Zooey wrote:

… environmental degradation have upped the stakes to a critical level, and we are tipping towards the drain, and I can’t think of one single reason to hope that the slide will be anything other than a Cormac McCarthy nightmare.

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Shoot Zooey, Hillary and the Dems will fix things.

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link:https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/democratic-sen-chuck-schumer-says-top-priority-for-next-year-is-giant-corporate-tax-cut/
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, likely to be majority leader next year if Democrats take back the Senate, told CNBC Tuesday that one of his top two 2017 priorities would be an enormous corporate tax cut.

Speaking of himself in the third person, Schumer said that “we’ve got to get things done…
……For his part, Schumer has long been negotiating with Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman to lay the groundwork for such a corporate-friendly deal.

While Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called such a scheme “a giant wet kiss for the tax dodgers,” Schumer told CNBC that he’d have no trouble getting her on board. “She’s going to surprise everybody,” Schumer said. “She’s going to be both a progressive and a constructive force.”
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Democracy Deferred: Ohio Removes Anti-Fracking Measures From County Ballots
link:http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38063-democracy-deferred-ohio-removes-anti-fracking-measures-from-county-ballots
“…Ohioans are not nearly as conservative as their gerrymandered state legislature might have one think. To fight back, many progressive Ohioans are going local to make gains on issues like the minimum wage and fracking. For this reason, the local ballot initiative process — by which citizens write, petition for and vote on legislation — has taken on increased significance. But after years of local battles, the future of this basic mode of resistance is in jeopardy.

This September, county-level “community bills of rights” in Medina, Portage, Athens and Meigs were removed from these Ohio counties’ respective ballots, despite all four gathering enough signatures to qualify for the ballot….”
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link:https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19102016/cafo-epa-regulations-factory-farms-get-bigger-pollution-grows-environmental-impact-methane
Factory Farms Get Bigger, Pollution Grows, but Regulators Don’t Even Know Where They Are
“If you look at the trajectory over the last 20 years, it’s going in one direction and it’s going there fast. It’s terrifying to watch,” said Abel Russ, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, which has sued the EPA for CAFO information. “They just keep getting bigger and more concentrated. There’s no limiting factor.”

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Is Trump the “first demagogue of the Anthropocene” ?

The Atlantic:https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/trump-the-first-demagogue-of-the-anthropocene/504134/

“…….So to now watch a demagogue contest the presidency, running a campaign that appeals to racism and xenophobia, has felt less like the sudden apparition of an unfathomable nightmare and more like the early realization of a seasonal forecast. You can hear the long-predicted gusts, the rain pounding on the roof and the groaning thunder. It’s all just happening four decades earlier than the weather person said.

So I want to propose a new way of understanding Donald Trump. He not only represents a white racial backlash, and he has not only opened the way for an American extension of the European far right. Insofar as his supporters are drawn to him by a sense of global calamity, and insofar as his rhetoric singles out the refugee as yet another black and brown intruder trying to violate the nation’s cherished borders, Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene.

We should take Trump at his word when he calls Syrian refugees “one of the great Trojan horses,” or when his son bizarrely describes them as Skittles that “will kill you.” In Europe, Trump’s far-right kin have long blurred the differences between legal immigration, Islamist terrorism, and the refugees fleeting the Syrian War. After the Paris attacks last year, one leader of the French far-right National Front said, “Today, we can see that immigration has become favorable terrain for the development of Islamism.”

This xenophobia is grounded in real-life trends. I will focus on two in particular: moribund economic growth and the mass migration of non-white people. Both will likely intensify as the planet warms. (A third vital trend—the political and cultural upheaval of the U.S. racial hierarchy—will not vary with climate change.)

First, climate change could easily worsen the inequality that has already hollowed out the Western middle class. A recent analysis in Nature projected that the effects of climate change will reduce the average person’s income by 23 percent by the end of the century. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts that unmitigated global warming could cost the American economy $200 billion this century. (Some climate researchers think the EPA undercounts these estimates.)

Future consumers will not register these costs so cleanly, though—there will not be a single climate-change debit exacted on everyone’s budgets at year’s end. Instead, the costs will seep in through many sources: storm damage, higher power rates, real-estate depreciation, unreliable and expensive food. Climate change could get laundered, in other words, becoming just one more symptom of a stagnant and unequal economy. As quality of life declines, and insurance premiums rise, people could feel that they’re being robbed by an aloof elite.

They won’t even be wrong. It’s just that due to the chemistry of climate change, many members of that elite will have died 30 or 50 years prior….see link

somethin i read, fwiw:

link:https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/10/17/20330/journalists-shower-hillary-clinton-campaign-cash?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=watchdog&utm_medium=publici-email&goal=0_ffd1d0160d-9567d30c7c-100386029&mc_cid=9567d30c7c&mc_eid=cdb5d77305
Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash
Far fewer making contributions to Donald Trump, analysis shows

…In all, people identified in federal campaign finance filings as journalists, reporters, news editors or television news anchors — as well as other donors known to be working in journalism — have combined to give more than $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis.

Nearly all of that money — more than 96 percent — has benefited Clinton: About 430 people who work in journalism have, through August, combined to give about $382,000 to the Democratic nominee, the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis indicates….”

Zooey wrote:

I have been told several times that Trump will win.

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I wonder if Trump voters will blame that Libertarian guy for the defeat,
the way Gore people blamed Nader.

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I thot this paragraph deserved a post of itz own:

“….GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.”

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