And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.
It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.
It's CNN who really should hold Trump accountable. And because they are trading the short-term fix of increased ratings by focusing on Trump drama - and I'm not saying they shouldn't cover the Russian investigations, of course they should - but the blanket coverage, it's not about news values. It is about ratings. And it comes at a tremendous cost because Trump supporters are fully defended against this. As far as they're concerned, this is a vast conspiracy, it's fake news, it doesn't impact their daily lives, it makes them see Trump as a victim, which he wants to be seen as.
Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go '80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.
Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.
And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.
It doesn't have the ability to think rationally this economic model. It thinks like a drug addict: 'Where can I get my next fix?' It doesn't learn wisely. Any kind of measure of natural wisdom would be: you make a mistake, you correct it the next time around. But a drug addict feels terrible... and then says: 'I want more'. Unfortunately we have an economic model that thinks like a crack addict.
And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.
Trump walked into a media setting for which he was far better suited than the other contenders because he actually knows how to do reality TV and made them all look like pretenders. And I would argue that our news media has only gotten worse since Trump got in office. Trump is media crack. The ratings have never been higher. The reason CNN would run an hour of an empty podium waiting for him to show up during the campaign is because they were terrified if they turned away from Trump their rating would go down.
Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.
Because it is such a huge crisis, because it puts us on a firm science-based deadline, it's a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a better society and address raging inequality, create huge numbers of jobs, rebuild our public infrastructure. But, we can't do it unless we break every single rule in the free-market playbook. Which is why the worst people in the world all deny climate change.