We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, April 6, 2017

The toll of pollution: How many lives vs. how much profit?

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from his blog Systemic Disorder.
Not only has the Trump administration proposed draconian cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and signaled its intention to rescind air-pollution rules for motor vehicles scheduled to come into force between 2022 and 2025, it has issued an executive order requiring a “review [of] existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources.”

One of the targets of this order is the Clean Power Plan....
Dolack sees that capitalism, with its current expression in the Empire's capitalist transnational class and their obsessive pursuit of profit/power for their tiny class, is on a course to destroy human life by destroying our habitat. Because the destruction is so slowly insidious, people don't notice it very much unless they suffer from some environmental illness. 

Far too many people (mostly the upper middle class) are going along to get along, and the lower classes of working people are too brainwashed or confused by all the misinformation, and maybe too preoccupied by just surviving in an increasing hostile capitalist environment, that they simply don't have the energy to resist sufficiently. Meanwhile our masters in the tiny capitalist class are totally preoccupied by their obsessive desire to satisfy their addiction to profits and power while the Doomsday Clock under the Trump administration may be accelerating its movement toward midnight.
The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging biotechnologies, and cybertechnology that could inflict irrevocable harm, whether by intention, miscalculation, or by accident, to our way of life and to the planet.