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OK - somebody's gonna be elected President in November - perhaps even the person voters have selected.

Ambitious pols come and go. No matter which of them sits in the Oval Office, Earth will continue her elliptical orbit. Earth's thin blue skin - the biosphere - is less robust. Over the last few centuries, we human monkeys have become so good at moving stuff around, digging holes, burning stuff, and mounding up stuff that we are one of the two greatest global forces determining the surface of our planet - otherwise known as the biosphere.

We busy monkeys do so much to change our planet - and we've been doing it so well - that we've created our own planetary Epoch: the Anthropocene.

And the other dominant force shaping our planet's surface?

Climate - now also disrupted by human activity.

We clever human monkeys have burnt so much to grow stuff, move stuff, pile stuff up, blow stuff up, break stuff down...

We've burnt so much that...

We have changed the chemical compostion of the seas and the skies. The carbon gases from our burning have dissolved in seawater, changing our oceans from the lifeblood of tiny swimming creatures to an acid which dissolves their bodies. The carbon gases we and our ancestors have spewed into the air have changed the air we breathe into an oven which will roast us.

Most of these carbon gases belched out of the smokestacks - and later the tailpipes - of Europeans and the nations their progeny stole from the First Peoples of the Americas and the Aborigines of Australia. Over the last few decades, the clever humans in Asia have begun to burn so much in their efforts to grow stuff, move stuff, and the like that their carbon gases play an increasing role in changing our sky to a lethal trap - for all of us.

So what does this have to do with the ambitious pol who will decide what to put on the Oval Ofice wall after Shrub and his favored horse thief turn tail for Crawford?

After all, neither Obama nor Hillary will have any claim to be "Leader of the Free World". The last seven years of Rethug tyranny and the slavish obeisance of what passes for the Democratic oppostion make that boast risible - and sad.

And even a decade before the Rethugs' 2000 coup, when South Africa threw off decades of apartheid and moved into democracy, the newly liberated South Africa looked at the US model - and rejected it, choosing instead the representative systems used by "Old Europe".

Old Europe, you see, has been more resistant to corporate rule than has America's young democracy and her endless appetite for campaign funds bribes.

Though America has lost her capacity to inspire, under corporatist rule (Rethug and Dem) America has grown her capacity to compel, intimidate, demand, and destroy. The "Washington Consensus" ruthlessly enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and "Fair Trade" False Trade institutions like the WTO provides the "soft power" to compel whole nations to discard their wealth, health, and self-interest - trading their futures for treaties a few scraps of paper ferried home by their corrupt leaders.

When the Consensus' our enforcers' "soft power" isn't enough, our bloated military spending - greater than the sum of all the other military budgets on our sorry world - provdes the power to smash and grab the corporatists' treasure du jour.

Or - as we found in Iraq - the power to smash, but not to grab.

The ambitious pol who sits in the Oval Office after next January 20 will assume all this power.

The ambitious pol will also assume control of a whole network of Executive Branch "regulatory" power which previous Rethug and Dem pols have wholly turned over to the corporatists who - thanks to the DLC - now own both parties.

The ambitious pol will also inherit the wrack and ruin of our trillion dollars (and counting) of lethal folly in Iraq; the collapse of our Gilded Age's crowning "achievement" - the housing bubble; concurrent crushing defecits in balance of payments and Federal budgets; and a devalued dollar increasingly distrusted as a reserve currency.

The ambitious pol will inherit a "budget" we - and Earth's thin blue surface - cannot and never could afford. This "budget" sluices immense subsidies into lethal policies and suicidal practices while leaving our people ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill from want of care.

This "budget" enriches the wealthiest families in America - those sucking off the corporate welfare teat at Walmart, Cargill, ADM, Hospital Corporation of America, the Westlands Water District, the Wall Street Ponzi houses, etc - and the deadliest corporations: Monsanto, Exxon, General Electric, Boeing, Rayethon, Blackwater, and the like.

This "budget" - through the inexorable combination of regressive payroll taxation and sclerosed support for children, families, and the working poor - ensures that Americans have less social mobility than the free people of "Old Europe" - and far greater obligations to enrich the wealthiest global investors.

This "budget" spews Federal currency into a monetary hydraulic saw that mows down forests, fisheries, rivers, communities, our children, our parents, and our own health - all pulverised by Federal subsidies that destroy America and the people who live in her.

While the subsidies murder us and our future, they further enrich only the tiny slice of mega-wealthy who sit atop the corporatist party - and have purchased both the Rethugs' and the Dems' power.

And the time frame for us? Already Americans can look forward to a decline in expected life expectancy. Ours is the first generation since at least the Civil War era in which those born now will live fewer years than their parents may expect. They will be more likely to develop cancer and other toxin-induced ills....more likely to "acheive" obesity as children from a diet of Federally subsizied swill....more likely to develop diabetes....

The time frame for the thin blue skin of life on our only planet? Well, we already are warming - and catastrophic feedback will cause run-away warming if the total change exceeds 2 degrees C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated that to avoid 2 degrees of warming total human carbon gas output must be reduced from 2000 levels a total of eighty-five percent - by 2050. The IPCC did not have the benefit of more recent data - the recent data suggests that industrial carbon gas output must be eliminated - reduced to near zero - by 2050 to avoid runaway warming.

So....the good news is?

The good news is that the first (elected) President of the Anthropocene will have a once in an Epoch opportunity to save the whole frakkin' biosphere - or sacrifice it to the corporatists.

And....more good news?

After almost three decades of corporatist rule:

  • America's roads are clogged and crumbling.
  • The United States' manufactuing output has dwindled.
  • Whole industries have left our shores.
  • New manufacturing jobs are ancient history.
  • The men graduating this year from America's high schools will be poorer than their fathers.
  • Real wages haven't increased since the mid-seventies.
  • Oil has increased 400% in six years.
  • We're increasingly more often to find the only housing we can afford traps us in our cars, leaving no time for family - much less walking or community.
  • Petroleum-derived industrial chemicals (including pesticides/herbicides - like Roundup) are associated with - and likely contibute to - incresaing rates of infertility, behavioral/learning disorders, and cancers.
  • The GMO's concealed in our crops and food sicken and kill lab animals - yet we can not opt out of the experiment.
  • As a nation, we are fatter, more sedentary, less able, and sicker than our parents at the same age.

So this is good news?

For the First President of the Anthropocene, yes.

A glance at their to-do list shows why:

1) Global Warming: America's devastated manufacturing/transport base is a tragedy...and an opportunity to rebuild the base and remploy our people - with carbon-neutral technology. And a carbon tax. Duh.

2) Precautionary principle: America's health system is broke - and broken. Much of our increase in disease is from exposure to toxic substances. Union Carbide, Monsanto and the like have duped us into believing bribed our "regulators" and "leaders" into acting out the lie that "chemicals have rights". Bullshit. People have rights - the goddamn labs are there to serve us, not the other way round.

Big Test Tube currently bribes writes the toxic substance rules so our children must die before the precious spawn from one of Big Test Tube's vats is pulled from the market. The PP - already law in the EU - restores OUR rights by demanding the frakkin' chemicals are shown NOT to risk our health before they're ever ON the market.

3) GMO crops: These mutants are often designed to require vast inputs from (fossil-fuel derived) toxic chemicals - and through the miracle of botany, each GMO crop pollutes North America with mutant pollen, spreading the madness every year. Europeans won't even buy this shit: we nuture and subsidize it. The lie that GMO's are just as safe as real crops was invented by the natural philosopher Dan Quayle ... perhaps building on his expertise with the potatoe. The First President of the Anthropocene (FPOTA - no "E") can end this insane decree with a stroke of the Executive Pen...er...Power Order.

GMO organisms have already shown the capacity to end Ag as we know it ...and thus Life As We Know It.

If they are serious about their Oath of Office, FPOTA will issue that Order before choosing the Oval Carpet. And the Executive Order forbidding (further) outdoor release of any living GMO - until such time as release is demonstrated to satisy the PP.

4) Subsidized Homicide/Ecocide: You name the ecosystem, community, or creature (including humans) and America - that's you and me, pups - is paying some industry and megacorp(s) to kill it.

The Forest Service and Bureau of Land "Management" subsidize below-cost logging. USFS has already built enough logging roads to reach to the moon...and we pay to build them for the loggers. We - in the form of our rivers and valleys - pay for the erosison and mudlsides the subsidized logging causes. Destroying the forests increases carbon gases - no one is directly charged, but we all pay. And the Shrub/Darth death cult just gave away another 3 million acres of Alaskan forest.

Same thing with ethanol subsidies: industry is paid to increase carbon gases - and use the world's food to do it, killing directly and indirectly. All on our dimes - billions of 'em. All on our nation's topsoil - washed to the sea in a river of subsidies.

Same thing with subsidies for oil and gas production on public lands. Same thing with hard rock mining - the Federal Act largely unchanged since 1872 with no royalties to the Treasury, costs passed on to local communites. (Also just like the 19th century.) Same thing with most Federal water subsidies - intended largely for family farms up to a few hundred acres, now sucked up by megafarms for (subsidized) export ag. Same thing with most commodity crop farm subsidies - we are paying to slough off our topsoil, spread pesticides through our kids, burn fuel we don't have to pump water we can't replace - and burning huge amounts of fossil fuel to do it all. Just so a relative handful of investors get big checks - and we and the biosphere wither and die.

All paid for through Federal subsidies.

And all those subidies? They are the real wealth FPOTA will have to fund our nation's carbon-neutral rebuilding and re-industrialization - and to refund reclaiming our forests and rivers, soil and waters, cities and transport from the corporatists. And to create good, well-paying jobs, safe workplaces, and green industrial methods in doing so.

To remake our economy for our families and our posterity - rather than to reap it (and us) for distant investors' lifeless quarterly earnings.

To reclaim America's natural wealth and national Treasury for us, our children, and our communities.

To let us live - and live well.

We can, and we shall.

As soon as FPOTA stops sacrificing our nation - and us - on the corporatists' altar to the Free Market Cult.

This post is already long enough too long. In the next part, I'll look with you at what we know of the two active Dem candidates' history with these matters. That's not my focus tonight - I hope in the comments we can look past the horserace to the more basic issues the Anthropocene will pose for any leader - and for us.

The sad truth is that - under corporatist rule - our media and "leaders" have said so little about the lethal risks of our current "economy" that neither major candidate has articulated clear awareness - much less cogent answers - for America on the cusp of the Anthopocene.

That's our job - here at the net and throughout the thinking world. Once we figure out the answers, some ambitious pol can pick them up and claim credit. Same as it ever was.

So...tonigh: what answers, what solutions can we share as the Anthropocene dawns?

photo by colinjackson1972 at flickr