...at which time the right, in service to monstrous corporations and war profiteers, took over the Republican Party. This leaden weight on our political system has resulted in weaker and weaker and now NON-enforcement of environmental laws and NATIONAL STUPIDITY of suicidal proportions as to respect for science. ROUTINELY scientists are overridden on the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and numerous other national and state laws that were written and passed to prevent loss of biodiversity, loss of forests, loss of clean water, pollution and other corporate assaults on Earth's ecosystem.
Any environmental regulatory system that permits what happened to the redwood forest is not worth the paper it is written on. But that is just ONE EXAMPLE of the impact of the far right on denying the American people effective environmental regulation in the far right's slavish service to transglobal corporations. We are now suffering catastrophic loss of high end animal species (forget the lower end--insects, lichen, etc), catastrophic weather disruption, catastrophic levels of pollution, catastrophic levels of toxins in the food chain, catastrophic loss of wild lands and biological connectivity to over-development and "privatization", catastrophic oil spills, deteriorating nuclear power plants which may just finish us off for good and on and on.
The environmental laws of the 1960s and 1970s were passed BECAUSE ORDINARY PEOPLE HAD CLOUT IN OUR DEMOCRACY in those days and INSISTED ON IT. It was nearly universally supported and largely a-political. And it was a characteristic of the massive American middle class that WAS CREATED BY THE "NEW DEAL" to insist on environmental regulation because they had the financial security, education and leisure to, a) learn about the environment, and b) DO SOMETHING about the environment. Their wishes have been defied by the corporate takeover of government which has turned this regulatory system into an ugly farce just as it has turned our democracy itself into an ugly farce, with the 'privatization' of vote counting, for godssakes, and horribly unjust war, just two examples of it.
My point about Latin America is that they are where we were in the 1960s and 1970s as to REAL democracy PLUS they are creating real democracies (which of necessity must be based on sharing the wealth) in the era of global warming and the potential death of planet Earth*. That is why I have hope that they will come up with the solutions and, as far as I can see, they are the only region on earth that might do so.
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*(The World Wildlife fund gives us 50 years--50 years to the DEATH of planet earth!--at present levels of consumption, pollution and deforestation. (And that was about five years ago.) Humans need to develop a new way of life or we are done for. Where are those new ideas going to come from? And how are they going to be implemented in the face of transglobal corporate power?)
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