Martin DyckmanScientists fear that global warming will reach a “tipping point” beyond which it could not be halted. That may already have happened, they said last week, to the West Antarctica ice sheet. If it slides into the ocean, seas could eventually rise by as much as 10 feet worldwide.
There’s a third tipping point that’s relevant to this discussion.
It’s the one at which we will lose — or perhaps already have lost — control of our government, leaving it forever powerless to represent the public on climate change or anything else.
That clear and present danger can be seen in the scads of politicians, mostly Republican, who would rather admit to believing in the tooth fairy than in what the climate scientists say.
That half of all Republican voters deny climate change helps to explain, but not to excuse, these professed idiots.
This epidemic of ignorance is the spawn of the petrochemical, coal, and power industries.
They’ve spent lavishly to confuse the public about climate change, to nourish the big lie that it’s only a debatable theory instead of a fact.
The massive campaign spending of the billionaire Koch brothers and their accomplices in the nonrenewable energy industries dictates how the tooth fairy politicians will vote and defeats the election of those who would vote wiser.
The war on government by the Kochs — who have budgeted $125 million to this year’s campaigns — began as a revolt against any environmental regulation that might dampen their swollen profits even slightly.
It’s a one-sided war that began when the Supreme Court eliminated campaign-spending limits in its 1976 Buckley decision. The court’s intellectually and politically corrupt rulings in the Citizens United case of 2010 and McCutcheon this year simply made it worse.
The issue is beyond whether corporations are “people.” It’s whether anyone should be able buy a country under the paradoxical rubric of “free speech.”
None of these slush funds, whether from the left or the right, devote a single dime to a serious discussion of real issues. Rather, it’s all about attack ads that twist the truth beyond context — as with the $900,000 a Republican group backed by the Kochs and others has already spent trying to defeat a Supreme Court justice in North Carolina, where fracking is the emerging issue.
The paid speech is silencing free speech. That’s wrong whether it’s spent by the right or the left. The Supreme Court is on the side of the public’s enemies.
The best and probably only chance to escape this political tipping point is the constitutional amendment that Majority Leader Harry Reid intends to bring to the Senate floor soon to halt what he calls the “hostile takeover” of America.
It’s Senate Joint Resolution 29, which would enable Congress and the state legislatures to once again enact reasonable limits on campaign contributions and spending.
There aren’t going to be the necessary 67 votes, not now, but a good way to begin the salvation of our country is to see who votes for the people and who votes for the Kochs. No candidate who opposes this amendment deserves to be elected or re-elected to Congress.
Reid credits retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens with giving him “the nudge that I needed.”
In articles, speeches and an excellent little book, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” Stevens has been showing how the court’s majorities got it wrong in Buckley and have made it worse since.
“(I)t is unwise to allow persons who are not qualified to vote — whether they be corporations or nonresident individuals — to have a potentially greater power to affect the outcome of elections than eligible voters have,” says Stevens.
During the Republican presidential debates of 2012, Stevens points out, it would have been “manifestly unfair” for the moderators to give Mitt Romney more time than his rivals simply because he had more money. Yet that’s what the court allows big campaign spenders to do in every other election context.
Moreover, he warns, voters who think money will buy the election are more likely to give up and not vote.
The conservative columnist Pat Buchanan wrote recently that there are issues that can and should unite people from left and the right.
SJR 29 should be one of them. The Tea Party’s candidates, for example, have been hugely outspent and thrashed by the so-called establishment in nearly every Republican primary so far. For them, the tipping point is now.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
