In catching up on the events of the past week, one thing has become apparent: Top-down policies no longer work. With Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia acting as an obstructionist to initiatives attempting to solve such problems as climate change, and with Republicans refusing to support anything that Democrats propose, and with Democrats taking an all-or-nothing approach to legislation, Washington, D.C., has become ineffective. It will take grass-roots efforts to make progress, which also means it will be a slow process.
As more people feel the effects of inflation, climate, and housing problems, their concerns eventually will prompt action that top leadership currently is incapable of addressing. Meanwhile, acting locally, people can move their communities and their state in the right direction.
Sometimes, things are taken to absurd levels. With Texas now considering a fetus to be a living child, one resident of the Lone Star State has argued that she should be able to use the carpool lane without other passengers because she is pregnant.
Remember when former president Donald Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the border wall? Last week, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador agreed that our southern neighbor would pay $1.5 billion to improve the infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border. In discussions with President Joe Biden Jr., Obrador joined in a commitment for the two countries to carry out “a multi-year, joint, U.S.-Mexico border infrastructure modernization effort for projects along the 2,000 mile border,” a senior Biden administration official said.
Maxim Shevchenko makes a comparison in Russian Dissent between the “special operation” in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, saying both are ongoing conflicts without resolution. Although the undeclared war in Ukraine continues, both sides are exchanging prisoners, and Shevchenko claims that those in power benefit from continued conflict.
On the one hand, Russia is under terrible Western sanctions; on the other hand, these sanctions allow Russia to strangle the West in the noose of inflated energy prices and to earn even more money on world markets in concert with global speculators. On the one hand, Putin is an outcast; on the other, he remains a guest of the G-20 summit.
Do you still have no understanding that influential world powers are simply sacrificing both Russians and Ukrainians to further tighten their grip on power? That while you are killing each other in the ruins of Lysychansk, someone is staking their claim in the oil and gas markets, taking successful advantage of exchange rates? That someone has created a territory of constant but controlled war in order to further their own pursuit of power and wealth?
Here in the United States, President Biden is trying to deflect all blame — not that he is really responsible for the high gas prices and inflation, as some people say — by laying the responsibility on everyone in sight. A few months back, he declared, “Americans’ budgets are being stretched by price increases and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike.” By early July, he was laying the blame on gas-station owners. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product,” he said.
The latest absurdity coming from the White House was Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s statement, “We are stronger economically than we have been in history.” That is something straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.
Nancy Rommelmann writes, “It was insulting. Americans can see for themselves the alarming dip in their 401ks, and the stock market failing to rally. They know they are paying more for less, that every trip to the gas station or the grocery store is at least $100. They know that they are not, in fact, stronger economically than ever.”
Rommelmann spoke with Hamza El Jamal, who runs two garages and four gas stations in Westchester and Northern Dutchess County in New York, and he said, “The margins go down for us, while big oil makes a ton more.” El Jamal speaks from experience, for he used to work at Shell. He knows that the big companies take advantage of gas prices by hiking up their own profit margins per gallon, along with the actual price at the pump. Yet Biden’s statement led to customers blaming El Jamal and other gas station owners for not lowering the price.
People are angry, but they do not know where to direct that anger. That anger spills over everywhere, and is likely behind the shooting of a parking enforcement worker in New York. A New York Police Department spokesman said 31-year-old Johnny Pizarro was shot on July 19 while he was saving parking spots for the production team for the Law and Order spinoff Law & Order: Organized Crime.
The oppressive heat wave is not making things any easier. Not everyone has a pool, lake, or river in which to cool down, and not every home has air conditioning. People are hot and tired, and prone to outbursts that can turn deadly.
Nature Communications published a report this week that assessed archeological, historical, and paleoclimate information that linked climate, civil conflict, and political collapse at the Maya capital of Mayapan on the Yucatan Peninsula in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE. Researchers found that the strife, which reached a crescendo between 1441 and 1461 CE, also was in a period of protracted drought conditions.
“Multiple data sources indicate that civil conflict increased significantly and … correlates strife in the city with drought conditions between 1400 and 1450 cal. CE,” scientists wrote. They suspect the drought may have stoked the civil conflict, leading to violence and the institutional instabilities that precipitated Mayapan’s collapse.
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