SUNDAY READER –
By Glynn Wilson –

What has the media world come to when a sensational tabloid stoops to engaging in extortion NOT to run a sex scandal story about a celebrity billionaire, and the rest of the press runs with it?

Personally I could care less if Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sent dick pics to his new celebrity girlfriend. I would not look at it even in the Winn Dixie checkout line if they did publish the damn pictures. But no news outlet in the land could resist the story, in part because it involves Donald Trump’s friend David Pecker at the National Enquirer.

I admit that the idea of a guy named Pecker wanting to get paid NOT to run a dick pic story is sort of funny. Too bad Saturday Night Live is too juvenile to get the job done. At least it knocked Trump’s wall off the front page and the top 10 minutes of the evening news for a day or two.

But it is sort of a sad state of affairs, if you think about it, when both of those diversionary stories captured the attention of the capitalist media and the engagement of the people just when a sensible, major milestone in the rise of solution oriented democratic socialism in America should be under serious discussion.

The truly biggest story of the week as far as I’m concerned was the introduction of a non-binding resolution in both houses of Congress on a Green New Deal, which at least the New York Times called on its front page “breathtaking.”

Introduced in the House by Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Democrat Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts in the Senate, the plan offers a grand, long-term strategy to both combat climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels and to provide high paying jobs for all out of work Americans in the process. It would guarantee health care health for all, along with “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security” to every single American.

How could anyone disagree with and disparage such a thing? Why it’s a politician’s dream of a campaign platform, and should dominate the national discussion in the 2020 presidential campaign. But don’t underestimate the ability of propaganda masters like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump and the mainstream media to keep us all distracted away from that issue.

Of course the president and the Republicans will disparage it, by calling it “socialism” by a bunch of “liberals,” as if that was a bad thing.

This should be a plan the masses could get behind — if they weren’t so brain washed by the capitalist media. It’s inspired by measures that got us out of the Great Depression in the 1930s, FDR’s New Deal, which included Social Security and the 40-hour work week and overtime pay provided by the Fair Labor Standards Act.

“Climate change and our environmental challenges are the biggest existential threats to our way of life,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in announcing the plan on Thursday. “We must be as ambitious and innovative in our solutions as possible.”

“We will save all of creation by engaging in massive job creation,” Mr. Markey added, with a Biblical twist.

The resolution came on the heals of a joint report issued Tuesday by NASA and NOAA, directly contradicting the public position of the president of the United States and declaring unequivocally that the effects of human-induced global warming from the burning of fossil fuels are already having a negative impact on the planet and life on Earth, including dire economic impacts.

The report presents evidence from the past 130 years and shows that since the 1880s, the average global surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius, a level of warming that scientists in the 1990s said would have “catastrophic consequences.”

Human-Induced Global Warming Impacts Are Already Being Felt by Life on Earth

And this was just days after the president’s own intelligence team testified before Congress about the national security threats facing the country, including climate change and global warming. Trump’s so-called “crisis” and “national emergency” on the southern border was nowhere to be found in the report.

U.S. Intelligence Threat Assessment Highlights Russian Election Tampering, Not Mexican Border Security

But it did contain a section on the “Environment and Climate Change.”

“The impacts of the long-term trends toward a warming climate, more air pollution, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity are likely to fuel economic and social discontent — and possibly upheaval,” into the future, according to the report.

It acknowledges that the past 115 years have been the warmest period in the history of modern civilization, and the past few years have been the warmest years on record.

“Extreme weather events in a warmer world have the potential for greater impacts and can compound with other drivers to raise the risk of humanitarian disasters, conflict, water and food shortages, population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks, and power outages,” the report concludes.

But since the problem has not become the subject of a national debate or policy focus, since other distracting issues tend to dominate our politics like unneeded border walls and dick pics, the report concludes that the research has not even been done to identify indicators of potential “tipping points” in climate-linked earth systems, which could result in “abrupt climate change.”

Check Netflix for all the science fiction films depicting many possibilities.

The report does acknowledge that worsening air pollution, urbanization and rapid industrialization — along with increasing public awareness — “might drive protests against authorities, such as those recently in China, India and Iran.”

Could the Green New Deal in the U.S. — if covered by the press and broadcast media — have similar impacts here? Is that what the capitalists are worried about? People getting off their duffs, protesting and voting?

What if all the liberal and progressive Democrats teamed up with all the environmentalists and environment non-profit groups, and they were able to convince all the labor unions and union workers to stop supporting corrupt, lying would-be dictators like Trump and get onboard with this plan in a new Good Jobs, Green Jobs movement to sweep away all the opposition from the diversionary social wedge issues that have dominated American politics for decades?

We might be able to save ourselves and this planet yet.

If only people were told of the threats we face in the coming years and decades by real leaders, might they turn their attention away from unneeded border walls and dick pics and come together to save democracy and the planet with a Green New Deal?

But of course that would take actual leadership, not diversionary tweeting by the Commander-in-Chief. And it would take courage on the part of reporters, writers and broadcasters working for corporate-owned chain newspapers and corporate owned television news outlets — the kind of courage that might cost them their jobs.

It was a bit disconcerting to see House Speaker Nanci Pelosi’s dismissive response on impeachment and when asked about the Green New Deal by Politico. She is still saying she won’t bring up impeachment and didn’t even seem to know what the Green New Deal was.

“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Ms. Pelosi said. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

The California Democrat did agree to launch a select committee on climate change, similar to the one she created back in 2007, when she first became speaker. And Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did not take the bait to split with the Speaker for what she said.

“I think it is a green dream,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “I will not allow our caucus to be divided by whatever narrative.”

Of course the Republicans are already going on the attack against it. The Republican National Committee derided it as “a socialist wish list.”

So what if it is? Instead of running from it, Democrats should embrace it, and just say, “Your goddamned right. And isn’t it about damn time?”

Run amok corporate capitalism is not solving these problems, only making them worse. It’s as if the company executives want to see how rich they can get before the world comes to an end like the Christians think it will.

Do they know something we don’t? Is that what Jeff Bezos has in mind with his new rocket ship Blue Origin? Do the uber-rich think they will be able to escape planet Earth and set up a livable colony on one of the moons of Saturn or Jupiter and leave all the poor people behind?

That’s not exactly what the Left Behind series had in mind. But that looks like the plan.

Let’s be clear about what is being proposed here with this Green New Deal. Maybe we can even get Bezos onboard with it, after he prevails in his fight with the National Enquirer.

No one here is advocating the total elimination of private property rights or religious liberty, as the Communists wanted to do. But as even my more conservative college professors said back in the day, the ideals of the American Republic require this striving toward becoming a socialist-democracy. That’s what all the other industrialized nations and democracies have become. Why should we be the last holdout?

Old John Kenneth Galbraith once said, if memory serves, something to the effect that the socialist New Deal of popular President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the capitalist class from utter economic destruction and created the American middle class, “but they never forgave him for it.”

Solving real problems requires true leadership, not just pandering to the lowest common denominator to get enough votes to win an election. Let’s see if the Democrats can find someone like that to run against Trump and win in 2020.

If not we may as well pack it in and prepare for the end of the world as we know it. Do you have your camouflage prepper outfit ready for the new reality TV show on human survival? Or would you rather just get everyone you know to vote in 2020?

The election is only 21 months away. It doesn’t look like Trump is going down any other way, although we could still be wrong. Maybe the CIA will come to its senses and take him out.

A New York Times reporter told NPR this week that there will not be an actual report to release from Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That’s what the Democrats have been counting on to get rid of Trump for the past two years.

If there won’t be an indictment and arrest, no resignation or impeachment (since the House won’t bring it up because a trial in the Senate would surely fail), then the only choice will be to beat Trump like a drum in 2020.