Okay, the Russia thing was funny. "Omigod the Russians hacked the DNC database and discovered everything the DNC hid from the American people!" Thus concludes the tragedy of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who almost became an American feminist icon by marrying into her husband's business.

At any rate, it's time to think practically about the future, and so we turn our attention to Counterpunch of Tuesday, "The Ascendance of Trump Makes Broad-Based Climate Action Essential…and Achievable, by Stan Cox. Cox has some books on ecological themes out, not all of which I have read, and he's prominently featured in the staff page of the Land Institute, an organization of some interest if you live out in the Great Plains or if you take an interest in agroecology.

Cox's main point in this excellent, must-read piece is that the election of Donald Trump has brought out a characteristic response both from the enviro celebrities and from Big Green: plead some more before the emperor. Such a response is likely to amount to the same sort of nothing they got from begging for climate change action from Barack Obama. Cox continues:

In a conversation with Gore on December 6, the climate-hawk governor of California, Jerry Brown, urged optimism. He believes that other world leaders can convince Trump that his retrograde climate policy is not a good idea politically. (First, though, those leaders are planning to convince Syrian president Bashar Assad to adopt Scandinavian-style social democracy.)

Fa-da-bum.

Cox instead argues:

Instead of begging our megalomaniac-elect to save the world, we all should follow the examples of the Standing Rock Sioux, the #ShutItDown activists, the city of San Francisco, and others who are confronting the ecological crisis where it’s happening.

So what's the ultimate goal here?

To achieve that transformation it will be necessary, in Marx and Engels’ terms, to expropriate the expropriators. The 99 percent will have to seize wealth and political/economic power from the 1 percent. But in a world with a ceiling on available energy, there will also need to be a shift of resources from the top half to the bottom half of the population if there’s to be sufficiency for all.

Well that's sensible. Y'all going to do that by taking over the Democratic Party? Too many people making excuses for why we shouldn't do this. It'll take too long, it's impractical, blah blah blah. (Translation: we don't want to do it. We like our doom just the way it is, because with all that fossil energy we can keep spinning the illusion that what we're doing is going to save us.)

At any rate, we won't get any solidarity for anything at all by bickering on the Internet, and as long as solidarity is the juice that keeps us going, we'll need a world based on it, and so our problems are not solved by coercing everyone all the way down to Bernie Sanders into some sort of nice compromise in which billions of people will eventually be celebrating in joy at the one tiny crumb they received from the tables of the super-rich because it accidentally slipped off the edge of one of them when Donald Trump shifted his elbows to get in better position to snort another line of coke. Cox continues:

So start asking your readers or audiences or neighbors this: “What gives you more hope: broiling ourselves on the High setting under Trump, cutting emissions gradually so as to broil ourselves on Medium under the Paris Agreement, or turning off the broiler and living with a lot less material abundance but in a more just, more fair country?”

One quibble: Cox would benefit greatly from a discussion of the "union of free producers," that topic of a piece by Victor Wallis which was very exciting when it came out back in 1997, "Ecological Socialism and Human Needs." The idea is this: what if everyone were doing something useful for a living? Since the current publisher, Taylor and Francis, likes to hoard its stuff, here's the gist of it: Wallis wants to imagine what professions our society could eliminate if it were really to make a maximum effort to put “an end to the wasteful consumption of resources and energy” (p. 48). So here is what he suggests ending:

* The advertising industry, together with private insurance, banking, and associated communications, acounting, and legal services;
* The construction, resource-use, and services arising from the automobile/ shopping mall/ suburban sprawl complex;
* Excess energy use arising from the global integration of production processes and from over-reliance on long-distance trade;
* The development of a highly specialized fuel-intensive agriculture with heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides;
* Certain fuel-intensive, typically macho recreational activities giving their users an artificial sense of power (car-racing, snowmobiles, jet-skis, speedboats, etc.);
* A growing sector of purely status-related luxuries, defined as such by (a) their frivolity — including pandering to sexist or racist norms (e.g. cosmetic surgery to disguise age or ethnicity) — and (b) their highly restrictive prices;
* The police, private protection, penal, and military services built up in response to the threat and/or the reality of challenges — whether individual (delinquent) or collective (revolutionary) — to concentrated private wealth;
* Whatever proportion of general production (and construction) or ancillary services — including health care — is accounted for by demands placed upon the system, or upon individuals, by the abovementioned practices. (49)

We have only started to imagine what society would look like if it weren't so bullshit. Read the Cox piece!