Arse-savers-of the-world unite! (Or ass-savers if you prefer)
Trump says global warming is a Chinese plot because, first, he’s happy to take the words of the rent-a-scientists who deny that human activity is causing the warming, because that denial helps his businesses and those of his crooked mates, and second, because he assumes everyone else will make shit up in order to make more money, like he does, so that’s why the Chinese and the Germans etc say that burning fossil fuels has to stop. Why else would they say it?
This guy has lived his life inhaling money and power, keeping at bay his fear of losing or being exposed as a fake by listening to no one except talking heads on Fox News. Rebecca Solnit suggested on lithub.com last week that Trump’s experience now must be “like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service.”
Kate Veitch, Lily and Vince Lovegrove, at the Mullumbimby Farmers Market on 11/11/11
The two most common questions I get about Trump at the Mullum Framers Market (pictured) are:
1) Why don’t the sane powerful people in America stop him?
2) Why do so many powerless people who voted for him still love him?
My answers are:
1) Some powerful people are desperately trying to stop him. Others don’t give a damn what he says or does as long as he abolishes government interference in business, such as laws against US industry releasing 6,587,000,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere every year, or laws that make it possible for everyone to go to school or to the doctor, because why would you give that away to everyone?
2) Many don’t still love him, having concluded that he was right when he told them he’d give the finger to the bureaucrats of Washington and the plutocrats of New York, but wrong when he told them he’d get their jobs back. They loved it when he promised to drain the swamp in Washington, but now they're realising that the Creature from the Orange Lagoon ain't the guy to do that job.
Some US intellectuals want him to demolish government in any form, to allow people to be as civilized or uncivilized as they wanna be -- these people call themselves libertarians. Some liberals are tending toward the view that those who believe in civilization should stop trying to convert the deplorables and instead focus on fixing the rules and regulations, to save our collective arse.
Meanwhile, arse-savers-of-the-world are uniting, even including a political leader of the West, Angela Merkel, while Australia's political leaders remain fundamentally toadies-to-Trump. And not just toadies but also enablers of the global oil and gas juggernaut. My friend Mark Schapiro reports in his recent article about Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former head of Exxon-Mobil, that “the United States, China, Russia, Canada, Australia and the UK collectively spent $63 billion in taxpayer funds on fossil fuel subsidies in 2014.”