GREEN Reactor: This Tea Ain't GREEN

Something was lost in the hoopla over the insane move by the Teapublicans shutting down our federal government. Most of the talk was about their obsession with keeping Obama from going down in history as the President who finally made some progress toward universal healthcare. (Everyone with a lick of sense knows that the “Obamacare is destroying America” rants are just a cover for their ire over Obama getting any “good” credit for anything.)  What faded from the public discussion was that the shutdown was also driven by their extreme Anti-GREEN agenda.

Besides delaying Obamacare, the budget bill put forth by the House Teapublican radicals called for the elimination of greenhouse gas regulations and the authorization of the Keystone Pipeline!  Each of these would be horrendous policy. There’s no way that an elimination of greenhouse gas regulations would ever pass a full congressional vote, because there are easily enough sensible congressmen who understand how this would accelerate our movement toward global catastrophe.  And at this point nobody believes the bogus “Keystone = Jobs” propaganda that had been touted as an excuse to okay the pipeline. Indeed, as the facts about Keystone roll in, its likelihood of being taken seriously as anything beyond a big pile of profit for Big Dirty Energy diminishes with each day.

But there those boogie men sat – along with delaying or defunding Obamacare – as ransom for keeping the government operating.  Could there be any more obvious signal that their posturing was disingenuous?   “Obamacare is going to destroy the American people!  (Shhhhhh, don’t pay attention to the give-aways to Big Dirty Energy that we’re also trying to ram-rod down your throats!)”.  Now why oh why would they dirty their “noble goal” with other demands so clearly antithetical to it?  Ohhhhh, yeah, we almost forgot – the Tea Party is 99% bought and sold by the Big Dirty Oil billionairs the Koch brothers.   No Koch money?  No Tea Party.

Who makes big bucks off Keystone XL? The Kochs.  Who can keep more of their profits if they can continue to produce profoundly dirty energy from coal and tar sands? The Kochs.   Who can produce record yields of Fracked  petroleum products while fouling the local environments?  The Kochs.  Who stands to lose profits as society shifts to cleaner energy?  The Kochs. And thus who spends hundreds of millions of dollars on public relations and payola for Bad Science to discredit virtually anything GREEN? Uh-huh.  Those guys.

Do you think the Kochs REALLY care that much about Obamacare?  Perhaps some of their industries will find it harder to screw over their employees when complying with the Affordable Care Act.  But those are mostly write-offs. And they – unlike most of their Teapublican minions — are smart enough KNOW that the hype about ultra-damage from the ACA is pure hyperbole.  Much closer to home are the various GREEN initiatives underway now or soon to be enacted.  Those are what have the potential for serious impacts in their uber-fortunes, and like so many who have let power go to their heads, they’re using their resources to fight it.

Resources like Ted Cruz, who’s Napoleonic complex has him snapping at the Koch teat in his quest for fame – or at least notoriety.   Resources like the Governors of Florida, Wisconsin, Texas and others, who are doing all they can to dismantle the protections that their states have enacted for their environment and the quality of life of their citizens.   Resources like John Boehner, who tries to break away and do what’s right for America, but keeps getting dragged back into the putrid swamp of small minds and testosterone of the pack of backwoods district representatives also being coddled by the Kochs.   Talk is that even members of the Supreme Court aren’t entire outside their influence.   And their Citizen’s United ruling – clearly made to order for Kochs and Murdochs – fails the sniff test.

The (not so) funny thing about this is that even up to the fairly recent past, the conservative talking heads would complain about how progressive voters were taking their marching orders from mysterious rich liberal power-brokers.  Even if it were true, the scale would be a drop in the bucket in comparison to what the ultra-rich screw-the-planet Kochs are doing to us all….

Koch brothers and their Gubernatorial minions.
(Picture from Mother Jones.)