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 2o Celsius target internationally-agreed upon
recently. So, if we are to keep overall temperature rise to that 2o
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
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