OMNI
Fossil
Fuels Crimes and Criminals
Newsletter #1
Compiled
by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
Contents
Kramer and White, Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes. 2020.
Publisher’s description.
From Western Michigan U.
Carter and Woodworth, Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science
Denial. . . . 2018.
Excerpt.
Dick’s Analysis.
Review by Andrew Glickson in Monthly Review.
Christopher Leonard. Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and
Corporate Power in America.
Review by Scott
Horsley.
Jane Mayer. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the
Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
Bromwich’s Review
Documentary
Mullins Library
Rachel
Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy,
Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth. Crown, 2019.
Publisher’s description
Jill Dougherty’ Review in The
Washington Post
And the criminals
pushing toward Nuclear War: Ellsberg’s The
Doomsday Machine and Perry and Collina’s The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and
Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. It’s up to us to connect presidential
power with fossil fuels and nuclear weapons.
TEXTS
KRAMER AND WHITE
Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes (Critical Issues in Crime and Society). Rutgers UP, 2020.
Carbon
Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes
the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective.
It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic
environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The
book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the
U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to
do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate
Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of
disciplines, to analyze four specific
state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising
carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of
these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes
of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate
disruption. The final chapter
reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a
warming world, and achieve climate justice.
Dr. Ron Kramer to
Speak on Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes and the Current Political Crisis
(from Western Michigan U communications)
March 22, 2018 12:30-1:30
Ronald
C. Kramer
Department of Sociology
Western Michigan University
ABSTRACT
This
presentation analyzes the serious social problem of climate change through the
lens of the concept of state-corporate crime. Four distinct forms of state-corporate climate crimes are
identified and described: 1) Crimes of Continued Extraction of Fossil Fuels and
Emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG); 2) Crimes of Socially Organized Denial of
Climate Change; 3) Crimes of Political Omission related to the Mitigation of
GHG; and 4) Crimes of Militarized Adaptation to Climate Disruptions. In the new
era of political transformation and crisis wrought by the 2016 U.S. election,
these climate crimes have been amplified, while prospects for holding carbon
criminals accountable for their blameworthy harms and achieving climate justice
have been dramatically reduced.
Ron
Kramer is Professor of
Sociology at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His books
include: Crimes of the American Nuclear State: At Home and Abroad (with
Dave Kauzlarich); State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection
of Business and Government (with Raymond Michalowski); and State
Crime in the Global Age (edited with William J. Chambliss and Raymond
Michalowski). His most recent research focuses on climate change as
state-corporate crime. Dr. Kramer is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement
Award from the Division of Critical Criminology of the American Society
of Criminology, the Larry T. Reynolds Award for Outstanding Teaching of
Sociology from the Michigan Sociological Association, and the
Charles Horton Cooley Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Sociology also
from the Michigan Sociological Association. Published on February 07, 2018
From
Western Michigan University:
Kramer’s
book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the
U.S. government, and the international political community did to cause global
warming.
Kramer
analyzes four specific "state-corporate climate crimes": the
continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; a political
failure to mitigation the effects of these emissions; socially organized
climate change denial; and what Kramer calls "climate crimes of
empire," which include militaristic forms of adapting to climate disruption.
The
final chapter reviews policies that Kramer believes could mitigate greenhouse
gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.
Kramer
says there are many ways individuals can get involved in fighting the climate
crisis.
“On
campus, we have the WMU working group on climate change that’s been in
existence since 2012, and so we’ve got an interdisciplinary group on campus
that is working hard on the issue. Our working group is part of a broader
Kalamazoo Climate Crisis Coalition that formed last summer and has been very
active…If people want to work on this issue, there are a lot of ways they can
get plugged in.”
Ron
Kramer is also the co-author of State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at
the Intersection of Business and Government (Rutgers University
Press).
CARTER AND WOODWORTH
Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth
Woodworth, Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial
and Game Changers for Survival. 2017.
EXCERPT.
EXCERPT
FROM THE INTRODUCTION OF UNPRECEDENTED
CRIME
Given this
availability of solutions (which are largely absent from
the North American media), we authors concur that the
political,
media, and moral failures to act decisively have now become
willful
crimes against life itself.
This conscious refusal to act with purpose helps to answer the
questions, “Where is the human outcry for earth’s life-support?
Why have we failed to seize control of our survival? ”
Trappist monk Thomas Merton explored a similar mystery in the
1960’s. During the nuclear madness of the Cold War, he coined
the
term “the unspeakable” to describe a vacuum that can be
utterly
void of compassion and responsibility.
This moral abyss is still very much alive within the deep military-
industrial state that Eisenhower warned about in 1961. The
public
needs to acknowledge and understand this nihilistic mind-set,
which will be discussed in a brief section, “Confronting the
Unspeakable.”
Pope Francis, in his 2015 Encyclical Letter – which was backed by
all the major world faiths – referred to climate change as “a sin
against God.”
Following the Pope’s declaration, the UN Paris climate summit was
signed by 195 countries – yet astonishingly our North American
national governments persist in activities of deep denial, as
they
rush ahead with new pipelines.
And incredibly, against decades of IMF and World Bank pressure to
phase them out, governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels
to
the globally suicidal extent of trillions of dollars worldwide, as
if
our political leaders wished to destroy our future.
Simply stopping these subsidies would be an instant game changer.
Another powerful strategy is legal action against governments for
the crime of omission to protect the right to life of their
populations – a public trust duty that dates back to Roman
times
and early British common law.
This book is presented in two parts: Crimes Against Life and
Humanity, and Game Changers for Survival. It will present:
1) the escalating emergency caused by
rapidly increasing CO2,
methane, and nitrous oxide;
2) the ongoing political and media
efforts to suppress climate
change as a crisis: by denial, by under-reporting solutions to
it,
and by fixating on adaptation to daily extreme weather events
while failing to urge radical emissions reduction; and
3) the emerging and largely
unreported opportunities for major
sectors of the economy to transition to renewable energy, while
increasing jobs and profits.
4) A special chapter called “Mission
Impossible,” introduces
entirely new thinking on how powerful and transformative action
can begin immediately.
In spite of all obstacles, we are encouraged to see powerful game
changers on the horizon: for one, the markets are forging
ahead
to bring wind and solar energy into mainstream dominance over
fossil fuels.
Another is the signatories to the Subnational Global Climate
Leadership (alias Under 2°C), which represents 1.2 billion people
on six continents, and 37% of the global economy. Its 175
jurisdictions pledge “emission reductions for a trajectory of 80 to
95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.”
Completely blacked out by the media since its inception in 2015,
this outstanding initiative has been called a game changer
by
former UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.
Predictably, many such survival responses are being downplayed
and ignored by the corporate media, which, although it now
reports
incessantly and superficially on climate change, is still criminally
tied to the profits and employment generated by oil, natural gas,
and coal.
It is very late – but not too late – to recognize and address the
crime of ecocide in the form of business-as-usual. There
is still
time for the planet to recuperate, but we must start emergency life-
saving measures to reduce CO2 emissions to near-zero.
(These
measures are explored in the chapter “Mission Impossible.”)
The truth embedded in climate science is unstoppable, and
solutions whose time has come simply need to be elevated into
general consciousness and translated into government action,
which is a central purpose in writing this book.
DICK’S
THUMBNAIL ANALYSIS
Its subtitle
makes the book’s unique and important two-part case
clear: “Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for
Survival.”
The first part, the “Unprecedented
Crime,” explains the fossil fuel industry’s and fundamentalist free market
foundations’ international crime of disinformation against humanity, the
environment, and the climate itself. The chapters move in persuasive
order: Reality of extreme weather around the
world. Science betrayed by the crime of denial by fossil fuel
corporations and their political agents. State crime against the
global Public Trust. Media collusion. Corporate and bank
crime. Moral collapse and religious apathy. Summary
evidence of the climate emergency (Appendix).
On
this solid, carefully researched foundation, the second part argues equally
persuasively that we should take the industry to international and national
courts, and to the global court of public opinion, and we should pursue
additional “game changers”: Ending energy subsidies and tax loopholes,
carbon tax, legal challenges to human rights violations, embracing
technological innovations, finding market solutions, public resistance strategies. And
“mission impossible,” a global mobilization to end dependence on fossil fuels
comparable to the Allied mobilization during WWII (or a Manhattan-Marshall-Apollo
Plan).
REVIEW of Carter and
Woodworth BY ANDREW GLIKSON, “THE CRIMINAL DIMENSION OF CLIMATE CHANGE,”
MONTHLY REVIEW (MARCH 2019)
Dear Reader, we make
this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to
afford or access the print edition of Monthly Review. If
you read the magazine online and can afford a print subscription, we hope you
will consider purchasing one. Please visit the MR store for subscription options. Thank you very much. —Eds.
“The Criminal Dimension of Climate
Change” by Andrew Glikson. Monthly Review (March 2019). A
summary.
Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth
Woodworth, Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial
and Game Changers for Survival . With a foreword
by leading climate scientist James Hansen. (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017), 270 pages.
“We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this
planet.” —Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute of
Climate Impacts
The extreme rise in
atmospheric carbon dioxide since the onset of the industrial age, reaching ~403
parts per million (ppm) in 2017, and the corresponding rise in mean global
temperature to 1.3°C above preindustrial temperature, pose an existential risk for the future of civilization
and nature.
Unprecedented Crime outlines
the criminality of those who actively promote the continuing
emission of carbon gases into the atmosphere despite having full knowledge of
the consequences. These consequences
include the breakdown of large ice sheets, rising sea levels, and the
intensification of extreme weather events around the world, such as hurricanes,
floods, and fires. MORE https://monthlyreview.org/author/andrewglikson/
Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleoclimate scientist. He is a visiting
fellow at the Research School of Earth Sciences at Australian National
University, College of Science. This review is adapted from the one published
in Media Monitors Network.
KOCH BROTHERS
CHRISTOPHER LEONARD
SCOTT HORSLEY.
“ 'Kochland' Explores How The Famous Brother Duo Made
Their Money.“ NPR August 13, 2019.
Kochland: The Secret History of Koch
Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard. 687 pages.
The Koch brothers are
a ripe target: political plutocrats who have spent hundreds of millions of
dollars in a decades-long effort to reshape the country and the Republican
Party.
They've used their
vast wealth to build a hydra-headed network of think tanks, lobbying shops, and
"astroturf" advocacy groups to advance a philosophy that conveniently
overlaps with the economic interests of their Wichita-based corporation.
None of this is exactly a secret, though. Jane Mayer's 2010 New Yorker article and subsequent book shined a bright spotlight on how the Kochs and other wealthy
patrons use their Dark Money to wield outsize influence on American politics.
What Kochland, the new book from Christopher Leonard, adds
to the story is not so much an account of the ways in which the brothers spend their money, but rather, a richly reported
tale of how they make it — the inner workings
of one of the nation's largest private corporations.
To be sure, the Koch
brothers aren't entirely self-made. They got a sizable head start from their
father. Fred Koch, a co-founder of the far-right John Birch Society, assembled
his own mini-empire of ranches, factories and oil pipelines. But Charles and David Koch supersized this fortune.
They added a Minnesota refinery that
was well-positioned to turn cheap, Canadian crude oil into pricey gasoline for
the fuel-thirsty Midwest. Over time, they expanded into fertilizer, paper
products, options trading and even greeting cards. . . .
But for the most part,
this is fast-paced business history. An episode about ammonia runoff at an oil
refinery keeps you turning pages like a John Grisham thriller.
Koch Industries has
some parallels with Enron, but without the flash. The company's low-key
employees often come from state schools in the middle of the country. They
don't pretend to be the smartest guys in the room, just the most disciplined.
The Kochs successfully
leverage the insight and experience gained in one industry to get a leg up in
others. They aren't always successful. A big push into agriculture and animal
feed in the 1990s ended in disaster. But many of their moves pay off, sometimes
lavishly. The Kochs were among the first to roll the dice on the shale oil boom, spending hundreds of
millions of dollars on speculative pipelines from south Texas to their refinery
in Corpus Christi.
"This investment
was entirely a gamble," Leonard writes. The Kochs could have been left
with useless pipelines to dry wells. "Then the oil started to flow."
For Leonard, the rise of Koch Industries is a
refined example of forces shaping the wider economy, with growing returns for
corporate shareholders — in this case just two — and shrinking bargaining power
for workers. Charles Koch's
philosophy of Market Based Management supposedly empowers workers to act as
mini-entrepreneurs. But there's little evidence of that among the Georgia
Pacific warehouse workers, whose autonomy is steadily stripped away in the name
of greater efficiency. . . .
The legal battles with
Bill spilled into a series of fines and criminal investigations in the 1980s
and '90s. Koch "developed a regulatory rap sheet that gave the company a
reputation for borderline criminality." Ultimately, Charles and David
decided that was counterproductive and declared the company would comply with
100 percent of the rules, 100 percent of the time.
Of course, Koch's
political arm was simultaneously working to water down or eliminate those rules
— a push that has been richly rewarded in the Trump administration.
A company that prizes information has been a
central player in efforts to spread disinformation about climate science.
"This wasn't accidental," Leonard writes. "As early as 1991,
Charles Koch and other executives in the fossil fuel industry helped foster
skepticism about the evidence of climate change."
Even ExxonMobil eventually abandoned this
strategy, acknowledging the scientific consensus. But the Koch political
machine continue to fight any effort to limit carbon pollution, using the
considerable resources that a $120 billion fortune can buy.
JANE MAYER, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise
of the Radical Right.
DAVID BROMWICH’s REVIEW OF DARK MONEY IN THE NATION (JUNE
6/13, 2016). Condensed by Dick Bennett
Bromwich
praises “this brave and resourceful book” for recounting pertinaciously the
abuses by the network of billionaires that is the subject of the book. On page 4 she declares clearly: The Koch brothers, Charles and David, “were
among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that
for decades poured money [from oil and gas by the Koch brothers], often with
little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and
voted.” This is her topic, and by
performing it thoroughly, she provides an enormous public service, for the
public needs to understand thoroughly and precisely this engine of the present
anti-regulatory government oligarchy, if we are to resist and return to the direction
for a social democracy developing during the 1930s-1970s.
If we are to
regain a system designed to help people, we need to understand both the scale
and the details of the money corruption possessed by this small group—“no fewer
than 18 billionaires”-- of extreme libertarians, and Mayer provides that
information compendiously yet interestingly, anecdotally, sometimes
electrically. For example, that W.
Clement Stone gave $2 million to Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign (approximately
worth $11 million today), causing a storm of protest and leading to reforms in
campaign financing, almost vanishes in significance when contrasted to the Koch
network’s $889 million projected for the 2016 election. For limited government, drastically lower
personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services, and much less
oversight/regulation of industry, “particularly in the environmental arena,”
these few billionaires “formed a new generation of philanthropist” to “alter
the direction of American politics” toward “their personal financial
interests.” The public must wrest power
back from the billionaires, and this book empowers us with the knowledge
necessary.
The full title
of Mayer’s book is Dark Money: The Hidden
History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. The direction of our struggle against the fossil fuels industry and money corruption
and for affirmative government of and for the people is much clearer because of
her book.
On PBS Frontline documentary “Dark Money.”
Seeing Corruption in Action
Last night, I watched Frontline
and it aired a program called "Dark Money."
Even though I was already aware of dark money and have seen its
effects, I felt more deeply enlightened by watching this documentary. In this
film, you can really see and feel the effects on human beings and on the
environment.
The specific techniques were spelled out. You could see how big
moneyed elites (oligarchs) were systematically taking over the running of our
nation and the damage that it causes.
Whether we realize it or not, we are in a war with dark moneyed interests and have been for some
time. Right now, dark money is winning. Dark moneyed interests have gained
control over our supreme court, the presidency, the national house and Senate,
most of the governorships, the leadership of our institutional departments of
government, the courts and more.
DARK
MONEY IN UAF’S MULLINS Main Library JK2356 .M373 2016 Here’s
its Bibliographical Entry
|
Includes bibliographical
references (pages 381-425) and index |
|
The investors -- Weaponizing
philanthropy: the war of ideas, 1970-2008. Radicals: A Koch family history ;
The hidden hand: Richard Mellon Scaife ; Beachheads: John M. Olin and the
Bradley brothers ; The Koch method: Free-market mayhem ; The Kochtopus:
Free-market machine -- Secret sponsors: covert operations, 2009-2010. Boots
on the ground ; Tea time ; The fossils ; Money is speech: The long road to
"Citizens United" ; The shellacking: Dark money's midterm debut,
2010 -- Privatizing politics: total combat, 2011-2014. The spoils: Plundering
Congress ; Mother of all wars: The 2012 setback ; The States: Gaining ground
; Selling the new Koch: A better battle plan |
|
Why is America living in an age of
profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address
climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again
and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do
hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big
government" led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative
movement. But Jane Mayer argues that a
network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views
bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the
American political system. Their core beliefs -- that taxes are a form of
tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom --
are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and
corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal
pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws. The chief figures in the
network are Charles and David Koch. The brothers were schooled in a political
philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security
and to enforce property rights. When libertarian
ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their
allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could
fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to
influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the
courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. These
organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity.
Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its
apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily
by the Citizens United decision --
a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network. And their
efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian
views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still
rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments,
the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance,
and tax reforms have been stymied. Jane Mayer spent five years conducting
hundreds of interviews -- including with several sources within the network
-- and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings to trace
the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent and to provide vivid
portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy |
Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State
Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth. Crown, 2019.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
• Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All
The oil and gas industry has weakened
democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers,
and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is,
according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a
gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.”
Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest
businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of
the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never
been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”
“At its heart, this book is a
tale of two countries, the United States and Russia, and how, as Maddow sees
it—individually and together—they have been warped by a rapacious fossil fuel
industry. . . . Fulminating comes easy to Rachel Maddow. What sets her apart
from other serial fulminators is that she does it with facts—and sardonic wit.”—The
Washington Post
“Expect a tweetstorm as Maddow’s indictment of a corrupt industry finds
readers—and it deserves many.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Known for her intense inquiries into complex subjects, Maddow brings her
laser-like intuitiveness and keen and wily perception to Big Oil, that stalwart
of global economics, and the shadowy nexus of commerce and politics. Maddow
likes murky, the murkier the better, and her examination of the intricacies of
off-shore drilling, transnational pipelines, and hydraulic fracking is as deep
as the coveted wells themselves. . . . Like trailblazing journalists before
her, Maddow exposes both the slapdash and sinister practices underlying
geopolitics and energy policies and revels in peeling back the layers of
malfeasance to stoke righteous outrage.”—Booklist (starred
review)
Review
“Rachel
Maddow pinpoints the root of all evils: The fossil fuel industry” By Jill Dougherty. Washington Post (Oct. 3, 2019 ).
Jill Dougherty is a
fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington
and a Centennial fellow at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown
University. She covered the White House and State Department for CNN and served
for nine years as CNN’s Moscow bureau chief.
. . . .In tracing the
industry and its impact on our lives, Maddow begins at the beginning, in 1859,
with the discovery of “rock oil” and, a few years later, John D. Rockefeller’s
founding of Standard Oil. She takes the story up to today’s inventions —
hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling — that have revolutionized
extraction and helped launch America on its road to “energy independence.”
An inseparable part of
America’s fossil fuel history, Maddow points out, are the federal and state tax breaks for the industry, what she
calls the “longest running welfare program in the nation’s history.” This
spawned a symbiotic relationship, as the fossil fuel industry began to feed on
the body politic, eventually creating its own “corporate shadow foreign policy.”
The ultimate victims,
Maddow says, continue to be average Americans across the country, in thrall to
an industry that gives them jobs but threatens their health, even their lives,
all the while undermining democracy.
Russia, without strong
democratic institutions, comes off even worse, beset with “the Resource Curse”
— abundant energy resources that create enormous cashflows but that crowd out
more stable and diversified roads to economic development. The result: “poor
governance and high corruption [that result in] devastating economic, health
and environmental consequences at the local level, and high incidences of
conflict and war.”
The culprit, as Maddow
sees it, is President Vladimir Putin. Early in his presidency he targeted
energy resources as the path to return Russia to its rightful place on the
world stage after the ignominious demise of the Soviet Union. That was a worthy
goal, and during the George W. Bush administration, when relations with America
were more hopeful, Putin calculated that Russia could become an important
energy supplier to the United States.
It didn’t end up that
way. . . .
There are a lot of bad
guys in this book. But there are a few good ones, too. Like Austin Holland,
head seismologist for the Oklahoma Geological Survey, who, under great pressure
from the industry and its supporters to stop his research, found that disposal
of wastewater from fracking was, indeed, linked to an astounding increase in
earthquakes in the state. Eventually, he left his position and headed for New Mexico
and a job with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The real heroes,
Maddow says, are the teachers, students and parents in Oklahoma, fed up with
the fracking and the earthquakes — more than 100 measuring a magnitude of 3.0
or higher in the state in February 2016 alone — and the tax breaks for the oil
and gas industry, even as spending per student plummeted by 24 percent over
eight years. Thanks to their protests, the state legislature eventually raised
taxes on the industry and put more controls on wastewater.
Maddow doesn’t think
the fossil fuel industry is going away anytime soon, although she says it will
eventually: “Coal is dead. As dead as whale oil and kerosene and every other
fuel source we once believed we couldn’t live without. Oil and gas are dead, too
— only they don’t look sick yet.”
The world, she says,
must figure out how to get along without them. And, although it seems hard to
believe after more than 350 pages of horrors that the industry has inflicted on
the environment and geopolitics around the world, Maddow claims that “this is a
doable, winnable fight here at home.”
In “Blowout,” just
like in her MSNBC monologues, Maddow doesn’t shy away from hyperbole:
“Democracy either wins this one or disappears.” But we readers have to ask
ourselves — is it really hyperbole?
Related Reading
Bill Moyers
interviews Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All
Politics — How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the
Middle Class. 2012.
Naomi Klein. This
Changes Everything and No Is Not
Enough. Provides a road
map for countering Trump’s shocks.
David Korten, Agenda
for a New Economy
Billionaires
and Stealth Politics by Matthew J.
Lacombe, Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright, 2018.
Mike Lofgren, The
Party Is Over. Pp. 11, 297.
The Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean, 2017.
Potter and Penniman, Nation
on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy
Jeffrey Sachs, The
End of Poverty.
Sons of Wichita, How the Koch Brothers Became
America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty By Daniel Schulman, 2014.
David Cay Johnston has 2: Perfectly Legal and Free
Lunch. Mayer quotes him page 15.
In
2004 David Cay Johnston’s book Perfectly
Legal showed how ideologues had made the nation safe for wealthy people who
don’t want to pay taxes. In 2007 in Free Lunch he itemized and analyzed
(declares the book’s subtitle: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves
at Government Expense and Stick You with the Bill): congressional earmarks, stock options,
hedge fund tax breaks, abuse of eminent domain, subsidies to sports teams, K
Street lobbyists, our health-care system, the gap between rich and poor, to
name only a few. These books were
published before the financial crash of 2008 and the victory of the rich in the
Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United. I highlight Johnston’s books (there have been many more like them)
to emphasize the long preparation, long preceding 2004, for the billionaires’
plutocracy exposed in Dark Money. His
books and those listed above teach us what the problem is and what we
can and must do to stop and reverse it.
--Dick
IMPERIAL WARS
Robert
Fantina’s new book, Propaganda, Lies and
False Flags: How the U.S. Justifies Its Wars, provides a chronology of warfare USA. This is not a peacemaking nation. A great peacemaker because national mythbuster,
William Blum started giving us the facts of US imperial aggressions back in the
1980s. Here are his books:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II. 1986, 1995.
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. 2000.
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir.
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire. 2005.
America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy. 2013.
To be
able to CONNECT the CALAMITIES OF CLIMATE CRISIS (above) AND NUCLEAR WAR, read
ELLSBERG’S THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE (2018) and THE BUTTON: THE NEW NUCLEAR ARMS RACE AND PRESIDENTIAL POWER FROM
TRUMAN TO TRUMP by William Perry and Tom Collina (2020). The failures of
the world's leaders to mobilize against nuclear weapons and climate change are
UNPRECEDENTED CRIMES. Read Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, or
at least the last chapter or concluding pages (on nuclear
winter) for indignation not only against the crimes but against continued
public apathy. Read the conclusion of The Button giving ten recommendations
for a safer world. Items 9 and 10 appeal
to citizens to incorporate the nuclear weapons crisis into the popular uprising
against diverse social dysfunctions, by implication the climate catastrophe And we in 2020 include the Covid-19 pandemic. The
editorial on the Covid-19 pandemic by Gregg Gonsalvez appeared in The Nation July 27/August 3, 2020 with
the title: “Stop the Death March.” Readers
can connect fossil fuels-wars-warming-pandemics.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/protest-survive-aids-coronavirus/
Connect
the dots. Blum, Fantina, Mayer, Leonard, Carter and Woodworth, Kramer and
White, Ellsberg, Perry and Collina, Gonsalvez.
We must stop the death march. They know how, and we must listen and act.
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