minds have been deployed to figure out? Vs. the less sexy calculation of risk and avoidance of risk.)

These articles address the problem that kicks in when insurers decide to abdicate instead of confronting risk. (From Lexology.com and from Reuters.

Instead of helping our massive economy address the risks and helping us put policies in place that reverse the risks, what do insurers do? I guess they shrug and give up. They pocket their winnings and leave the game.

The Looting of America

This video is worth watching. A former Assistant Housing Secretary for George H. W. Bush explains how the American financial sector has come to resemble a criminal enterprise. How the too-big-to-fail financial giants (who taxpayers bailed out) have systematically looted the middle class, with the protection of the Republican wave of deregulation. It's an interesting cool-headed rant. How valid are the allegations? I don't have the expertise to judge. They square with the events and the trends of the past thirty years, since Reagan inaugurated Voodoo Economics and started dismantling regulations. (The regulations that had safeguarded the longest period without a financial panic or significant downturn in American history, between 1937 and 1974––and the '74 downturn was caused by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo.)

While watching this I had the definite feeling that this played one way, leftward, away from corporate power, toward better government regulation, better enforcement of transparency and fairness...

...but then I find a very aggressive, Tea Party, Obama-bashing website that endorses her video too. (I find no progressive sites commenting on this interview.)

Question is: does common ground exist to overcome the hatred felt by the right wing populists toward this president, toward good-government types, toward Democrats and progressives? Can the Tea Partiers agree that the financial crisis was caused by financiers and speculators, not by the homeowners they ripped off?

Probably not, as long as they are funded by Wall Street billionaires like the Koch brothers and inspired by the manipulative rhetoric of FoxNews and talk radio. The rabble needs to be roused, and they tend to conform to their learned loyalties. Call it team spirit. Or herd instinct.

Trading with Our Enemies–Treason or Patriotism?

From Bloomberg News: the Koch Brothers flouted U.S. law prohibiting trading with enemies of the U.S. They did business with Iran, who funded the recently convicted underwear bomber and other terrorists far more competent and dangerous. The person who uncovered the wrongdoing was a Koch employee whose job it was to check company compliance with laws and ethics. When she found non-compliance she was quickly transferred and subsequently fired.

Is this new? No. Unique? Not at all.

Trading with the enemy used to have the quaint label of "Treason", but no longer. When Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton, his company traded with Iran too. They broke explicit U.S. laws in doing so. A grand jury was empaneled and a Senate Committee reported on the lawbreaking, but Mr. Cheney did not go to jail. Maybe because he'd become George W. Bush's Vice President.

Forbes magazine reported on Halliburton's ingenuity in evading laws. But Halliburton isn't the only company mentioned. Dell, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft are also tagged. Treason? Corporations are (thanks to the Republican majority in the Supreme Court) legally classified as "people" ––except when they commit treason. Then they aren't people and are immune from capital punishment.

A BBC report from 2002 shows Cheney was also linked to charges of stock manipulation and corporate fraud. Again nothing happened. He was Vice President.

A good summary of the corruption at Halliburton under the leadership of Dick Cheney and during his period as Vice President when he fed contracts to the company and continued to receive payments from the company can be found at Business Ethics magazine.

This way of doing business may be treasonous but it is commonplace and seldom punished. Halliburton has since moved its headquarters to Dubai as a way of evading American taxes, regulation and legal liability. It still earns its billions off the American taxpayer but it keeps its offices and profits safely offshore.

CBS Marketwatch published this in 2003, as America went to war:

"When individual Americans are accused of helping terrorists, they're thrown in jail and their names are dragged through the mud. But when major U.S. corporations are caught trading with the enemy, they get just a slap on the wrist from the government. In the past two weeks, the government has revealed that 57 companies and organizations have been fined for doing business with terrorists, despots and tyrants."

"However, neither the government nor the companies are forthcoming with the public about the details of the illicit trade with rogue governments like Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Sudan."

Not done yet. This article from The Guardian outlines how the father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush helped finance the Nazi war machine, funneling investment money to the companies that used slave labor to prepare Germany to invade Poland, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belgium Norway, and rain bombs on London. His firm helped build the war machine that precipitated the global war that killed (by conservative estimates) 60 million people. This financing of the Nazis was legal until war broke out. The war declaration finally made it a crime and the capital investments were seized in 1942. He lost lots of money but Senator Bush didn't go to jail. Why was Prescott Bush less immune than Dick Cheney?

There's another kind of treason that doesn't involve aiding fascist dictators bent on destroying America. If it's homegrown is it more patriotic? Prescott Bush was also one of the Wall Street figures behind a 1934 plot to overthrow the Roosevelt presidency. Here is a recent BBC program about the plot which nearly turned America into a fascist state.

Today's Wall Street bigshots may be losing the ability to be traitors here at home. They've exported so many jobs and so much of our manufacturing muscle to China that America isn't really worth overthrowing anymore.

It will be interesting to see whether Immelt does anything to repair his anti-American record. This article in Foreign Policy Magazine asks the same question. He's now in charge of restoring the American jobs picture, hired by Obama much as Wall Street pirate Joseph Kennedy was hired by FDR to set up the SEC. Who knows the criminals better than these guys?

Getting back to massive criminal extortion, and back to the Koch Brothers–––the Koch Bros have now been implicated in the 2008 spike in gasoline prices––at a time when demand was slack and supply was sufficient prices still went to record highs. How much did these manipulations steal from Americans? And how much did this theft of household liquidity contribute to the near collapse of our economy in late 2008?

This is predatory behavior similar to the kind of market gaming that Enron traders laughingly executed against the utilities customers of California.

Listen to those tapes, reported years later when obtained by CBS News, and you get a sense of the cold-bloodedness of the traders involved, and the cold-bloodedness of the game Enron set up and exploited. Enron did its damnedest to bankrupt the largest state in the nation rather than let up when public finances imploded and citizens suffered rolling blackouts.

"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"

"Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."

Traders or traitors? Businessmen or criminals? It's hard to tell the difference. Sometimes, not often but sometimes, corporations are run by psychopaths. (I covered this in an earlier post.) When this happens, it happens because there's lax regulation, because there's a sense of impunity, because the government watchdogs have been defanged and defunded, and there's too much money available to be stolen. When this happens it's very hard for an ethical company to compete. And there are ethical companies. Most corporations are pretty good employers and good citizens. By cracking down on the bad actors wouldn't we be helping them? Maybe a few good corporations should join the protests on Wall Street.

Writing Laws by Remote Control

The income the middle class has lost over the past four decades (ever since Reagan put a kick me sign on our back) has all been funneled upward. Not all of this money can be spent at Tiffany and Bergdorff and on fifth and sixth mansions for billionaires who need more closet space. Some has been spent paying for the writing and enacting of state laws to cut taxes on billionaires and outlaw unions and deregulate corporate pollution, fraud and dangerous products. Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco created a group called ALEC which instructs Republican lawmakers how to make laws. Sadly nobody knew how elaborate the ALEC project was until an insider started feeling lousy about what he was doing and shared the story with a reporter.

Here's a great Terri Gross interview about this with John Nichols.

John Nichols has written an excellent series for the Nation magazine about ALEC and what these documents have disclosed.

Coverage and analysis from TruthOut.

Among the documents revealed through the Center for Media and Democracy, are bills prefabricated by ALEC, with help from the industry groups who wanted to have regulations gutted or consumers unprotected. Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, industrial agriculture, big polluters, gun manufacturers and dealers, the private prison industry and others.

The same ALEC-written bills were proposed in multiple state legislatures, ushered through the democratic process with ALEC supervision, and passed into law, where their enactment will be overseen by judges tutored by the Koch Brothers and others. Law by remote control.

Some background on the investigation by PR Watch and the Center for Media and Democracy.

Privatizing Our Democracy

There are some chilling articles being published these days. A few making it into the mainstream media describe what's going on in state capitals all across America, where "Tea Party" Republicans, funded, organized, trained and instructed by Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, are taking orders from bosses like the Koch Brothers and working to kill not only the middle class but representative government as we know it–––while neatly wrapped in the flag and singing God Bless America.

From TruthOut.Org

From In These Times

It's like a scene out of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; government by the bosses.

What's the alternative to government operated for the convenience and profit of multinational corporations and rich individuals like the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch? It's us. It's government by us.

It's ordinary, practical, people-centered elective government. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt that's meant "progressive" government, not big government necessarily, or not any bigger than we are––let's face it, the US is now home to over 300 million people––but progressive, focused on more of us doing better and living better, having better jobs and secure lives.

This is both progressive and conservative. Flexible and practical. Led for and by the people rather than for and by corporate bosses. It's as American as apple pie.

It's both liberal and conservative––conservative in that it preserves and improves what works. Which means preserving what worked well for the best fifty years in America history–– the time-tested institutions and commonsense rules, put in place by TR and FDR and Truman and Ike. This is what the modern Republican Party is trying to tear down. The Republican Party isn't conservative at all, it's dangerously radical.

Astroturf Guerillas

Ever wanted a glimpse inside the right wing machine? Take a look. This is what's called the dittohead effect. These people know how to listen and do as they're told. You have to hand it to the right wing. They've got obedient servants.

Who is paying for this guy to go around teaching "guerilla tactics"? The Koch Brothers among others. Big Oil. Big Tobacco. Big health insurers. Big Polluters. Wall Street. Guerilla, my foot. The original minutemen weren't funded by multinational fat cats or bused to Lexington and Concord by Koch Industries.

Whether they know it or not (and they probably have no idea) the people in this "training session" are learning how to be obedient storm troopers for the very very rich. They are ordinary folks being trained to help degrade the interests of ordinary folks like themselves. Being taught underhand tactics to distort information and cover up for their masters. A strange mixture of flim-flam and Maoist revolutionary cell. It's a con game.

Who are the American Majority? They appear to be a majority of two, sons of a Kansas Republican with ties to Jack Abramoff. Often as not it seems the Republican Party and corporate lobbying groups are one and the same. They certainly have the same HR department.

It's the names of these groups that make me suspicious. When it says "Majority", assume a handful of people working for a very few very rich people. When a group is named "Women United for Liberty" assume that it's funded by men and dedicated to limiting women's rights. When "Tax Reform" is in the name, you can pretty well guess the goal is to shift taxes off its rich clients and onto everybody else. If its name contains the word "Prosperity" it will be the narrow prosperity of a few very rich corporations and individuals funding the organization.

Think We Don't Need To Worry About Climate Change?

Wrong. We need to worry. The vast majority of scientists and the vast majority of good science confirms what NASA and other bodies have been telling us. Here's a good article from Scientific American. Read it. Share it. Climate change is already hitting us where we live.

And if you heard a local TV weatherman saying an inch or two more of sea level won't harm us, read this. He's wrong. It won't be inches; it'll be feet. That and more and stronger storm systems like those that submerged New Orleans a few years ago and flattened large areas of the American south this month.

Get used to the idea of Miami, London, Baltimore, Copenhagen and other cities under water. Not to mention whole countries. Bangladesh. The Netherlands. With once-a-century floods every year or so and more frequent and more powerful storms like the one that hit the American South two weeks ago, picture whole areas in a state of permanent wreckage. Climate change does more than make the flowers bloom a week earlier, it sometimes makes them bloom later. It unhinges the steady climate that civilizations rely on. Babylon fell because the climate changed. So can we.

Meanwhile Americans flock to exhibits in our national museum (funded by the Koch Brothers) telling us climate change isn't happening.

And if it is happening it's not a bad thing.

And if it's a bad thing, there's nothing we can do about it.

And if there were something we could do about it it's too late now.

And anyway the Koch brothers (who paid for the exhibit) are in no way responsible. And who cares––all the fossil fuel giants are raking in billions more every year. It's especially nice when there are tax breaks on top of the profits.

Maybe the next exhibit at the Koch-Smithsonian will tell us about Jesus's pet dinosaur, or how the sun revolves around the earth.