Who Cares About the Environement?

[Fake Messiah]

Yeah, not gonna happen.

And what makes you say that? Is it because politicians just gave $100 billion to ICE instead of giving it to cleaning up the planet and inventing clean technologies?

But why does this happen? Is it because the media (and the police) are devoting their time to riling up the public against minor or fictitious problems like, not just immigrants, but poor people's crimes? Let's face it, pollution is a crime done by rich people, and their crimes usually go uncovered in daily news stories.

Air pollution kills 10 million people each year and causes untold additional illness and suffering. It kills at least 100,000 people in the United States alone annually. But it rarely features in daily news stories. Police and prosecutors ignore pollution, much of which is criminal, and so do most journalists. For example, federal prosecutors charge maybe 20 people with environmental offenses every year, and they charged more than 20,000 people with drug offenses in the same period.

Take the news media’s obsession with shoplifting that led to emergency actions by politicians across the U.S. to address the “crisis” of retail theft. Politicians felt intense political pressure to pass laws, hire and assign thousands more police officers, and increase “enforcement” budgets to tackle a supposed “wave” of retail theft, even as police-recorded theft crimes were going down. On the other hand, there is wage theft going on: those same chain stores make around $137 million in corporate wage theft that happens every day, but since that is a rich man's crime, politicians and journalists never project the urgency they have shown for wage theft.

The same absence of urgent reporting applies to the great criminal littering epidemic: several trillion pieces of plastic are thrown illegally into our waterways each year, and they make their way into the bodies and bloodstreams of every living organism on the planet, with profound consequences for all of us. Or the crime wave of the intentional insertion of lead, mercury, cyanide, and cadmium into the ground.

So people should first change the media narrative because what the news treats as urgent affects what people think is urgent. It shapes what and who people are afraid of. It helps dictate what people demand from the political system and from each other. Imagine if, every day for the last four years, every newspaper and TV station had “breaking news” stories and graphics about the thousands of deaths the night before from water pollution, about the death, destruction, cancer, infertility, and other harms to humans, animals, and ecosystems from criminal acts of industrial littering in cities across the U.S. every day.

You only need to look at Trump and how he won the presidency: he didn't win it because he was smart. No. He won because it was already prepared for him to win, years before he showed up on the political scene. Prepared for him by the media, like Fox News and the "good" ones who focus their daily news stories on the kinds of legal violations usually involving poor people. Just remember, years ago, the race between John McCain and Obama: at one point, McCain realized that people coming to his rallies were filled with hate toward Obama based on conspiracies and racist rhetoric (that he was a communist, Muslim, cannibal, and whatnot), but McCain decided he would have none of it and said that Obama was a "good and decent guy."

So in the end, even a moron like Trump could become a president because all had to do was to take the path that was prepared for someone who is greedy, narcissistic, spineless, and psychotic.