Alarming changes

After our conversation last night at the Mary Daly Discussion Group, my friend Carolyn sent me this great link to this recent post on the New York Times Green Blog. A new draft report from the National Assessment and Development Advisory Committee (NCADAC). The Green Blog's Justin Gillis reports that the draft seems to be taking a much stronger stand about the seriousness of climate change and the ways that human activity is responsible for bringing climate change about:

If it survives in substantially its current form, the document will be a stark warning to the American people about what has already happened and what is coming.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the draft document says. “Americans are noticing changes all around them.

“Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between.”

The lesser of two evils?

If the Green Party's presidential candidates had been listed on the Oklahoma ballot, I would have voted for Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala.

Given Oklahoma's extremely restrictive ballot access laws, the only two choices I had were Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Obama is the lesser of two evils by a large margin. Romney demonstrates a complete lack of core integrity, a willingness to shift from progressive to extreme conservative opinions based on whatever is popular at the moment, and an alliance with the most regressive economic and political forces in the United States.

Nevertheless, I wish I'd had the option to vote for Jill Stein today. For one thing, living in the reddest of red states, I know that Oklahoma will go solidly for Romney. Given the reality of the way the Electoral College operates, a vote for anyone else is a protest vote. I would like my protest vote to be for the candidate I prefer.

As Doug Henwood put it in a recent post for The Nation:

...I wish, just once, an endorsement of a Democratic presidential candidate coming from the left would mull over some serious structural issues that are at stake.

There are certain eternally recurrent features of these endorsement editorials, and they are depressing. The shortcomings of this year’s Democrat are acknowledged, only to be dismissed, because this is always the most important election since 1932, or maybe 1860. If the Democrats lose, brownshirts will move into the Oval Office. It will be repression and immiseration at home and aggressive war abroad. Sure, there will be some repression, immiseration and war even if the Dem wins, but see above re dismissal of shortcomings.

The persistence of the pattern is no exaggeration. Here’s something from a 1967 essay by Hal Draper on the imminent 1968 election: “Every time the liberal labor left has made noises about its dissatisfaction with what Washington was trickling through, all the Democrats had to do was bring out the bogy of the Republican right. The lib-labs would then swoon, crying ‘The fascists are coming!’ and vote for the Lesser Evil.”

And what is the consequence of that swoon? Draper’s answer: “the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right.” Almost every editorial urging a vote for this year’s Dem will lament the rightward move of our politics without ever considering the contribution of such calls to the process.

In other words, the Democrats will continue to ignore and disrespect the progressive vote, because they've learned that they can get away with it.

I would much prefer to have the opportunity to vote for candidates who actually respect my views.

Not the climate change I was hoping for

Reclaiming Medusa on Facebook for linking to this post at thenation.com by Naomi Klein. As I write this, the Unites Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen has been teetering on the brink of failure. In order to get the conference moving again, the Obama administration -- in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- is pushing to seriously weaken the Kyoto Protocol in return for the financial assistance poor countries desperately need to cope with the effects of climate change that they've already suffered.

This offer is being spun very differently in the mainstream media -- for instance, see this version of the story in the New York Times. In that version of the story, the US offer of aid may save the climate talks from failure, by forcing developing nations -- including China -- to be more "transparent" about its level of carbon dioxide emissions.

The official UN home page for the conference has cross-posted this article from the Associated Press, noting that President Obama is extremely unlikely to promise any significant reduction in US emissions of greenhouse gases.  Western European nations will likewise be unwilling to make serious cuts in their own emissions. Developing nations have called on western developed nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions at least 34 percent from their 2005 levels by 2020.

The situation puts a person in mind of the debate here at home over healthcare reform. Once again, the Obama administration will try to achieve a cosmetic change and then repackage it as substantive progress.

Lucinda Marshall of Reclaiming Medusa also has a blog called Feminist Peace Network, on which she has posted this interesting and comprehensive set of links to news and analysis about the climate change conference.