After Health Care ends….if it ever does with all of the stall tactics The Corporations and Corporate Repubs are using….the next two issues we will be dealing with have planetary implications.
Climate Crisis and Immigration Reform are unfortunately, inexorably linked. And as is the American way, we are dealing with both of them from a starting point of American Exceptionalism. We are approaching them in terms of the Right Wing Framing that the Corporatists have succeeded in imposing on us. We are approaching them with…heh…a Pre 9/11 mindset.
One of the supposed lessons that 9/11 supposedly taught us is that The USA is “no longer protected by our oceans.” Yet we still seem to think that we are somehow insulated from the rest of the planet. We are not. But we still deal with THE most important issue on earth, and it inevitable effects, as if we were.
As the already devastating economic and social effects of Climate Crisis inevitably accelerate, so will economic migration. And no border wall will stop either one.
Our planet of nearly 7 billion people is already experiencing food and water shortages. Some caused by, but most …so far… just exacerbated by Climate Change. Those food and water shortages, along with their effects on agriculture and industry, will cause massive economic migration.
What is economic migration? It is when people, when our fellow human beings are faced with a choice: Stay where you are and watch your children starve….or move somewhere else.
Which would you choose?
Add in the political instability caused by economic instability that will…again inevitably….lead to regional strife and war, and you have what will be one of the most devastating near term effects of Climate Crisis: Climate refugees….economic migrants. Human beings who have no choice but to flee there once productive and sustaining home regions and go somewhere else…so as not to starve, die of thirst or be killed by armies waging Resource Wars.
How are we dealing with these planetary problems here in America?
The same way we deal with ALL big issues, ignoring them and denying them in the Exceptionalist, Right Wing thought frames that are designed to bring short term benefit to the Ruling Class while screwing everybody else.
The Ruling Class wants economic migrants to exploit for cheap labor to continue running their businesses in a way that will kill the planet…while also wanting to xenophobically demonize them to keep them as a helpless Lower Class…a Serf Class. Vulnerable to their control through laws that make them “illegal” even while exploiting our fellow human beings for their short term economic benefit.
That short term benefit, the temporary prosperity, makes America appear to be THE place to try to come for economic migrants. We are already faced with a ridiculous situation when it comes to “Illegal Immigration.” American businesses lure economic migrants, while American government attempts to keep them out. American businesses”bring” them here so they can make billions of dollars from their cheap labor. And then the American Government SPENDS billions of dollars to round them up and hold them in absolutely horrid conditions…
Immigrants detained in a short-term processing center in the basement of a Los Angeles federal building can no longer be held for weeks without access to drinking water, clean clothes or items such as sanitary napkins, according to a settlement announced Wednesday.
….to send them back home. Back to a home that will kill them if they stay there…so they come right back…and American Businesses hire them again. To exploit them. In numbers that dictate that the American Government has absolutely NO way to regulate or abate, let alone stop. We are literally overwhelmed with economic migrants that are encouraged to come here….and then treated like criminals…treated worse than criminals…when they do.
And this is of course, all the fault …..somehow….of the economic migrants, not the Businesses who lure them here.
The American solution to economic migration? Spend 94 BILLION dollars to round up 12 million people and……????
What happens when we take 12 million people out of the work force? What happens when we send 12 million people back to the impoverished or deadly conditions in the places they migrated from? And most importantly….what happens when not just those 12 million all try to come back….but are joined by millions of other economic migrants and Climate Crisis refugees?
The Ruling Class wants us to view Climate Crisis as a strictly American, narrowly focused economic issue. They want to frame the fact that their industries are killing the planet strictly as a trade off of their “right to make money” vs “alarmists attempting to kill businesses.”
American Businesses, in other words Corporations and The Ruling Class that owns them want us to think that unless they are free to kill the planet “those other countries” will steal our industries (that they are busy outsourcing for cheaper labor, or exploiting economic migrants for cheaper labor)….and “hurt America.”
Well guess what? Climate Change is already hurting America, as are the effects of economic migration.
And denying it is not going to make that hurt go away. In fact ignoring, denying, and failing to deal with these planetary issues in a planetary, rather than parochially nationalistic fashion …..will END America.
And the rest of the planet.
And making a bunch of money before that really won’t do anybody any good at all, if you don’t have a planet to spend it on. If we DON’T put the health of the planet before the profits of The Corporations. There will BE no Corporations.
We are about to deal with these planetary issues in Congress. Will there be ANY thought given to the long term effects of the rapidly changing nature of our planet?
Will we deal with these two inevitabilities in a TRULY comprehensive and well thought out fashion, addressing the REAL issues that we are facing?
No, of course not.
We will deal with them from the posture of the Right Wing Framing od=f these issues.
Scary Brown People WILLFULLY invading our country to steal our jobs and murder us in our beds, and Dirty Fucking Hippies trying to cripple American Businesses.
We will in other words do what America always does, hide under the metaphorical bed in Right Wing Fear and pretend that building walls and changing light bulbs are going to make a difference.
What WILL make a difference?
The first step is discrediting and discarding those Right Wing Fear Based frames and addressing the REAL issues that our PLANET faces. The 7 billion people who live on the planet. Not the short term concerns of the Ruling Class and the paltry 300 million Americans, a mere 5% of the population of the Planet, (or a goodly percentage of them) that they have duped into thinking that as long as America is ok under their beneficent Corporate Rule, and that the rest of the people on the Planet, and the Planet itself, doesn’t matter.
But we are NOT ok.
And the rest of the Planet DOES matter. As we are about to find out in very harsh terms.
And no amount of Exceptionalism and denial can change that.
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no one will want to go there.
The Youngbloods
Loving this stupid planet of ours has given everyone a wrong sense of priorities. If only those enviro-wingnuts would devote their lives to the pursuit of money like normal people, then everything would be OK.
back in the 90’s.
Got the hell out of the Rust Belt,
before the place imploded.
It’s a tough decision —
leaving everything you know and love,
in exchange, for the great unknown,
somewhere else.
It’s hard for me to imagine that happening
on a mass scale.
It was hard enough to make the transition
for just 1 person.
But you do, what you got to do, I guess
to survive. (that is, if you still have the means to.)
thx for the thought-provoking, and forward-looking post, buhdy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
http://www.exopoliticseurope.com/
Was the continued suppression of free energy
Advanced life extension and cheap disease cures which generate zero profits for big pharma
And the decision to wipe out humanity and start all over again
So it’s far bigger than either left or right.
on a blog elsewhere, the other day; a comment posted to an essay about what global warming might bring. The commenter seemed to see only new, intriguing possibilities, and minor inconveniences, in all of that.
When it was pointed out that ocean levels rising would eliminate a great deal of inhabited real estate, his response was “Well, can’t they all just move inland?”
As if everyone was middle class, and could just happily pick themselves up out of their rental housing and go move somewhere else…I guess? Since everyone has these nice middle class jobs that can finance dealing with such…inconveniences?
He was also convinced that climate change would not adversely affect Appalachia, so how could we expect those people in coal-mining country to support a climate bill?
That’s what we’re up against, in part. Argumentative, willful ignorance. People who think they are all talk show hosts and thus have no agenda but to try to show the other guy up. Information is apparently not required, just attitude.
but with the innefectual left and the cynical “center” the latter being far more dangerous than the right.
The street-fascists are just dupes to the corporate/banker class that makes up the oligarchy. The oligarchy uses the culture wars and paid stooges to broadcast ridiculous lies that make Joseph Goebbels, Stalin and Mao look like objective journalists. The oligarchy is, essentially, threatening to unleash right-wing terror if they are not placated. This happened in 2000 and persuaded the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Bush and is happening now with Obama’s very feeble attempt at some minor reforms.
unless we smarten up