Trump

The Developer-in-Chief and environmental law, regulation and enforcement

"Nothing in these new rules helps wildlife, period. Instead, these regulatory changes seek to make protection and recovery of threatened and endangered species harder and less predictable. We're going to court to set things right,"

Where Trump is as steady as a rock

"We don't really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept," Darroch wrote in one memo. "We don't really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept," Darroch wrote in one memo. – Katz, AP, July 7, 2019

Trump a fascist?

Of course, Trump is not alone in this: populist nationalist authoritarian leaders on the rise all over the world win and hold power in ways very similar to the fascists of the inter-war period. What is there in these two eras almost a century apart that would explain this common political trajectory?

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you don't have a high speed railroad

The California High Speed Rail project, ruinous to farmland, farm operations and habitat for endangered species, was sold to voters in a highly deceptive initiative and has been rammed down the throats of Valley landowners ever since by a cabal of project potentates and real estate special interests cattle-prodding local governments into support.

Three by Pepe Escobar on Iran, China, and Russia

 

My melancholic contemplation of the Sixth Extinction (got as far as the White Nose Syndrome wiping out bats) has been rudely interrupted this week by the saber rattling flatulence emanating from the White House. I turned as this site has often turned in the past to Pepe Escobar, the former Roving Eye of Asia Times and the best correspondent in English on subjects like the New Silk Road and a region he calls “Pipelinestan.”

The velocity of the rate of extinction

The United Nations reported this week that the Sixth Extinction is well on its way. Without strenuous, consistent and intelligent action taken on a global level, the predicted “iconic” event of the new Anthropocene epoch of man-made ecological catastrophe is upon us. And the velocity of the rate of extinction in this epoch eclipses the known geological record.

A fool and his money are soon elected -- Will Rogers

America’s  better angels, present and absent, are haunting us demanding that, just to start with, we remember, recall, bring important things to mind. Thorsten Veblen flies among our best angels, and Ann Jones, of Norwegian-American background like Veblen and like Veblen from the Upper Midwest, tells his story and shows his importance in the fewest and clearest words we’ve ever read. Nobody described American plutocracy – its origins and tendencies -- better and more fully than Veblen did in 1899, in his Theory of the Leisure Class.

Crazy Developer Kung Fu

Under cover of darkness, nobody but the special interests that benefit, the resource agencies themselves and a few members of the public in damaged regions, will know what environmental harm the Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency will approve, overlook, ignore or complely fail to notice. The Trump administration, which looks so bumbling at times, never seems to miss a beat when it comes to rewarding environmental spoilers. It's all part of Crazy Developer Kung Fu. -- blj

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