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Title : One last shot at sanity?
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One last shot at sanity?

(The following is a contribution from David Jay Morris, a faithful reader.)

The world is in a real crisis – and it is growing.

Everybody knows it, but do enough of us appreciate just how bad the situation really is?

Around the globe, the liberal democratic order is crumbling. What’s emerging in its place is not a socialist utopia, or even the libertarian pipe-dream of a perfect free-market economy. What we are getting instead is crude authoritarian kleptocracy – government by a set of gangsters whose prime motivation seems to be greed and self-interest. People who couldn’t care less how much damage they do as long as they get their cut.

Regular readers of the Cannonfire blog know just how thin a thread is keeping American democracy from collapse. They already understand the extraordinary depth of ignorance, racism, sexism, narcissism and corruption with which Trump has conducted his affairs for decades. They know that the Russians have Trump – in the recently reported words of Christopher Steele – “over a barrel” and that our alleged president shows every sign of being quite willing to put Putin’s interests over those of the United States. They clearly see that Trumpism has become a genuine cult, and that his happily brainwashed acolytes will do anything at all – anything – to protect him from accountability (and themselves from having to honestly examine their own foul belief systems.) There is no need for me to re-document any of this here. If you need further convincing, just go back and take a look at any number of the excellent columns our host Joseph has posted over the last three years, or check out a few reports such as these: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/31/active-measures-film-documentary-russia-trump https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/convergence-is-worse-than-collusion/567368/ https://truthout.org/articles/is-there-a-cult-of-trump/

Terrifying as this is, however, is the danger we now face even worse?

Have we gone beyond the realm of what – in a properly functioning universe - would have been a script for a political thriller that would have been rejected as too far-fetched by any self-respecting Hollywood studio? Have we now entered the territory of what ought to be apocalyptic grade B science fiction, in which the very survival of the human race – and who knows how much more life on earth – is at stake?

Looking at the latest climate change data – and verifying events in the news almost every day – the answer for that would seem to be yes.

A frequent claim of climate change deniers is that the science still isn’t settled, and in that they are actually right. The oil company shills and various right-wing nutcases would have us believe that the range of the disagreement is between those who deny the problem exists at all, and the mainstream UN position as outlined by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which basically warns that we will have at least a 2oC temperature rise by the end of century if we don’t take action - and the results will be catastrophic.) In the world of actual measurable data, scientific inquiry and fact-based hypotheses, however, the IPCC position can safely be considered the most conservative reasonable estimate of what’s to come. At the other end of the debate spectrum, some scientists believe that, in the very worst case, a series of catastrophic tipping points could soon be passed, which could lead to the virtual extinction of the human race as early as 2021. That’s the actual range of the legitimate debate.

The real alarmists point especially to the potential danger of rapid warming in the arctic leading to the sudden release of giga-tons of methane (a worse greenhouse gas than CO2) now frozen in the arctic seabed and tundra, which could, in turn, set in motion an irreversible feedback loop of atmospheric warming and arctic ice thawing that could result in temperature increases in our lifetimes (and I am 67) of up to 10oC.

For a well-documented, although not peer-reviewed, look at this argument, check out these links: https://ift.tt/2wCurnf https://ift.tt/2pIPfmv https://ift.tt/1qvoGMQ

And for some more mainstream supporting information: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/06/domino-effect-of-climate-events-could-push-earth-into-a-hothouse-state https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/unexpected-future-boost-of-methane-possible-from-arctic-permafrost

Yikes!

In light of these dire possibilities, some think the Paris Climate Accords were far too little, far too late, but at least they were something. With aggressive U.S. leadership they might well have kick-started a serious global effort to do something about the looming calamity.

Instead we have Trump.

Instead the U.S. is running full-speed in exactly the wrong direction.

Under Trump and his minions, everything put in place under Obama aimed at mitigating climate change is being undone – and why? Are we to believe that Trump has carefully studied the science, weighed the various arguments and reached a considered decision based on the facts? Pu-leez! It’s all about more money for his buddies in the oil industry, saying a big F*** you to the left and taking petulant delight in erasing everything accomplished by our first African-American president. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/trumps-war-on-the-climate-begins/519159/

Do we have time for even one more day of this? Maybe not. What is the single action that will start the cycle of unending, irreversible feedback? No one knows – but do we really want to find out? Every day Trump stays in power, the closer and more inevitable it becomes.

And – as Cannonfire readers know so well – every day Trump remains in power the less likely it becomes that we will ever see him out of it.

Bluntly put, the election this fall may well be our final off-ramp on our highway to hell, our last shot at sanity. If Democrats fail to gain control of at least the House of Representatives and much more influence at state levels, it’s pretty much game over. Trump is aggressively following the tried and true Putin playbook for unravelling a democracy and if he has two more years without any serious checks on his ambition, my bet is that he will win. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Unfreedom-Russia-Europe-America/dp/184792526X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535867693&sr=1-1&keywords=timothy+snyder

All investigations will be shut down, buried or curtailed, the press will soon enough be cowed, the killings and imprisonments will begin and, in the end, all serious opposition will be crushed.

The stage for utter climate catastrophe will be well and truly set.

If we even make it to that point, that is. With such a stubborn, self-centered, uninformed and downright unhinged person having his hand on the big red button, the possibility of his blundering somehow into an all-out nuclear war also cannot be ignored.

Make no mistake, even if the Democrats prevail in the elections, the survival of American democracy – and with it any serious chance of forestalling the worst – is by no means certain. The cult of Trump will not suddenly see the error of its ways and go quietly into that good night. They will fight tooth and nail with every trick in the book to maintain the power of their dear leader, and I for one fully expect to see blood in the streets before it all is over.

So much more will need to be done before the world can start to breathe a sigh of relief, but if the Republicans majorities stand, the rest will be virtually impossible.

That Trump and his allies – both Russian and domestic – will pull out all the stops in trying to steal another election this fall is also a given. And it is no means a given that they will accept the result if they lose.

The only possible antidote is for EVERYONE in the US who is eligible to vote and isn’t a die-hard Trump cultist to make sure they are registered and cast a ballot. Only an incontrovertible and obvious landslide – not a blue wave but a huge blue tsunami can save us.

It’s as simple as that.

#####

By David Jay Morris

September 2, 2018

About the author: Now semi-retired, long-time believer in progressive causes David Jay Morris is a former international news editor and columnist for the Guam Daily Post and has worked for the New York Daily News and Long Island Business Review. Holding British-American dual nationality, he now lives in the UK with his wife and three dogs and works part-time as a teacher, Japanese – English translator and editor.

P.S. – This is the first of four articles I hope to write over the next several months. The next will be an updating of the piece Joseph was kind enough to let me post shortly after the 2016 election examining the underlying causes of that catastrophe.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/a-slow-motion-coup-detate.html

Following that will be an examination of the kind of actions that will need to be taken if the Democrats get back enough power to make any of it possible. The final one will be some musings on the kind of world we could have if enough of us come to our senses in time.

P.P.S. – As a kind of teaser for my next offering, let me throw out one thought I’ve been having about one of the things Joseph (and almost nobody else) has been discussing – kompromat. Like Joseph, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that nothing else adequately explains the extraordinary way the leaders of the Republican Party, especially in Congress, have been falling into line behind Trump.

What I’ve been wondering about, however, is if personal, one-by-one kompromat – mainly of the sexual or financial variety, one would suppose – is enough to explain such a rapid and wide-spread phenomenon. Do Trump and/or his minders in Moscow just have an extensive dossier of individual misdeeds, or is there something more there? Something party-wide whose exposure would seriously threaten the survival of the whole Republican Party and brand?

One candidate for this might be concrete evidence of the Republican tampering with election tabulating machines and software since 2004 or earlier that many of us have long suspected. Could the Russian penetration of state voter databases and other systems been either aimed at this, or else just serendipitously yielded (or pointed them to) such evidence?

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