What's It All About, Newt?

Listening to the new Republican majority in the house list their top priorities this morning, I realized that it is entirely possible for this crowd of morons to pull off an unintended conspiracy. Their agenda is to strip the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, to eliminate any federal funding of Planned Parenthood, to bankrupt the Social Security system, and to undermine health care legislation. Their campaign monkey-talk about "jobs" and "it's the economy, stupid" was a smokescreen for the brainless morons who vote Republican but live Democrat. Now that they are in the driver's seat, their "plan" is to eliminate every federal government activity that provides value to working people. That was the idea behind Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" and Ronny Wrinkle's "government is the problem" and Bush/Cheney's outright pillaging of the nation's banking account.

None of that is new news. The only question one might ask is "Why?" I think the species-suicidal green house gas agenda is the key to the answer.

Republicans have always--with the momentary exception of Teddy Roosevelt and, sort of, Abraham Lincoln--been the tools of international money. Every action an American conservative takes is intended to either preserve the assets of the idle rich or put more money in their pockets. Global warming, especially ocean warming, presents an emergency to these powerful, useless, corrupt, and lazy people.

If the working class woke up to the threat to our species and to the world, huge resources would be spent on saving future generations. The only people who have huge resources are that 1-10% who own the majority of assets in the industrialized world and who control the world's income. Those people have two characteristics: they are incredibly greedy and incredibly foolish. Those qualities have worked for them for centuries and they expect them to keep working indefinitely.

Apparently, their theory is that the world is going to suffer a catastrophe regardless of what we do now. After all, scientists have been saying the world is heading toward a point of no return since the mid-1960s. Fifty years late, we must have past that point, right? So, if we can't save the world we might as well finish raping and pillaging every culture and resource on the planet right up to the end of life as we know it. Because many of those filthy rich families have pulled this off for the last several hundred years, they expect it will keep working for them, at least, for the rest of their lives. And they are probably right.

Worst case, my generation will suffer the result of the last 100 years of unrestricted industrial pollution and profiteering near the end of our lives. Which leaves out children to live lives of suffering and misery, one environmental catastrophe after the last, depleting resources, collapsing societies, and many of the horrors that science fiction has depicted in thousands of apocalyptic end-of-times scenarios. While most of us worry for our children, the rich have no such limitations. The ruling class has been willing to eat its young for convenience, entertainment, and profit since Roman times, at least. Every one of these crusty old families is willing to sacrifice humanity to preserve another week or two of their own opulence.

Since the 2010 elections, they have accelerated their misbehavior; tossing off even a pretense of doing what they do "for the good of the nation." Today, it's all about grabbing as many resources as they can hoard with the hope that they can hole up in their gated castles while the rest of us suffer the consequences.

The media is doing a damn good job of distracting the marching morons from issues that matter, too. Jabbering about Charlie Sheen's latest stupidity, Justin Beiber's ass, and all of the rest of the mindless crap that passes for "news" is just a way to eliminate any focus on anything that actually matters.

The real question is, "Will it work when the sky really begins to fall?" Ask the Roman ruling elites or the German Nazi elites or the British ruling class or King Louis the 16th's buddies. Obviously, it worked for a few of them, but a bunch of those useless inbred horse-faced, big-toothed, cousin-marrying hillbillies went down in a wave of pissed off peasants. I hope I live long enough to see our Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Girards, Biddles, Morris, Fords, Hiltons, Mellons, Kochs, Vanderbilts, Bushs, Murdocks, Trumps, Waltons, and the rest of that pack reap the humiliation and lynching they so well deserve.