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Global Warming Is Shifting The Axis Of The Earth!

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me
Help ~~~ The Beatles

I see where loss of water on land through ice melting and human-caused factors is changing the movement of the North and South poles. Yes, just when you thought the effects of global warming couldn't get any worse, eh?

Glacial melting due to global warming is likely the cause of a shift in the movement of the poles that occurred in the 1990s.

The locations of the North and South poles aren't static, unchanging spots on our planet. The axis Earth spins around-or more specifically the surface that invisible line emerges from-is always moving due to processes scientists don't completely understand. The way water is distributed on Earth's surface is one factor that drives the drift.

Melting glaciers redistributed enough water to cause the direction of polar wander to turn and accelerate eastward during the mid-1990s, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU's journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

"The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s," said Shanshan Deng, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author of the new study.

The Earth spins around an axis kind of like a top, explains Vincent Humphrey, a climate scientist at the University of Zurich who was not involved in this research. If the weight of a top is moved around, the spinning top would start to lean and wobble as its rotational axis changes. The same thing happens to the Earth as weight is shifted from one area to the other.

Melting of glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, the Southern Andes, Antarctica, the Caucasus and the Middle East accelerated in the mid-90s, becoming the main driver pushing Earth's poles into a sudden and rapid drift toward 26 degrees E at a rate of 3.28 millimeters (0.129 inches) per year.

Researchers have been able to determine the causes of polar drifts starting from 2002 based on data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a joint mission by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, launched with twin satellites that year and a follow up mission in 2018. The mission gathered information on how mass is distributed around the planet by measuring uneven changes in gravity at different points.

Previous studies released on the GRACE mission data revealed some of the reasons for later changes in direction. For example, research has determined more recent movements of the North Pole away from Canada and toward Russia to be caused by factors like molten iron in the Earth's outer core. Other shifts were caused in part by what's called the terrestrial water storage change, the process by which all the water on land-including frozen water in glaciers and groundwater stored under our continents-is being lost through melting and groundwater pumping.

The authors of the new study believed that this water loss on land contributed to the shifts in the polar drift in the past two decades by changing the way mass is distributed around the world. In particular, they wanted to see if it could also explain changes that occurred in the mid-1990s.

In 1995, the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward. The average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 also increased about 17 times from the average speed recorded from 1981 to 1995.

Shifts in the geographic location of Earth's North and South poles is called polar drift, or true polar wander.

Now researchers have found a way to wind modern pole tracking analysis backward in time to learn why this drift occurred. The new research calculates the total land water loss in the 1990s before the GRACE mission started.

"The findings offer a clue for studying past climate-driven polar motion," said Suxia Liu, a hydrologist at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the corresponding author of the new study. "The goal of this project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China is to explore the relationship between the water and polar motion."

Using data on glacier loss and estimations of ground water pumping, Liu and her colleagues calculated how the water stored on land changed. They found that the contributions of water loss from the polar regions is the main driver of polar drift, with contributions from water loss in nonpolar regions. Together, all this water loss explained the eastward change in polar drift.

Makes you wonder what new nightmares await us, due to global warming, does it not?

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06-20-1931 ~ 05-01-2021
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Until the next time, Peace!

Here's the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names "Little Boy" and "Fat Man."

I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day, but in a sense for me, my whole generation, and this country, war never really ended.

The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was "cold" (which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight), but war as a way of life never really ended, not to this very moment.

In fact, as the decades went by, it would become the "infrastructure" in which Americans increasingly invested their tax dollars via aircraft carriers, trillion-dollar jet fighters, drones armed with Hellfire missiles, and the creation and maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons around the globe, rather than roads, bridges, or rail lines (no less the high-speed version of the same) here at home. During those same years, the Pentagon budget would grab an ever-larger percentage of federal discretionary spending and the full-scale annual investment in what has come to be known as the national security state would rise to a staggering $1.2 trillion or more.

In a sense, future V-J Days became inconceivable. There were no longer moments, even as wars ended, when some version of peace might descend and America's vast military contingents could, as at the end of World War II, be significantly demobilized. The closest equivalent was undoubtedly the moment when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Cold War officially ended, and the Washington establishment declared itself globally triumphant. But, of course, the promised "peace dividend" would never be paid out, as the first Gulf War with Iraq occurred that very year and the serious downsizing of the US military (and the CIA) never happened.

Never-Ending War

Consider it typical that when President Biden recently announced the official ending of the nearly 20-year-old American conflict in Afghanistan with the withdrawal of the last US troops from that country by 9/11/21, it would functionally be paired with the news that the Pentagon budget was about to rise yet again from its record heights in the Trump years. "Only in America," as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote recently, "do wars end and war budgets go up."

Of course, even the ending of that never-ending Afghan War may prove exaggerated. In fact, let's consider Afghanistan apart from the rest of this country's war-making history for a moment. After all, if I had told you in 1978 that of the 42 years to follow, the United States would be involved in war in a single country for 30 of them and asked you to identify it, I can guarantee that Afghanistan wouldn't have been your pick. And yet so it's been. From 1979 to 1989, there was the CIA-backed Islamist extremist war against the Soviet army there (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars). And yet the obvious lesson the Russians learned from that adventure, as their military limped home in defeat and the Soviet Union imploded not long after-that Afghanistan is indeed the "graveyard of empires"-clearly had no impact in Washington.

Or how do you explain the 19-plus years of warfare there that followed the 9/11 attacks, themselves committed by a small Islamist outfit, Al Qaeda, born as an American ally in that first Afghan War? Only recently, the invaluable Costs of War Project estimated that America's second Afghan War has cost this country almost $2.3 trillion (not including the price of lifetime care for its vets) and has left at least 241,000 people dead, including 2,442 American service members. In 1978, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, had I assured you that such a never-ending failure of a conflict was in our future, you would undoubtedly have laughed in my face.

And yet, three decades later, the US military high command still seems not faintly to have grasped the lesson that we "taught" the Russians and then experienced ourselves. As a result, according to recent reports, they have uniformly opposed President Biden's decision to withdraw all American troops from that country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, it's not even clear that by September 11, 2021, if the president's proposal goes according to plan, that war will have truly ended. After all, the same military commanders and intelligence chiefs seem intent on organizing long-distance versions of that conflict or, as The New York Times put it, are determined to "fight from afar" there. They are evidently even considering establishing new bases in neighboring lands to do so.

America's "forever wars"-once known as the Global War on Terror and, when the administration of George W. Bush launched it, proudly aimed at 60 countries -do seem to be slowly winding down. Unfortunately, other kinds of potential wars, especially new cold wars with China and Russia (involving new kinds of high-tech weaponry) only seem to be gearing up.

War in Our Time

In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a "voluntary" activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making but also to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as Nick Turse reported, they would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries, often involved in semi-secret conflicts "in the shadows" that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.

Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an anti-war movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life. Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous offered by citizens and corporations to "the troops." But that's where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year after endless year, remain remarkably supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but-despite, for instance, the militarization of this country's police and the way in which those wars came home to the Capitol last January 6-it remains a remarkably distant reality for most Americans.

One explanation: Though the United States has, as I've said, been functionally at war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly-on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19 mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let's just consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you're of a certain age, you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1954-75)-and don't forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos and Cambodia as well-that first Gulf War of 1991, and the disastrous second one, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that Global War on Terror that began soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the rest of the Greater Middle East, and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance, the first 12 American special-ops trainers arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread American anti-Islamist terror role (now failing) across much of that continent.

And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the people in the countries involved) that we've now generally forgotten about, the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about President John F. Kennedy's April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson's sending of 22,000 US troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to "restore order"; or President Ronald Reagan's version of "aggressive self-defense" by US Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them; or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?

And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA's endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the US military) to intervene in the affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao Zedong's communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala and Iran, among other places. There were an estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few US soldiers or CIA agents died in them. No, these were hardly "wars," as traditionally defined, not all of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of this country's militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist William Blum's "A Brief History of Interventions" makes all too clear.

Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on Planet Earth. That brief period might almost have passed for "peace," American-style, if the US military under President George H.W. Bush hadn't, in fact, invaded Panama ("Operation Just Cause") as 1989 ended to get rid of its autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians (including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.

And then, of course, in January 1991 the First Gulf War began. It would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and "only" a few hundred deaths among the US-led coalition of forces. Air strikes against Iraq would follow in the years to come. And let's not forget that even Europe wasn't exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the US Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when something like 200,000 US troops have regularly been stationed abroad and US Special Operations forces have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked "terrorists" in nation after nation and American presidents quite literally became assassins in chief. To this day, what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called an American "empire of bases"-a historically unprecedented 800 or more of them-across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come from the country whose military budget at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that's 10!) countries combined, including China and Russia.

The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American Century have, in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been "at war" at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke-well, something like the War on Terror that also become a war of terror and a spreader of terror movements in our world.

As journalist William Arkin recently argued, the United States has created a permanent war state meant to facilitate "endless war." As he writes, our nation at this very moment "is killing or bombing in perhaps 10 different countries," possibly more, and there's nothing remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.

The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the United States were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country's focus on permanent war, and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped?

What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?

(c) 2021 Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).Previous books include: Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

David Gelles, the New York Times reporter, likes to report about corporate plutocrats raking it in while stifling or endangering their workers. We've all seen those large advertisements by big companies praising the sacrifices of their brave workers during this Covid-19 pandemic. When workers ask for living wages, most of these bosses say "No" but take plenty of dough for themselves.

Gelles reports that Boeing, after its criminal negligence brought down two 737 MAX planes and killed 346 people, went into a corporate tailspin. The company laid off 30,000 workers and its sales and stocks plummeted as it reported a $12 billion loss. No matter, the new Boeing boss, David Calhoun, managed to pay himself about $10,500 an hour, forty hours a week, plus benefits and perks.

"Executives are minting fortunes, while laid-off workers line up at food banks," writes Gelles. Carefully chosen Boards of Directors rubberstamp lavish compensation packages, as they haul in big money themselves for attending a few Board meetings.

It gets worse. Hilton Hotel had many rooms empty due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But CEO Chris Nassetta made sure his pockets weren't empty. He was paid $55.9 million in compensation in 2020 or more than a million dollars a week!

Gelles goes on to report that with "the cruise industry at a standstill...," the Norwegian Cruise Line, "doubled the pay of Frank Del Rio, its chief executive, to $36.4 million." That is more than $700,000 per week. He must have worked overtime counting empty ships and red ink.

T-Mobile's merger with Sprint got government antitrust approval with the assurance that more jobs would be created with cost savings. Instead, they're starting layoffs while awarding CEO Mike Sievert over a million dollars a week. Sometimes, CEOs make more dollars from their company than the entire company itself makes in profits. Companies that lay off workers pay their top executives huge amounts, and still have the avarice to demand and get federal stimulus grants.

On March 22, the New York Times reported a new analysis by IRS researchers and academics about tax evasion by the richest 1% of U.S. households. Taken as a whole, these super-rich don't even report a fifth of their income, according to this study. The ultra-wealthy get away with this heist by offshoring to tax havens and pass-through businesses. Adding to this unlawful evasion is their upper-class power over Congress to rig the tax laws so they can avoid even more taxes.

The Republicans, by starving the IRS budget and audit staff over the past decade, have aided and abetted enormous tax evasions. Curiously, the cowardly Democrats have not made this an issue in their campaigns against the GOP. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are at stake.

Trump, of course, made matters worse. ProPublica found the IRS audited the poor at around the same rate as the richest Americans.

Big Corporations make out like no mere individuals. Earlier this month, the New York Times told its readers that The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) study revealed: "55 of the nation's largest corporations paid no federal income tax on more than $40 billion in profits last year." These companies even received $3.5 billion in rebates from the Treasury Department, so zany are the fine-print tax bonanzas.

Twenty-six corporations paid no federal income taxes since 2017, according to the ITEP study. These included Nike and FedEx.

Corporations get lots of these tax breaks by arguing before Congress that they need them to invest and create jobs. Repeatedly, these promises turn out to be false. Some have called them lies, citing profits totaling over 7 trillion dollars in the past decade being shredded in buybacks of the companies' own stock.

Apple, whose quasi-monopoly reaps huge quarterly profits, just announced another $90 billion in stock buybacks. Apple doesn't know what to do with its cash from vastly overpriced computers and iPhones. Apple, not surprisingly, pays very little in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam - despite the U.S. being the land of its birth and source of ample R & D corporate welfare paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

CEO Tim Cook, arguably the most miserly CEO plutocrat in America, turns a deaf ear to health, labor, and environmental specialists pleading with him to address the solid waste of its junked electronic products and pay its serf-labor in China a living wage. These two expenditures would not consume 10 percent of Apple's enormous profits. To which Emperor Cook says no dice.

Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, Kimberly A. Clausing, a U.S. Treasury official, said according to the Washington Post, that while other wealthy nations typically raise roughly 3 percent of GDP through corporate taxes, in the United States that share fell to just 1 percent following the 2017 Trump tax cut−all while corporate profits, as a share of U.S. GDP, were setting records.

The usual progressive members of Congress issue denunciations of this whole corporate, ultra-rich tax escape racket. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe corporations pay too little in taxes, according to Gallup polling. Unfortunately, nothing happens in Congress to address this injustice.

When are the American people going to move on to Congress and their Big Boy paymasters? When the plutocratic class evades taxes, either there are fewer public services, more public deficits, or higher taxes on the middle class. As Joe Biden says - they must pay "their fair share." People, use your civic muscle to make your members of Congress act and do it, now!

Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 51, a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the 51st state of the union. It finally would end the denial of voting representation to its more than 700,000 residents, the majority of whom are Black or Brown.

The bill was passed 216-208, with Democrats voting unanimously and Republicans offering not one vote. That led the media to declare the bill dead on arrival in the Senate, where it could be passed by a majority but derailed by a filibuster that would require 60 votes. Republicans have announced that they are prepared to filibuster the bill and block the majority from passing it.

Once more, legislation guaranteeing basic civil rights is threatened by a minority employing the filibuster, the favored instrument used to block civil rights legislation and sustain segregation for decades. Only this time Republicans, once the party of Lincoln, have taken up the mantle of the plantation Democrats of the Old South.

The case for D.C. statehood is clear. The nation was founded in protest against taxation without representation. D.C. residents are denied voting representation in the House and Senate. The nation is shamed by military service without representation. D.C. residents have fought in wars going back to the Revolutionary War and yet have no representatives to vote in favor or against those wars. America, which claims to lead democracies across the world, denies the foundation of democracy to more than 700,000 citizens in the nation's capital.

D.C. is not too small to be a state. It has more citizens than Vermont and Wyoming, and about as many as Alaska. Those states, of course, are overwhelmingly white. D.C. would have the largest proportion of African Americans of any state. There are no constitutional obstacles to making D.C. a state. The Constitution calls for Congress to control the seat of government. The new bill defines the seat of government as including Capitol Hill, the White House, the National Mall and connecting property, drawing the state from the remaining areas.

Historically, voting by D.C. residents-even for local officials-has been suppressed because of racism. In the 1870s, at the same time the South was beginning to suppress Black votes and construct what became the American version of apartheid, Southerners in Congress moved to strip District residents of the vote for fear of Blacks. This isn't disputed.

As segregationist Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained in 1890, "In the face of this influx of Negro population from the surrounding States, [Congress] found it necessary to disenfranchise every man in the District of Columbia ... in order thereby to get rid of this load of Negro suffrage that was flooded in upon them. That is the true statement. History cannot be reversed. No man can misunderstand it."

And racism propels the opposition today. Across the country, Republicans are mobilizing in state after state to make it more difficult to vote in ways that disproportionately impact minority voters. Rather than seeking to win the votes of Black and Brown voters, they choose instead to find ways to impede their ability to vote. Filibustering against D.C. statehood is simply the most extreme expression of this campaign of voter suppression.

Republican legislators toss out all sorts of objections to D.C. statehood-it's too small, too urban, lacks manufacturing, doesn't have a landfill. But their real objection is that it is too Black and Brown and likely will elect two Democratic senators and a Democratic member to the House. D.C. residents tend to be more affluent and better educated. You would think that they would be prime targets for Republican appeals. And they would be, except that the residents are disproportionately Black and Brown, and the modern-day Republican Party has made itself into the party of racial division.

The opposition to D.C. is mirrored in the opposition to statehood for Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but, as a territory, have no right to vote. They too pay taxes and serve in the military. Puerto Rico, with 3 million citizens, is even larger than the District. Most Americans support Puerto Rican statehood. But Republicans fear that, since Puerto Ricans are largely people of color, they will tend to elect Democrats. Once more racism stands in the way of democracy.

In 1988 when I ran for president, I called for statehood for the District and for Puerto Rico. I also called for the U.S. to end its support for apartheid in South Africa and demand that Nelson Mandela be freed. Since then, Nelson Mandela was freed and became the leader of his country, leading a peaceful transition from apartheid. Historic change is possible. Yet in the U.S., the citizens of the District and of Puerto Rico remain deprived of representation. And the right to vote is once more under siege across the country.

This summer, the Senate will convene a hearing on D.C. statehood. The White House has strongly issued its support. If Republicans continue to employ the filibuster to block the vote, it is time for Democrats to suspend the filibuster, just as Republicans did to drive confirmation of their Supreme Court nominees to lifetime appointments. The tricks and traps of our segregationist past should no longer stand in the way of simple democracy for the citizens of the District of Columbia.

Oh great - here comes a new stealth attack on the fragile, life-sustaining natural resources of Planet Earth. This assault is by Wall Street alchemists who're out to redefine one of our most basic resources: Water.

Everyone knows that water is "invaluable" - it's literally life, requiring a constant intake by each of us... or we quickly die. But the Wizards of Wall Street want to reduce potable H2O from its environmental, humanitarian, and spiritual essence to just another perishable economic good that they can market-price and sell to the highest bidder - literally turning our water into speculators' gold.

This contrivance has opened the door for financial manipulators who've quietly been devising razzle-dazzle schemes to allow rich global investors to play in water. They're now pushing water futures, automated split-second trading, "water grabbing" ventures, hedging schemes, and other financialization hustles to maneuver the monetary value of this essential resources.

To see this ethically-debased future, look to an outfit with the ominous acronym of WAM (Water Asset Management). It's buying up water rights in low-income farming communities in places like Arizona, then literally moving the "commodity" to rich suburban developments that will pay more. WAM profiteers call water peddling "the biggest emerging market on Earth... a trillion-dollar market opportunity." They even boast that the crises of "drought, flood, and fire" caused by climate change creates a market volatility that will provide "an unprecedented period of transformation and investment opportunity for the water industry," allowing investors to "thrive and prosper."

As we celebrate Earth Day, let's not only raise the issues of global pollution and sustainability, but let's also begin to force a public discussion about this crucial question of environmental and existential ethics: Is access to an affordable supply of clean water to be a human right for all - or will we let it become a wet dream for a cabal of rich speculators?