written 7 August 2022
published 14 August 2022
Such interesting times! Reality is demanding we look deep inside and decide from our heart who we are as a nation.
Climate deniers are twisting into pretzels to ignore the heat, fires, and floods that are destroying communities and portions of the economy everywhere. Extreme heat has increased in extent and duration, hitting parts of the country not tooled up with wide spread air conditioning, killing people, crops, and livestock while disrupting the economy. Fires in the west have been relatively modest, so far, with nothing like the million acres California blazes of the last few years. However, there is a new fire east of Eureka and over 100 fires are currently burning in Alaska.
The flooding in the east just keeps coming. This is the result of the wide swings of a jet stream weakened by higher Arctic temperatures, combined with massive moisture from a warmer ocean coming from the monsoons in the southwest and the regular input from the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is so warm that any hurricanes that come through there could accelerate from category 1 to category 4 within a matter of hours, giving little warning.
Most Republican "leaders" still proclaim it is all a hoax, and oppose any efforts to do anything different. Not to be outdone, corporate Democrats like Senator Manchin, with coal wealth, held up climate progress to allow more oil and gas production, and Senator Sinema, funded by Wall Street, protected wealthy hedge fund managers rather than her constituents.
But the oil industry already knows the end game is near, and exhibits little interest in developing new oil leases. These multi-decade projects are financially risky, because new fields are more expensive to develop, since the easiest oil has already been produced and depleted. What we see instead are massive corporate stock buy backs, using the extreme profits from high oil prices to pay off stockholders while there is still value left in the industry. The fossil fuel corporations have known for decades that they are killing the planet, but they don't care.
After decades of effort, the Republican packed Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion. They rarely campaigned on the issue overtly, except when speaking to the faithful, while assuring the general population that they accepted the established legal precedent. The three Trump Court appointees skillfully avoided declaring their abortion positions to get through the Senate confirmation process. However, once on the bench, forming a solid 6-3 majority, they ignored the popular support for abortion and overturned 50 years of legal rights, simply because they wanted to. Suddenly, people are reacting to the reality of dealing with a forced pregnancy, not just the possibility.
I was encouraged by the abortion vote in Kansas, where Trump had won by 15 percent in 2020, but a solid 59 percent supported keeping abortion legal. The Republicans tried to sneak this through in a minor election year, during a Republican primary, expecting mostly Republican voters. The outcome was the result of hard work by abortion rights supporters to make sure they got out the vote, suggesting the election this fall could be quite different from a typical midterm election.
Republicans have also exposed their fundamental fascist inclinations. The recent week long, Fox News tribute to Hungarian fascist president Victor Orbán, followed by Orbán's keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Committee, shows the party's extreme disrespect for democratic traditions. Authoritarian 2020 election deniers have become the Republican primary winners in many states, and a significant portion of the party believes QAnon conspiracies. Fascism incites violence, and per capita murder rates in states Trump won are 40 percent higher than blue states. The election this fall will determine if this is really the will of America, or just a very vocal, crazy subset, destined for abject failure.
As I have stated in several previous articles, I believe that America is better than what Republican extremism represents. Winston Churchill once said, "you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities." Not very complimentary, but hopeful in the end. We have accepted decades of self-serving principles from the post Reagan Republicans; greed is good and government is bad. But now the social bankruptcy and cruelty of those limited views are open for all to see. It's time for something different.
