by John Sanbonmatsu
“We won’t see a
presidential candidate like Bernie again in our lifetimes.” As I heard these
words, spoken by a woman at a Sanders campaign event recently, I felt a chill
go through me. Because I knew she was right. We won’t.
We won’t see another
presidential candidate who refuses to take campaign donations from the wealthy
and the corporate elite. We won’t see another candidate with the courage to
take on Wall Street. We won’t see a candidate with the guts to tell the
American people that they have lost their democracy. We won’t see another
candidate who mentions the working class and the poor in his speeches. We won’t
see another candidate sounding the alarm bells over global warming.
It is no wonder that the wealthy
owners of the New York Times and Washington Post and
other media organs have reacted to Sanders’ insurgency with such fury, emptying
their stables of talent each day in an effort to run him down and exterminate
him politically. It’s like watching the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz,
standing in the window of her castle, arms outstretched, sending her flying
monkeys hurtling through the sky on a mission to destroy her would-be
destroyers.
Just recently, the day after
Sanders crushed Clinton in the Wisconsin primary by 13 percentage points — his
seventh win out of the last eight caucuses and primaries — the New York Times published a front page article on the
results that included only a single, one-sentence reference to Sanders (falsely
claiming that the race in Wisconsin had been “close”). That was all. Every
other word in the 1500-word news story was about Ted Cruz’s victory over Trump
in the state.
In a normal election year, the
fact that an avowed “democratic socialist” was routinely winning Democratic
contests in states like Washington, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Wisconsin, or that
he was raising far more money, from small individual donations, than an
establishment candidate drawing on the vast resources and connections of her
national party, would have been huge front page news.
But this is not a normal
election year. It’s the end game. It is a crisis, in the original sense of the
ancient Greek word, krisis — the turning point in an illness when a
patient either dies, or recovers. Except that the patient, in this case, is
both the American body politic and the living earth itself.
Global temperatures in February
smashed all previous records, putting 2016 on track to be even hotter than 2015
— previously the hottest year on record. Not only didn’t we humans reduce our
carbon emissions last year, we increased them — and at a greater rate than ever
recorded. As Piers Tan, a leading climate scientist at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration observed, “Carbon
dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of
years.“
Just four months after the
supposedly historic climate
talks in Paris, then, the world is plunging headlong toward a
full-scale ecological meltdown. Drought, flood, fire, monster storms,
acidification of the oceans, disappearing fresh water, the migration of
tropical diseases into the northern hemisphere, pandemics, accelerating species
loss — we’re just at the beginning of things. Crops and agriculture will fail.
Billions of people will lose their homes and even nations. Whole regions of the
earth may become uninhabitable.
Last week, scientists issued a
stunning new
estimate about the West Antarctic
ice sheet: it’s melting at a far greater pace than earlier studies suggested.
Just a few years ago, climate experts at the United Nations warned that the
oceans could rise as much as two to three feet by the end of the century. Such
a rise was then considered the worst case scenario — a true calamity to be
avoided. The new study suggests that sea levels could instead rise as much as
five or six feet. That means that dozens of world cities — New York,
Philadelphia, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Dhaka, Cape Town, Bangkok, Alexandria, among
numerous others — will be swallowed by the sea in our children’s lifetimes.
But the problem isn’t just
global warming. The entire biosphere of the earth is coming violently apart.
Thousands of species across the phylogenetic spectrum are disappearing. The
oceans are becoming acidic. Billions of sea animals are being “mined” from the
sea, tearing the oceanic food web to shreds. The very fabric of life on earth
is being destroyed.
Does this sound bad? It is
beyond bad. If it is not literally the end of the world, it is certainly the
beginning of the end of a livable world. For two million years, the earth has
been an amazing, beautiful, bountiful place for our species. It is the only
home we have ever known or ever will know. Now, the writing of impending
calamity is on the wall — it’s just in letters so big that most people can’t
see them.
Liberals planning to vote for Hillary don’t seem to grasp what is really at stake in this election. They imagine that the worst thing in the world would be to have Donald Trump in the White House. But they’re not exercising their imaginations enough. This election is about far, far more than stopping the Republicans, as important as that is. It’s about interrupting the system of global wealth accumulation before it destroys all life on earth.
There are many reasons to find Hillary Clinton
repugnant as a politician: her support for the Iraq War in 2003 and for the Honduran military coup in
2009, her ties to Goldman Sachs and
Big Pharma, her support for neoliberal trade and economic policies that
hurt working people, children, and the poor, her depiction of Edward Snowden as
a “traitor,” her support for fracking, her past mockery of thewomen who
accused her husband of sexual assault, and so on. But the worst thing about
Hillary is simply that she represents the status quo.
Please go
here to continue this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-sanbonmatsu/new-york-bernie-sanders-is_b_9629028.html
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