Well, the story is back, and as it turns out, it is bigger than anyone imagined a year ago. Researchers have combined what they know about the Panama Papers with what was discovered in 2007 after the release of what became known as the "Swiss Papers" -- a document leak that described the hidden wealth of some 30,000 clients of HSBC Private Bank, a Swiss subsidiary of the British banking titan. The results, to date, are nothing short of astonishing and infuriating.

From a recent Washington Post report:

Researchers in Scandinavia and the United States use the Swiss and Panamanian leaks to show that global tax evasion is likely much more prevalent than previously thought. Their estimates indicate that the top 0.01 percent of the wealth distribution own about half of all offshore assets and may be hiding roughly a quarter of their wealth offshore. Their estimates show that the wealthiest people are getting away with paying far less than their fair share. If the top 0.01 percent have 30 percent more wealth than their tax returns indicate, that puts far more distance in the yawning wealth gap between the haves and have-nots. The findings imply that governments are missing out on a lot of revenue that is being hidden by the super wealthy.

Look no further than President Trump's own budget proposal, a truly monstrous document that would, among other things, strip $800 billion (that's "billion" with a "b") from Medicaid, and obliterate educational services, job training programs and nutritional assistance programs like school lunches for children and "Meals on Wheels." The foolish border wall gets a couple billion dollars in this budget, and the Pentagon gets a 10 percent bump in its revenue. Natch.

Trump and congressional Republicans put their heads together a little while back and concocted what are essentially matching tax plans. These plans, if reconciled and passed, would represent a massive transfer of wealth to the richest people in the country, again. Remember the George W. Bush tax cuts of fifteen years ago? Like that, but strapped to a rocket pack and launched into space. And then there is the American Health Care Act, the witless GOP answer to Obama's Affordable Care Act. Beyond stripping more than 20 million Americans of their access to health insurance, the AHCA is also a stealth tax cut for the rich. The ACA is supported by various taxes, mostly on wealthier Americans who can presumably afford it. The AHCA would cut those taxes by around $765 billion, and a vast majority of that money would go to the top of the financial heap, again. "According to the Tax Policy Center," reports NPR, "the top 20 percent of earners would receive 64 percent of the savings and the top 1 percent of earners (those making more than $772,000 in 2022) would receive 40 percent of the savings."

An ancillary benefit to the GOP in all this is the fact that another victim of the AHCA would be, again, Medicaid. Through their plan, funding for Medicaid would be diminished significantly and control of the program itself would be taken out of federal hands and put under the purview of the states. In this, they get two entitlement birds with one stone: The end of the Affordable Care Act, and the end of Medicaid as we have known it.

Why in the name of all that is holy and good would any reasonable person wish to inflict such pain on ordinary, innocent people? Put the question to a conservative advocate of these ideas, and they'll tell you lickety-split that it's the responsible thing to do. We're broke, see? Big debt, big deficit, we're all out of cash, so we have to make some painful choices to right the ship.

Lies.

These people are doing this because, for whatever reasons, they are driven by one sole purpose: fathomless greed. They are going for the loot, period. Whatever they have, they want more, and they don't want to share even a little bit they wouldn't notice was gone, so they hide it away in bank vaults spread across a global network of financial spider holes to avoid paying taxes, peeling off a few bills now and again to pay a politician to go on television and talk most earnestly about how broke we are.

Between the lost revenue to be found by taxing all that hidden money and one big audit of the Pentagon and the "defense" budget, we would have more than enough revenue on hand to solve problems we didn't even know we had. Education reform, infrastructure repair, actual health care reform … the money for it is all there, stuffed inside bank vaults on islands you've never heard of. The next time you see one of these animated mouthpieces talking about the necessity of austerity on your television, know to the very well of your soul that you are looking at a liar, a peddler of poison, a wrecker and a thief-in-waiting.

Neoliberalism, in the name of this absurd utopia, stripped away government regulations and laws that once protected the citizen from the worst excesses of predatory capitalism. It created free trade agreements that allowed trillions of corporate dollars to be transferred to offshore accounts to avoid taxation and jobs to flee to sweatshops in China and the global south where workers live in conditions that replicate slavery. Social service programs and public services were slashed or privatized. Mass culture, including schools and the press, indoctrinated an increasingly desperate population to take part in the global reality show of capitalism, a "war of all against all."

What we were never told was that the game was fixed. We were always condemned to lose. Our cities were deindustrialized and fell into decay. Wages declined. Our working class became impoverished. Endless war became, cynically, a lucrative business. And the world's wealth was seized by a tiny group of global oligarchs. Kleptocracies, such as the one now installed in Washington, brazenly stole from the people. Democratic idealism became a joke. We are now knit together, as Mishra writes, only "by commerce and technology," forces that Hannah Arendt called "negative solidarity." The backlash, Mishra writes, resembles the anarchist, fascist and communist violence and terrorism that took place at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century. In one of the most important parts of his brilliant and multi-layered analysis of the world around us, Mishra explains how Western ideas were adopted and mutated by ideologues in the global south, ideas that would become as destructive as the imposition of free market capitalism itself.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran, for example, borrowed liberally from Western ideas, including representation through elections, egalitarianism and Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary vanguard, which was adapted for a Muslim world. Nishida Kitaro and Watsuji Tetsuro of Japan's Kyoto School, steeped in the romantic nationalism of German philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, transformed the glorification of the German nation into a glorification of imperial Japan. They "provided the intellectual justification for Japan's brutal assault on China in the 1930s, and then the sudden attack on its biggest trading partner in December 1941-at Pearl Harbor." South Asia's most important writer and scholar, Muhammad Iqbal, provided a "Nietzschean vision of Islam revivified by strong self-creating Muslims." And the Chinese scholar Lu Xun called for Chinese to exhibit the "indomitable will exemplified by Zarathustra." These bastard ideologies cloaked themselves in the veneer of indigenous religious traditions and beliefs. But they were new creations, born out of the schopferische Zerstorung, or the "gale of creative destruction," of global capitalism.

Nowhere is this more true than with the modern calls for jihad by self-styled Islamic radicals, most of whom have no religious training and who often come out of the secularized criminal underworld. The jihadist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, nicknamed "the sheikh of slaughterers" in Iraq, had, as Mishra writes, "a long past of pimping, drug-dealing and heavy drinking." The Afghan-American Omar Mateen reportedly was a frequenter of the nightclub in Orlando, Fla., where he massacred 49 people and had been seen there drunk. Anwar al-Awlaki, who preached jihad and was eventually assassinated by the United States, had a penchant for prostitutes. Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, a senior leader of Islamic State before he was killed, called on Muslims in the West to kill any non-Muslim they encountered. "Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison," al-Adnani told followers.

The idea of Mikhail Bakunin's "propaganda by deed" is, Mishra writes, "now manifest universally in video-taped, live-streamed and Facebooked massacres." It grew, he writes, "naturally from the suspicion that only acts of extreme violence could reveal to the world a desperate social situation and the moral integrity of those determined to challenge it." These imported ideas filled the void left by the destruction of indigenous beliefs, traditions and rituals. As Mishra says, these jihadists "represent the death of traditional Islam rather than its resurrection."

"As it turned out," he writes, "the autocratic modernizers failed to usher a majority of their wards into the modern world, and their abortive revolutions from above paved the way for more radical ones from below, followed, as we have seen in recent years, by anarchy."

The terrorist attacks in Paris or London were driven by the same ressentiment, Mishra points out, as that which led Timothy McVey to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including 19 children, and injuring 684. And when the American was imprisoned in Florence, Colo., the prisoner in the adjacent cell was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993. After McVey was executed, Yousef commented, "I never have [known] anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his."

Mishra writes, "Malignant zealots have emerged in the very heart of the democratic West after a decade of political and economic tumult; the simple explanatory paradigm set in stone soon after the attacks of 9/11-Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernity-lies in ruins." The United States, aside from suffering periodic mass killings in schools, malls and movie theaters, has seen homegrown terrorists strike the Boston Marathon, a South Carolina church, Tennessee military facilities, a Texas Army base and elsewhere.

"The modern West can no longer be distinguished from its apparent enemies," Mishra notes. The hagiography of the U.S. Navy sniper Chris Kyle-who had a tattoo of a red Crusader cross and called the Iraq War a battle against "savage, desperate evil"-in Clint Eastwood's movie "American Sniper" celebrates the binary worldview adopted by jihadists who deify their suicide bombers.

"The xenophobic frenzy unleashed by Clint Eastwood's film of Kyle's book suggested the most vehement partisans of holy war flourish not only in the ravaged landscape of South and West Asia," Mishra writes. "Such fanatics, who can be atheists as well as crusaders and jihadists, also lurk among America's best and brightest, emboldened by an endless support of money, arms, and even 'ideas' supplied by terrorism experts and clash-of-civilization theorists."

Donald Trump, given the political, economic and cultural destruction carried out by neoliberalism, is not an aberration. He is the result of a market society and capitalist democracy that has ceased to function. An angry and alienated underclass, now making up as much as half the population of the United States, is entranced by electronic hallucinations that take the place of literacy. These Americans take a perverse and almost diabolical delight in demagogues such as Trump that express contempt for and openly flout the traditional rules and rituals of a power structure that preys upon them.

Mishra finds a similar situation in his own country, India. "In their indifference to the common good, single-minded pursuit of private happiness, and narcissistic identification with an apparently ruthless strongman and uninhibited loudmouth, [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi's angry voters mirror many electorates around the world-people gratified rather than appalled by trash-talk and the slaughter of old conventions," he writes. "The new horizons of individual desire and fear opened up by the neoliberal world economy do not favour democracy or human rights."

Mishra excoriates the West's idealized and sanitized version of history, "the simple-minded and dangerously misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn from a triumphant history of Anglo-American achievements that has long shaped the speeches of statesmen, think-tank reports, technocratic surveys, newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless columnists, TV pundits and so-called terrorism experts." The mandarins who spew this self-serving narrative are, as American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them and their ilk, the "bland fanatics of Western civilization" "who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence."

The roots of modernization and colonization are, as Mishra writes, ones of "carnage and bedlam." The rapacious appetite of capitalists and imperialists never considered "such constraining factors as finite geographical space, degradable natural resources and fragile ecosystems." In carrying out this project of global expansion, no form of coercion or violence was off-limits. Those who opposed us simply learned to speak our language.

"The intellectual pedigree of today's nasty atrocities is not to be found in religious scriptures," Mishra writes. "French colonialists in Algeria had used torture techniques originally deployed by the Nazis during the occupation of France (and also were some of the first hijackers of a civilian aeroplane). Americans in the global war on terror resorted to cruel interrogation methods that the Soviet Union had patented during the Cold War. In the latest stage of this gruesome reciprocity, the heirs of Zarqawi in ISIS dress their Western hostages in Guantanamo's orange suits, and turn on their smartphone cameras, before beheading their victims." The West's dangerous faith in the inevitability of human progress is chronicled by Mishra through the dueling French intellectuals Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, Fichte, Giuseppe Mazzini and Michel Foucault. This intellectually nuanced and philosophically rich book shows that ideas matter.

"The Hindu, Jewish, Chinese and Islamic modernists who helped establish major nation-building ideologies were in tune with the main trends of the European fin-de-siecle, which redefined freedom beyond bourgeois self-seeking to a will to forge dynamic new societies and reshape history," Mishra writes. "It is impossible to understand them, and the eventual product of their efforts (Islamism, Hindu nationalism, Zionism, Chinese nationalism), without grasping their European intellectual background of cultural decay and pessimism: the anxiety in the unconscious that Freud was hardly alone in sensing, or the idea of a glorious rebirth after decline and decadence, borrowed from the Christian idea of resurrection, that Mazzini had done so much to introduce into the political sphere." Mishra goes on:

ISIS, born during the implosion of Iraq, owes its existence more to Operation Infinite Justice and Enduring Freedom than to any Islamic theology. It is the quintessential product of a radical process of globalization in which governments, unable to protect their citizens from foreign invaders, brutal police, or economic turbulence, lose their moral and ideological legitimacy, creating a space for such non-state actors as armed gangs, mafia, vigilante groups, warlords and private revenge-seekers.

ISIS aims to create a Caliphate, but, like American regime-changers, it cannot organize a political space, as distinct from privatizing violence. Motivated by a selfie individualism, the adepts of ISIS are better at destroying Valhalla than building it. Ultimately, a passion for grand politics, manifest in ISIS's Wagnerian-style annihilation, is what drives the Caliphate, as much as it did [Gabriele] D'Annunzio's utopia. The will to power and craving for violence as existential experience reconciles, as [philosopher and social theorist Georges] Sorel prophesized, the varying religious and ideological commitments of its adherents. The attempts to place them in a long Islamic tradition miss how much these militants, feverishly stylizing their murders and rapes on Instagram, reflect an ultimate stage in the radicalization of the modern principle of individual autonomy and equality: a form of strenuous self-assertion that acknowledges no limits, and requires descent into a moral abyss.

"Totalitarianism with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a malevolent reaction to the benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy-a tradition seen as an unproblematic norm," Mishra writes. "It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century."

Even if you attended the 4,000-strong Peoples Summit in Chicago on June 9-11 organized by folks from the Bernie Sanders campaign and National Nurses United (NNU), you might have missed the most significant moment of the gathering. It was a seemingly offhand comment made by NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro during the Saturday evening session when Bernie Sanders spoke to an adoring crowd, but a comment that adds kindling to a potential 2020 fire.

The audience in the packed Chicago theater included volunteers for a new effort called Draft Bernie for a People's Party. They waved Draft Bernie signs and throughout Sanders' speech, urged him to launch a new party.

The group is made up mainly of young staff and volunteers who worked on the Sanders campaign but were so disillusioned by the Democratic Party that they are determined to start a new one. They are sympathetic to and want to collaborate with the Green Party and other existing third parties, but they want a new, fresh progressive party like the European ones that captured the public imagination and made sweeping gains. While their focus right now is getting Sanders on board, they say they'll build a People's Party even if he refuses to join.

At the end of Sanders' rousing address at the Summit, he was joined on stage by his wife, Jane Sanders, whose Sanders Institute was launched this weekend, and by NNU's RoseAnn DeMoro. DeMoro looked directly at the Draft Bernie people in the audience and grinned. "We're going to take a few questions but I want to thank all the Draft Bernie people here," she said. Then came the zinger. "I'm with you," she added, as she turned around to look at Bernie and his wife. Then she pivoted back to the audience, "Nurses, are we with them?" As they roared their approval, DeMoro turned to Sanders again. "I always say: 'heroes aren't made, they're cornered."

"It was amazing," said Nick Brana, Draft Bernie founder, who was former national political outreach coordinator for Bernie 2016 and former electoral manager for Our Revolution. "We knew that RoseAnn was supportive but had no idea that she would announce that support publicly, on stage, with Bernie Sanders standing next to her and in front of thousands of cheering fans."

I don't think most people in the audience realized the potential significance of the DeMoro's endorsement. Her union has about 150,000 members and spent about $1 million on the Sanders campaign. It's one of only six national unions that backed Bernie Sanders for president. Under DeMoro's leadership, the nurses have become heavyweights in the progressive world, championing everything from universal single payer healthcare to a Wall Street tax to pay for free college education. Just imagine if DeMoro could get her whole union to back a new party, and leverage that to get other unions and progressive institutions on board.

Throughout the summit, speaker after speaker railed against the Democratic Party. TV personality Van Jones trashed Hillary Clinton's campaign for failing to connect to working-class and minority voters. "Let's be honest," Jones shouted. "They took a billion dollars, a billion dollars, a billion dollars, set it on fire, and called it a campaign!" Author Thomas Frank said Democrats signed off on Wall Street bailouts, mass incarceration, and the Iraq War, giving up everything the party supposedly stood for. Former State Senator Nina Turner, who had the crowd on their feet during her entire speech, said the Democrats would have to follow the people to the left, or they'd be left behind.

But criticizing the Democrats and ditching them are two entirely different things. There are certainly sincere leaders still determined to change the party from within. The Summit heard from Congressman Mark Pocan, a progressive champion who was recently elected co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And most of the Summit was focused on getting more leftist Democrats elected, from former NAACP head Ben Jealous running for Maryland governor to the dozens of attendees running for city councils and state houses.

Getting Bernie Sanders to break with the Democrats is a long, long, long shot. And even if he agreed, creating an effective third party in the US "winner-take-all" electoral system is a treacherous path littered with dead bodies, from Ross Perot's Americans Elect to the Tony Mazzochi's US Labor Party.

Do you remember Harry Potter's invisibility cloak? It turns out wizards aren't the only ones who can vanish from sight with a special coat. Marine researchers have discovered shrimp-like crustaceans called hyperiids that can hide in the open using internal nanotechnology to cloak themselves in invisibility. That's just one among many fascinating discoveries to celebrate on World Oceans Day.

Last summer, scientists confirmed the elusive Greenland shark can live up to 400 years, beating out ancient bowhead whales and rougheye rockfish for the longest documented lifespan of any vertebrate. Researchers are just starting to learn about the two-metre, scale-free ragfish with cartilage skeleton and flabby flesh found in Alaskan waters, and the faceless fish found in Australian waters, whose eyes, gills and mouth are hidden.

That we're still discovering new wonders in the oceans is even more reason to protect them. We have a long way to go, though. In early 2016, about three per cent of oceans had formal protection from industrial activities, up from one per cent five years ago. Twenty countries, including Chile, Palau, the U.S. and the U.K., have committed to increasing marine protection.

Last summer's expansion of Hawaii's PapahAnaumokuAkea Marine National Monument created the world's largest marine protected area. In October, the Ross Sea - home to some of the most productive waters in the Antarctic - was finally declared a marine reserve after a decades-long push. When a coalition of 24 countries agreed to provide international protection for 1,548,812 square kilometres of the Southern Ocean, the Ross Sea surpassed PapahAnaumokuAkea as the largest marine reserve. Most impressively, Palau, part of Micronesia in the western Pacific, turned 80 per cent of its waters - an area the size of California - into a marine reserve. Britain established the Pitcairn Islands reserve in the South Pacific, a contiguous underwater park nearly the size of Pakistan.

In 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and then U.S. president Barack Obama issued a joint statement to "substantially surpass" international commitments to reach 10 per cent marine protection, even though Canada has protected less than one per cent so far. Our government is getting started, though. It announced strong protection for globally significant glass sponge reefs near B.C.'s Haida Gwaii earlier this year, ending years of inaction.

Along with increased ocean protection, new technologies are opening up ocean exploration. Researchers are adapting drones to track coastal erosion, map coral reefs, survey penguin populations, assess whale health and even learn about mysterious sea turtle behaviour. Thanks to a microscope that works underwater, scientists are learning how coral polyps interact and about patterns algae use to take over coral ecosystems.

Some jurisdictions are also getting serious about plastics that are choking seabirds, fish and marine mammals. California and Hawaii banned plastic grocery bags and some countries discourage use through taxation. In the U.S., Congress passed the Microbead-Free Waters Act to phase out tiny plastic microbeads in soaps, facial scrubs, toothpaste and other products by 2018. The United Nations Environment Programme is calling for a worldwide ban on products containing microplastics.

Protection efforts appear to be paying off. This year, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada down-listed shortfin mako sharks from "threatened" to "special concern". Around the world, anti-finning campaigns have helped decrease shark fin consumption. Endangered manatees made a comeback in the U.S., with Florida seeing a 500 per cent increase in the population, prompting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to propose reclassifying them from "endangered" to "threatened".

Many whale populations are also rebounding after decades of commercial exploitation. Hunted to near extinction in the early 20th century, North Pacific humpback whales were recently reclassified from "endangered" to "special concern." Biologists estimate their population at 18,000.

Likewise, blue whales in the eastern North Pacific off California are showing signs of recovery, currently numbering about 2,000. Nearly exterminated by commercial whaling fleets before receiving worldwide protection in 1967, blue whales remain one of the rarest marine mammals, numbering between 10,000 and 25,000 worldwide.

All of us are potentially endangered by those driven to violent acts called hate crimes when committed by individuals, but social acts of hatred and depravity are much greater threats and exclude none, no matter where we live or what moral, spiritual or market values we entertain.

Still reeling from recent bloody terrorist attacks in societies in which most people were previously shielded from retaliation for the horrendous violence they performed on foreigners, the world faces an even greater threat from an empire falling from global domination while its minority controllers manipulate their people into accepting behaviors which would call for clinical isolation or solitary prison confinement if practiced by an individual. The continued forcing of more citizens into an alleged asylum of near dementia endangers far more than what some of us call "our" democracy.

This manic state in which a minority believe themselves controllers of their nation's material life has existed since America's electoral origins, but we have always been under the domination of the wealthiest minority in the country and the national democracy thought to be "ours" by so many has never included a majority of our people. Even the most rudimentary understanding of arithmetic - let alone history - reveals this fact without necessity for a degree in mathematics. In fact, any schmuck with a calculator can do the math.

There has never been a presidential election in the history of the USA in which a majority of the electorate chose the winning representative of minority capital. And most recently, while millions held their noses to cover the stench of voting for the despicable or the deplorable lesser evil offerings, far more voted for neither. 231 million Americans are deemed part of the electorate, which means being 18 and older and with enough mental capacity to select burgers, pizza, guns, tacos, pet food or political candidates at the market. If we can afford them. Of that number, more than 165 million chose neither the republicrat nor the demublican. That's far more than double those exercising the alleged power of the majority and voting, as usual, in the minority.

Our alleged political democracy is even less so than our economy, which is really a dictatorship of a tiny minority. In fact, it's even worse since all of us are forced into the economy and cannot choose to opt out, like voters, while its control falls to an even smaller cabal than the one running the political system. They are part of the same anti-democratic minority that dominates politics, but there is a bit more room for small entrepreneurs to get a foot in the door of economics than is possible in politics. There are very few gourmet-taco-street vendor political parties and those radical minorities choosing to contest for the presidency and national offices are given as much chance by the system as a mom and pop store has going up against Amazon or Wal-Mart.

The breakdown of the political economic system has been in process for hundreds of years, decades, or the past few months, depending on the consciousness and vocabulary of the critic, and has become so much more serious that minority ownership, and thus a major part of the manipulated-by-media public, is reduced to wondering which boogie man - Putin? Trump? Napoleon? - is to be blamed for the state of collapse. Thus the frenzy to impeach the rich, arrogant clod who got to the white house despite established power's desire not to have him there. They first got rid of the potentially democratic menace of Bernie Sanders but were not equal to the task of dumping an even greater threat from one of their own whose arrogant and ignorant honesty strips the cosmetic facade from the ugliness of so much reality. The social disease revealed is too much for those who must label him a pathological liar because they cannot, refuse to, or are incapable of facing reality. This egotistical fool may well be the most honest resident we've ever had at the public housing we call the white house and that honesty is partly why established power views him as danger because he neither minces capital's words nor even tries to cover up its horror with the usual political double talk that calls bloody murder peace and blatant dishonesty the truth.

Trump's victory is making a mockery of the fiction of American leadership in morality, which serves as euphemistic foundation for the empire's bloody horrors of mass murder and national destruction performed while calling itself global director of ethical culture and insisting the rest of the world follow its immoral lead. And getting even the previously thoughtful among its home population buying into the most inane explanations for why their world - the one called "our" democracy - is in a state of near collapse. It supposedly has everything to do with foreign intervention in "our" multi billion-dollar democratic process. You know, the one that reduces half a million citizens to living in the street while we moan about Trump's sexism, or reduces 20% of our children to lives of poverty while we visit therapists to discuss our depression over Trump's xenophobia, or stresses out a population that can afford to go into debt for luxury goods while most americans are in debt in order to survive. You know, that massive dysfunctional family that worships weapons, cosmetics and pets while nearly half its population is low income or poor? The one that's saving refugees escaping wars we organize, finance, start, and perpetuate? It's as though the people on the Titanic were at each other's throats to get a new captain for the sinking ship. Maybe an African American transsexual Jew could keep it afloat? If a savior captain isn't available, maybe some toilets shared by the crew and the paying guests will do the trick? One thing's for sure: once we get rid of the Russians, the Koreans, the Iranians, the Palestinians, the Chinese, and much of South America and especially this captain, the boat will rise to the heavens and everything will be just fine.

America has become an even dumber reality show than the one that helped put this president in charge of the circus. Further comic relief from TV and cartoonist clowns won't help. We need a transformation of our political economy that starts from the roots of the problem. They have to do with our origins, our history and our behavior, not those of particular CEOs of capital's national corporation, and very little if anything to do with any foreign nation. If we're even mildly serious about a threat being marketed as Climate Change, we'd better stop listening to the people responsible for it who offer toothless reforms like the Paris Accords, and work for the radical and revolutionary political and economic change we need to solve not only that long range problem, but far more short term ones that threaten us right now.
(c) 2017 Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate.

Laughter is a wonderful thing. It's hard to get too much of it. But there may be something even more valuable - something that you may be better able to grasp than some of your elders.

When you're able to see a failure in others, it can be an opportunity to spot other similar failures - even those that you may be, in some measure, sharing in.

Why do climate deniers deny? No two are identical, but a major factor for many of them seems to be, not an analysis of evidence but loyalty to a worldview. In this worldview it simply cannot be the case that people are destroying the earth. That's not in the sacred texts. There's no place for it in many careers or lifestyles designed around extraction, consumption, destruction, and "development" of the world. Accepting the obvious would be harder than denying it. So it is denied, or - by far preferable - simply ignored and avoided.

But there are two ways in which the world may be destroyed for human (and much other) life, and millions of people who care about ending the destruction of the climate are steadfastly ignoring and avoiding the other problem. Those best informed on climate change have the darkest views on it. They say it's progressing far more quickly than most have been willing to recognize. Those best informed on the other danger we face say the risk of it is at its highest point and increasing.

The other danger is that of nuclear holocaust. The number of bombs needed to end all life on earth through the destruction of the atmosphere and mass starvation continues to shrink in the expert analyses. The number of nuclear weapons ready to fire at a moment's notice in the U.S. and Russia remains sufficient to destroy a large number of planets. The U.S. says it is developing newer, higher-tech, and "more usable" nukes. Other nations say they are following suit. The number of nations with nuclear weapons, and that of nations with nuclear power continue to grow. A major push is on in U.S. politics by some of the same people most concerned about climate change to create ever greater hostility toward Russia. And the proliferation of wars and weapons, with the potential of generating nuclear war, has reached new extremes.

But avoiding recognition of one of the twin dangers we face severely handicaps even one's efforts on the one that is recognized. Militarism is the single greatest contributor to climate and other environmental destruction, yet militarism proceeds utterly unopposed by major environmental advocacy organizations. Advocating for the obvious would be more inconvenient than denying it. So it is avoided.

Dear Uber Fuehrer Cornyn,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your asking softball questions to Deputy Fuehrer Sessions, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 06-24-2017. We salute you Herr Cornyn, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence