Journalist Tom Brokaw famously dubbed the generation that came of age during the Depression and World War II "The Greatest Generation." This was a group of people with the wisdom to face these two global evils, the courage to confront them, and the selflessness to accept the sacrifices meeting them entailed.
By those standards, I guess you'd have to call the present generation of so-called grown-ups in this country "The Greediest Generation."
I was reminded of this when I read that all but one of the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to deny the reality of global warming, regardless of cause. Yep, they actually voted--nary a climatologist in the bunch--to deny that global warming exists.
The hubris of such a vote is nearly unfathomable. It's as if they'd voted to deny that the earth revolves around the sun.
Beyond this, such a vote is strikingly stupid.
To put it in perspective, let's imagine these clowns had been in the House during our grandparents' time. They decide to take a vote on the reality of the Depression. Sure, lots of folks are out of work, the banks are bankrupt, the breadlines are growing, the breadbasket is blowing away in a cloud of dust, but is the Depression really real?
Nope, we don't think so.
And what about those politically-motivated rumors of war over in distant Europe? They say some guy named Hitler invaded Poland; that he's currently bombing England and France; that his tanks are in North Africa; that he's moving on Stalingrad? Let's take a vote on it.
No, there's no war.
We can deny all we want. We can even legitimize our denial through the political process.
But we can't change the nature of reality. It'll always be there, silent and irresistible, to show us when we're wrong.
Showing posts with label Republican Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican Party. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Sixty Students
Facing financial meltdown, the Detroit public school system has been ordered to close half its schools, raising class sizes to as high as sixty students per high school class. Just another present to the people from our enlightened leaders in Washington.
It's not fair, of course, to blame this crisis entirely on the present Republican Congress. Detroit's public schools, like most big-city public schools, have been in freefall for decades.
But then, it's not inappropriate to suggest that the slash-and-burn mentality the current Republican Congress has brought to our nation's capital is the same that has failed our public schools over the past half-century.
To speak bluntly, our nation's leaders don't give a shit about poor black kids in Detroit's public schools. They never have. And witness the results.
I looked up the statistics on one of Detroit's public high schools, Barsamian Preparatory Center. (It was first on the alphabetical list.) Almost 100% of its students are black. Almost 80% receive free lunches. Its attendance rates are around 55%. Over 60% of its students lack proficiency (as defined under No Child Left Behind) in all subjects, including reading, math, and writing. That's actually a lot better than the district as a whole, where the below-proficient population is over 80%. And anywhere between 50 and 60% of the students in this "preparatory" high school drop out before completing their degrees.
Apparently, what they're being prepared for is the reality of being poor and black in America: no one gives a shit about you.
I have a prediction for the 60 students in each class at schools like Barsamian Prep. 30 will drop out and end up either dead on the streets, hooked on drugs, living off welfare, or working at minimum wage. Of the remaining 30, 10 will rely on public assistance, 10 will find low-wage employment, 5 will go to community college and obtain work as lab techs or clerical laborers, 4 will go to state schools and possibly manage to claw their way into the middle class, and 1 will go to Harvard, where, feeling hopelessly alienated and out of place, he'll commit suicide.
And our elected leaders in Washington will be chauffeured home to their mansions and townhouses, and wash their hands for dinner, and congratulate themselves on a job well done.
It's not fair, of course, to blame this crisis entirely on the present Republican Congress. Detroit's public schools, like most big-city public schools, have been in freefall for decades.
But then, it's not inappropriate to suggest that the slash-and-burn mentality the current Republican Congress has brought to our nation's capital is the same that has failed our public schools over the past half-century.
To speak bluntly, our nation's leaders don't give a shit about poor black kids in Detroit's public schools. They never have. And witness the results.
I looked up the statistics on one of Detroit's public high schools, Barsamian Preparatory Center. (It was first on the alphabetical list.) Almost 100% of its students are black. Almost 80% receive free lunches. Its attendance rates are around 55%. Over 60% of its students lack proficiency (as defined under No Child Left Behind) in all subjects, including reading, math, and writing. That's actually a lot better than the district as a whole, where the below-proficient population is over 80%. And anywhere between 50 and 60% of the students in this "preparatory" high school drop out before completing their degrees.
Apparently, what they're being prepared for is the reality of being poor and black in America: no one gives a shit about you.
I have a prediction for the 60 students in each class at schools like Barsamian Prep. 30 will drop out and end up either dead on the streets, hooked on drugs, living off welfare, or working at minimum wage. Of the remaining 30, 10 will rely on public assistance, 10 will find low-wage employment, 5 will go to community college and obtain work as lab techs or clerical laborers, 4 will go to state schools and possibly manage to claw their way into the middle class, and 1 will go to Harvard, where, feeling hopelessly alienated and out of place, he'll commit suicide.
And our elected leaders in Washington will be chauffeured home to their mansions and townhouses, and wash their hands for dinner, and congratulate themselves on a job well done.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Burn, Baby, Burn
Sorry for the blaze of environmentally-themed posts in recent days--I promise I'll have something entirely new soon--but I was so incensed by the House vote yesterday, I just had to fire off this cartoon. And yes, as you can see, all the incendiary language is intentional.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
A Tolerable Planet
Recently, I reported on attempts to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases. Today, I am sad to report House Republicans have had their way: in their spending bill, the House not only slashed EPA funding but tucked in an amendment to prohibit EPA regulation of heat-trapping gases. The reason, of course, is that they claim such regulations would hurt the economy.
The last time I talked about this issue, I tried to see it from the side of your average American, someone who's afraid of losing her or his job (or who has already lost it) and who honestly believes regulating CO2 and methane will hurt their chances of a decent life. That person, I suggested, was someone with whom one can sympathize.
But the Republican leadership and representatives aren't supposed to be your average Americans. Politicians are supposed to be forward-thinking, insightful people who understand the implications of their actions. They're supposed to think about the damn future, not just about the next election cycle.
Sadly, American politics are in ideological freefall, with neither party able to govern effectively. All they can do is piss off the electorate enough that the vote swings toward the other party two or four years later.
We are living in a climate-altered world. That's fact, not ideology. If the world's climate gets much worse, we may not be living at all. I can appreciate the difficulty of the average citizen in accepting that reality. But I can't accept elected officials' ideological purblindness to the actual world in which they and their constituents live.
Thoreau wrote in his journal: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" That was in the 1850s. He was thinking of the future. If he were here today, he'd surely be shocked and saddened to see so many of the nation's supposed leaders living in the past.
The last time I talked about this issue, I tried to see it from the side of your average American, someone who's afraid of losing her or his job (or who has already lost it) and who honestly believes regulating CO2 and methane will hurt their chances of a decent life. That person, I suggested, was someone with whom one can sympathize.
But the Republican leadership and representatives aren't supposed to be your average Americans. Politicians are supposed to be forward-thinking, insightful people who understand the implications of their actions. They're supposed to think about the damn future, not just about the next election cycle.
Sadly, American politics are in ideological freefall, with neither party able to govern effectively. All they can do is piss off the electorate enough that the vote swings toward the other party two or four years later.
We are living in a climate-altered world. That's fact, not ideology. If the world's climate gets much worse, we may not be living at all. I can appreciate the difficulty of the average citizen in accepting that reality. But I can't accept elected officials' ideological purblindness to the actual world in which they and their constituents live.
Thoreau wrote in his journal: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" That was in the 1850s. He was thinking of the future. If he were here today, he'd surely be shocked and saddened to see so many of the nation's supposed leaders living in the past.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Or Well
Pennsylvania voters, God love ‘em, have just elected (by a sizable margin) a Republican governor and (in a squeaker) a Republican senator who share, among other loony opinions, the belief that taxes are evil and should not be imposed under any circumstances. Seems like folks in the Keystone State were sick an’ tired of them damn tax-and-spend liberals in Warshington and Harrisburg with their bailouts, stimyoolous plans, and what-not draggin’ our country and our economy down.
Never mind that without the bailouts of the automobile, banking, and lending industries, millions of jobs (not only in those industries but in all sectors affected by them) would have been lost. Never mind that without the stimulus, we’d be in a full-blown depression comparable to the Great one. Never mind that the deficit under Obama is actually lower than it was after eight years of Bushonomics.
Never mind any of that. The citizens hath spoken, and their word is law.
Now, from an environmental perspective, the most depressing part of this whole business is the governor-elect’s vow to resist imposing a severance tax on the gas companies that have descended on my state like a swarm of locusts. Every other state in the union that allows deep-well drilling (the “fracking” process you’ve heard me talk about before) makes the drillers pay such a tax, which the states use to support various programs including, most importantly, environmental clean-up from the drilling. Pennsylvania’s State House, controlled by Democrats, passed a severance tax last year, but its State Senate, controlled by Republicans, can’t seem to move this legislation out of committee. With the new governor at the helm, all hope for a severance tax is lost: even if, by some miracle, the Senate could be convinced to pass this legislation, the governor would surely veto it.
Those opposed to the severance tax say it will scare away the gas companies. If this were true, I’d say that's the best reason of all that we should impose a severance tax. But it’s not true: the gas companies will come wherever the gas is, and the gas is in Pennsylvania. They’ll pay the tax if that’s what it takes to mine our state’s natural resources, just as they pay it in every other gas-rich state across the land.
As you know, I'd prefer a permanent moratorium on gas drilling. That would be the ideal. But in the absence of that unlikely outcome, a severance tax is a minimal palliative against the environmental devastation drilling causes, as well as a minimal mechanism to level the playing field for alternative energy development. It’s a recognition that when drillers drill on public lands--as they’ve already begun to do in Pennsylvania’s state forests--they owe the people who own the lands, namely the citizens of the state of Pennsylvania, something in return. It’s a tax, sure, but it’s a tax that returns money to the citizens, not one that takes money away from them.
But in the Orwellian logic of our newly anointed governor and senator, any tax is a bad tax. The only exception they’ll make, the only tax they’re all too willing to impose, is the exorbitant tax on the health, the environment, and the communities of the very people who put them in office.
Never mind that without the bailouts of the automobile, banking, and lending industries, millions of jobs (not only in those industries but in all sectors affected by them) would have been lost. Never mind that without the stimulus, we’d be in a full-blown depression comparable to the Great one. Never mind that the deficit under Obama is actually lower than it was after eight years of Bushonomics.
Never mind any of that. The citizens hath spoken, and their word is law.
Now, from an environmental perspective, the most depressing part of this whole business is the governor-elect’s vow to resist imposing a severance tax on the gas companies that have descended on my state like a swarm of locusts. Every other state in the union that allows deep-well drilling (the “fracking” process you’ve heard me talk about before) makes the drillers pay such a tax, which the states use to support various programs including, most importantly, environmental clean-up from the drilling. Pennsylvania’s State House, controlled by Democrats, passed a severance tax last year, but its State Senate, controlled by Republicans, can’t seem to move this legislation out of committee. With the new governor at the helm, all hope for a severance tax is lost: even if, by some miracle, the Senate could be convinced to pass this legislation, the governor would surely veto it.
Those opposed to the severance tax say it will scare away the gas companies. If this were true, I’d say that's the best reason of all that we should impose a severance tax. But it’s not true: the gas companies will come wherever the gas is, and the gas is in Pennsylvania. They’ll pay the tax if that’s what it takes to mine our state’s natural resources, just as they pay it in every other gas-rich state across the land.
As you know, I'd prefer a permanent moratorium on gas drilling. That would be the ideal. But in the absence of that unlikely outcome, a severance tax is a minimal palliative against the environmental devastation drilling causes, as well as a minimal mechanism to level the playing field for alternative energy development. It’s a recognition that when drillers drill on public lands--as they’ve already begun to do in Pennsylvania’s state forests--they owe the people who own the lands, namely the citizens of the state of Pennsylvania, something in return. It’s a tax, sure, but it’s a tax that returns money to the citizens, not one that takes money away from them.
But in the Orwellian logic of our newly anointed governor and senator, any tax is a bad tax. The only exception they’ll make, the only tax they’re all too willing to impose, is the exorbitant tax on the health, the environment, and the communities of the very people who put them in office.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Well, Well, Well....
And here's a shock: it now appears that Halliburton, the company that brought us the Iraq War as well as the gutting of environmental regulations to promote the Marcellus Shale feeding frenzy, knew weeks beforehand that the cement mixture it planned to use to seal the bottom of the Deepwater Horizon well was unstable. Halliburton has steadfastly denied that it did anything wrong or that it had any prior knowledge of faulty methods or materials.
Halliburton lied.
And when Halliburton lied, 11 human workers--and countless non-human workers--died.
If the Iraq War is any indication, Halliburton's punishment for its criminal malfeasance and suppression of the truth will be . . . well, nothing.
When you go to the polls tomorrow, all fed up with the damn Democrats and itching to make a change, to get the country back on track, to axe Obamacare, to do away with the new regulations on Wall Street, to lock in tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans, or whatever the hell else you plan to vote for, remember this: a vote for the Republicans is a vote for Halliburton, a vote for everything Halliburton stands for: rampant corporate greed and disregard for human (and non-human) life. It's not about limiting government, cutting taxes, restoring individual liberties, or any of that tea-party crap; it's about limiting government, cutting taxes, and restoring individual liberties for the people and corporations who are ruining this country and this world.
But hey, if you can live with that, vote for Halliburton. Maybe they'll be so thankful they'll clean up their act.
Halliburton lied.
And when Halliburton lied, 11 human workers--and countless non-human workers--died.
If the Iraq War is any indication, Halliburton's punishment for its criminal malfeasance and suppression of the truth will be . . . well, nothing.
When you go to the polls tomorrow, all fed up with the damn Democrats and itching to make a change, to get the country back on track, to axe Obamacare, to do away with the new regulations on Wall Street, to lock in tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans, or whatever the hell else you plan to vote for, remember this: a vote for the Republicans is a vote for Halliburton, a vote for everything Halliburton stands for: rampant corporate greed and disregard for human (and non-human) life. It's not about limiting government, cutting taxes, restoring individual liberties, or any of that tea-party crap; it's about limiting government, cutting taxes, and restoring individual liberties for the people and corporations who are ruining this country and this world.
But hey, if you can live with that, vote for Halliburton. Maybe they'll be so thankful they'll clean up their act.
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