Threatening the planet

There must be personal and cultural reasons why some people never touch guns and others arm themselves and consider it their fundamental right to bear arms.

Connecting the rhetoric of possessing arms to the time of revolutionary war against England is meaningless. Arms for civilians come from the arms industry that produces the vast quantities of lethal weapons for the Pentagon. So the arms industry is a giant at the core of the economy and the military industrial complex.

However, armed Americans keep committing atrocities for decades, especially slaughtering children. And despite the moral revulsion for such behavior, the gun lobby wants all Americans armed.

The high court agrees with this dismal militarism. This probably mirrors the tremendous inequality in America, the land of the small number of billionaires and the land of the many who barely make it. So the court is telling the gun owners to show off their lethal power. But this official blessing of a fear-politics is bound to blowback. A return to the slaughter of the Indians is not that far away. The Indians this time are likely to be poor whites and minorities.

The high court edict with the most potential deleterious impact is restricting EPA’s miserable but minimum control of the fossil fuel industry.

The excuse for this irresponsible ruling is willful misunderstanding of the Clean Air Act of 1970. The Republican-appointed judges said that Congress did not give EPA the power to regulate the carbon emissions of electricity producing companies.

On the contrary, the Clean Air Act directs EPA to regulate “pollutants endangering public health.” Some of the pollutants include soot, smog, mercury and countless other toxic chemicals in the air humans breathe. In 2009, the EPA documented that carbon dioxide threatens human health and the environment. Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas resulting from gasoline-powered cars and trucks as well as natural gas and coal-powered electricity power plants.

So the June 2022 edict of the Republican judges is pure politics, continuing Trump’s thoroughly illegitimate denial of climate change in order to boost the profits of the fossil fuel billionaires and their feudal servants in Congress and state governments.

In addition, the court has no authority to deal with technical issues about which its judges don’t have the scientific knowledge or experience. Are these judges telling Americans their lives are worthless compared to the profits companies make selling dangerous products?

Excerpted: ‘The Supreme Court is Threatening America and the Planet’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org