Houston is Only the Latest Libertarian Disaster

The middle of the country has been the laboratory of right wing and libertarian experimentation and the results keep coming in.

Houston is the latest. Libertarianism didn't create the hurricane, but 35 years of laissez-faire economics and rolling back environmental science did set up the worst case that has unfolded. The richest irony is Houston is the home of Big Oil, the industry that fueled the surge in global warming and hid the warnings of their own scientists.

The city itself is a libertarian paradise, with no urban planning, no regulation of land use, no real preparation for what happened. A worst case scenario, like the other "libertarian paradises" we've read about in recent years. Nobody predicted this deluge...

Actually scientists did predict it. The oil companies’ own scientists saw this coming but they were silenced by their employers. Scientists said not decreasing use of fossil fuels would lead to this kind of event. The fossil fuel industry spent millions denying it and hiding what they knew. Talk about "natural consequences."

There's been a lively discussion of the Trump administration's re-instatement of civil asset forfeiture, confiscating property and wealth from persons suspected of crimes. It's a medieval device but maybe there is a proper use for it here: pay for the huge costs of climate change by confiscating the massive wealth of the companies who have caused it.

HOUSTON

From QUARTZ

"The Harvey-wrought devastation is just the latest example of the consequences of Houston’s gung-ho approach to development. The city, the largest in the US with no zoning laws, is a case study in limiting government regulations and favoring growth—often at the expense of the environment. As water swamps many of its neighborhoods, it’s now also a cautionary tale of sidelining science and plain common sense. Given the Trump administration’s assault on environmental protections, it’s one that Americans elsewhere should pay attention to.”

OKLAHOMA

From the Guardian

"Added up, the facts evoke a social breakdown across the board. Not only does Oklahoma lead the country in cuts to education, it’s also number one in rates of female incarceration, places second in male incarceration, and also leads in school expulsion rates. One in 12 Oklahomans have a felony conviction.

"Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center wrote in an essay that states begin to fail when the contract between citizens and public institutions breaks down. States “lose control over the means of violence, and cannot create peace or stability for their populations or control their territories. They cannot ensure economic growth or any reasonable distribution of social goods.” "

KANSAS

From USAToday

There are many lessons from this fiasco, none more important than the need to be wary of free-lunch promises that sound too good to be true.
Gov. Sam Brownback pitched his tax-cut plan with classic "supply side" economics. Lost revenue from lower rates, he argued, would be made up with surging growth and rising incomes.

That never happened. In 2014, the first year in which the cuts were in effect, revenue from the state’s individual income tax plunged by more than $700 million, a 25% drop. Since then, tax receipts have stagnated at their reduced levels.

The promised revenue from increased business activity and higher wages never materialized. In fact, Kansas’ economy has not responded to this enormous fiscal stimulus in any measurable way. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the state's annual rate of growth in personal income has been stuck in the low single digits since the tax cuts went into effect.

This lesson should be particularly relevant to lawmakers in Washington, where the Trump administration is pushing what Vice President Pence last week called "the largest tax cut since the days of Ronald Reagan." The irresponsible plan slashes taxes so much that it would likely hasten the arrival of a debt crisis already on the horizon as the result of surging spending on benefits.

COLORADO SPRINGS

From Politico

"The city’s experiment was fascinating because it offered a chance to observe some of the most extreme conservative principles in action in a real-world laboratory. Producers from “60 Minutes” flew out to talk with the town’s leaders. The New York Times found a woman in a dark trailer park pawning her flat screen TV to buy a shotgun for protection. “This American Life” did a segment portraying Springs citizens as the ultimate anti-tax zealots, willing to pay $125 in a new “Adopt a Streetlight” program to illuminate their own neighborhoods, but not willing to spend the same to do so for the entire city. “I’ll take care of mine” was the gist of what one council member heard from a resident when she confronted him with this fact.”

"…One of the lessons: There’s a real cost to saving money.

"Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.

“Sometimes the best-laid plans don’t work out the way you’d hope,” says Merv Bennett, who served on the City Council at the time and asked officials at the utilities about whether the savings were real.

The Triumph of Make Believe

“Lying” is such an ugly word. We are told not to say “The Republicans won by lying.” Even if it’s true (and fact checkers say it is) it’s so unpleasant.

Let’s say it another way. Republicans are very good at Magical Thinking. (Prime example: Trickle Down Economics) They won by Pretending. They have ushered in a new era of Make Believe.

The first bit of Let’s Pretend that turned this election cycle was when Chief Justice John Roberts announced that racism and prejudice was over and done with in the South where it had been so bad that (at least in some history books) white people owned black people as slaves. After slavery went away white Southerners spent another hundred years keeping their black brothers and sisters down by not letting them vote or sit at soda fountains or work at various jobs or walk on a sidewalk a white woman might want to use. An ugly time… if you believe those darn history books. But that was over and done, said John Roberts. So it was with joy and pride that he announced the Voting Rights Act no longer needed to be upheld in the South. No more protection of black and minority voters was necessary. Hurrah! He said it with such a convincing smile a lot of people applauded.

The response was immediate. Republicans quickly and gleefully reinstated exactly the kind of voter suppression laws that the Voting Rights Act’s supervision had prevented. Some even boasted about the achievement. Job done. The Chief Justice is very good at Make Believe and didn’t even notice the mockery of what he had said. Maybe someone close to him saw him wink.

PBS/Frontline reported the rapid surge in voter suppression that followed this Supreme Court ruling. As did ProPublica and McClatchy news service. The fair and reliable framework for our democracy was sent back into the kind of corruptions that existed during Jim Crow.

This voter suppression is not confined to the South, though it’s history is more outrageous there. Northern states Republicans have been emboldened by the Supreme Court to propose cynical, racist and antidemocratic laws in many states. They’re on the books in some key swing states. One of their tricks is to demand all voters purchase a special photo ID and then to make it hard to obtain them, placing the ID centers far from historically black or Democratic areas. A conservative judge skilled at Make Believe can pretend that none of this has anything to do with bigotry or Republican bias and the laws remain. In Wisconsin it’s estimated that 300,000 voters were barred from voting by not being able to produce the magic ID or having their ID challenged. Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes adding to his Electoral College total.

This was reported by a Wisconsin NBC affiliate.

Did this make the difference? Several reliable sources say No, it was not the deciding factor. (VOX, who I cite very often is one of these.) That the suppressed voter was less likely to vote anyway. I point out that the surge among the rural Republican voters was also unlikely. Who would have expected devout rural people and respectable suburbanites to vote for a man who boasts of groping women, who mocks the handicapped, who encourages mob violence, a man who faces charges this month of defrauding thousands of ordinary people like themselves? It required magical thinking.

I suspect that a clear public rejection of one candidate’s lies and bigotry would help suppress his turnout even among people who believed the lies and the bigotry. That did not happen this year. For most of the year mass media broadcast hours and hours of Donald Trump’s outright lies… excuse me, Make Believe… and his downright bigotry without comment or criticism. While they were giving free air time to this ugly demagogue they were aggressively reporting the endless investigation of unsubstantiated charges against his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Those two factors gave Trump a major updraft and Hillary a major downdraft. It was not enough to explain what happened but it contributed to it, it gave it a boost.

We look to our news media for truth. When they promote Make Believe and give lengthy air time to bogus accusations they make us doubt what is real. They make us more receptive to Magical Thinking and Make Believe. (And Lies.)

Donald Trump’s entire career has been flim-flam. When he had catastrophic setbacks in real estate he turned to what’s called Reality TV. Reality TV is not reality at all. It is Make Believe. But it’s label is persuasive. The networks broadcasting it knows it is a total fabrication, a lie, but it is good for ratings and good for profits. If you promote falsehood as truth, truth is degraded and falsehood becomes part of conventional thinking. Here I could go into the teachings of Joseph Goebbels on this topic, the uses and execution of the Big Lie, but conventional thinking has barred that from any modern day discussion. Supposedly because Trump voters are not wearing brown shirts while attacking Jews and immigrants and people of color they are not the same as Hitler’s mob. Hitler is He Who Must Not Be Named. We mustn’t speak of these things. They are history and nobody cares about history anymore. Pretend those things didn’t happen. It makes it easier to pretend they won’t happen again.

But let’s get back to Make Believe.

Let’s pretend for a minute that Donald Trump is a Man of the People. That has been the media narrative, and you know how authentic that is. His followers have spent the past year believing this myth. The Man of the People is a man who lives in marble halls with gilt furniture and large oil paintings of himself in gilt frames. (Hillary’s credibility has been endlessly attacked because she sides with working class interests from an expensive home in Westchester. Trump doesn’t pretend to embrace the laboring classes at all. (He’s famously phobic about touching regular people unless they are sufficiently young, female and “hot”.) He does not embrace their interests. He only embraces their resentments and hatreds. He is an America First hero who builds his exclusive towers with imported steel and imports his flash neckties and Trump label suits from Mexico. He refuses to pay the builders and tradesmen he hires to do work on his properties. He is bogus from his ludicrous hair to the manicured fingernails on his tiny hands. He has contempt for the working classes and their mundane unglamorous lives. But he does voice their anger. He has replanted the idea that outright bigotry is OK and All American, a sad notion that many in the working classes are receptive to. The bogus reality star has legitimized our ugliest tendencies and television has turned him into a hero. We spent a century and a half since Lincoln slowly repudiating this lie of white superiority and in one election year Trump has relegitimized it, with the eager collaboration of popular media. It’s ironic that such an inferior specimen is now the show pony of white supremacy. He isn’t even white, he’s orange.

So Donald Trump is a make believe business success, a make believe Man of the People. The picture we have of him is a television fairy tale. He is a creature of the media he pretends to despise. But we are here. The package has arrived. We have opened it. No returns allowed. Does it belong to us, or do we belong to it?

I won’t spend a lot of time sorting out the empty promises he’s made. He’s already walked back some of them. The wall he promised to build was another piece of make believe. The swamp of lobbyist influence he promised to drain he is now stocking with more lobbyists, ones who owed their new status to him. He only pretended to want to end the influence of the big bankers. They are now in his posse.

The most dangerous promise he made remains. He said he’d end all efforts to combat Climate Change, because he says Climate Change is a Chinese hoax, and his transition and cabinet have a strong odor of oil and coal, not mine workers or oil field workers but lobbyists and PR geniuses. The authors of Big Oil’s successful campaign to discredit the science are all for Trump because they know his millions of devotees will believe whatever they say. We have come to a dangerous point in our history when the most powerful person in our nation is a con man, facing significant indictment this month for a massive fraud related to his bogus Trump University scheme, and the scientists, the people we trust to find out the essential truths about our world, are accused of fraud. And the news media collaborated with this inversion by giving his falsehoods equal credence and equal time. The fact checking sites found her statements mostly honest (are any of us completely honest?) and Trump’s mostly false, and mostly very very false. He thinks science is bunk. Millions of his followers who presumably passed their science classes in schools have now endorsed this dangerous idea. They cannot pretend they haven’t. So millions of others who didn’t really know or don’t fully understand are now convinced that science is something we vote on. That it isn’t true if we decide to not believe it.

Science doesn’t care whether we believe in it. It will happen whether we believe it or not.

We may think we are hostages to Trump now. But Trump has made us hostages to the horrible scientific consequences that are now going to unfold. We could have wished Trump away by voting more emphatically against him, by not trusting the cozy belief that Americans would reject something like this without every single person voting against it. But we cannot keep climate change from unfolding unless we enact and keep in place key policies which Trump has promised to oppose and reverse. This is an insane kind of make believe. Like a person who steps out of a 15 story window believing he can fly, or that angels will rescue him.

As delusions go this is not as much of an outlier as you might think. There are millions of devout right wing Christians who honestly believe that if we screw up this planet badly enough that Jesus will come. They long for this to happen.

This was reported recently in The Atlantic.

We pass these people on the street and they seem like other people we know, until they begin to discuss their beliefs. Stepping politely away from them is the safest social response but it is not going to keep us safe from the final ascension of their kind to power. Donald Trump is not a churchgoing religious zealot but his Vice President is. Mike Pence is an intense believer in Christian fairy tales and magical thinking. He not only believes the proven climate science is a hoax, he believes that the whole science of evolution from Darwin to the present day is a hoax and a lie. (In terms of ethics and morals, the New Testament is a very useful and humane document, but the superChristians evade the humane elements and prefer the more dubiously interpreted bits, the ones that provoked holy wars and inquisitions down through the Christian era. The Biblical fragments that seem to endorse slavery and oppression of women seem particularly popular among superChristians.) Mike Pence firmly believes the earth is exactly as old as the Bible says it is and that everything that is in the Bible happened exactly as written. He does not like to go into the hundreds of huge contradictions in the Bible any more than he likes to address Trump’s own almost daily contradictions because he is a Man of Faith. To him science is myth and the Bible is fact. If scientific evidence is worth anything at all today he is evidence that we have returned to the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, before Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Crick. The Nazis burned thousands of books in their era. In our era we don’t need to burn them because the vast majority of people aren’t aware that books exist, except the one they clutch on Sunday. They have made us a near twin of the Sharia Law extremist Islam they profess to despise. Anti-modern, anti-toleration, out of the reach of questions and proofs.

Kids used to play a particular game of Make Believe. “Let’s pretend Diane doesn’t exist,” they’d say, and Diane would find people she knew walking past her in the school hallway and not hearing the things she said. It was a fun game and very popular. Kids were very good at it in junior high and then outgrew it. Gay teenagers experienced this in an earlier time, as did teenagers of color. Each new wave of immigrants experienced this, Italians, Swedes, Irish, eastern Europeans included. They were treated like they didn’t exist. Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it disappear.

Recently, there was a woman in Montana interviewed by a reporter on NPR. She was opposed to the settling of Syrian and other refugees in Montana. The reporter asked her if this was racist. She replied that there couldn’t possibly be any racism in Montana because there weren’t any black people there. A GOP chairwoman in Ohio said to a reporter that there was no racism in this country until Obama became president. For millions of Americans this is absolutely true, because they believe it is true. If they never saw any other races they didn’t despise them. It was those other races coming within their range of vision that caused the racism, impinging on their lives, breathing white people’s air, walking on white people’s sidewalks and demanding to eat at their lunch counters. This uppityness is what caused racism. It wasn’t their fault. Racism was not their problem, it was the problem of the other races. The problem with this is that those other races are a majority of people on this earth and white people are a diminishing minority. This magical thinking about race is a dangerous self-deception but it is now the norm because the Trump presidency has validated it. It is very difficult to change people’s beliefs.

Mike Pence believes no one is born gay, despite the clear science on this. Mike Pence says science is bunk and his beliefs are true and he is the Vice President elect, and his frank, polite Indiana way of looking at you convinces you that he has no interest in hearing otherwise. He is firm in his bigotry. If Trump has as short an attention span as he has demonstrated up to now Mike Pence will be the acting president the way Dick Cheney was for eight years. And we know how well that went. At least Dick Cheney was able to understand the difference between science and fairy tales but he exploited this vulnerability in others. We are now led by a fake with no center and a true believer in magical thinking.

Was it our own magical thinking that allowed it to happen? At crucial moments in history the worst possible reaction is to doubt the science and the truth. The failure of the polling experts to predict the late Trump surge has undermined our trust in all experts. How did they fail to see this? They failed to see this outcome because they underestimated the likelihood that America might fall for nonsense this evident and this dangerous. They trusted us. In fact more Americans voted for science and honesty and trustworthiness than voted for fraud and deception and fairy tales. The fact that a lot of Americans were uncertain might be explained by the news media’s dangerous habit of always presenting both sides as equally true. As if it’s biased to say truth is more honest than falsehood or safety is no better than clear danger and enormous corruption is no worse than petty indiscretion. The American public was poorly served. We were delivered to this place. Magical thinkers believe we can shape things to suit our private fantasies, but the universe doesn't care about our private fantasies. We may soon reach a point where mankind cannot walk back the harm we have done. The scientists do not deal in fairy tales, and they have warned us. Covering our ears and chanting USA! USA! or Trump! Trump! Trump! will not keep the oceans from flooding our ports and shorelines. Prayer will not keep the crop growing regions we depend on for food from drying up or washing away or civilization from collapsing around us. If you believe in the teachings of the Bible, heed the part where we are instructed to be good stewards of this creation, to choose truth over lies, to oppose bullies and aid the poor in their struggles rather than falling in with the rich. Over thousands of years our wisest teachers have taught us what to do, how to make wise humane choices, and we seem poised to do the opposite.

The End Of Science May Signal The End of Civilization––and Trump's In Favor Of It

Millions of trees suddenly dying. Storms of unprecedented violence. Once in a millennium floods occurring once a month. This sort of thing ought to mobilize world leaders to action.

This scary die off of forests was reported this morning in The Guardian.

There have been many articles recently about ocean levels already rising. Scientists predicted this and many Americans chose to demonize them.

Rising ocean levels reported by National Geographic.

Rising oceans is not as worrying as rising ocean acidity, which may compound the climate change dynamic and also degrade the earth’s ability to create oxygen. Think about that.

Rising acidity of the oceans reported by Scientific American.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in control of Congress and on the verge of winning the White House. The Republican leadership has accepted millions of dollars in exchange for denying climate change and blocking scientific research into climate change. They think that believing something isn’t happening will prevent it from happening. So they close their eyes and wish and pray and they punish and condemn anyone who is paying attention. Being rational and responsible is a punishable offense, according to the Republican Party.

The ignorant and dangerous anti-science leadership in this Republican Congress, reported in the New Yorker.

Half of our country is in thrall to a delusion. The right half of the country believes if they vote for Donald Trump all the things he denies are true will automatically be untrue. One man’s mental illness has become contagious and it may become the law of the land. Bigotry may become policy. Ugly rumor will be our guide to what is true, the uglier the truer. Superstition and corporate PR will replace science. One man’s angry impulses will replace careful and rational planning. Policies that should benefit the whole country will be retooled to suit one man, his whims (and boy has he got whims), his prejudices, his hates, his lusts, his greed, his narcissism, his frequent urges to do violent harm to people who have displeased him.

The New Yorker gives us a picture of what Trump will be able to do immediately when he reaches office.

If Trump is elected all of our nation’s decision-making institutions will pass to him. He will cancel climate change accords and devote America to full use of fossil fuels. And 99% of our scientists will be silenced if not criminalized. Let’s set aside his endorsement of more nuclear weapons in trouble spots and a looser policy about using them. Let’s forget about his expressed willingness to kill people he “has a feeling” are criminals. Let’s forget about his ugly bigotry toward all non-white people living on earth. Let’s forget about his long history of fraud and violation of contracts and reneging on promises and lies big and small. Let’s forget about his scary admiration for the worst dictators on the planet, and his many millions in debt owed to one of them.

Let’s just focus on one thing, the greatest danger to human civilization in the history of human civilization: global climate change.

It won’t stop happening just because one poorly informed individual refuses to believe it is happening. Half of America’s voters seem excited to go on this carnival ride with him, to trust his shallow beliefs, to place their lives and their loved ones’ lives in his hands. It’s like a hostage situation, where the male head of a household barricades himself and his family in his house with his arsenal, only this arsenal is nuclear. It seldom ends well. Usually it ends with the family dead and the deranged man dead by his own hand. It’s like Jonestown where many hundreds were willing to drink the poisoned kool-aid because their leader instructed them to. His beliefs were translated into orders and they obeyed.

A few years ago we laughed as a creepy and hilarious congresswoman left the political stage. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said science was evil and the End Times were here. She seemed downright pleased that the world was coming to and end. It was all falling apart according to her prayers. People like Bachmann believe that if they can screw up the world badly enough by provoking wars and poisoning the environment and making economies collapse, then Jesus will come and rescue them. Like a fire starter who believes the fire department will give them a medal. Her loopy beliefs got a lot of mileage and endorsement from FoxNews, the leading cable news channel, and from talk radio. (On talk radio 9/11 is believed to have been a plot run by the U.S. government.)

Well, folks, half of American voters, or nearly half, seem to fit this description. America’s future, and the world’s, may be in the hands of ignorant, hateful, deranged, heavily armed lunatics.

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.

Did The Lewis Powell Memo Create This Mess?

History unfolds from hinge moments. I have been wondering lately about the Lewis Powell memo and what larger things have unfolded from it. If a private memo is a small thing consider its effects if it galvanizes far greater powers and undoes important precedents.

Did the Powell memo (and the doctrine that it made) make corporate and wealthy America immune to their obligations to society, enabling them to levitate away from tax obligations and the necessary support and protection of institutions and infrastructure and the environment? Did it enable them to hoist (permanently, it appears) the justice system and the financial apparatus out of the reach of the vast majority of Americans? Did it then enable the justice system and financial system to be reorganized to prey on the wider population rather than serving it? (Granted, the law has a recurring habit of acting to protect property from people, to become an instrument of property without a primary obligation to people.)

Did the Powell memo make corporations and the belief system of wealthy Americans immune to inconvenient science? Did it make science subservient to the profit imperative? Did the Powell memo obligate all businesspeople to ignore and defy any science that might diminish their profits? Not just reverse their profits but cut into them. Did the Powell memo lead to the mindset that made the profit imperative the single obligation, the only sacred idea?

I got on this train of thought after seeing the story this morning where NASA scientists are now convinced climate change will unfold more suddenly and devastatingly than previously thought. That is moreso than we were previously led to think by the corporate deniers. I began to think how colossally stupid we’ve become in the space of a few decades. What was the off button on the American genius? I think it was the Powell memo’s assertion of money, overruling intelligent discourse. (The assertion of what I’ve called Moneythink on my blog. A dangerously corrupt and corrupting philosophy, if you can call it a philosophy.)

Business and Money and Markets and Corporations and the whole apparatus of our financial side used to obey basic norms to correct folly and regulate the “animal spirits” that cause problems. Those regulators were turned off subsequent to the assertion of corporate power and veto that followed the Powell memo.

One chief example of a useful regulator that was turned off is the insurance industry, which was bought and harnessed by large financial companies and told to make its functions serve the profit of the larger company rather than do its job, which was to place a cost on risks. The insurance business didn’t raise the costs of insuring harbor facilities or coastal properties or the longer term risks climate change represented to our agricultural infrastructure (civilizations are based upon reliable climate, and our civilization is therefore at high risk.) The insurance industry was told to keep its mouth shut and to tailor its charges for risk to suit the profit demands of the shareholders and the corporate parent, which probably was investing decades of premiums in very profitable fossil fuel investments.

If nothing else, the Powell memo gave Money a veto over Reason. It allowed the shareholder class to veto the warnings of scientists in the matter of climate change and to veto the legitimate demands and grievances of people who work for a living because they might limit the return on investment to people who own for a living. The only loyalty was to return on investment, no other obligation mattered. That was the central justification for Lewis Powell’s memo which evolved into a fiat: that concentrated money ought to assert the deciding vote on all of our public decisions, because money had a better brain than people did. This breathed legitimacy into the ludicrous Citizens United ruling that stated Money = Speech. And the similarly ludicrous Bush v Gore decision that stated that equal protection required the Court to intervene to protect the interests of George W Bush from irreparable harm by the voters who had voted against him. Money and patronage (the values the Powell memo places uppermost) were again the pollutant in that decision: how many of the justices who stepped in for Bush Jr. were appointed by Bush Sr.?

Once you make Money immune to intelligent discussion you give it control over the public conversation. Which is why we have a billionaire of low cunning dominating one of our political parties right now. Who are we non-billionaires to question his right to rule us? We have learned not to embarrass Money with difficult questions. The galvanizing moment in Ronald Reagan's presidential run came early, when he faced down the annoying challenge of some journalist, saying: "I paid for this microphone!" Except he hadn't. General Electric and a few decades of other corporate sponsors had. Reagan had been employed as their spokesmodel. He was the political incarnation of Lewis Powell's memo.

Are we all to blame? We voted for Reagan, and all his works and all his ways. We liked him. Half of us still worship him even though he presided over the theft of our prosperity via Reaganomics. He organized the redirection of wealth from the many to the few. Money isn't speech, but it can buy a lot of it. And it can buy the likable voice of an aging actor. Money isn't speech any more than Money equals thought or intelligence. By delegating more of our decisions to our money, which the Lewis Powell memo urged, we stopped thinking. And that is why we are surprised to learn the oceans will rise and there is no longer anything we can do about it. Maybe that is also why a handful of billionaires are using their tax-immune billions to build personal rocket ships.

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 Climate Change Denial Business

The businesses who profited from the cancer delivery system known as cigarettes knew for decades how lethal they were, but they engaged in a long, deliberate and very successful coverup, bribing and intimidating scientists and lying to the news media and in sworn testimony. That was their business model.

We are seeing it again today, not with a lethal product line but with the careful and well-funded denial of what scientists have been warning us about for more than a decade: that our climate is warming because of fossil fuel use. And because civilization itself depends on existing climate patterns, rainfall patterns and temperature ranges this denial is endangering the survival of human life as we know it. We and our children are being put at grave risk to allow the fossil fuel giants to squeeze huge profits from peak oil. They don’t care what history might say about them because, as George W. Bush said “by the time that happens we’ll be dead.”

There's a new film out about the Denial Business. It's called MERCHANTS OF DOUBT. Big Oil is paying to suppress it.

Here are the main perpetrators in the climate change denial business, as reported by a Pulitzer Prize winning climate news service.

In The Guardian today: the Kochs refuse to testify about their climate change denial apparatus. Are the powerful allowed to plead the Fifth on the extinction of the human species?

Language Held Hostage

The Guardian today has a trenchant discussion of the Rick Scott banning of the term Climate Change in Florida, written by Jeb Lund.

If words don’t exist the problem goes away. At least that's the Republican belief.

This analysis also uses another underused term: Regulatory Capture. Regulatory Capture is the main plank in the Republican platform. We should know what it is, and it should be discussed more in print and on TV…of course our news media is a prisoner too.

The power of money and influence shapes our laws, but it also shapes our thoughts by shaping our language. Why do conservatives, deregulators and pure market capitalists own the language? Because they own everything. Pulitzer prize winning financial journalist David Cay Johnston discusses the problem with his usual clarity and insight.

THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Civilization, meaning everything in history that comes after we learned to farm, in fact all of history, is founded upon reliable climate, reliable rain and growing seasons. Climate change caused by the greed of fossil fuel billionaires fucks all of that.

Some places will be warmer, some colder, some will have longer growing seasons, some shorter, most will fluctuate meaning farmers will have to guess and hope even more than they do now (imagine the crop insurability problem then).

The changes will be dramatic. Some places will be too dry to support life. Some will be washed away in huge floods or flattened by huge storms. Things like this that happened in the Bible were interpreted as God’s punishment for wrongdoing––our wrongdoing this time is stupidly placing ourselves in the political grip of fossil fuel billionaires.

Think we can solve these problems by shipping grain from one lucky continent to another? Picture all of our functioning and extremely expensive port facilities under water and no longer functional.

Weird how the big insurers haven’t cottoned to this huge risk overhang. I think it’s because most big insurers think of themselves as investment companies investing the premiums they collect rather than insurers of risk, and right now at peak oil their biggest investments are with the oil companies. Colossally stupid. Stupid on top of stupid, which should help disprove the free market capitalist’s religion that says money is smarter than any of us. Money is mostly just greedy.

The greed of the top 1% may doom all of civilization, murdering millions. We should mind.

There is a local weatherman where I live who hosts “documentaries” that explain why Climate Change and Global Warming are stupid hoaxes. He says it’s hard enough to predict weather two weeks out, so it has to be impossible to predict what will happen in two decades. This sounds persuasive if you don’t think about it. Children are unpredictable too. We can’t predict what they’ll do tomorrow, but we have a pretty good idea what they’ll be up to over time, and we can be pretty sure in twenty years they’ll be twenty years older, with average luck. With average luck they'll live lives like ours, with better than average luck, better lives. Throw that average luck out and what happens?

Climate stability gives us average luck that we can build on. Climate instability takes that away: no predictability, no reliable averages to plan our complex civilization around. Climate scientists are warning us about the risks of enormous changes in our children's lifetimes. What changes exactly? It's hard to say, and that is the danger. Unreliable climate destroys civilizations and has ground many into dust over the centuries. Usually it happens slowly. Previously the climate changed slowly. Not this time.

The well paid attractive telegenic criminals who are distracting us from this enormous danger are being paid to distract us and dissuade us. 97% of all climate scientists agree, but we are being persuaded by smiling weathermen and ignorant politicians to ignore science.

These shills are being paid to help shore up a dirty 19th century industry that threatens us all. They are being paid to help us confuse Weather and Climate. Weather is if it’s raining outside. Weather is a discussion about whether to carry an umbrella tomorrow. It’s not deep stuff. Climate change is as deep as life and death for our nation, the happiness or misery of our descendants' lives, the arc of history itself.

Climate is the reason we have a prosperous nation. We are lucky to have a good, reliable, moderate and predictable climate. Climate Change is why there are dead civilizations buried under the sands of North Africa. Usually climate changes slowly. We are changing it radically and quickly and lethally unless we decide to stop changing it by changing the way we fuel our lives.

Control Fraud and the Sexiness of Bribed Executives

I learned a new term today: Control Fraud. (Thomas Frank writes about it at Salon.) It’s where the top executives in a company ignore warnings because heeding them would limit their huge pay packages. It’s why Bank CEOs ignored the flood of liar’s loans that would collapse the bank because they were making huge bonuses based on the volume of loans, and they would keep those bonuses even if the bank failed.

Control fraud has appeared in other key areas of our economy. I’ve been asking for some time why the insurance industry has been so silent about the huge risks of climate change. Their companies would quickly collapse if and when the claims came in on submerged port facilities, flooded coastal cities, croplands flooded or desertified, and the many other catastrophes that climate scientists have warned about. Another kind of control fraud might explain this.

The thing is, during the Reagan era (which we’re still in) insurance companies stopped thinking of themselves as insurers. Such a gloomy, pessimistic role. Not fun at all. Sexier to be in high finance. So they transformed into financial giants. Now they weren’t in the business of insuring things, they were in the business of investing insurance premiums, and one of the best investments of all in recent decades has been fossil fuel companies. They earned bigger returns from fossil fuels and from investments that benefited from plentiful oil and gas than they did from insurance. Because the high finance guys were making the big returns they outshouted the doleful insurance worriers.

I’m guessing cheap gas was the bribe the giant food companies were taking. Food supplies are the most at risk from climate change. If the climate moves away from your thousands of grain farms or from your elaborate grid of grain depots and rail lines, you are out of business. (Business always matters more than famine.)

But it was only in the past year that Lloyds of London and a few other insurance giants began pushing warnings and insurance rates based on climate science warnings that have been growing louder for the past two decades. General Mills finally made a clear statement warning about climate change.

Why this long delay? Why do huge companies run by intelligent men and women choose to ignore the best information? Why do they ignore science? Because the money they get now is more persuasive than the ruin they might experience later. And it will kill a lot of other people before it hurts them.

In the area of financial collapse the warnings were muted because our financial intelligence is corrupted by this same Control Fraud. Economists are paid by the financial giants. They are flattered by the friendship of the top people taking these Control Fraud bonuses (or should we call them bribes?). University economists and professors are sitting in chairs endowed by the same finance CEOS who sit the top of the corruption. Financial writers are their priesthood, they worship these big shots.

Why doesn’t President Obama’s Justice Department go after these people? He is. But the cases are brought slowly and in parts. Complex cases are more often settled and the settlements are growing larger. The larger the target the harder the prosecution. I hope I am seeing the unfolding of a longer game.

Still, there ought to be long term criminal jeopardy for Control Frauds of this kind. No statute of limitations. If there's no end to college debt collection, there should be no limit to this kind of prosecution and recovery. These cases should also be very class actionable––lots of victims, and those victims have descendants. This legal reach would also need to be global, because these billionaires keep their fortunes overseas. The irony is that trillions of their ill-gotten gains are held in banks on islands that will be underwater when the oceans rise.

Why Have Insurers Been Silent on Climate Change?

I began asking this question among economists, opinion shapers and policy people. Then I read the article in the Guardian, about how Lloyds is finally beginning to charge for climate change risk. Then, just this week, Farmers Insurance began filing lawsuits, not against the fossil fuel companies triggering climate change, but against the communities who failed to plan for the harm climate change will wreak on properties insured by Farmers. Why did it take so long for the insurance industry to wake up?

Maybe they were distracted. Maybe they had (in Dick Cheney's famous phrase) "other priorities." Are insurers still in the business of protecting against risks? Is that just a sideline, a way of raising investment capital?

I would suggest that insurance companies stopped being insurance companies at least a decade ago. They evolved into financial companies whose main duty is getting maximum returns on Wall Street…and these days that means sizable investments in the very profitable peak-oil fossil fuels business. Damn the risks. Profits tend to speak louder than risks at shareholder meetings.

Last month* I put these questions to a small group of people whose job it is to think forwardly. One reply from (a national columnist’s intern) suggested I need to learn more about how business works. The rest was silence. It is important to consider which division of massive financial companies dominates the thinking.

There was another time, in 2006 and 2007, when huge profits dulled the financial sector’s awareness of significant dangers. We ended up paying for their stupidity. Which means they are probably still stupid.

* "When you think of the vast liabilities of violent weather and rising ocean levels, insurers should be mounting a narrative to overturn the fossil fuel industry's campaign.

One reason occurs to me why they’re not. Perhaps insurance companies are overinvested in fossil fuel stocks. The returns on these stocks are huge because of the subsidies and because of peak oil, but they cannot possibly outweigh the potential for disaster.

Can the issue be raised that insurers are investing in industries that are causing these disasters? The causal link would be difficult legally, but less so as a narrative, letting the public change its mind.

Maybe it’s time for people to start writing to insurance companies. Ask an actuary if climate change will pose risks to their insured and to their companies. These issues have enormous economic consequences. The losses may be even larger than profits can cover."

The Scandal About Global Warming

The big scandal about global warming isn't over whether it's happening. It's happening, and the effects are horrendous.

The scandal is that in most American living rooms the term "global warming" is taboo, Off limits. Censored. We get alarming reports about the latest storms, the vast wildfires, the horrible drought conditions, the deaths from the heat, but NOT ONE TV OR RADIO WEATHER REPORTER SAYS A WORD ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING.

Newspaper stories in Europe are linking the summer's powerful storms to global warming.

The New Scientist is connecting the dots between superstorms and climate change.

Business journals are beginning to track what business journals track: the huge economic downside of our doing nothing. If the climate doesn't kill us with weather events it will make us poorer and hungrier. I suppose the upside of that is there are business moguls who will find a way to profit from misery.

Global warming (surprise) causes inconveniences like power outages.

Scientists warn that global warming is killing off the world's coral reefs, which protect millions of coastal dwellers from being washed away by the ocean. Reefs also support the populations of fish we eat. Here's a trenchant and frightening analysis from the New York Times.

Still, there is a coordinated embargo of broadcast discussion of global warming. You won't hear about the embargo on TV, but you can read about it in print. Which means only people patient enough to read are aware of the censorship.

Inside Climate News sums it up.

The Houston Chronicle created a storm of controversy when it raised the issue in the newspaper. Houston's weather guys replied, basically claiming they believed in global warming, but thought it might be rude to discuss it on the air.

I've read articles about the heat waves across the U.S. and watched reports about catastrophic superstorms in middle America and millenial floods in Duluth and across Europe...

The Guardian reports.

But I have yet to hear ONE television meteorologist mention global warming or global climate change. Not one. Not once. Scientists, yes; weathercasters, no. Not once. Never. And when a scientist is brought on to discuss the issue a fossil fuel flunky is usually there to rebut it. We have facts and evidence on one side but, apparently, it's only fair to give enormous profits equal time. After all, they pay for it.

I'm not the only one who's noticing this, but an embargoed idea doesn't get discussed. That's the point of embargoes.

Why is the discussion of the embargo confined to sciency and lefty websites?

Is there an organized ban on broadcast meteorologists discussing global warming? TV weather forecasters are where most people learn about what's happening in the atmosphere. Most people think it's the best science there is.

If there is a TV ban on climate change talk (and it appears there is) why aren't major print media outlets reporting on it?

Who is behind it? Who is enforcing it? Why does a weathercaster on TV need to be "brave" to report consensus science in the first place?

My guess is that the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers and their paid and programmed pseudo-scientists have ordered the silencing of TV weathermen and weatherwomen. They've frightened program directors to obey their commands. They have successfully cast global warming as dangerously controversial, as something that will threaten friendships and endanger jobs.

This ban on climate change reporting is being enforced despite the fact that most Americans link the extreme weather with climate change. A new Washington Post/Stanford University poll backs this up.

But despite the evidence of our science and the direct experience of most Americans, the science is being censored, suppressed, silenced. This takes money, and the fossil fuel industry has it. Science groups are fighting back. Remember this organization: Forecast The Facts––forecastthefacts.org.

Sadly, good science has become risky for the first time since the Enlightenment.

Good science that helps the global population reduce and plan for risks is considered a risk itself. That's ironic. It's also big story. And it's another story that's too risky to report on.

George Will is intelligent enough to know when a fool is running for the Republican presidential nomination, but he has not mastered the basic Venn Diagram. What contains what? Climate contains weather, weather is or can be evidence of climate change but understanding of weather patterns and being able to predict rain a week in advance doesn't imply a mastery of the much greater complexity of climate. Weather is a wholly owned subsidiary of climate just as one company's finances are a tiny portion of the larger economy. And the big worry among climate scientists is that global warming will trigger, is already triggering, larger, more frequent, more powerful more sudden changes in weather.

Media Matters, discussing George Will's lame climate change denial commentary, uses an economics analogy, and it's apt. Because all economics is based on climate. All civilization is based on climate. And the ability of households and companies and economies and societies to survive is predicated on an ability to predict relevant trends, their specific climate, from one season to the next. An economy that gyrates, as ours did prior to the New Deal regulations that steadied and moderated it, is a hard environment to survive in. You would hope economists and corporations would appreciate that and want to ensure against volatility, but sadly short term profits, the weather that rains millions on CEOs, is all that matters to them.

During the winter, when heat sounds like a blessing, climate advocates argue back that "weather is not climate". They are trying to communicate that weather variability doesn't stop and cold weather doesn't entirely disappear just because the planet is heating up on average. It's crucial to note that they are saying this in response to those who claim a snowstorm or a cold snap refutes global warming. Big snowstorms are part of the climate change volatility too. The evidence of a single moment tends to convince most people, and the fossil fuel billionaires use that kind of persuasion. Weathermen also think short term; if their weekly forecast is off, they lose credibility. But climate science is a longer and more complex game than that, and what takes more than a soundbite to explain is usually too complex for Americans to understand. This shortness of attention span may kill us. It will kill our economy first.

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.