More Drought, More Famine, More Floods, More Ocean Acidification, More Extreme Weather Disturbances, More Disease and More Human Suffering

By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

27 August 20

ometimes, when you hear a speech, what is NOT said is more important than what is said. 

You wouldn’t know it if you watched the first night of the Republican National Convention, but we are in the middle of a climate emergency with scientists telling us we have just a few years to act in order to save our planet for future generations.

Just look around our country:

The second and third largest fires in the history of the state of California have burned more than 1.2 million acres in just a month, thousands of homes and businesses have been lost to the blaze, and tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee.

But that is not at all.

In the Gulf Coast, a pair of hurricanes threaten to strike within miles of each other and within a 48-hour period this week, a meteorological event unlike any in modern history.

But that too, is not all.

Earlier this month in the Midwest, an 800-mile wide derecho with winds the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane swept through Iowa and Illinois, causing absolutely catastrophic damage. Homes and businesses were lost. Some estimates say 35 percent of Iowa’s corn was destroyed along with “100 million bushels worth of grain storage and processing infrastructure as well,” according to Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture. 

There’s more: 

• July 2020 was the second-hottest month ever recorded on Earth.
• June 2020 was the second-hottest June of all time.
• May 2020 was the hottest May of all time.
• April 2020 was the second-hottest April of all time.
• March 2020 was the second-hottest March of all time.
• February 2020 was the second-hottest February of all time.
• January 2020 was the hottest January of all time.

But was any of this discussed during last night’s Republican National Convention? 

Of course it wasn’t. 

There wasn’t a word about climate change, other than to play a video calling me and our ideas “RADICAL.” 

But don’t tell me the Green New Deal is radical. 

What is radical is doing nothing to take on the existential threat of climate change while the world burns.

What is radical is the Trump administration opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling at a time when the arctic is on fire and we face a serious climate emergency in this country and around the world. 

What is radical is doing nothing while scientists tell us very clearly that if we do not act boldly within the next few years in transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy, the planet we leave our kids and future generations will be increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable. 

What is radical is making the decision to accept more drought, more famine, more floods, more ocean acidification, more extreme weather disturbances, more disease and more human suffering simply to line the pockets of a few greedy fossil fuel executives. 

Here is the truth: in the midst of everything going on right now, a global pandemic, an economic meltdown, a struggle for racial justice and more, we simply cannot lose sight of the existential threat of climate change which puts at risk the very survival of this planet.

We cannot go far enough or be too aggressive on this issue.

We are living in absolutely unprecedented times that require us to bring forward an unprecedented response. 

I wish I could say we could address our climate crisis with a few tweaks at the edges. But I cannot say that. Now more than ever, we need a Green New Deal to effectively address the existential threat of climate change. So, in my view there are two things we need to do:

Step 1: We must defeat Donald Trump. There is simply no way around just how important it is that we beat him this November and beat him badly.

Step 2: At the same time, we must elect as many progressive candidates as we possibly can who will fight to pass a Green New Deal. 

Now, I cannot do that alone. And over the course of the next few months, our supporters are going to be doing everything possible to generate the largest voter turnout in American history, reaching out to people who might otherwise not be voting. We're going to be doing virtual rallies and town halls in every battleground state. We'll be making phone calls, sending text messages, and safely distributing literature throughout communities across this country.

That takes resources, but it is important work that must be done. So today, I am asking:

Can you make a $2.70 contribution to help me elect progressives all across this country who will come into office prepared to treat climate change as the existential threat we know it to be? This is important.

We are custodians of the earth. All of us. And it would be a moral disgrace if we left to future generations a planet and that was unhealthy, unsafe, and uninhabitable. 

So thank you for making your voice heard.

In solidarity, 

Bernie Sanders

Time to Defeat Trump - Without Make-Believe About Biden

By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

27 August 20

ne result of the Republican convention will be a drop in the number of progressives who are in denial about the Trump regime's momentum toward fascism. This week’s relentlessly unhinged GOP gathering has probably done more to win votes for Joe Biden from the left than last week’s Democratic convention did. And that points up a problem.

The people running the Biden show have been trying hard to woo Republicans, while the affection remains largely unrequited. Mainstream media keep featuring VIP anti-Trump Republicans, but few registered voters have defected from Trump. Recent polling data continue to show the electoral folly of messaging to cultivate “Biden Republicans” while damaging the turnout prospects from the Democratic Party’s progressive base.

Neither the Democratic nominee nor his media echo chambers have much use for Bernie Sanders supporters or genuine progressives overall, who now rarely get words in edgewise — even though they represent a major chunk of the electorate (many times that of the phantom “moderate Republican voter”).

During the spring, the Biden campaign extended a few olive branches in a progressive direction, but some of them morphed into sticks in the eyes of Bernie convention delegates and their constituencies — whether in the form of the eleventh-hour deletion of a platform provision to end fossil-fuel subsidies and tax breaks, or the suppression of the delegates’ vote tally that had more than 1,000 voting against the platform mostly because it lacks Medicare for All. In a non-virtual convention or a country with less corporately biased media, such dissent from a party platform would have been big news.

The imperative of preventing a second Trump term is roaring at us every moment. Some progressives mistakenly believe that means we should melt into the ranks of Biden boosters and otherwise keep quiet until after the election. On the contrary. For instance, continuing to insist that the Democratic Party must take a clear stand for Medicare for All is not only the morally right thing to do; it’s also good politics in 2020, as polling clearly shows.

Nor should we pretend that Biden doesn’t have a five-decade record that is very far from progressive. Reasons to distrust him are profuse. But this presidential election isn’t really about Biden, who’s a garden-variety corporate Democrat. It’s about a clear and present threat to democratic capacities in the United States.

The irreversible fork in the historic road of this election was aptly summed up by an activist and scholar with a long history on the left, H. Bruce Franklin, who concluded a new article this way: “Even in these dark days, light is visible. In my 86 years as an American, I have never witnessed a progressive movement as broad and deep as the one sweeping across the nation today. If Biden and the Democrats win in November, this movement will have room to thrive. If not, it will be crushed.”

Progressives should be a leading force in a united front against Trump for the next 10 weeks. We must go all out, so that we — and progressive movements — are not crushed.

There’s no point in arguing about whether progressives should vote for Biden in “safe states” like New York or California; such discussions are at best a waste of time. Whether Trump can remain president for another four years will hinge on the votes in a dozen swing states.

Professor Franklin takes aim at the disconnected-from-facts argument sometimes heard (disproportionately in reader comments on some progressive websites) that the two parties are, in essence, indistinguishable: “Really? If you can’t see glaring differences between the Supreme Court justices chosen by the two parties and their votes crucial to our lives, your name might be Magoo.”

And Franklin added: “Compare the Democrats: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (Clinton appointees); Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (Obama appointees) to the Republicans: Clarence Thomas (appointed by George H. W. Bush to take the place of the great Thurgood Marshall, appointed by LBJ); Samuel Alito and John Roberts (appointed by George W. Bush); and Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh (appointed by Trump). I agree with Mitch McConnell that there is no more important outcome of presidential elections than the composition of the Supreme Court, an outcome that will probably be crucial for decades after the four- or eight-year term of Donald Trump. For starters, who will get to appoint the successor to the heroic Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg? The same president who will get to appoint the successor to the 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer. If it’s Trump, those two will be replaced by two more Kavanaughs, or worse if possible. Whatever Trump wants to be the law of the land will be validated by that truly supreme court.”

Franklin makes a broader point: “On health care, public education, voting rights, civil rights, the environment, abortion rights, immigration, minimum wages, union rights, and taxation of the wealthy, every vote in the House and Senate splits right along party lines. And these party lines are drawn along the lines of the voting bases of the two parties. The Republican Party today is the party of white supremacy.”

Denial of such realities is dangerous. As my colleagues at the #VoteTrumpOut campaign point out, “For every undocumented family seeking asylum, for every woman seeking access to reproductive healthcare, for every young person fighting to avert climate catastrophe, for every parent afraid of gun violence at their children’s school, for every working class family hoping for some relief from the medical and economic fallout of the coronavirus, life will be very different under a Biden presidency than under four more years of Trump.

“And crucially, Biden is moveable. We’ve already shown that with mass pressure, we can push him to support more progressive policies. Trump, on the other hand, is immune to public persuasion or protest. With a Biden presidency, a disciplined and mobilized left could extract significant victories. With another Trump presidency, the left would have few options and could face new levels of government repression. Our democracy, our planet, and our human rights would continue to sustain enormous — and potentially irreparable — damage.”

This is our political crossroads.

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.