Capitalism vs. the Climate

The title above is the subtitle to Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything (Simon & Shuster: 2014). Though it’s not as pathbreaking as Klein’s previous book The Shock Doctrine, it’s still a much-needed review of what global warming really means and what really must happen if an earth hospitable to humans is to have a fair chance of survival. In a nutshell, if our earth is to continue as a human home, capitalism has to go. Or change. Or go through a mutation that would mean it was no longer the profit-driven, growth-mad capitalism we know. This is because the logic of capitalism, especially the “grow-or-die” paradigm that drives modern corporations to put profit and growth above all other concerns including life on earth, is proving to be—especially concerning the fossil fuels that are its engine—hostile to civilization, humans, and life on earth generally. As we all know (except for some of the ‘denialists’ in our U.S. Congress), burning fossil fuels like coal and oil produces an inevitable by-product: carbon dioxide. This has been happening at an accelerated rate since at least the 18^th century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and its accumulated effects (a kind of CO₂ bubble that traps warming air in the atmosphere) are now heating up the planet beyond anything seen since the dinosaurs. The Copenhagen climate conference of 2009 issued the warning that we now live with: if the accumulated warming of the planet exceeds 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), it will set in motion unstoppable changes in our climate like sea level rise that will be catastrophic to large swathes of the inhabited globe, not to mention drastically acidifying the oceans (making shells and coral unable to form). In short, anything over 2 degrees and we’re all cooked. The problem, as Bill McKibben noted in his recent book Oil and Honey (see my blog “Global Warming’s Big Three Numbers,” Oct. 23, 2013), is that the proven reserves of the major fossil fuel producers amount to about 2,795 gigatons, which they must, according to capitalism’s dictates, sell for burning. But in order to keep global warming below 2 degrees, the planet can only tolerate the burning of about 565 gigatons. That means that the fossil fuel companies would have to refrain from using 80% of the reserves that constitute their wealth; and more, they would have to stop doing what they’re now doing via fracking and tar sands and offshore drilling, i.e. adding to those burnable reserves.  So you can see the situation (and, as Klein vividly points out, the denialists do see it very clearly, which is why the Koch Brothers among others are spending small fortunes to deny and muddle and in any way discredit and short-circuit the science of global warming): it’s either capitalism as we know it, or life as we know it. One or the other has to go.

            Needless to say, this is a most dire situation. International corporations now rule the world. They control governments (like ours), international trade, and can keep and have kept individual countries from doing anything to save themselves (see my Nov. 10 blog, “Inmates Control the Asylum,” which discusses how the WTO ruled that Canada’s use of “buy local” standards to encourage its renewable energy industry was illegal, a restraint on trade). Trying to get them to agree to keep their assets (oil and coal) in the ground to benefit a vast planetary Other seems like the sheerest folly. And it probably is. As Klein puts it early on in her book,

..(this is) what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time (40).

What Klein lays out, however, is first, the urgent need to win that battle and keep that fuel in the ground; and second, the possibility that people power, whole districts, regions, nations of people, could make it happen if they joined forces. Pie-in-the-sky it may be. But what Klein is convincing in demonstrating is that there is no alternative. Either we change the way the world does business, or we die. And ‘changing the way we do business’ means far more than corporations simply refraining from using assets, or finally admitting that global warming is real and their products are responsible.  It means actually using some of their accumulated wealth, our accumulated wealth, to help the poorer nations develop. It means reparations—no other word fits the case, and the comparison with abolitionism and the more recent demands of African Americans is intended—from those who have done most to pollute the planet to those who have already suffered and stand to suffer more if nothing is done. It means paying the climate debt the developed nations owe for the three centuries of pollution by which they grew rich; it means, oh horrible word, redistribution. In other words, either the wealthy already-industrialized nations (Britain, the U.S., most of Europe, Canada) and their corporations agree to help (via donations or taxes, both of money and technology) the developing nations bypass the carbon-intensive stage of industrialization by going straight to renewables and mass transit; or, by refusing to help, guaranteeing that the mass burning of carbon-based fuels by those developing nations trying to catch up (India, China, Brazil, and countless nations in Africa) will push the entire planet into a warming trend that will doom us all. That is the analysis and those are the stakes in this ideological battle. It’s either continuing with the policy known as extractivism (mountaintop removal to get at coal more cheaply; fracking that pollutes precious aquifers; in short, a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth typical of capitalism); or moving to a policy and mindset of stewardship—that is, taking from the earth only in a way, common among indigenous peoples, that concerns itself with fostering the fertility of soil, plants, animals and the earth upon which all depends.

            And impossible as it seems, there are examples, as Klein points out, of small pockets of human communities beginning to do just this. She points to “transition towns,” for example, the first of which in 2006 was Totnes, an ancient market town in Devon England. In a movement that has spread to more than 460 locations in more than 43 countries, “each (transition) town tries to design what the movement calls an ‘energy descent action plan’—a collectively drafted blueprint for lowering its emissions and weaning itself off fossil fuels” (364). Town residents discuss everything from increasing food security through local agriculture to building more efficient affordable housing. Another example closer to home is Greensburg, Kansas. Devastated by a tornado in 2007, Greensburg was almost totally rebuilt by local government efforts on a “green” plan (406-7). The new buildings like the hospital, city hall, and schools have “all been built to the highest certification level issued by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.” The town has become a virtual laboratory for low-energy lighting, green architecture, waste reduction, and power generation via wind turbines that produce more than locals need. The other point of hope for Klein is the movement by Indigenous peoples to stop high-polluting energy projects like Alberta’s tar sands (by blocking the pipelines without which the dirty tar sands oil is useless) and hydraulic fracking. Klein cites two important rulings in Canada that offer this hope. First, in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia in 1997, the court “ruled that in those large parts of B.C. that were not covered by any treaty, Aboriginal title over that land had never been extinguished and still needed to be settled” (371). Native people there concluded that they still had full fishing, hunting and gathering rights to that land. In 1999, another ruling, the Marshall decision, established that when First Nations in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia signed “peace and friendship” treaties with the British in 1760, they did NOT

…agree to give up rights to their ancestral lands. Rather they were agreeing to share them with settlers on the condition that the First Nations could continue to use those lands for traditional activities like fishing, trading, and ceremony (371-2).

If these rulings were extended to cover the Alberta tar sands region, it would mean that Indigenous peoples in Canada and elsewhere would have veto rights over the use of their lands by corporations that, by their damaging extractive processes, make native use of that land impossible (what use are fishing and hunting rights in lands polluted by crude oil?). As Klein puts it, “No one has more power to halt the reckless expansion of the tar sands than the First Nations living downstream” (375).

            Klein of course has no illusions about how great a shift in power such a transformation (from extractivism to stewardship) would represent in our world. As she writes,

..moving to renewables represents more than just a power shift in power sources but also a fundamental shift in power relations between humanity and the natural world on which we depend. The power of the sun, wind, and waves can be harnessed to be sure, but unlike fossil fuels, these forces can never be fully possessed by us. (394, emphasis added.)

The point she is making, though, is that if we humans want to live in a hospitable world, in the world as we have known it for thousands of years, we have no choice. We must either change worldviews—from one based in the unbridled individualism that undergirds Western culture, that sees the earth and all other animals as exploitable, buyable objects unrelated to us, to a new/old view of the “collective, the communal, the commons, the civil and the civic” in which we see ourselves as embedded in, as continuous with the earth and all her creatures—or perish from our arrogance. In order to make this momentous shift, Klein, again employing the comparison with abolitionism (Chris Hayes first made this argument in a 2014 essay in The Nation, “The New Abolitionism”), insists that rather than using economic arguments (carbon trading, renewables are cheaper), climate activists must use moral arguments to define the struggle. She quotes David Brion Davis (historian, author of Antebellum American Culture):

“The abolition of New World slavery depended in large measure on a major transformation in moral perception—on the emergence of writers, speakers, and reformers, beginning in the mid-18^th century, who were willing to condemn an institution that had been sanctioned for thousands of years and who also strove to make human society something more than an endless contest of greed and power.”

That, Klein writes, is what those who argue for sweeping changes in moral perception must do if humanity is to survive this latest threat. And indeed, they must do more than argue. They must use every tactic known and unknown—protests, blockades, sabotage, more—that will resist and overcome the money and corporate and national/international power that will be galvanized to oppose them. For it is already known to what lengths entrenched power will go to stop the people of the world from gathering, feeling, and exercising their strength to close the gap between rich and poor individuals, rich and poor nations. Abolition required a deadly Civil War after all. Here, though, the stakes are, if anything, far higher than ending the horror that was slavery. Here, the stakes involve the death and destruction of entire islands, entire populations, entire species, the planet as the life-giving source we depend on, that we, in fact, are. What, in the end, could be more crucial than that?

Lawrence DiStasi

Ferguson, Oh Ferguson

The airwaves have been, are still being filled with the news: The Grand Jury empaneled in August to decide whether Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson should be indicted for the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, has made its decision. No, Virginia, there will be no indictment. The decision was announced to the public last evening (7 pm Pacific Time, 9 pm Missouri time), though why the County Prosecutor waited until after dark to announce what he knew would be an inflammatory decision (and it was) is beyond all imagining. A couple of things about the press conference alleged-Prosecutor Robert McCulloch gave in presenting the decision are noteworthy. First, according to the 11/25/14 New York Times, there were 162,500 grand jury cases prosecuted by U.S. attorneys in one year (2009 to 2010), and a grand total of 11 cases ended up without an indictment. Eleven! So this was not quite business as usual for the American justice system. Second, the website Daily Kos pointed out that McCulloch is the son of a police officer killed in the line of duty, so he is not exactly an impartial prosecutor where police shootings are concerned. This helps explain why his presentation made him sound like what he was: the prosecutor not of the murderer, Officer Darren Wilson, but of the victim, slain teenager Michael Brown. In fact, in his presentation the prosecutor sounded more like the defense attorney for the police officer, laying out the probable cause for why he “had” to shoot this menacing teenager whose crime—if there was one—was jaywalking in the middle of the street, or perhaps stealing some cigarillos from a convenience store. There is a great deal of dispute, in fact, about whether Wilson knew of the robbery before he confronted Michael Brown: in the early days after the shooting, the disclosure of Brown’s part in the robbery indicated that Wilson did NOT in fact know about the robbery when he first confronted Brown. But in his presentation, McCulloch made clear that what he presented to the Grand Jury was that Officer Wilson had received the information beforehand, and allegedly confronted Michael Brown as the probable suspect in the robbery—thus presumably justifying his decision to use deadly force on a criminal.

            But in truth, the details of the alleged crime and the killing of the black teenager are not the real core of the story. The core, as it is for most black communities around the nation, is the fact that once again, a white police officer has arrogated to himself the right to act as judge, jury and executioner of a young black man, and the so-called justice system in a society supposedly based on the rule of law and the presumption of innocence until a trial proves otherwise, has judged that police officer, the murderer, innocent—justified in shooting to kill in a situation where he claimed to fear for his life (though how an armed police officer can fear for his life in the face of a supposed threat from an unarmed teenager in broad daylight would seem to defy logic.) And, by default, has judged the unarmed victim guilty. If this were the only such case, it would perhaps not appear so startling. But such a scenario—of white police officers killing young unarmed black men—has become so common as to become one of the defining marks of our society. The situation is always said to be the same: the officer (or self-proclaimed vigilante as in the Trayvon Martin case), felt himself threatened and feared for his life. Therefore, he had no choice but to shoot. And shoot to kill. Very American this—in any situation where police are involved, or where American soldiers in any of our far-flung “police actions” around the world are involved, there is never any choice but the deadly one. We kill at the drop of a hat. Or a shadow. Or a dark face. Often enough these days, in fact, we kill without ever seeing the face. We kill from the air. We kill with robotic messengers of death called drones. We kill anything that looks suspicious on our magic screens thousands of miles away. When I was in the reserves many years ago, I remember how shocked I was at the bayonet training we briefly received: “What’s the motto of the bayonet?” our sergeants would bellow. And we would shout our response: “Kill! Kill! Kill!” It has become an American mantra, only now enforced with far more lethal weaponry than the homely bayonet.

            But of course it’s not just that large percentages of the police forces on our streets get their initial training in weaponry and attitudes in our military (thus does every war eventually come home). It’s also the history. Hundreds of years of slavery—the forced servitude of one group by another, justified by the alleged racial superiority of the one over the darker other—leave their mark. They indelibly brand and warp oppressor and victim alike; the victim, with what Joy DeGruy calls “post-traumatic slavery syndrome;” the oppressor with the never-departed fear that, without invincible shields and ever-more lethal weaponry, the rage their enslaving has instilled will result in mass revolt and the mass slitting of their throats. It lies at the back of every uprising from the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina to the riots of the 1960s in Watts to the similar riots after the slaying of Martin Luther King on up to those in response to the Rodney King and Oscar Grant verdicts and now the one in Ferguson. And that Stono Rebellion, according to historian Sally E. Hadden, assistant professor of history and law at Florida State University, marked the beginning of what really lies at the base of all our police constabularies since then: slave patrols. Her book bears precisely that title: Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard U Press: 2001); and what it points out is that though slave patrols probably stemmed from the laws many sugar-growing (and hence slave-owning) Caribbean islands adopted, and though Virginia had actually adopted slave patrols by 1727, the real impetus to a fully-formed system of slave codes with formal slave patrols to enforce them came in South Carolina after the aforementioned Stono Rebellion. As Hadden put it in an interview about her book, “Slave patrols amounted to an unequivocal manifestation of white fear.” In response to that fear, the new slave codes initially made it mandatory for all white males to do slave patrol duty, punishment being a fine for non-fulfillment of that duty. Eventually, though, with the growth of Southern cities, some slave patrols were replaced by regular full-time police, while other cities simply gave the slave patrols additional police duties such as arresting suspicious characters of any color and capturing those who broke the laws. Of note to anyone interested in language is the fact that the slave patrols were often called “paddyrollers,” a reference to the groups of white men charged to keep slave revolts from happening. This also seems to be the origin of the word “paddywagon;” not, as some have claimed, because early lawbreakers were often Irish or “paddies,” but because the origins of police forces can actually be found in the slave patrols or “paddyrollers.” After the Civil War, of course, most overt slave patrols had to be disbanded, with the result that their functions were split into two: law enforcement was taken over by regular police forces, while the terrorizing, vigilante functions were assumed by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Nonetheless, we can see clearly that the genesis of modern American policing, like many other aspects of American society, has deep roots in slavery and the fears it generated among those who held, sold, and otherwise abused slaves.

            We can also see this legacy in Ferguson. A majority-black city in Missouri is governed by an all-white administration, and policed by a nearly all-white constabulary. And the same fear seems to operate in the police force as in the original slave patrols. The citizens they must most often police are blacks like Michael Brown, whom Darren Wilson referred to in his testimony as a “demon” (here a literal “demonizing;” in our foreign ventures, a more symbolic demonizing). It would appear that the prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, saw the victim through this same lens. It would also appear that a huge percentage of the white police forces in the United States of America shares this same perception, and the resultant corollary: when confronted by a black man, shoot first and ask questions later. Unless and until that perception, that shoot-to-kill mentality is educated or mandated or shamed out of our system, the mass incarceration of as many as one-third of young black men, and the senseless killing of many others, promises to continue.

Lawrence DiStasi

Inmates Control the Asylum

Now that a week has passed since the November 4 election, it may be time to assess the damage and the prospects for the next two years. And of course it’s easy to attribute the debacle to Republican money made possible by Citizens United. For example, everyone on the left knows that the Koch Brothers contributed untold millions to super-pacs that bought tons of TV ads making the Republican victories possible. But what we may not have known until recently is that these same brothers, some of the biggest and dirtiest oil men in the nation, actually have leases on about 1.1 million acres of Canada’s tar sands land, the biggest non-Canadian leaseholder in Alberta (see Washington Post, 3/20/2104). If they can get the Keystone pipeline built (the issue Republicans say is first on their agenda), they stand to double their fortune—from about $100 billion they have now to about $200 billion in a few years. That’s why they’re willing to invest millions into political support for tea-partiers and conservatives in general. (Someone without money, like myself, would have thought that $100 billion might be enough; it could support me and everyone I’ve ever known for a lifetime in unimagined luxury; but not for these guys.)

            But of course it wasn’t just money that the Repugnants used to win the election. They also did everything they could to mess with the vote, suppressing it here, making it impossible to unseat their candidates in safe districts there. In general, this means targeting cities and urban areas (where minorities live) in order to enable rural and suburban areas (where whites live) to dominate the vote. Several methods have been used to achieve this. First, by taking over state houses in key states, they’ve managed to gerrymander voting districts to such an extent that even were the Democrats able to get out their vote, it wouldn’t matter. All the Dems power has been limited to urban zones, while suburban and rural zones have been crazy-quilted in such a way as to vote-proof their conservative candidates. Then these clever fellows instituted voter ID laws that made it almost impossible for minorities to comply—either because getting birth certificates and other IDs were too difficult or expensive, or by making common forms of ID ineligible. Though Republicans routinely allege massive voter fraud, studies in recent years have all given the lie to this dodge; there has been almost no voter fraud in recent years (one study found only 31 incidents nationwide between 2000 and 2014), especially compared to the millions of voters who have been disenfranchised. And finally, some clever lawyer type came up with the scheme known as Crosscheck. Used by 27 states, Crosscheck involves going through huge voter rolls in various states and trying to find name matches—which often occurs with common minority names like Jackson or Kim or Garcia or Patel. Then they claim, on no other basis than a name match, that a Jackson or Lee or Garcia has voted in two different states—an obvious violation of law—and succeed in getting the names thrown off the rolls. In Georgia, this worked to throw 40,000 voters off the state rolls, thus disqualifying a huge percentage of voters that had been newly registered as a result of a campaign by Atlanta’s Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church. (For a summary of these methods, see Juan Thompson’s piece for The Intercept, reprinted 9 Nov. in Reader Supported News [http://readersupportednews.org], where he notes that overall turnout in this election was 36.6%, a modern low.)

            This brings us to the underlying point of this election. Yes, it is surely to get Republicans elected to control the Congress. And yes, it is surely to allow billionaires like the Koch Brothers to control the government. But it’s more specific than that, and it’s not just a bunch of scared white males trying to maintain their positions of privilege, though it’s that too. This is about the deeper fear among conservatives that demographics as well as scientific truth is turning against them and could upend the huge victory they’ve achieved in recent years—convincing the world that free trade, deregulated free market capitalism and globalization are divine edicts from nature and hence the only game in town. I addressed this in a previous blog called Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes’ brilliant summary of the conservative battle to undermine the science of cigarette smoke, CFCs, acid rain, and global warming. Beginning to read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate has buttressed the case even more. Because what Klein does is not simply to cite all the reasons that the science of global warming has become definitive, compelling and truly urgent; she makes clear that the massive threat to human civilization posed by global warming cannot be stopped short of a massive change in our economic system. This is the sense in which she titles a chapter with the counterintuitive slogan, “The Right is Right.” Oreskes actually made a similar point in her book. That is, the right, the tea partiers, the conservative nut jobs who continually make apparently lunatic statements equating liberals with socialists and communists who intend to impose collectivist social controls on freedom-loving individualists like themselves—they actually have a point. And that point is simple. The world has allowed global warming to get so out of hand that amelioration measures that might have worked two or three decades ago can no longer work now. Globalization and its resultant export of the West’s industrial base to Asian countries like Korea and Bangladesh and China and India have exacerbated the problem to the point where now only large, cooperative planetary measures can work. And by “work” is meant keeping global warming below the 2^o Celsius target internationally-agreed upon recently. So, if we are to keep overall temperature rise to that 2^o C mark or less—and Klein makes clear that the International Energy Agency warns that if we don’t do this by 2017, a mere three years away, our fossil fuel economy will “lock in” truly dangerous, runaway warming—then the measures feared by the right will become mandatory. The CO₂-producing methods we’ve been so profligate with until now (indeed, even more profligate since the 1990s when scientists began their dire warnings about the perils involved in continuing to burn fossil fuels) will force governments to impose measures that could well end up ending capitalism and free markets and so-called “free” trade as we know it.

            In truth, Klein makes the case in her book that this result is all but demanded and assured. Here is how she puts it in her Introduction:

…our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate (Klein, 21-22).

Now we know why the Koch Brothers and Crosscheck and all that Republican energy was put into the recent election. These are the people who know that if the truth about global warming is allowed to reassert itself (Klein points out that as recently as 2007, a Harris poll found 71% of Americans believing that burning fossil fuel alters the climate), they and their whole economic system, their whole wealth system, their whole belief system, their entire worldview, is doomed. As Klein puts it beautifully a bit later, “Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests” (41). And it does; because the threat of global warming demands one thing above all: collective action by the world’s nations, especially the nations that have profited most from burning fossil fuels, Great Britain, Europe in general, and the United States of America. And collective action, regulation, environmentally-based action to preserve the planet from the massive changes to life that excessive warming will unleash, is already unleashing, goes against everything conservatives purport to believe.

            So we understand why Mitch McConnell and John Boehner announced what their preferred agendas would include: putting an end to EPA interference in coal and other energy production (like fracking), passing the laws to enable the Keystone pipeline to bring all that tar sands sludge into the U.S. and through New Orleans, and fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All are intended to energize the energy-wasting, globalized capitalist system which fuels their wealth and success. Naomi Klein is particularly revelatory about how trade rules and the WTO (World Trade Organization) fits into this diabolical system. Recently, a case came before the WTO relating to both trade and solar panels produced in Ontario, Canada. The solar company was/is run by Paolo Maccario, an Italian businessman who moved his solar factory to Ontario in 2010 due to its Green Energy and Green Economy Act to promote the production of renewable energy there. Besides providing subsidies to green companies, the Act ensured that a percentage of the workers and the materials (between 40% and 60%) companies used were local to Ontario. This made sense, especially after the economic crisis that had earlier devastated the province. The plan worked quite well, and by 2012, Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada, with only one coal-fired plant left.  There was a fly in the ointment, though: the WTO rules about discrimination against outside producers. Japan and then the European Union brought claims against Ontario’s requirement for those percentages to be sourced locally, saying that this requirement would “discriminate against equipment for renewable energy generation facilities produced outside Ontario.” That is, by Japan and the Europeans. And the WTO agreed, ruling against Canada that the buy-local rules were illegal. Ontario then had no choice but to void the local-content rules that were the heart of the program, and Maccario’s solar operation—by common consent producing the best solar panels anywhere—had to pull back and suspend all its plans for expansion.

            Thus, the “national treatment” rules in almost all free-trade agreements (and they will operate in the Trans Pacific Partnership that the Congress wants to vote on right away, and which Barack Obama is even now trying to facilitate on his Asia trip) work directly against local laws that are intended to support green manufacturing to help and heal the environment. It is an absurdity. But that is what the free-marketeers—i.e. the multinational corporations who rule the world these days—have worked day and night to achieve. Trade trumps the planet. That would seem to be their motto. And it is happening in every nation, all the time. Klein cites another example from 2012, when an oil company decided to use NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement so beloved of our politicians) to challenge Quebec’s fracking moratorium, “claiming that it robbed the company of its right to drill for gas in the province” (72). As Klein sums it up,

To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future, is a special kind of madness.

            And it is. Madness. But then, what is one to think of another outcome of the recent Republican victory in the Senate: that, since the majority party selects committee chairmen from its members, the new head of the Senate’s Committee on the Environment and Public Works will be none other than the chief denialist in the U.S. Congress, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe is the author of the book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. He has said things like “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous;” and that the temperature increases from global warming “may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives.” In any country but the United States, putting such a person at the head of such a critical committee would be considered madness indeed. But here we are, with Inhofe poised to take over from Senator Barbara Boxer as head of the committee most responsible for laws related to our environment and the greatest threat to the planet in history.

            So that’s the ultimate skinny on the last election. The most deranged inmates are now in control of the asylum.

Lawrence DiStasi