Well, as one paper put it, the Biden Administration is already in victory lap mode after signing into law the "huge" bill that will see us tackle (but not head spear, which is what we need at this stage) Climate Change. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is the real deal, we're told, just before the MidTerm elections that could see Republicans take over Congress and make the limp dick president a lame duck too -- just as they took a few beats off the step of Obama after they force-fed him the TARP bail-out (aka, The We're-Too-Big-To-Fail Bill) that had to come before any social infrastructure hopey dopey keep-the-promise cash out to the loser element (the working class and under). But like the TARP (TARP spells prat backwards, and what an ass backwards bill it was) bail-out the TIRA will prove just as problematic for our democracy -- probably not long after the election.
As the MSM lead-mouth The Guardian puts it in "Biden hails 'biggest step forward on climate ever' as he signs Inflation Reduction Act." They tell us:
Joe Biden has signed into law a plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the climate crisis and lowering healthcare costs for Americans, capping more than a year of negotiations ahead of elections in which voters may oust his Democrats from control of Congress.
Clraw not Craw. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is a reduced version of the Biden administration's proposed Build Back Better Act. BBBA sounds an awful lot like the MAGA resolve. And even Bobby "Raging Bull" DeNiro was nonplussed by Biden's Corn Pop fable featuring rusty straight razors and wanted to beat some face. First query, did he hope to win over some MAGA types for Democrats in tough House races across the country? Truly, if the Republicans take over the House, Biden's going to be revenge-impeached. If they take the Senate, too"oh boy, Avuncular Joe might be the first to be actually heaved-hoed from the First Office. Ukraine and China dealings coming back to squeeze his dangleberries. It's all there in that family biography that that fella Ben Schreckinger from Politico wrote. (See my review.)
Hell, even some progressives want Biden impeached over what he did to the Afghanistan economy with freezes and seizures -- in revenge -- that "is sadistically punishing the victims through deliberate economic warfare" and almost guaranteed that the return rule of the Talibans will devolve to its previous savage ways. Even the eye-con-ographic green-eyed ladies GIs brought home from the Green Zone in the Ghan to meet Mom before the wedding are shedding tears to think that there but for the grace of GIs go I.
The TIRA law (note the priority on inflation rather than the climate) will raise $737 billion and authorize $369 billion in spending on energy and climate change. This after a COP26 climate summit last fall that Bill McGuire called, in his new book, Hothouse Earth, "arguably the most important meeting in the history of humankind," which Bill ends up calling a failure to respond. (See my interview with the sad lad when it comes out next week on Truthout like gangbusters.) Now, assuming the honest brokers in Congress can get past the loopholes still to be negotiated on the raising-money front, $369 billions to ameliorate the coming climate disaster by 2030 is chimpanzee chump change that maybe doesn't even amount to an ante in this crazy world.
But let's do some rudimentary math here. As I interpret it, and I've been known to be wrong (it's one of my better features), $369 billion is to be divided by the 8 years of its enactment, so that, on average, $46 billion will be spent each year fixing the security and upgrading the efficiency of what's referred to as The Grid, as well as subsidizing the green energy sector with its new-fangled wind turbines, solar paneling, new batteries for electric cars and e-planes.
This latter clause is problematic in very much the way that was described in the recent Michael Moore production, Planet of the Humans, which was widely attacked by many environmental activists, including poster boy Bill McKibben, because the documentary undermines the notion that a green-corporate partnership would solve The Problem. The film argues that it won't work, that it's not enough, and shows how e-cars, solar and wind technologies have had only modest success stories and present their own environmental issues, and, Planet of the Humans points out, population growth is not even addressed by environmentalists. At all.
The other problem I see is that there is no One Grid per se; it's not like Big Pharma or Big Oil that way. Whilst there are three main interconnected grid zones -- The Eastern Interconnection, which operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains; The Western Interconnection, which covers the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountain states, and The Texas Interconnected system -- none of them is a gestalt; each is a hodge-podge, a mish-mash, a Rube Goldberg rejection of Occam's razor resulting in weirdo beardos with electric guitars, but not a system you could, say, hack into easily and hit a switch. (Although, that's exactly what the US did to Russia -- place a gizmo on their lines to take their Grid down in case of war, according to 9/11 Myth Debunker Popular Mechanix (fed by the NYT) -- so you know it has to be true.) According to Ashley Dawson, author of People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, US centralization of its grids is not even possible. (See my review.)
By the way, I reviewed a podcast recently, Black Out, starring Rami Malek (Mr. Robot), that enacted what would happen if we had a centralized grid and some nutter or some Russian or some Russian nutter took down our grid (psst, in the podcast it was a homegrowner). We'd be fucked, is what we'd be, if someone hacked The Grid by Internet. No, really. In the podcast -- get this! for fucked -- only the Texas grid comes on, partially, in the end. And our heroes from Massachusetts have to migrate from the place where JFK's light first came on, in this miserable world, to the land where they blew out his f*cking candles and blamed it on a magic bullet. And all he was doing wrong was waving to the nice people, one opening an umbrella, he noticed, when it was too late. How about that? The Lone Star becomes the Only Star. Fuuuuck a duuuuck.
I won't say that Biden's Inflation bill, in the city of the little blue pill, won't do anything, but it's a long way to Temporary sometimes and methinks Biden better hope the CIA and FBI are out there on election day helping to rig the vote back to the Left in another "best election ever" process. If he were smart, he'd pull a Michael-on-Carlo scene, and send someone to beat the snot out of Mitch McConnell -- just to send a message that the domestic abuse is over, mofo, and the Age of Democratic Reform has begun. Damn! Michael was a war veteran! How dare you try to Corn-Pop this country, you selfish little man. Republicans will say.
The US throws away huge globs of money, just pallets and pallets, in war. As the Brown University Cost of War project estimated that "the US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion." Wowzer! But even before that, remember that on the day before 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld told the press that the Pentagon had mislaid some $2.3 trillion dollars -- oops and oh well, he said. Imagine if we had that $10 trillion back to fight Climate Disaster/ Imagine if we had the balls, as a democracy, to refuse to let them fight these stupid wars that have not only cost so much in "blood and treasure," but which, as the Brown study indicates, has been so bloody destructive to the global environment.
Seen in the light of the damage done by war-spending, the piddly amount spent on fighting the imminent collapse of civilization by suicidal tendencies among the psychos hooked on precious dinosaur fluids, $369 billion is virtually nothing. In addition, instead of leading the country into the morass of another funding battle to open some loopholes for the weasels -- the Pentagon, Big Pharma, Big Healtho -- to slip through "we" should have stripped Big Oil and Big Pharma of their windfall profits that have come as a result of a pandemic and a war in Ukraine (probably more coming in Southeast Asia) to pay for the Climate solution.
Bernie Sanders has introduced the "Ending Corporate Greed Act" to Congress, to no avail. He reckons that billions have gone to big corporations during the pandemic period alone:
This about $125 billion dollars that could have been grabbed back from Big Greed to tackle the Climate catastrophe that we're in. Instead, we get a bill, just before an election, that is way too little and maybe too late, and which may just get amended once the MidTerm elections are over -- if the Republicans end up taking control of Congress, the purse strings people.
Humanity, take a bow and then get off the stage. The Fraudville Era is over.
