Until …

The world is facing its sixth extinction crisis, scientists are beginning to agree. 96-year-old Australian scientist Stephen Boyden’s comment on our hopes of preventing says what everyone involved in trying to save species feels:

“While there's a glimmer of hope, it's worth working to solve the problem. We have the scientific knowledge to do it but we don't have the political will,” Boyden said.

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.

While the plutocrats get richer and the president proclaims the greatest economy in the history of the nation, the three counties which led the race to the top of the most inflated real estate prices in the nation and the race to the bottom of highest foreclosure rates in the nation are creating institutions to cope with permanent recessio

Among the many damaging contradictions that plague California society is its agriculture, which regularly, exports irrigated crops while pretending to develop sustainable groundwater plans and grabbing every acre-foot of surface water from every river it can, with contempt for the habitat of species it endangers and destroys. From farmworkers paid to carry signs at public meetings demanding more water to save jobs, to bank loan officers and hedge-fund rainmakers, no one involved with California agriculture can tell the truth about water. Most don’t know it, and those that do lie.