Saturday Report 7/15/23 - Climate change is melting down America; is it time to nationalize the poison that's killing the planet?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

— The Clarence Thomas corruption scandal grows. In addition to hustling lavish vacations, private jet travel, gifts, a home for his mother, school for his son, and entrance into the most rarefied clubs and venues in America, Thomas appears to have also been shaking down his former law clerks. They’ve been passing tens of thousands of dollars apiece to his assistant via Venmo, marked as being for Christmas parties or gifts or something else that’s still a bit fuzzy. Plus, The New York Times published an in-depth piece about Thomas’ membership in a super-high-prestige fat-cat club named after rags-to-riches author Horatio Alger; Thomas has even brought the club into the Supreme Court chambers when they’re unused for their rituals and ceremonies. The Republicans on this court were eager, with Citizens United, to legalize political bribery for members of Congress; most Americans didn’t realize they were simultaneously legalizing it for themselves. Most of the Republicans on the Court been on-the-take ever since, sucking up to rightwing billionaires and then doing their bidding in their decisions, and this has severely corrupted American politics. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse promises hearings on Supreme Court corruption this coming week; get some popcorn and stay tuned!

— Should we protect our great-great grand children’s rights today? One of the basic tenets of many indigenous people’s worldview regarding decision-making is to always consider future generations, even all the way out to the seventh generation down the line. Now the United Nations is proposing we cement in place the rights we currently enjoy in the free world so they’ll be there for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. It’s been 75 years since the adoption of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Maastricht Principles on the Human Rights of Future Generations, rolled out yesterday at the UN, is intended to update them and strengthen them for the future. It’s a great start.

— Florida Republican calls for gutting the FBI like a fish and ending all public schools. State Representative Anthony Sabatini wants to be a Republican congressman when he grows up, so at a recent fat-cat fundraiser he laid out his vision for the party. They need, he said, to “completely and totally destroy the political Left in this country.” In addition, the GOP should get rid of all public schools and replace them with private schools not beholden to federal laws (presumably like the requirements against racial, religious, and gender discrimination). He also called for the Department of Justice and the FBI to be “gutted like a fish,” and for Congress to shut down the federal government this fall when next year’s budgets must be completed at the end of September. The fact that not one single Republican has stood up to repudiate Sabatini and he has a good chance of ending up a congressman from Florida tells you everything you need to know about these MAGA Republicans. One-party rule, school indoctrination, destroy our government and its ability to defend us against terrorists: it sounds like he’s getting his marching orders straight from Vladimir Putin. Classic MAGA Republican.

— In Good News: Biden to forgive student debt in the billions for over 800,000 people. President Biden had planned to forgive $10,000 to $20,000 in student loan debt across the board for millions of Americans under the HEROES Act, which has clear language authorizing such debt relief. That plan got blown up by six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court who simply pretended the law didn’t say what it said. Now he’s going after the same goal in a more piecemeal fashion, announcing yesterday full loan forgiveness for around 800,000 Americans. It’s a start, and Biden promises there’s more to come.

— Florida is going down in flames because the insurance industry is cutting their losses. Who’s next and what will this mean for the future of America? One of the consequences of Governors Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott before him both denying climate change (so they can continue to take big bucks from fossil fuel billionaires) is that in the past year 15 home insurance companies have stopped writing new policies in Florida and four have left the state altogether. State Farm led the exodus and this week Farmers Insurance Co. announced they’ll be the fourth to pull the plug altogether. Home insurance rates have exploded in the Sunshine State, now that it’s also increasingly the severe storm, flooding, hurricane, and tornado state, and it’s just a matter of time before this begins to affect home values and home sales. Last week, DeSantis turned down $377 million in free federal money that would’ve gone directly to Florida residents to subsidize the purchase of more efficient appliances; he’s screwing his states’ citizens just to prove his climate denial bona fides to the fossil fuel billionaires who are helping fund his campaign. Most recently, DeSantis — when asked about global warming — said that he wasn’t willing to “politicize the weather.” Somebody should tell him that “the weather” doesn’t care if he politicizes it or not: it’s coming for Floridians and it’s going to get ugly.

— Would you live in a Red state or Red area? Louise and I have moved around a lot in our lives; our philosophy, decided on when we got married in 1972, was that we’d take our retirement in pieces while we were young enough to enjoy it (we got the idea from John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee). So, we’ve been serial entrepreneurs, starting five successful businesses, building them up enough to sell off, and then spending a year or two or three living off the proceeds before moving to another state or country and starting over. In the past 50+ years we’ve lived in Michigan, New Hampshire, Georgia, Vermont, Oregon, and Germany but we’ve never made a decision about where to move based on politics. Today, however, things have changed so much in America that we’d probably be reluctant to ever again move to a Red state, and apparently we share that concern with millions of Americans who are moving from state-to-state purely to find a comfortable political climate. Earlier this month the Associated Press published an in-depth article about families who are migrating just for politics; it’s an amazing and frankly tragic commentary on the tribalization of American politics.

— What!? Are publishers already training AI to write books “from” best-selling authors? SAG/AFTRA, the union I’m a member of, went on strike this week over studio demands to be able to “scan” an actor to put in future movies — without residuals or other pay — via AI systems (among other things). At least one famous author has said his publisher has looked into training an AI system on his writing so it can crank out future books under his name. Things are shifting in the creative landscape, and whether this is simply a technology change or a major revision of the creative fields is yet to be seen. I plugged “write an article about immigration in the voice of Thom Hartmann” into ChatGPT a month or so ago and got a startlingly good 500-word essay back, although it still wasn’t publication quality. Will this become a tool used by artists and other creatives, or will it replace us? There was a time when knowing how to drive a team of horses was a highly marketable skill; then came the automobile and the gas-powered tractor. Is this analogous? I’m not sure, but frankly find the entire scene fascinating. I’m just hoping the number of people who get left behind — like those teamsters of old — can land on their feet if things go the way they look they’re going.

— Geeky Science! Climate change is melting down America: we need to nationalize the poison that's killing the planet. Here’s just a short list of headlines from yesterday via Drudge:
Temps climb to extreme levels even for hottest part of USA...PHOENIX HEATWAVE LONGEST EVER...
FEAR: Blackout would kill 9X more than Katrina...
Texas power demand ANOTHER record...
Florida ocean warmth soars to shocking levels...
Canada sees farthest-north 100-degrees ever...
Capital of Vermont cut off and bracing for catastrophic flood...
Last November, I wrote a Daily Take here arguing that for less than the cost of the Trump Tax Cuts the federal government could go into the stock market and buy up controlling interest in the four largest fossil fuel companies in the country. We could then replace their boards of directors, start them cleaning up their thousands of methane-leaking wells and dirty refineries, and reconfigure them as energy companies rather than fossil fuel companies, moving them to renewables as preparation for selling them back into the marketplace. During the transition, we could also stop them from funding climate denial groups and Republican politicians.
I brought the topic up with a member of Congress on my show yesterday and he backed away from such a nationalization scheme (and I understand why; until there’s a solid Democratic majority even talking about such a thing will bring the “socialist” and “Venezuela!” labels), but more now than even back in November when I wrote about it I believe this is the best starting place to deal with America’s climate crisis. Check out the article if you haven’t read it before; I think you’ll find the argument compelling: