Running In Place

Some totally new, unorthodox, out-of-the-box thinking: the treasury secretary says economic expansion can get the US out of debt! How original. Wow. Elite thinking at its best. The problem isn't that a drone like Bessent would spout such idiocy. It's that the Wall Street Journal would print it. It's that the WSJ readers would nod and say yeah, that could work. All we would have to do is burn more fossil fuels, extract more productivity out of workers and gut the social safety net. Joila! And right on point we have the EPA removing greenhouse gas regulations from power plants. Remember Obama telling us we could "de-couple" economic growth from emissions? Not so. We can have capitalism or we can have robust ecosystems but we can't have both. Elites understand this perfectly. Guys like Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap, doesn't get it. In a piece in today's Times he says Democrats must embrace fossil fuels if they expect to win elections. Because in a capitalist "democracy", voting will save us eventually. Yes, according to the latest UN report we are blowing past 1.5 degrees, yes, the tech oligarchs are fuelling all their AI compute with methane ( remember how "natural gas" was the "transition fuel" that would wean us from coal?) But Alaskans vote for whoever supports oil so Democrats should support oil. Duh. Robinson will never use the word capitalism because somehow Markets and price and innovation yada yada. The woman running for Senate in Alaska is indigenous, adding even more contradiction to the equation. Water Is Life, right? Seven generations, right? Capitalist realism colonizes everyone equally, regardless of race or religion. Naomi Kein and Astra Taylor are calling out what they term "End Times Fascism". This is a sect or cult which has fused Christian millenialism with tech-utopian/dystopian futurism into a hyper-capitalist nationalism. Basically a genocidal attack on the poor and Nature. These are the same Christians which support the Zionist project because of the prophesy that Jesus will return and bring about the End Times. Therefore the more dead Palestinians (and Jews) the better.