Petro-Theo-Kleptocracy
Men the barricades
PRESENTED BY CHILDISH GAMBINO
This is America: The Trump Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) were loyal Democrats, or at least had any fear of President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party which officially controls Congress could act to reverse the decision before it becomes official. The court could also overturn the government’s power to regulate greenhouse pollution any day now.
Manchin and Sinema, vultures who putatively care about abortion rights and climate change, are instead loyal to the kleptocracy. The gerontocracy that is Democratic Party leadership is unlikely to do anything about it.
In American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money, Ken Phillips described, in 2005, how the Republican Party is a coalition of evangelicals, Big Oil, and Wall Street, captive “of the sort of biblical inerrancy—backwater, not mainstream—that dismisses modern knowledge and science.”
The Judicial Crisis Network, which helped to block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and backed the Georgetown Prep duo of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as the open theocrat Amy Coney Barrett, is funded primarily by the dark-money Wellspring Committee, founded by the Koch network in 2008.
The glue that binds libertarian petrochemical oligarchs to religious white nationalists is their common opposition to pluralist democracy and liberalism, which threatens their vision of a strict socioeconomic hierarchy where the chosen few have dominion and exploit the lesser people (including women) and the planet.
“Law enforcement was quick to construct barricades and post police officers around the U.S. Supreme Court Monday night.”
This is America: Agya Aning tells the story of LaFanette Soles-Woods, “a leader of the fight to clean up her home of Wedgewood, a small historically Black community a few miles away from the meeting in downtown Pensacola,” where Black families thought they were buying a “piece of the American dream,” but it become a cancerous dumping ground, “home to seven solid waste facilities and four borrow pits,” now worsening as fossil-fueled flooding grows.
It’s primary election day in Ohio and Indiana today, where petro-theo-kleptocrat Republicans are duking it out, and the fierce progressive Nina Turner is expected to lose her rematch with the crypto-and-oil-and-Biden-backed Shontel Brown.
White House Climate Envoy John Kerry’s chief of staff, the former Covington & Burling lobbyist Dan Feldman, is returning to Covington & Burling, whose client list includes BP America and Royal Dutch Shell.
On Monday, the Department of Energy announced $3.1 billion in funding to help boost U.S. production of high-capacity batteries and battery parts.
This is America: An “absolutely insane” pattern of back-to-back-to-back storm systems are battering the central and southern United States this entire week with fossil-fueled thunderstorms and tornadoes.
Pilita Clark in the Financial Times rails against the “magical thinking” that justifies continued fossil-fuel development:
The fossil fuel project pipeline is already so large that no more exploration or new oilfields are needed in a net zero world. Pretending otherwise must end.
Francis Wilkinson denounces the “largest Army Corps proposal in history”—a vast, $29-billion-plus project to build a “vast array of walls, gates, barriers and berms” to protect Houston’s Galveston Bay:
“The nation’s carbon energy capital is seeking protection from a sea and sky broiled by its own manufacture.”
“It’s 2022, and carbon, like global temperatures, is still burning hot.”
~ Girl, I hear some thunder
Golly, look at that water, boy, oh Lord ~
Hearings on the Hill:
10 AM: Senate Foreign Relations
State Department Authorization: Strengthening U.S. Diplomacy for the 21st Century10 AM: Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Department of Transportation Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Priorities10 AM: Senate Appropriations
Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies
Proposed budget estimates and justification for fiscal year 2023 for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation10 AM: Senate Appropriations
Defense
Proposed budget estimates and justification for fiscal year 2023 for the Department of Defense10 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Nomination of Maria Duaime Robinson to be an Assistant Secretary of Energy (Office of Electricity), Pending Legislation
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