And the highpoint for the current administration this week was only the PR opportunity to make the most of a "Big Number" moment; a moment they can take some credit for only because they gave a bunch of money away to the rich and called it "tax reform." All the while much of the rest of our world burns. Or is inundated by terrible floods, or parched by chronic dry spells. And then tries to get by, through all of this, with increasingly devastated, and neglected, infrastructure that leaves so many communities cut off more and more from the economic mainstream of the still, mostly functioning, tech, aerospace, and regional, traditional manufacturing, or agriculture, hotspots; or at least the ones still not hit too hard by repeated, not fully recovered, extreme event disasters.

What is really disappointing to someone like me, however, is how they don't even acknowledge what the world as a whole faces if it doesn't act sufficiently within the next ten years or so; a time frame that is sure to decrease as we get more info on the already depressing trend line for ice at our poles; a fact that truly emphasizes the notion that, when it comes to impending disaster, it is always half past later than you think. And sadder still is the fact that this is why a great part of the earth is on fire, and why the extremes of weather have gotten so bad. And it is all connected, without any doubt, to the fact that the fault for this lies squarely at the feet of our toxic, woefully out of date, economic operating system. An operating system that values private profit over every other human value; including survival.

It is time to not only send them home permanently, but to finally realize that this system, as currently constituted, isn't ever going to solve the problems we face, no matter how many times we flush the "get the turds out of there" toilet. No, the only way those problems are going to be solved is when we finally realize that we have to take responsibility for ourselves and start governing ourselves as directly as possible; biting the bullet, so to speak, on accepting that a "Grand Compromise" of some kind must be worked out between the Right and the Left in this country. Something that has to be done in double quick time, no matter how difficult it might be, because we just have no other choice. Assuming we want to survive, mind you, and we still value Democracy.

This is what we face, and what we ignore, if we insist on continuing to conduct "Business As Usual."

Half of Congress is leaving town. Their to-do list isn't going anywhere

See Also:

Drought brings big worries for farmers across northern Europe

[Post Note: A flip of the coin between "Fire And Ice" are exactly what we are likely facing if we continue to chose to do nothing about truly addressing extreme climate change. And in that, of course, we have to go all out; as in a complete mobilization like we did for WW2. And to do that we will have no choice but to be revolutionary as to how we go about redefining our social/economic organization; something we would have had to do in any case as it has become mandatory because of the vast changes in the reach, and effect, of our new, electrified instrumentality. J.V.]