Governor
and the Projo collude against the community AGAIN
My favorite author, the
late Ursula K LeGuin, wrote about a
certain kind of wizard, the patterner, in her Earthsea
Trilogy.
I am no wizard, but I do
see patterns, and then write about them. In the same set of books LeGuin also
points out the importance of calling things by their real name, and that only
by calling things by their real name can you have power to change things.
Part of looking at
patterns is the ability to connect the dots on the events of the day. Part of
using the real name of things is speaking truth to power.
Recently in the space of
24 hours the Providence Journal wrote
an editorial slamming the Green
New Deal titled “Going out on a
green limb,” the Rhode
Island Department of Transportation (DOT),
with the permission of Governor Gina
Raimondo, decided to “scoop,” read “steal,” most of the money that has
already been dedicated to pedestrian and bike safety and access so that it
could be used to fund roads and bridges (including a new off ramp in
Speaker Nicholas Mattiello‘s district),
and a research paper came out from the Institute
for Public Policy Research entitled “This is a
Crisis, Facing up to the age of Environmental Breakdown.”
The connection is that
opposing the Green New Deal the way the ProJo does is exactly the same mind set
as the governor and DOT are showing.
The received wisdom of
the 1 percent is that it is not possible to take the ecological crisis on
planet Earth seriously and it is not possible to take the challenges posed by
climate change seriously because the things we would have to do to reverse the
damage would take too much power away from the oligarchs.
Their solution is to
call it socialism, pretend you do not have to discuss it further and then continue
on like lemmings over the cliff.
Climate change is the existential crisis of our times, with the only thing that might beat it to the punch being nuclear war set off by crazy oligarchs like the orange headed idiot in the White House.
Barring nuclear war,
human induced changes in the climate due to the incredibly excessive release of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is already causing major disasters from
floods to droughts to heatwaves to hurricanes to wildfires.
The cost leaps up every
year as the temperature rises and the refugees swell in number as the natural
disasters drive warfare for resources as well as drive people to seek food and
shelter. Often there is no place to return to, especially for the refugees from
sea level rise.
And for the bean
counters, rest assured that the cost of transition is less than the cost of
continuing on the fossil fuel path.
The ecological crisis is
not just climate change, which may be looming faster and more powerfully than
any of the other manifestations of the ecological crisis.
Other parts of the
ecological collapse include the water crisis, the extinction crisis, the
deforestation crisis, the collapse of insect populations, the destruction and
emptying of the oceans, and the loss of nutrients and soil. And this is not an
exhaustive list.
Each year the biological
life on the planet is diminished by more than 1 percent as we use 1.7 times the
biological productivity of the planet each year, with the rate of depletion
going faster and faster.
The Governor and the Providence
Journal believe the same fantasy, that you can have infinite growth on a finite
planet, and that economic growth, the expansion of GDP, is the single most
important and beneficial thing they do, despite the fact that it is killing the
planet and that almost all of the growth (or rather supposed growth) is ending
up in the hands of a tiny sliver of the population while more and more people
are falling further and further behind, precisely because of the type of
economic growth being fostered.
Growing inequality is a
threat to both democracy and the economy.
The Governor and
Providence Journal intentionally misread the economy (mostly to protect ruling
class interests, especially political power), misread the intentions and
thinking of those opposed to their power grabs and stealing (often calling the
opposition some term related to NIMBY when the opposition is principled
opposition to misguided policy that harms communities and the planet), totally
misread and ignore the ecology of planet earth that keeps us all fed, and
misunderstand how critical green transformation is if our communities are to
thrive in the 21st century and beyond.
All they seem capable of
is protecting the status quo, which means rigging the system for the rich and
powerful, and doing everything to prevent real discussion of what the future
seems to hold for our communities.
It means placing their
faith in an economics that is drifting ever further into theoretical models and
farther away from what produces prosperity in communities. A discipline that
has received wisdom like the business climate is important to the economic
prosperity of a community, without any statistical data from the real world to
back it up needs to be replaced.