Month: December 2018

Having lost all statewide offices to the Democrats in the 2018 election, the Republicans were unwilling to leave after eight years of highly divisive and incompetent rule in Wisconsin. They decided to directly overturn the people’s decision by actions in back room offices during a lame duck session by passing and enacting a law which drastically reduces the power and influence of the principal state offices, for example, the governor and the attorney general.  The Republican participants in the lame duck session were themselves gerrymandered into office.  As evidence, the Republicans have the current majority and in the fall 2018 election Democrats received 54 % of the votes but received only 37% of the seats. Needless to say the outgoing Republican governor Scott Walker promptly signed the bill. This basically keeps most of the political power in Republican Party hands even though the people of Wisconsin voted to take it away.

Not a single Republican legislative or party official protested this act by the legislature. What are these people doing? This is fascist-type behavior! These are the sort of tricks that Victor Orban of Hungary utilized to push the democratic state of Hungary into a Mussolini style fascist authoritarian country. This seems to be what the Republicans in Washington are aiming at in Wisconsin, sort of an Orban style authoritarian state by the Great Lakes. And likewise neither similar behavior in Michigan nor the outright electoral fraud committed in North Carolina has been criticized by Republican Party leadership. It appears that the Republican Party just isn’t interested in democracy anymore. It seems to have become a made-in-Europe neo-fascist Party. This means that every election threatens America’s liberties with one of the two major parties having evolved into an authoritarian party opposed to democracy.

Authoritarian rule seems to be spreading around the world as in the 1930’s. In those years it was Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Today it is Orban, Erdogan, Putin, Xi, Ayatollah Kameini, Duterti of the Philippines and many others. In earlier times American principles and its people were protected by FDR and Ronald Reagan against the strongmen. But who will stand up for America now?

Our Founders had a lot to say about this:

“A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of the Republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”

Alexander Hamilton, 1788

“Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.”

Alexander Hamilton, 1787

“But if the laws are to be trampled upon—with impunity—and a minority (a small one too) is to dictate to the majority there is an end put, at one stroke, to Republican government; and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter…”

George Washington, 1794

“A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.”

John Adams, 1775

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude rather than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!”

Samuel Adams, 1776

“No person that has enjoyed the sweets of liberty can be insensible of its infinite value, or can reflect on its reverse without horror and detestation.”

Alexander Hamilton, 1774

“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied upon to set them to rights.

Thomas Jefferson, 1789

“It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.”

Samuel Adams, 1748

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1800

“I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of examples of justice and liberality.”

George Washington, 1790

 

John Jay

For some months now Marathon Oil Company has been leading a secret campaign aligned with powerful oil industry groups and a conservative Policy group financed by Charles G. Koch to roll back automobile emissions standards, going far beyond what the Trump administration had initially proposed. Marathon’s standards have been now adopted by the Trump Administration. The argument is that, with the US now awash in oil, there is no reason to limit the use of oil. “With oil scarcity no longer a concern” Americans should have the kind of cars they want says a Marathon letter circulating in Congress.

A Koch Industry spokesman said that the Company had “a long, consistent track record of opposing all forms of corporate welfare, including all subsidies, mandates and handouts that rig the system.”  This statement should be translated from the conservative code language in which it is written to say what it means: Koch Industry opposes all government and other attempts to limit its profits and corruption. The Trump plan if adopted would increase US carbon emissions by more than the amount many mid-size countries put out in a year. Meanwhile, as this deeply un-American, unpatriotic, and threatening effort goes forward in the US, the US delegation at the current climate negotiations in Poland actively has been trying to subvert the climate discussions to be sure that they lead to nothing.  Two days before the end of the COP24 Conference the US appeared to be near achieving that goal with the Conference scheduled to end on December 14, 2018 and the representatives of around 200 countries would then go home with nothing.  When the Conference did close on December 14, this objective seemed to have been largely achieved, given the limited results.

The US delegation even made a presentation at the Conference on the benefits of fossil fuel, the direct and identified cause of global warming. The UN Secretary General had this to say as reported by the Washington Post on December 12, 2018, page 4:  “I understand that none of this is easy. I understand that some of you will need to make tough political decisions. …To waste this opportunity … would compromise our last best chance to stop runaway climate change. It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal.” In other words the point of no return is in sight. Many world leaders and their followers these days-particularly in the US -seem interested only in their own profits and care little for civilization or the people they serve.

By the point of no return is meant that time when because of the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere no matter what we do the world will continue to warm to catastrophic and extinction levels and beyond.  Dr. Stephen Hawking, the great astrophysicist, said a year before he died, in 100 years the Earth will no longer be able to support human life.  “It is collective madness.”

Our Founders had doubts whether our Republic would survive but it never occurred to them that we would ever become sufficiently technologically advanced and at the same time sufficiently greedy and foolish so as to destroy ourselves. What might they have said about this miserable state of affairs?

“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.”

Samuel Adams—1749

“Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

John Adams—1798

“Let me add, that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

Benjamin Franklin—1787

“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.”

Thomas Jefferson—1810

“Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.”

Benjamin Franklin—proposed as the motto on the Great Seal of the United States.

“Some boast of being friends to government; I am friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.”

John Hancock—1774

John Jay

On the front page of the December 3, 2018 Washington Post there appeared an article entitled “GOP falling in line with skeptics on climate.” The article cites Congresswoman and Senator-elect Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee falsely asserting that the earth has started to cool and also stating equally dishonestly that scientists have not reached a consensus on climate change.

Rick Scott, the Governor of Florida and Senator-elect, has admitted that the seas are warmer and rising and will be harmful to his state but will not admit that human activity has anything to do with it. And John Neely Kennedy who may announce for Governor of Louisiana in the near future recently said he agreed that the earth is getting hotter but asserted that “I’ve seen many persuasive arguments that it’s just a continuation of warming up from the Little Ice Age.”

On December 6, 2018 the Post published a further article on this subject.  It noted that global carbon emissions are at a record high of 37.1 billion of tons of carbon per year.  No nation is even close to meeting its voluntary carbon emission reduction level under the 2015 Paris Agreement.  The United Nations Secretary General said “We are in trouble.  We are in deep trouble with climate change.”  And of course the President has announced U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement—for personal political reasons—thereby perhaps dooming any effective response to climate change.

So as President Trump becomes more and more isolated internationally and more and more irresponsible for denying that climate change is real, he has presided over a fundamental change of the U.S. Republican Party, pushing it to place climate change denial as one of the principal assertions of its ideological mainstream. But all these politicians know better, they know that climate change in real and they know it is an existential threat to the survival of human civilization. The Trump administration even admits this in arguing for a relaxation of the automobile efficiency rules instituted by the Obama administration which were designed to prevent billions of tons of carbon from being ejected into the atmosphere.  The Trump administration has argued publicly that by the end of this century the average temperature of the earth will reach four degrees Celsius above preindustrial norms.  At this level global warming will cause enormously catastrophic effects on earth and likely could not be stopped before reaching plus six Celsius—the geologically historic  extinction level—so what difference would a few billion tons of carbon make.  It has been argued that if the world average temperature reaches plus 3.7 Celsius there is not enough wealth in the world to stop it.  It will just keep going until the world is too hot for human habitation.

Perhaps President Trump doesn’t care what happens to children in the future but many Republican members of Congress do have children and grandchildren about which they do care. And they understand that such a policy amounts to allowing the current generation to drive in big fast cars and risk their grandchildren burning. These members can’t want that, but that is the policy they are adopting.

The children and grandchildren of these members will curse them for leaving them with such a world at the end of the century—a world that is difficult to live in for humans as is and is also perhaps highly vulnerable to increases in warming not too many years in their future that will lead to a heat level that will not support human habitation. “Old grandpa Joe and/or grandma Jean when they served in the US Congress some 80 years ago, they made the pact with the devil making life difficult if not impossible for their children and children. Didn’t they care about us.”  Why is this how Republicans in Congress want to risk being remembered? It is immorality on the highest scale.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

John Adams—1798

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”

George Washington—1796

“It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

James Madison—1788

John Jay