It’s a sickening day offshore today. It’s a day to fight back today. It’s a Mario Savio kind of day.

Fight back how? Start here: 1,000,000 Strong Against Offshore Drilling

From an analysis by the Center for American Progress on agriculture’s future:

U.S. agriculture is a critical bridge between global warming challenges and solutions. Our agricultural and forest lands sequester 246 million metric tons of carbon annually, absorbing 13 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And the Congressional Budget Office has suggested that this number could rise to 50 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions with the appropriate incentives.

The analysis shows how clean energy will add income to U.S. farms, through carbon offests, power co-generation, and next-generation bio-fuels. While of course climate change will take income away through all the obvious dynamics such as drought, water shortages, season dysfunction, and unremitting fossil-fuel price increases.

We know that the information stream is poisoned – now Greenpeace brings to the surface some of the corporate poisoners who are pouring $millions into the think tanks, legislators, TV networks and talking heads who deny climate change. Nice interactive map of the conspiracies too.

Greenpeace has released the report “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine” to expose the connections between these climate denial front groups and the secretive billionaires who are funding their efforts. The Koch brothers, their family members, and their employees direct a web of financing that supports conservative special interest groups and think-tanks, with a strong focus on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industrial pollution.

Use the interactive map to trace out the linkages between payments made and assertions published, and see how deliberate the lies are.

Why does the oil industry want to delay climate action? My answer is that possessed by greed and narrow interest the leaders of this family of industries understand that they can make billions in the remaining margins before the global populace finally turns on them and shuts them down. Taking that additional wealth they can enclave in the last remaining temperate zones of Earth, for a time.

I personally don’t see that it will happen that way at all. I believe they’ll carry life into extremis for all species including our own, and merely  generate immense guilt burdens to carry into death. I think they have no idea of the pain they will feel as their crimes sink into their hearts. Any modern psychologist would agree I suspect. As for their wealth, I think they’ll end up with all their profits sequestered by dwindling populations to fight the last battle against the encroach of desert planet earth.

I actually don’t believe they’ll be allowed to carry on this way much longer anyway. The immune response of humanity is surging into activity across the planet to combat our disease of industrial savagery, itself only recently diagnosed. Win or lose, the forces of healing are far swifter and more ruthless than the forces of deterioration I believe. We shall see.

I and millions of other supporters of this Obama moment in history have been puzzling over the strange events of the last few months. We’ve seen health care reform abandoned by a party and president both elected with a clear mandate to pass it.

As I wrote last time, William Greider explained early in the game that Democrats were probably too bought, with too much money, for them to embrace their classical values.

Now Glenn Greenwald takes this to its obvious conclusion, and nails the Democrats – both party and president – as playing a deliberate game of deception.

See if this dynamic introduced by Greenwald resonates with your experience of the last few months:

The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation.  They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it supports these measures while an always-changing handful of their members invariably prevent it.
- The Democratic Party’s deceitful game

Greenwald’s analysis is devastating and final. You should read it, and click some links. He cites many commentaries, and several previous of his own. I especially recommend his linked post from December 16 which summarized several months of his analysis of the White House’s own deceitful strategy: White House as helpless victim on healthcare

Greenwald’s analysis explains why we didn’t see a rush of “liberal revenge” with the change in administration. I don’t believe the country really made a sharp turn left, but it seems clear enough to me that the nation as a majority wanted to see some leftish extremism in action for a period of time simply to redress some of the rightish extremism of the previous administration. But it never happened.

I had started to understand that the Democrats will actually be relieved to lose badly in the 2010 elections, so they no longer feel pressured to perform to an agenda they no longer support. But Greenwald’s work now makes it crystal clear to me that this has been the case since the 2008 landslide.

Damn.

We’ve been gamed. We voted these people into office, trusting them to deliver on one last hopeful throw of the political dice. They’ve thrown away the entire possibility of our ever believing in trustworthy representation again. This fine moment in history that could have shone so brightly is dulled and smeared, ultimately cast away in betrayal, sold for pieces of silver.

And the Democrats seem so insulated in their political compromise that they fail even to understand how badly they themselves are about to be abandoned for their treachery.

Because none of this means that the Republicans are fit to govern this country. It just means the answer to the troubles of America and the world cannot be addressed by any of the commonplace political members. It means the answer lies outside of the business-as-usual machinery.

The answer must lie with individual representatives who will cleave to an agenda more powerful than their party affiliation, and more powerful than the ocean of money existing to defeat it.

It would be naive to expect this kind of strength in representation to come from any individual’s character, the forces of corruption are far too strong. Undeviating representation can only come from a compact made with the agenda itself. It’s time to elect people who swear to follow a path laid down clearly in advance.

We’re not going to be able to root out this corrupted nest of politicians for any cause less than sustainable world. If the inhabitable biological world were not dying, none of this would matter much. As things stand however, political corruption is in the way, and has to go. Nothing less than excellent accountability will suffice now. The crisis itself forms the agenda and lends strength to its executives.

A year ago William Greider spelled out very clearly the dilemma faced by the Democrats, namely: can they return to their historic values against the corruption of money that has saturated them in the last three decades?

We saw in 2009 that so far they are unable. Instead of watching the Democrats fail all through that year, I wish I’d paid more attention to Greider and spent more energy working towards the new economy. Lesson learned.

I like Greider. As a fervent Fed-watcher I read his 1987 book, Secrets of the Temple, back in that time, and learned for the rest of my life what to expect from recessions.

What to expect from recessions you ask? Well, the productive, wealth-creating economy, and the workers and business leaders dependent on that economy, will endure the wait of attrition – with help from nobody – until the economy begins to gather force again from the new productivity created largely by productive workers and leaders, usually in new margins and areas of effort.

Then the thieves will come back into the daylight and begin to rip off the economy again, taking as much in unfair economic rents, and by actual fraud and theft, as government imperfection and corruption will allow, and distorting the economy by degrees towards its next collapse.

These processes go by different names as the fashions change.

I have been a great supporter of Barack Obama. But I watched the Democrats blink after Massachusetts and walk away from health care with their nerve shattered, and the White House was nowhere to be seen or heard. Exactly when a rallying cry could have shored up the crumbling spine of an entire political party and carried the field of battle, Obama held his silence.

It was then I realized his strategy wasn’t good enough for these times, and would fail to create for us what we must actually create ourselves.

Take a look at my bookmarks archive to see reactions in those fateful days. Here’s how three people in a row felt in the comments thread of Ezra Klein’s blog as we watched health care reform vanish. The third one is me.

I walked away on that day from a year’s worth of fascination with our broken, decayed and ghostlike democratic process, and turned back to the task at hand, which is to help create sustainable world.

Reversing climate damage and restoring the biosphere will not happen from the greatness of governments, but from the persistence of people.

I think this excerpt from Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2007 film The 11th Hour says more eloquently than I could ever write what’s wrong with our nation’s great institutions, and the direction we must point our efforts in now.

The 11th Hour: The forces blocking change

And since I hate it when people provide links and don’t say what’s in them, let me throw a bit of transcript your way.

Around 1:50 Michel Gelobter explains that despite appearances, in reality we have very responsive political leaders, it’s just that they’re responsive to wealth, and to money, and to corporate power.

And the reason our politicians aren’t responding to global warming is that their response is to a higher power. It’s to the fossil fuel industry.

Starting at 3:15 listen to David Orr describe how our political system has failed us with climate change. The general public wants a green world of renewables and clean air, but this fails to materialize. In a beautiful piece of imagery, Orr cites “the chasm between public opinion and public policy,” and the bridge across that chasm which we call “government.”

The bridge is broken, he explains.

Two compelling stories from Simon Johnson in two days.

He says the Republicans eagerly await the next round of election money from Wall Street players ready to take revenge on politicians who have tried to reform them.

The administration prefers a bipartisan approach – avoiding confrontation on the true nature of “too big to fail” or even explaining how much worse our problems became during the Bush years – but that just can’t work when the other side refuses to cooperate.  Given Republican relationships with big banks, there will be no serious attempt to cut financial institutions down to a size at which they could be allowed to fail – no meaningful version of the Volcker Rules will make it into law.

Goldman and the other big Wall Street firms have already won big on this round.  They will plow even more money into defeating political candidates who have opposed them – for example, on credit card legislation.  The Republicans see this coming and are rubbing their hands with glee.
- Simon Johnson, February 5, 2010

###

Then he says the crisis in Europe will be too much for U.S. banks – credit will tighten, forget recovery.

As the international situation deteriorates – or even if it remains at this level of volatility – banks will hunker down and credit conditions will tighten around the US.

And if the European situation spins seriously out of control, as it may well do early next week, the likelihood of a double-dip recession (or significant slowdown in the second half of 2010) increases dramatically.
- Peter Boone and Simon Johnson February 6, 2010

Today is a good day to ask, what would be so bad with voting green? I think the only reason a lot of people placed their climate anxiety on hold was to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority. Now one has to wonder if this was worth foregoing the green message.

Hearts are heavy across the so-called “progressive” spectrum because the Democratic party and president seem to have walked away from passing health care reform, their nerves shattered by the Republican win of Ted Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts.

Ezra Klein asked yesterday, Can Democrats govern? and response from commenters highlighted fears that the base of voting support would fracture, people would not vote, or vote green, as it this were a bad thing.

If the Democrats can’t use the majority that a number of different interests joined together to give them – if they can’t even pass desirable legislation at the national level – then what good are they to the environmental cause?

If partisan politics won’t work, then sustainability candidates are the only answer, regardless of where they come from.

The planet’s comfort zone for human civilization is running out, quickly. This forms its own messaging, no packaging required. This issue won’t go away, it will rise in damage and immediacy month by month, year after year, unremittingly, right up to endgame.

What is needed are people who can get things done. From their recent record it didn’t look as if it would be the Republicans solving our problems. And from the beginning it was always questionable if the Democrats were able to step into this requirement.

For the future of the Democrat label as a political identity, a little more loss of nerve such as we’re seeing at the moment and Democrats will be finished with progressive dialog, because the planet’s fate itself will soon take over that entire conversation.

Oddly, even as the Dems go down, Obama may rise, on this one front, the most important of all. And as Joe Romm shows today, many Republicans seem interested in saving the biosphere. There is indeed much bi-partisan support for climate legislation.

It’s time for those who care about the planet to throw away party affiliation, for those independent voters who joined the Democrats in hopes of getting change to focus instead on sustainability platforms, wherever they may be found. It’s time for sustainability to become the number one vote-getting plank in any representative’s platform.

There’s more good commentary on the old America, the one that’s broken and needs to fix itself.

Two commentators, both of whom have spent time in China recently, have come back to worry on the bone that everyone seems to be chewing now, asking: is America in permanent decline, or can it be fixed?

I noted recently that the political process is broken, and it’s a theme we’ll see more of as the country comes to terms with what Obama’s first year has shown us. I think in 2009 we saw a great president get weighted down to a crawl because Congress and his own administration was captured by lobbyists.

We’ve seen obstruction to change, and a lack of will to change, that serve at least to show us how paralyzed the systems of government have become.

James Fallows has over 10,000 words at The Atlantic contemplating the questions of how badly America is broken right now. He concludes that external competition has very little bearing on our current issues, and that the American spirit is still in good shape, but that government is gridlocked.

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is ‘I wish we had a Senate like yours.’
- How America Can Rise Again

Fallows recounts how special-interest groups take bites out of the total national wealth, easier to implement than to remove. This amounts over time to a gradual hardening of the arteries, and “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt” to the requirements of the people.

Fallows is not optimistic that we the people can reform our government, but he makes a point that I really want to emphasize: when public life goes down, private life goes down after it. A nation without a strong, democratic public-policy interest cannot progress scientifically or economically.

Fallows points out that California has now been forced to start on the road that demonstrates this.

And since this seems counter to the easy Libertarian notion that less government is good for the private sector, as a one-time libertarian analyst and essayist I want to come down heavily with Fallows on this point. Read his article for greater illustration.

A second analysis of the American decline (or not) gets into the nuances with an actual checklist we can sink our teeth into. Professor Orville Schell has been thinking about our national condition for some years as he travels around the world, and his tentative conclusions are reprised in the Los Angeles Times under three headings:

• Aspects of U.S. life that are still vigorous and filled with potential.
• Aspects of U.S. life that still function but need help.
• Aspects of U.S. life in need of drastic intervention.

Along with the national infrastructure, the airports and the public schools, Professor Schell dumps both federal and state government into the last category, “in need of drastic intervention.” Yep.

And note also his warning for the future:

I started keeping these lists because I was searching for things that would banish that dispiriting sense that America is in decline. And yet the can-do list remains unbearably short and the can’t-do one grows each time I travel.
- America’s can’t-do list

Can we fix America? It’s clear that government will not fix itself. And Obama’s inability to change it may have surprised him as much as it surprised us. He has yet to turn to the only people who can help him – us the people ourselves – and he may never. I think he’s the best we’ll ever get, and if he fails to enact change in the government then it’s only us left.

As we know from Kevin Drum’s analysis of Wall Street and its capture of both government and media, the answer to much of our government’s paralysis lies with campaign-finance reform. The administration itself is beholden to its contributors also.

We can fix the productive economy by developing the new sustainable industries and combating climate change. This takes government, and government will increasingly find itself compelled to be present and active in these areas, especially as they show their profitability and GDP-strengthening virtues.

But how to get the thieves out of the new economy, and how to get the government to attend to the commonwealth? I’m hearing agreement that a new refrain must begin to call the campaign contributions and the lobbyist dollars the bribes that they are.

Political rhetoric founded on calling bribes what they are would be the start of a good thing for the Union.

I’m trying to stay away from working with the old economy, especially since I declared for the new economy, but good commentary deserves mention. Kevin Drum has a beautifully written article explaining in completely clear terms how Wall Street managed to walk away unscathed from the global disaster it left the rest of us buried under.

It’s the kind of piece you can send to any of your friends and they will see a light breaking as they read it. The article, Capital City, has this to say: “A year after the biggest bailout in US history, Wall Street lobbyists don’t just have influence in Washington. They own it lock, stock, and barrel.”

But Drum’s story is not about economics, it’s about politics, and more precisely about political lobbying. The finance lobby has quite simply captured the entire U.S. government, and to a large extent it’s taken over the media and popular culture as well.

Now if the aerospace lobby had told us after the 1986 Challenger disaster that the key to better performance was to turbocharge the engines and quit performing preflight inspections, everyone would have agreed that they were crazy. Yet that’s essentially what the finance lobby has done over the past decade, and in some weird way we were too mesmerized to recognize it. Within months of a near catastrophe caused by one of the industry’s brightest stars, the lobbyists were busily making certain that it would happen again—and that when it did happen, it would be bigger and more disastrous than ever.

If you read Drum’s article you’ll experience tingles of recognition from your own life as you realize how severely the working taxpayers have been short-changed over the last three decades.