News Chunks: Capitalism and groundwater wars; Regarding the dangerous enraged one

In a long but excellent article, the NYT writes about how a few wealthy, mostly unaccountable elites control vast amounts of groundwater in Nevada, Kansas and Montana. Long story short, elite capitalists and their business interests are pumping groundwater fast and it will be gone in the coming years. People will simply have to move away from affected areas, including the businesses. The land alone will not sustain much in the way of modern large-scale human activities. 

This is what unregulated, social conscience-free capitalism always or nearly always does. Capitalists do not care about you, me, the public interest, or the environment. They care about themselves and profit. Period. The NYT writes about the Kansas situation (not paywalled off):

From a small brick building in Garden City, Kan., 13 men manage the use of groundwater across five million acres in the southwest corner of the state, some of the most productive farmland in America for corn, wheat and sorghum.

They serve on the board of Groundwater Management District 3, which since 1996 has overseen the pumping of 16.2 trillion gallons of groundwater — enough to fill Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, twice over.

The board is elected, but not by everyone: The only people eligible to vote are large landowners, a group of less than 12,000 people in an area of roughly 130,000. And in some years, fewer than 100 people actually vote. Others — cashiers at Walmart, teachers at the community college, workers at the local St. Catherine Hospital — have no say in the management of the aquifer on which they, too, rely.

The aquifer is running out of water, fast. But the board hasn’t slowed down the pumping.

In a country where the value of land often depends on access to water, powerful interests in agriculture, heavy industry and real estate draw vast amounts of water out of the ground. For generations, that water has been treated as an unlimited resource in much of the United States, freely available to anyone who owns a piece of land and can drill a well. Entire local economies have been built around the assumption that the water will never run out.

Now it is starting to run out, not only in Kansas but across much of the country. From Maryland to Hawaii groundwater levels are falling, often the result of overpumping and underregulation, made worse by climate change. As the planet warms, demand for water is increasing. At the same time, increased evaporation, as well as decreased precipitation in some places, means that less water is refilling the aquifers, accelerating their decline.

“If we don’t make change, we’re not going to have water,” said Lindsay Vaughn, a state lawmaker in Kansas who has tried to curtail pumping in her state. 

But change is being actively resisted by many of the agribusinesses, multinational companies and big landowners who depend on enormous amounts of water. They say that reducing groundwater access strikes at the heart of local and regional economies. It also strikes at their bottom lines.

“You lose land value, you lose tax base, and quite frankly you lose the way of life,” said Joe Newland, president of the Kansas Farm Bureau.

In reporting around the country, The New York Times found that the struggle is intensifying between those who benefit from pumping large amounts of groundwater and those who see it as a looming catastrophe.

Once the water is gone, it’s gone unless humans mount a major, years-long effort to replenish depleted aquafers. This raises a bigger question than just groundwater. When unregulated capitalism runs wild and butt naked until there is nothing left to exploit or to sustain the local human population, the enterprise collapses. The elites just move on, mostly cushioned and protected by accumulated wealth. Regular people are left behind to fend for themselves. That's the typical narrative, with the typical human and/or environmental wreckage. 

Capitalism, it privatizes wealth and trickles most profit (usually ~95% ?) up to the elites, while socializing human and environmental risks and harms to the rest of us. No wonder the plutocrats fight tooth, claw and poison dagger to keep their vast wealth and power. They generally fight in darkness with as much secrecy and plausible deniability as possible. That’s how Trump always operated and still does. They all do it, with few exceptions.

One critically necessary thing needed to keep rural farm operations going is fresh water. Once that is gone, affected areas will in essence be mostly bankrupt wastelands. Natural rainwater will be insufficient to maintain most modern large-scale farm operations. The day is coming when there will be a lot of irate displaced farmers asking pointed questions, but getting no good answers. The plutocrats will quietly slink away in the dead of night, leaving the usual plutocrat wreckage behind them for others to deal with.

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A long, detailed NYT opinion by columnist Thomas Edsall considers the race for president and how the MSM is stumbling, fumbling, bumbling and failing (not paywalled off - the article is worth the time to read):

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”

Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits

a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power

against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”

“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges.)”

Klaas asked:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?

The media, Klaas argued, has adopted a policy in covering Donald Trump of “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”

In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”

This approach, according to Klaas,

has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “don’t amplify him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.

Looking over the eight and a half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there had been no warning signs.

The warnings that Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.

These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.

In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.

In March he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:

I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.

“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,

we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.

At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration, shoplifters would be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”

Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, N.H., on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

Trump, the Washington Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”

In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency but which never went into effect.

Schedule F, the reporters wrote,

would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.

Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.

Edsall’s column is quite long. It goes on at length like this. There is a heck of a lot to write about. What Klass and Edsall are arguing is for the MSM to stop treating DJT nicely. The MSM needs to pretending DJT didn’t say the horrible things he said. A few others in the MSM have recently seem to woken up to the gravity and urgency of the threat and are starting to use words like fascist.

 

Q: Should the MSM do as Klass and Edsall are arguing, or should keep a firm and steady hand on the tiller of the status quo, i.e., will it persuade the few persuadable minds that might still be open to more warnings about DJT?