berniesrevolution:

On Meet the Press yesterday, Utah Senator Mike Lee said about our climate change crisis, “all the proposals I’ve seen so far that would address any of these issues would devastate the U.S. economy.” This is considered a reasonable explanation of maintaining the status quo. This is the insanity built into capitalism.

Lee was specifically explaining why he would not support a carbon tax, the single most direct, rational, and market-friendly way of restricting carbon emissions. The context for the question was the release on Friday of a report from the US government itself saying that, within a century, climate change could cost our country “hundreds of billions of dollars annually” and kill thousands of additional Americans per year.

Mike Lee is a right wing ideologue. But on this issue, his position is the mainstream one. The entire world—led by the rich developed nations, the US in particular—is staring down a huge, slow-moving tidal wave called climate change. We know it is coming. We have been told repeatedly the devastation that it will cause. And yet world leaders collectively go about their business as usual, taking no action concomitant with the level of danger that we all know we are facing. On a very basic level, this is insane. If we were standing on the train track, and we knew the train was coming, and we did not rouse ourselves to step out of the way, we would be suicidal. We are doing exactly that on the issue of climate change. Are we suicidal? No. We are capitalists. And we are following the logic of capitalism straight to hell.

As practiced in America, capitalism incentivizes the maximization of short-term, private profits. This private profit seeking is bolstered by the implied public safety net should anything go wrong, as the financial crisis amply demonstrated. Capitalists operating within the framework of capitalism have every incentive to grab every possible dollar they can as soon as possible and keep them all. Should disaster strike, the government can ride to the rescue. Compensation from investment is supposed to be tied to risk—the higher the risk, the higher the reward. When you have a political system in which it is possible to purchase political power, as we do, you can do something neat: you can shove your risk off onto the government. It is privatized profit and socialized risk. It is the best deal you can get. It is also, at its core, corrupt, the most inhuman manifestation of crony capitalism. But that is what we have, and companies and investors and by extension all of us are engaged in a system that encourages us to drive directly into a wall of doom, rather than, say, allow carbon to be taxed.

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This Is How Capitalism Kills Us

seandotpolitics:

When Michael D. Cohen admitted this past week to lying to Congress about a Russian business deal, he said he had testified falsely out of loyalty to President Trump. When he admitted this summer to lying on campaign finance records about payments to cover up a sex scandal during the campaign, he said it was at Mr. Trump’s direction.

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, former senior Trump campaign officials, lied to cover up financial fraud. George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide, lied in hopes of landing an administration job. And Michael T. Flynn, another adviser, lied about his interactions with a Russian official and about other matters for reasons that remain unclear.

If the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has proved anything in his 18-month-long investigation — besides how intensely Russia meddled in an American presidential election — it is that Mr. Trump surrounded himself throughout 2016 and early 2017 with people to whom lying seemed to be second nature.

They lied to federal authorities even when they had lawyers advising them, even when the risk of getting caught was high and even when the consequences for them were dire.

Even more Trump associates are under investigation for the same offense. They are part of a group of people surrounding Mr. Trump — including some White House and cabinet officials — who contribute to a culture of bending, if not outright breaking, the truth, and whose leading exemplar is Mr. Trump himself.

Mr. Trump looks for people who share his disregard for the truth and are willing to parrot him, “even if it’s a lie, even if they know it’s a lie, and even if he said the opposite the day before,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. They must be “loyal to what he is saying right now,” she said, or he sees them as “a traitor.”

Mueller Exposes the Culture of Lying That Surrounds Trump