“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.” – Donald Trump
The Washington Postrevealed yesterday that Donald Trump told a group of fossil fuel executives that if they’d give him a billion-dollar bribe, he’d use it to become president and then eliminate all of President Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones from coming into law.
The industry barons had been grumbling that they’d already spent more than $400 million lobbying the Biden administration over the past year to little effect. They really shouldn’t have a basis to complain: just the three largest oil companies operating in America made $85.65 billion dollars in profits last year, which they could split up among shareholders and senior executives.
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Nonetheless, Trump’s brazen appeal for them to grease his palm seemed to shock even these hardened planet-killers.
This comes the same week that The Guardian broke the story that most of the world’s top climate scientists surveyed — all of them among the 843 authors of the IPCC’s most recent report — believe the planet is going to crash through the 1.5° Celsius threshold they’d previously defined as a disaster scenario. Most are now expecting us to hit 2.5° or even 3° Celsius, levels that could make much of the planet uninhabitable for humans. And it’s going to happen a hell of a lot sooner than anybody had anticipated just a decade ago.
It’s gotten so bad that some climate scientist’s are questioning the wisdom of their own families having children.
In other words, Donald Trump and his Republican friends are explicitly willing to trade our and our children’s future for a billion dollars. And they couldn’t have offered this deal to the industry if five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court hadn’t legalized political bribery of both politicians and judges (like themselves and Aileen Cannon) when they overturned the good government laws Congress passed in the wake of the Nixon bribery scandals in the 1970s.
It may have been an unnecessary effort on Trump’s part.
The Saudis and Russians — who both desperately want Trump back in the White House — cut oil production over the past two months by 1.4 million barrels a day with the apparent goal of driving US gasoline prices up past $6 a gallon in time for the election this fall.
Remember the GOP hysteria around gas prices hitting $5 a gallon in October and November of 2022 just in time for the midterm elections, with Fox “News” hosts hyping stickers being put on gas pumps across the country bearing a picture of Biden pointing to the price with an “I did that” slogan? It almost singlehandedly gave us GOP control of the House of Representatives and was the result of a similar Saudi and Russian production cut.
Now, it looks like we ain’t seen nothing yet.
When he was president, Trump allowed the Saudis to buy the largest gasoline refinery in America (at Port Arthur, Texas); between their oil supply cuts and the possibility they could reduce that refinery’s output this fall (no doubt because of “maintenance issues”) gas could easily puncture the $7 a gallon ceiling by November.
Analysts found that throughout the midterm election year 2022, there was a nearly one-to-one inverse correlation between the price of gasoline, Americans’ perception of the state of the economy, and approval ratings for the Biden administration. As The Washington Post pointed out that year, there was an estimated 91 percent inverse correlation between the price of gas and the popularity of Democrats when they’re in power: as gas prices go up, Democrats’ approval ratings (and electability) measurably and predictably go down.
The willingness to destroy our collective home in exchange for riches is one of the most tragic and extreme examples of greed run amok. Which shouldn’t surprise us: for the past century, the unofficial slogan of the GOP has been “Greed is Good!” as memorialized in the 1987 movie Wall Street.
Will Rogers used to tell the story that when he was a kid the way he learned which visitors to his parents ranch were Republicans was that they were the ones his dad told him to keep an eye on so they didn’t steal anything. Decades may have passed, but the GOP hasn’t changed a bit.
Their standard-bearer this year is the living incarnation of that slogan. As Trump told a cheering audience when he was first running for president:
“I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that, I’m a greedy — I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?”
The good news is that there is, increasingly, pushback from the Biden administration and Democrats in the states.
Five Blue states are now looking at ways to hold fossil fuel moguls and their companies accountable for the damage climate change-fueled extreme weather has inflicted on their people. Vermont is leading the way, with legislation that passed their House this week and is now headed to the Vermont Senate, almost certainly carrying a large enough majority to overcome a veto by the state’s Republican governor.
The bill would set up a $2 billion fund to pay for weather damage, funded by a tax of sorts on the fossil fuel industry. New York, California, Massachusetts, and Maryland are all looking at similar legislation this year.
But as long as the Supreme Court’s corrupt 5-4 Citizens Uniteddecision stands and Republican politicians and judges are eager to take bribes from the industry, these efforts will be purely remedial, the equivalent of putting Band-Aids on cancerous lesions.
These tragic realities highlight the extraordinary stakes of this year’s election, which will not only determine the future survival of American democracy but also the destiny of most all life on Earth. The GOP’s embrace of greed isn’t just a moral issue any more: it’s now threatening us all.
Double-check your voter registration and reach out to wake up everybody you know. Given how rapidly extreme weather is amplifying, causing death and destruction across America (and the world), your own family’s survival may depend on it.
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